Not even sure what the above means, but since you’re apparently taking issue with my statement, I’ll try to clarify.
From the article cited by the OP:
Wikipedia definition of “truthiness”:
OED entry on “truthiness”
To the best of my knowledge, both Christianity and Islam are nominally opposed to deceit, dishonesty and lying. Tawriya (for muslims) or truthiness (for Christians) seem to be similar constructs, intended to justify some specific dishonesty, provided the lie is told in the furtherance of a “higher good”.
Another question is if it’s lying. I’m not going to hit the links, but what I’ve seen described so far are true statements that are not the whole truth and that are framed in a way to imply something that isn’t true. So these are not strict lies, and the minute you say that they’re lies because of the intent of the speaker, you’ve shifted the question to the intent of the speaker and why wouldn’t that encompass the whole intent of the speaker?
Because if the intent of the speaker doesn’t matter, then they’re not lies.
I believe Mark Twain said something like, “If you want to know whether a man is dishonest, ask him if he lies. If he says ‘no’, he is.”
I worked for a guy who, as far as I could tell, never made a false statement, but would often make a statement that seemed to imply something different. He was a shrewd operator, and I made it a point to set things up so that if he prospered, so did I, and that worked out pretty well for both of us.
The religious don’t have a corner on the market for deceit while maintaining a self-image of high ethics, or of fundamentalism.
That matches what I was taught in (Reform Jewish) Sunday school ethics class as a kid. The example was “if a known anti-Semite is holding a gun to your head and asking whether you are Jewish, do you tell him the truth? Of course not!”
That’s interesting. My old Sunday School taught me that denying my Christianity, even under threat of death or torture, would result in severe punishment by God; i.e., the plagues and tribulations of The End Days would be 7 to 70 times worse for Christian deniers. (The obvious implication being that it’s best to never accept Christ in the first place!) However I think the teacher confused that dogma with the penalty for accepting the Mark of the Beast in Revelation 13.
Lots of ethical systems, both religious and non-religious, permit various degrees of lying, deception, equivocation and supressio veri. A more interesting question would be, is there a widely-accepted ethical system that rigorously excludes this?
Interestingly, if you do a google search of tawriya, you’ll find over a dozen supposedly differently articles that all came out within a four week period in early 2012, all making these same claims.
It seems impossible that all of these writers independently discovered this same topic in the same month. I have to assume that they’re reading and plagiarizing each other.
So basically it’s the use of metaphors. It’s no more lying than it is when a Christian refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God. Nobody over the age of five actually thinks Jesus is a baby sheep.
The Jesuits called it equivocation in the 16th century and were very skilled in the art, as they had to be when facing questioning in Elizabethan England, for instance. They were also much castigated by Protestants for it.
A little hard on the Jesuits, aren’t you? Who are these Jesuit theologians who have “twisted themselves into knots trying to find some kind of justifications for all kinds of sins?” Rahner? Danielou? Teilhard de Chardin? Can’t think of one, myself.
Lying is wrong in Buddhism (wrong speech) and in Buddhism intention is important. If you are technically truthful but deliberately deceptive that would be wrong, AIUI. But lying to save a Jewish family from the Nazis would be, not free of (karmic) consequences, but still less wrong than handing them over to be killed, because your considered intention was to help them.
Relax! I went to a Jesuit high school, and didn’t encounter this among any current Jesuits!
But centuries ago, Jesuits were famous for “casuistry,” which meant coming up with intellectually plausible explanations of why any given sin, crime or rule violation wasn’t REALLY a sin, crime or rule violation. The Jesuits also came up with intellectual justifications for many of the Renaissance Church’s most corrupt practices.
That was one reason that Protestants began using “Jesuit” as a perjorative.
Bertrand Russell once asked G. E. Moore if he had ever uttered a false statement. Moore replied that he had. Russell said he believed that was the only lie Moore ever told.
