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Why do you lie?

Is lying really a "bad" thing the way most people and religions seem to teach?
Are there any legitimate reasons for lying? If so, what are they?
When is it harmful to lie?

The_Antichrist 6 May 31
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25 comments

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5

Pretty much the only time I lie or bend the truth is to spare someone's feelings.

3

Sometimes mercy or compassion is better than truth. I tend to be too "truthful" lol

Lauxa Level 5 May 31, 2018
3

So I can have chocolate biscuits.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

2

Lies are a gift from God!

The necessity to gain an advantage by distorting the truth would have been an evolutionary directive even before we were able to speak.

Two apes share a cave, one ape steps in a pile of poo and starts to get mad at the other ape, but then the target of hostility shrugs his shoulders and throws his hands up, leaving the angry ape confused and curious.

Nice analogy 😀

2

I lie all the time to protect myself
I am agnostic exmuslim in a very religious community
If the gov finds out I may lose my citizenship
If my family finds out I may get killed or beaten and deprived from life till i am corrected
( trying to take off the hijab my brother threaten to Lock me in the house and fire me from work )
I lie to meet my friends who are from the opposite Sex
I lie when I am dating
I lie when I pretend to fast
I lie all the time and it’s harmful

I feel like a hypocrite no one should lie if they don’t have to
It consumes so much energy

@ShuMei2018 thank you dear

2

As a writer, I lie to tell a greater truth.

Gohan Level 7 May 31, 2018

No you lie to make money, that's the truth.

@x0lineage0x That's just a side effect.

@Gohan
Again, No.
That is the goal.
Hours of work to not sell is not your goal.
Even your last reply was a lie, you sly writer you 😛

2

Try not to hurt someone's feelings so will tell a white lie

So white lies are good and non-white lies are bad?

RACIST!! lol j/k

@x0lineage0x You can't even say "black" can you?

@The_Antichrist
I'm not sure how colors are assigned to reasons for lying, so I just kept to the point.

2

To save the ass beaten really hard.. haha. But I rather not. Honesty is much more sexy to me.

2

Honesty is the best policy, but there are also many good reasons for lying such as to protect others feelings or because what someone has asked is none of their business.

cava Level 7 May 31, 2018
1

I think most people lie on a fairly regular basis -- and it's not a bad thing. The 'little white lie' is social lubrication and a form of kindness. Your mother is all dressed up for an anniversary party and she looks like a train wreck. There's no time to change her clothes and she doesn't have anything else, anyway. She asks you how she looks. Are you REALLY going to be honest ?? I hope not. When your adolescent daughter asks you, Daddy, am I pretty??? There is only one correct answer here, and if you would feel you were telling the truth and being noble for saying 'no', I think you deserve the damage it will do to your relationship.

1

I have to chime in on this. Embellishment is lying and I WAS really good at it. Before going through a very important time of therapy (phycologist) for me I used embellishment to make me something I wasn’t. Say what you want but it is the simplist and possibly the most dangerous form of lying. I used it to make things better than they were AND also to make things worse than they were. I either wanted people to like me or feel sorry for me. It got so habit forming I didn’t even think about what I was saying anymore. If you’re lying to make someone feel good, I can understand but I have gotten to a point I pause before speaking. I want to make sure what I say is truthful. It took a long time but I feel much better about the truthful way I communicate vs the old me. Lying/embellishing bad. Truth good. Just my thoughts.

1

To avoid fruitless conflict

1

I have never been comfortable with lying, meaning that I never lied, until recently. 😕 I have acquired a level of comfortableness (thats a word right?) with lying, but use it only for good. I wonder at what point do I become so comfortable with lying that I will start to use it for evil???

You are a superior person for not lying, and I do mean that earnestly. More intelligent people are not known to be liars, and lying is basically what children do out of their own inability to discern consequences.

@DZhukovin I appreciate your words.

@patchoullijulie I appreciate them too haha. But seriously, keep your policy of honesty. Lying is not actually a thing, per se. It correlates with a lot of defects of character, I keep reading about it all over. To sum up my learning, it's always the low castes and types that are the liars.

@DZhukovin So, are you saying that lying is for the dumb people of the world and truth telling for the intellectual elite?

@The_Antichrist

I'm just following what I have read on intelligence. Intelligent people are more likely to be honest because they're better at frontal lobe functions, which involve understanding the consequences of actions.

@DZhukovin Could it be that intelligent people know WHEN it's an appropriate time to tell a lie or conceal a truth and that unintelligent people lack this level of discernment at varying degrees?

@DZhukovin Interesting

@The_Antichrist

Not necessarily, intelligence has a flimsy correlation with social skills.

1

I have never lied

KenG Level 6 May 31, 2018

Awesome!

@MrLizard

Ha! 🙂

1

To protect myself or others from possible harm.

1

I don't.

Liar

@The_Antichrist I'll assume your basis for that is that you think "everybody lies" and to that I'd say "blanket statements are rarely accurate so why would you use them?" At that point I'm fairly certain you'd change the direction of the discussion to explain further what "lying" is or something equally useless. Point is you don't know me and can go fuck yourself. Believe that.

@mattersauce Hahahahahaha! You're so funny! You fucking lying son of a bitch!!! You're probably a serial liar. You've got to see Liar, Liar if you haven't. So funny.

1

You call yourself the antichrist and you asking us why you lie?

0

Lying is a calculated risk almost everyone makes. The consequences determine its value.

0

Generally, I don't care enough to have the conversation and a lie ends it.

0

I don't lie or think it's a good strategy for me or others, but I have noticed that in their over-eagerness to be honest, fundamentalists tend to be excessively ... shall we say ... transparent. They over-explain. They reveal things that are no one's damned business.

They also do this because they are used to invasive / impertinent questions like "we missed you at church last Sunday, where were you?" They call this "accountability". You are supposed to rat each other out, shame each other, over the rules and your [non]adherence to them.

So what I do is, I generally offer a bare minimum of information on any given topic, other than to immediate family and close friends. Aside from keeping people's noses out of my personal business, it makes me more desirable. Sort of an international man of mystery 😉

Mystery man with no profile pic.

0

If I say I lie then I am telling the truth.....think about that ??

Do you lie all of the time?

@The_Antichrist of course not....the question is, am I lying now?

@IamNobody That's deep bro

@The_Antichrist and we are only having fun, can you imagine if we get serious?? Have a great weekend buddy

@IamNobody Thanks. You too 🙂

0

I've never cared enough to bother I don't give a fuck never have never will so why lie absolute brutal honesty all the way.

0

It's tough to discern where dishonesty comes from in a person. I think some people are simply too quick to communicate, or have a memory problem.

I also notice that mistaken expectations also underpin what is going on when a person lies, because some people do not grasp how attention and doing life works.

So generally, person A wants to know something concerning person B, but person B's mind is on something else, and person A is not picking up on that because they share the same mind with person B.

However, the reality is that everyone has their own life, and therefore everyone has legions of things they think about, and honesty becomes tough because when the time comes to answer certain questions, person B is simply not prepared to answer because they need to back-track.

0

I see very little reason to lie. I'm mostly likely to lie by avoiding something, this especially happens when I'm working. I work in a very religious and conservative area with kids. I can't always answer questions personally, so I am likely to dodge or over simplify. But on a whole lying seems like a pointless thing to do.

If it were pointless people wouldn't do it.

@The_Antichrist It's pointless to me.

0

To not be caught lying.White lies to protect someone from something is acceptable many times.LYing is bad to be deceptive or criminal

Who's the one that determines what's a white lie and what's not?
Isn't all lying deception to a certain extent? Trying to make someone believe something that is not true.

@The_Antichrist Yes deception always but I would tell the wife of a severely injured person that he is going to be alright knowing he is probably going to die. This is what I would call a white lie.

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