Greatest Lies in history. Their great price. Look for the truth in history. Don’t fall for these biggest lies

It is a sad fact in the story of the human race that many of our attitudes, particularly to races, or to groups of people have been developed because of mistaken interpretations of history, and even downright lies that have been propagated by unscrupulous individuals for their own ends.

It is solely in order to correct these misconceptions that still in many cases are the causes of oppression and undeserved infamy for innocent targets for vilification in our society today that I want to briefly address two of these topics. I do not propose to go into each one in great detail, rather to enumerate them so that my readers can appreciate the danger of the lie, and the especially great danger of the lie when it is applied the creation of histories.

It has long been the belief among the more conservative branches of the Christian faith that the sin of Sodom was engaging in homosexual practices. We are told that God was so disgusted with the sight of all those men engaging in "unnatural sexual practices" that he sent down fire and brimstone to destroy that city and the neighbouring city of Gomorrah. I am not going to go into the scriptural reasons why I believe this not to be the case. It is generally accepted among the more perceptive of biblical scholars that the offence of the inhabitants of those cities was breaching the laws of hospitality anyway. But what I do want to point out is that the notion that homosexuality was the sin actually entered Christian mythology centuries after the bible was written.

The Byzantine emperor Justinian I was the person who declared originally that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was explicitly homosexual practice. This he did in two novels which he wrote in Ad 558 and ad 559. The reason why he did this was to distract people from thinking his government was to blame for earthquakes, and to put the blame on homosexuals instead. He also wanted to enact anti-homosexual laws to be used against his political opponents in case he could not find anything else to pin on them. Such was the power of the personality cult that surrounded the emperor in Byzantium that any utterances from his mouth, or his pen were considered to be divinely inspired, and so that particular lie came to be a basic belief throughout Christendom, and indeed is still used as a rod to beat homosexuals to this day.

One of the greatest crimes that has ever been committed in history was the attempted extermination of the Jewish population of Europe by the Nazis in the Second World War. One of the saddest facts about this whole situation is that a large portion of the non-Jewish inhabitants, and not just the Germans stood by and let these atrocities happen. The belief at the time was that there was something sinister and alien about "the Jew". That the people of that race were malevolently intent on world domination, and to kill them was just another form of vermin control.

This belief was fostered by our next big lie.

A book was written in Paris between 1895 and 1900 which gained wide circulation throughout the world. This book, called The Protocols of The Elders of Zion claimed to be the minutes of The World Jewish Congress at Basle and contained details of a supposed Jewish plan to subvert civilisation and to set up a world that would be dominated by a Jewish tyranny. The instructions varied from sinister directions on how to subvert governments to rather silly suggestions that laws should be passed to outlaw drunkenness in order to make people unhappy.

It was all one outrageous forgery. The book was written by a Russian secret agent called Pytor Ivanovich Rachovsky, and was a plagiarisation of an earlier satire by a French writer called Maurice Joly. Copies of the book were brought to Europe after the Russian revolution by émigrés who wanted to blame the Jews for the Russian revolution. In 1921 "The Times" of London exposed the book as a complete forgery, even going as far as to do a chapter by chapter comparison with the earlier book by Joly to illustrate the plagiarisations. But such is the power of the lie that by that time it was already too late. The book was taken up by the Nazi propagandists, and used to justify the persecution of the Jewish people.

This book is still circulating widely throughout the world today, and is still believed by a large section of humanity. How much more harm must it cause?

I will write today only about these two instances about how lies can enter popular belief. This is something that we should all be wary of. Half-baked conspiracy theories are just half baked conspiracy theories, nothing else. The notion that the world is ruled by "The Illuminati" is one, or that the American government bombed its own people in The World Trade Centre is another. We must never forget how easily people have been fooled in the past, and how the continuation of some lies can bring endless misery to millions well into our future.

The truth should always be our watchword.