A willful lie is a conscientious contradiction between your thoughts, feelings, or actions and your honest perception of and interaction with the world around you, to include your actions with other people. Contradictions can occur between categories, such as acting in a way that does not align with your beliefs, or within categories, such as holding beliefs that you know are contradictory to other beliefs that you hold. While this characterization of willful lies may be new to you, the applications of it are not. Who hasn’t simultaneously held contradicting feelings, such as desire for two mutually exclusive things? Honesty requires extensive recognition and effective resolution of such contradictions.
A willful lie is distinguishable from a lie of neglect by whether it is rebellion against information you already possess or not. Willful lies are responses to what you are already aware of.
Those who engage in willful dishonesty think of it as a way of getting something good that they couldn’t have if they played by the rules of their conscience, but nothing good can be obtained through dishonesty. No good thing comes from evil. Lying to yourself may indeed bring to you what you immediately seek, but it comes with a price that will eventually have to be paid. Acting against your own sense of what is best will always do more damage than obedience would. Everything you do in secret has an effect on everything else you do.
Willful sin causes inevitable harm in the form of future blindness. Any conscientious rebellion against what you believe is best attenuates your ability to perceive and obtain what is valuable. Every time you act contrary to your understanding of what is best, you impede your ability to perceive what is best, you attenuate your desire to do what is best, and you weaken your ability to do what is best in the future.
Those who sin willfully incrementally lose their ability to see how obvious and involuntary their lies become, or the damage they do to themselves and others by continuing them. To the extent that you turn away from the best you know, it is not just that your thoughts, feelings, and actions will decay, but that your awareness of this decay will be so dimmed that you probably won’t even realize it is happening. In some ways, the choice to engage in willful sin and the effects that follow are a lot like leprosy. The disease not only decomposes the outer flesh, it also dulls the body’s senses, leading victims to accidentally cut themselves or break bones, and leaving them unaware of the putrid smell of their rotting flesh. Leprosy is a disease caused by a bacterium that is fairly easy to prevent through a reasonable degree of personal and societal hygiene. Those who work actively to discover and minimize lies of neglect will significantly mitigate the temptation to lie willfully.