Since no lying means no imagination, most of the consumer products in the film are boring and unimaginative. The computers, monitors/televisions, stereo equipment... even the office decor. Humanity invented these things out of necessity, without any flair. It's more subtle than the advertisements in the film, which are more prominent in their mundaneness, but it goes along the same concept.
As to why there isn't any religion. Go to your nearest bible and read about what Jesus said. Most if not all of his lessons are stories about hypothetical situations, metaphors, or other fiction. Religion is told through stories and since no one can even think about falsehood spreading the word becomes rather hard.
Also, religion can't be proven either way. Since no one lies, saying something you don't objectively know to be right must be very hard.
It seems like this would fall under the things people believe to be true, however. People who are devoutly religious certainly don't believe it's lies (nor are atheists lying when they say it is, or at least unproven). Assuming you take a purely secular view, it's still not "lying" to surmise that there is an intelligence behind events, that the essence of a person doesn't just fade away after death, etc. The film has a plot hole here I think.
Though several of the stories of The Bible include people lying. The Serpent from Genesis may or may not have believed what it was telling Eve but according to this movie’s rules, Cain wouldn’t be able to deny knowing where Abel was, Abraham wouldn’t be able to claim that Sarah was his sister rather than his wife, Jacob wouldn’t be able to claim to be Esau, Laban wouldn’t be able to dupe Jacob into marrying Leah, Joseph’s brothers wouldn’t be able to pretend he was killed by a wolf, Pharaoh in Exodus wouldn’t be able to claim he planned to free the Israelites and the Ten Commandments wouldn’t include “thou Shalt not bear false witness”. Quite a lot of it falls apart not because of there being anything false about The Bible but because The Bible portrays a world where people lie.
In a world where partners select each other for genetics, marrying Mark makes perfect sense, since he has a superior ability, which turns out to be congenital.
We can assume that fraud and other acts of deceit are unknown, and therefore not criminalized. Therefore, Mark never does anything illegal.
Likely to be Wild Mass Guessing, but why is the main Character "Mark"? Because according to modern and most accepted biblical scholarship, Mark is one of the two source document for the two other Synoptic gospel.
Since everyone is gullible that they'll believe anything anyone told them, despite all evidence to the contrary, schizophrenia must be contagious. The crazy person says something crazy, everyone believes it, they repeat it, and so on.
Schizophrenia is not simply believing "something crazy" is true. Although, this does bring up the question of how people would react if they realized Mark was saying things that aren't...
The only way such a world could exist is if the condition didn't exist. Likewise, hallucinogenic drugs also can't exist. With no concept of falsehood, then there can't even be conditions where one person believes something to be true that another knows to be false.
If everyone believes in a happy afterlife and the world of the living is cruel to anyone who isn't good-looking, what's stopping the suicide rates from going up?
Mark probably engaged in a lot of Digging Himself Deeper by explaining why suicide is bad after this exact question.
One that's been asked to death but let's ask it again here: In a world where everyone is brutally honest all the time, why hasn't the human race wiped itself out?
Maybe because, for all their jerkassery, even without the protagonist's lies to keep them in line people aren't that bad.
You could argue that for some things at least, it would improve the world-no CEOs defrauding millions, for instance, crimes solved by simply asking suspects if they did it (as is seen in the movie), etc. A baby will cry because they have realized that crying gets them attention. And, as any parent knows, children will lie to get out of trouble or hide that they were doing something they shouldn't have been. This suggests, and is further proven at the end, that lying is a genetic trait in this world. This begs the question if Mark was simply the first mutation to develop the gene or if it is a recessive gene many have that just hasn't been activated.
In Real Life, there are some physiological safeguards against lying (blushing, etc) which seem to be carried on by evolution. This movie just take them one step further.
Which doesn't even make sense when you think about it. Wouldn't it make more sense for evolution to favor good liars?
Evolution doesn’t work that way. There’s no sentient mechanism of evolution that picks and chooses favourable traits, traits end up in the gene pool when an animal mates. This line of thinking assumes liars would be inherently more sexually attractive. Since humans in the real world don’t find lying sexy, I’d say, no, that makes no sense whatsoever.
One can also wonder how thieves can ever make a living in this world. As shown in the scene with Mark's father, catching a thief is trivial.
This brings up another question: why can't suspects just refuse to answer? Of course, if everyone only tells the truth, one might surmise that torture is a common interrogation method, since it really would always work in this world.
As mentioned elsewhere, refusing to answer/leaving out the whole story could be considered lying.
If Mark could mention aliens and not have to explain what they are to everyone, that means that no one has invented them. Therefore, do aliens exist in this world?
Wondering could still be possible. Everyone is just honest that they don't know if aliens exist or not?
If that were so, wouldn't you have people in the movie posit that there may be a god/afterlife instead of simply being nihilistic? There's no proof that there are any higher beings or an afterlife, but there isn't any proof that they don't exist, especially if you subscribe to the idea that they exist in a different plane of existence from ours.
If Mark is automatically believed when he gives a different number for his bank account than what he has in there, does that mean that humans in this world all have perfect recall and don't make honest mistakes? Or see something and initially mistake it for something else? Did no animal in this world ever evolve Mullerian or Batesian Mimicry? Do animals like cats not use threat displays to make themselves appear larger and more formidable than they really are when they see a predator?
I think its a human trait to be unable to vocally lie, and Marks' insistence on him having more money, rather than a mistake, remember the computer is believed to be the cause of the mistake, so its more of a case that fallibility is possible, as long as it isn't the human making it, also a lack of imagination does open up the possability that humans developed perfect recall instead to fill in that particular gap, in Marks' world bluntness is how they work, so bluntly saying "yes i had that much money" over and over wins, because people can't argue with someone saying something that is wrong, because wrong doesn't technically vocally exist.
I'm sure it's unintended by the director, but: the image of the "Man in the Sky Church" is of the prophet who brought the commandments to people, not God sacrificing Himself to redeem humanity's sins. Moses, not Jesus. Which makes the Church Judaism, not Christianity. In our world, Hitler claimed that "the Jew invented the lie"...
There are plenty of other religions that involve prophets receiving messages from their gods, and no real reason to jump to that specific Hitler quote.
That's a pretty Christianity-centric point of view you've got there. From two perspectives: On the side of "you're looking at the religions": Only Christians (and not all Christians) believe Yeshua was the living incarnation of the Abrahamic god. Most other religions believe that he was "a great man, but only a man" (a teacher/rabbi, or prophet). On the side of "you're looking at the production": What makes you think they were trying to spoof Christianity in particular and not religion in general? Christianity's not the only religion to use houses of worship or have images (even stained-glass images) of important figures in their places of worship.
What makes you think Mark really went into coming up with some lore for his religion and actually claimed that God died for our sins? It could just be a more simplistic faith (he tells his mother that people, not necessarily good, go to a good afterlife when they die, which leaves out the concept of a bad afterlife or the idea that there are things you can do that will send you to one afterlife or the other). He quite literally is the prophet claiming to have brought the words of the Man in the Sky to us, so that would be the most obvious symbol if you don't want to add a whole subplot about Mark thinking out his theology.
Ricky Gervais' character is literally the Father of Lies (ie., Satan) in this movie. I wonder if that ever occurred to Gervais himself.
At one point, a character sends a bottle of wine at a restaurant back, and says it's because he wants to appear sophisticated and domineering. Funny, but makes no sense on both a world-building and logical level; the idea of doing something for one reason, but in an way that implies its for another to appear a certain way should never have occurred to the character, and even if it did, saying he's doing that obviously ruins the charade.
Are you saying that an atheist can't make fun of the origins of Judiasm just as much as those of Christianity?