I'm no Liar...Are you?

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Tomas
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Re: I'm no Liar...Are you?

Post by Tomas » Tue Jan 12, 2010 11:09 am

mensa-maniac wrote:Call me anything else if the shoe fits, but I'm no confused Liar! Liars become confused because they don't know if they've told a truth or lied about it.
A bit off topic but the first time I tripped on LSD (orange sunshine) .. lost my shoes!! The confusion lasted all of 10? minutes but let the party begin.
Don't run to your death

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1456200423
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Re: I'm no Liar...Are you?

Post by 1456200423 » Tue Jan 12, 2010 12:11 pm

Tomas wrote:
mensa-maniac wrote:Call me anything else if the shoe fits, but I'm no confused Liar! Liars become confused because they don't know if they've told a truth or lied about it.
A bit off topic but the first time I tripped on LSD (orange sunshine) .. lost my shoes!! The confusion lasted all of 10? minutes but let the party begin.
Sounds interesting. Let's hear the whole story! Did they turn up?
veritas odium parit

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guest_of_logic
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Re: I'm no Liar...Are you?

Post by guest_of_logic » Thu Jan 14, 2010 1:07 am

Animus wrote:
guest_of_logic wrote:
Animus wrote:The trick is, you are going to have trouble finding such an example that doesn't straddle the definition of enlightenment and simultaneously is morally repulsive to a child.
Why would it have to be morally repulsive - couldn't it just be very ugly for a child's mind to contemplate? How about if that day the father, who had a sprained ankle so that he couldn't run, had been attacked by a knife-wielding maniac, who screamed obscenities and his utter contempt for all life and all of the foul tortures he wanted to perform, and who could only be stopped by disarming him of his knife and stabbing him to death when he produced another knife (a switch-blade, from his sock)?

Do you, Animus, think that such a situation might occur to a fully enlightened person? If so, would you advocate that the father as such a fully enlightened person relate that story to his young child in all of its disturbing details when asked by that child what he did that day?
The individual in your example seem particularly attached to their own existence, to the extent they are willing to murder another over it. To me that doesn't sound enlightened, I want to avoid sounding like a Christian, but say that a truly enlightened being would probably surrender to the attacker.
Well let me try to address your objection by adding these details to the scenario: the man's son suffers psychological and inter-personal difficulties such that he finds it all but impossible to establish meaningful relationships with parental authority figures, and it is with great skill (and luck/coincidence/happy circumstance) that this man has been able to establish such a relationship with his son. Were he to have been killed, his son would have suffered greatly for that missing relationship: the man's attachment was not to his own existence, but to the prevention of his son's suffering.

In case you then want to suggest that an enlightened individual would not have sired a child in the first place, I'll add this: the child is not the man's biological son, but was entrusted to him as an orphan by people who recognised the man's unique capacity for relating to the boy.
Animus wrote:There is nothing preventing the father from stating that he was attacked to his child. This information is not going to significantly impact the child.
OK, but in that case he's withholding from his son the very significant fact that he stabbed a man to death that day. By implication, then, you seem to be acknowledging that, as Cahoot seems to me to be arguing, context is very relevant in deciding how to frame the truth - correct?
Animus wrote:People do not just lie to their children, they lie to each other and to those they really shouldn't. You may not realize this but even a child can detect lies and dishonesty, and although children can be forgiving, they may not understand any justification for lying when they are expected to tell the truth. Consequently the lying can cause a loss of trust with the child and its parent, and this I assure you will cause much more harm to the child than a full exaggerated account of the attack.
Granted, so how do you feel about a response like the following? Do you consider it to be sufficiently truthful? Or do you consider it to be deception by omission? Is it unnecessarily patronising?

"I had a difficult day today, son. I had to do something that I tried very hard to avoid but that in the end I had no choice except to do. It's something that you'd find difficult to understand right now, so I'm not going to explain it in any more detail than that. The important thing for you to know right now is that I did what I had to do and that everything's OK. I'll tell you more about it when you're older."

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Cahoot
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Re: I'm no Liar...Are you?

Post by Cahoot » Tue Jan 26, 2010 7:06 pm

Beingof1, thank you very much for your kind and generous words earlier in this thread.

And Carmel, thank you for your positive comments in your post of Nov 16, 2009 5:21 am, in that other thread that got padlocked before I could respond to your words.

Even though contentiousness can be a valuable spur to engage one to dig deeper for clarity in communication, attachment to decency isn’t really necessary to appreciate a bit of kindness now and then!

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Re: I'm no Liar...Are you?

Post by Animus » Tue Jan 26, 2010 9:39 pm

guest_of_logic wrote:
Granted, so how do you feel about a response like the following? Do you consider it to be sufficiently truthful? Or do you consider it to be deception by omission? Is it unnecessarily patronising?

"I had a difficult day today, son. I had to do something that I tried very hard to avoid but that in the end I had no choice except to do. It's something that you'd find difficult to understand right now, so I'm not going to explain it in any more detail than that. The important thing for you to know right now is that I did what I had to do and that everything's OK. I'll tell you more about it when you're older."
Yes, but that can't be taken too far either. The father could tell his son that he was forced to defend himself or succumb to the attacker and in the struggle the attacker was fatally wounded. He doesn't have to go into morbid detail about the incident, but at least then the child would understand why daddy has to hang out with the cops while they perform their investigation. It seems unlikely in the situation that such a man would casually stab someone to death and go home to tell his son about it in graphic detail. Sounds like the m.o. of a sadistic psychopath and not an enlightened sage. I would expect that individual to notify the respective persons needed to identify and dispose of the carcass, police would invariably be involved in which case the man might even be detained in police custody. He could be detained for several weeks awaiting a bail hearing and possibly detained until justice is served if deemed a risk. In any realistic situation he'd have to tell his son what happened, but not necessarily in glorified narrative. Otherwise his son would be suspicious. Obviously though, it can be taken too far, the guy doesn't have to call every person in the world to tell them what happened that night, or what he had for lunch every day of the week. Not all truths pertain to the subject matter or the parties involved.

It might seem a little bit odd to state at a dinner party that you shit your pants, but in my world these things aren't uncommon. I come from a family that are generally pretty open about these things. I mean, realistically they are open about it because they are impressed by shitty humor. They would probably laugh for a while talking about it. No harm to the person who it happened to, I mean usually they are the ones joking about it the most. I don't find any of it particularly funny though. It's more just an ease I have with matters of truth. Maybe this wouldn't apply to all people, maybe its just me, I've always had a comfort with the way things are outside of human involvement. And the past is done, that's always been easy for me to accept. Perhaps thats because I was never sheltered from much truth.

In the parenting situation, I might argue that the interest of the child is in grasping truth. If the father/mother weave a web of deceit around the child so that they don't see clearly then that isn't very helpful to the child at all in my opinion. That just means they are calibrated all wrong for reality. To what extent is the assumption of what a child should hear based on what the adult themselves would want to hear? Shouldn't we look at child-rearing as a calibration process? If we raise up our kids to be something else then when they move out they have to undergo a lengthy process of undoing all the insanity of childhood and finding all their fantasy shattered. No wonder our species spends an inordinate amount of time raising our offspring. First we keep them around as pets when they are small and adorable, and when they are big and bothersome we kick em out and tell them to get real.

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