Two stories… technically unrelated, but they cover similar ground.

First, lying to justify your religious beliefs. I know people with strong religious faith, faith based on… well, faith, I guess. You cannot argue with faith; there is no rational argument to be made against “I believe X.” What you *can* argue argue about is “there is hard evidence for X.” And anyone who lies about matters of fact, who claims to have done things they didn’t, who misquote people… well, one can feel justified in kinda hoping that their religious beliefs are true, at least in their case, and that there will be divine retribution for deceiving lots of people.

One such person:

How “Case for Christ” author Lee Strobel fabricated his best-selling story

In short: Strobel claimed to be an atheist,  hard-nosed investigative journalist, who tried to disprove the Bible and wound up becoming an evangelist because the evidence all turned out to be in favor of Biblical historical accuracy. His process of doing so involved “challenging” theologians, to prove they’re wrong… and lo and behold, they turn out to be right. But his actual process involved softball questions, taking things out of context, misquoting, being generally dishonest. This is not the approach of someone taking a hard-nosed approach to disproving the other guy, but instead someone *pretending.* And in his own words:

“My attitude was ethics were fine to discuss in journalism school, but they shouldn’t get in the way of getting a good story.”

Gah.

Strobel, as it turns out, was working as a pastor to a megachurch preacher (who later resigned after an army of women came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment) when he wrote a book claiming to be an atheist. Odd form of atheism, that.

And then there’s this story about Jim Jefferies, a TV comedian/interviewer who has been accused of severely editing interviews to make people look bad. It’s an easy accusation to make, but unless you can prove it… what can you do. But if you know you’re going to be involved in a hit piece, and you’re able to get away with it, set up a hidden camera in advance and then release the video showing just what a dishonest scumbag the interviewer is.

Given the lack of videos recorded by interviewees, I’m assuming that it must be standard practice for interviewers to disallow the interviewees from recording the interview. But given this new video, I think it should be standard practice to come to an interview with a GoPro or two of your own.