I'd like to be just as sensitive as the next guy to not calling something a lie if it's just a mistake. I've seen that done plenty often enough in my day, and explained the distinction to many religious people who needed it. One of the favorite tactics of the religious is to claim that deep down, you really know they're right. I'm aware how obnoxious that practice is. I wouldn't like to accuse them of it. However, it becomes difficult not to point to their own words about how they form and maintain their beliefs. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." "For we walk by faith and not..." by what? "... by sight." "Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet believe." Faith is biblically defined as hostility toward reality. Tell me how that's honesty.
I thought Abraham Lincoln put it pretty well when he said "It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him." Whether we call it "falsehood", or call it whatever, there is something morally untoward going on, and when those we trust practice it, it's time to be angry.
OK. Look at it this way. I'm sure you have had the experience of being convinced of something. Think of a proposition that looks overwhelmingly more likely than the alternatives to you. After that happened, how much did you need to have a weekly infomercial-style pep rally in which, if only you all shout "amen" loud enough and sing it over and over until you're practically in a self-hypnotic trance, you convince yourself that you truly believe it?
I'll bet you don't need to do that. If you have no beliefs in your life that require you to do that in order to go on thinking they're true, consider the possibility that you have never seen or experienced the phenomenon I am describing as lying. It's possible you've never looked back on decades of preaching and suddenly recognized their crowing and strutting as desperately trying to convince themselves they really, really mean it. Pushing one's sight of reality out of consciousness and brazenly admitting to everybody that you are doing so is not honest. So your point is that not all forms of a lack of honesty are "lying"? I'll revise my words, but it won't make much difference where the anger is concerned.
no subject
I thought Abraham Lincoln put it pretty well when he said "It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him." Whether we call it "falsehood", or call it whatever, there is something morally untoward going on, and when those we trust practice it, it's time to be angry.
OK. Look at it this way. I'm sure you have had the experience of being convinced of something. Think of a proposition that looks overwhelmingly more likely than the alternatives to you. After that happened, how much did you need to have a weekly infomercial-style pep rally in which, if only you all shout "amen" loud enough and sing it over and over until you're practically in a self-hypnotic trance, you convince yourself that you truly believe it?
I'll bet you don't need to do that. If you have no beliefs in your life that require you to do that in order to go on thinking they're true, consider the possibility that you have never seen or experienced the phenomenon I am describing as lying. It's possible you've never looked back on decades of preaching and suddenly recognized their crowing and strutting as desperately trying to convince themselves they really, really mean it. Pushing one's sight of reality out of consciousness and brazenly admitting to everybody that you are doing so is not honest. So your point is that not all forms of a lack of honesty are "lying"? I'll revise my words, but it won't make much difference where the anger is concerned.