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TimFreeman comments on Crisis of Faith - Less Wrong
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So here I am having been raised in the Christian faith and trying not to freak out over the past few weeks because I've finally begun to wonder whether I believe things just because I was raised with them. Our family is surrounded by genuinely wonderful people who have poured their talents into us since we were teenagers, and our social structure and business rests on the tenets of what we believe. I've been trying to work out how I can 'clear the decks' and then rebuild with whatever is worth keeping, yet it's so foundational that it will affect my marriage (to a pretty special man) and my daughters who, of course, have also been raised to walk the Christian path.
Is there anyone who's been in this position - really, really invested in a faith and then walked away?
This is exactly the situation where the Litany of Gendlin seems most questionable to me. I haven't been in your situation. One option for dealing with the situation might be to learn to lie really well. It might be the compassionate thing to do, if you believe that the people you interact with would not benefit from hearing that you no longer believe.
(Yes, I'm aware that I'm responding to a stale post.)
I don't believe I should lie to you (or anyone) because there might be one way you might not benefit from my honest and forthright communication. So, unfortunately, I've decided to reply to you and tell you that your advice is terrible, however well-intentioned. You seem to think that if you can imagine even one possible short-term benefit from lying or not-disclosing something, then that's sufficient justification to do so. But where exactly is the boundary dividing those things that, however uncomfortable or even devastating, must be said or written and those things about which one can decieve or dupe those one loves and respects?
'Radical honesty' isn't obviously required, but I would think that honesty about fundamental beliefs would be more important than what is normally considered acceptable dishonesty or non-disclosure for social purposes.
That's not what I said. I said several things, and it's not clear which one you're responding to; you should use quote-rebuttal format so people know what you're talking about. Best guess is that you're responding to this:
You sharpened my "might be" to "is" just so you could disagree.
This is a rhetorical question, and it only makes sense in context if your point is that in the absence of such a boundary with an exact location that makes it clear when to lie, we should be honest. But if you can clearly identify which side of the boundary the alternative you're considering is on because it is nowhere close to the boundary, then the fact that you don't know exactly where the boundary is doesn't affect what you should do with that alternative.
You're doing the slippery slope fallacy.
Heretics have been burned at the stake before, so compassion isn't the only consideration when you're deciding whether to lie to your peers about your religious beliefs. My main point is that the Litany of Gendlin is sometimes a bad idea. We should be clear that you haven't cast any doubt on that, even though you're debating whether lying to one's peers is compassionate.
Given that religious relatives tend to fubar cryonics arrangements, the analogy with being burned at the stake is apt. Religious books tend to say nothing about cryonics, but the actual social process of religious groups tends to be strongly against it in practice.
(Edit: This all assumes that the Litany of Gendlin is about how to interact with others. If it's about internal dialogue, then of course it's not saying that one should or should not lie to others. IMO it is too ambiguous.)
The Litany of Gendlin is specifically about what you should or should not believe, and your feelings about reality. It says nothing about telling people what you think is true — although "owning up to it" is confusingly an idiom that normally means admitting the truth to some authority figure, whereas in this case it is meant to indicate admitting the truth to yourself.
And that's why I wrote "You seem to think that ..."; I was describing why I thought you would privilege the hypothesis that lying would be better.
You're absolutely right that learning to lie really well and actually lying to one's family, the "genuinely wonderful people" they know, everyone in one's "social structure" and business, as well as one's husband and daughter MIGHT be the "compassionate thing to do". But why would you pick out exactly that option among all the possibilities?
Actually it wasn't a rhetorical question. I was genuinely curious how you'd describe the boundary.
The reason why I think it's a justified presumption to be honest to others is in fact because of a slippery slope argument. Human being's minds run on corrupted hardware and deception is dangerous (for one reason) because it's not always easy to cleanly separate one's lies from one's true beliefs. But your implication (that lying is sometimes right) is correct; there are some obvious or well-known schelling fences on that slippery slope, such as lying to the Nazis when they come to your house while you're hiding Jews.
Your initial statement seemed rather cavalier and didn't seem to be the product of sympathetic consideration of the original commenter's situation.
Have you considered Crocker's rules? If you care about the truth or you have something to protect then the Litany of Gendlin is a reminder of why you might adopt Crocker's rules, despite the truth possibly not being the "compassionate thing to do".
Rationality can't be wrong, but it can be misused.
"People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it." is technically correct, but omits factors relevant to the situations when most people consider lying to be necessary. The fact that you know something is true is itself a truth.
So if you reason "they have to endure the truth whether I tell them it or not", you also have to acknowledge that by telling them you've added a second-order truth, and they now have to endure that second-order truth that they didn't before. The implication that telling someone the truth doesn't change anything because it didn't change the original truth... isn't true,
Of course most people don't think in terms of "telling someone a truth adds another truth", but if you try to analyze it, it turns out that it does.
Virtually nobody "cares about the truth" in the absolute sense needed to make that statement logically correct. Most people care about the truth as one of several things that they care about, which need to be balanced against each other.
As a matter of logic nobody caring about the truth (in whatever sense is meant by the claim) is sufficient to ensure that the statement is always correct (the part replaced by the ellipsis need not be resolved). (The problem is that it is then probably useless.)
Because it's a possibility that the post we're talking about apparently did not consider. The Litany of Gendlin was mentioned in the original post, and I think that when interpreted as a way to interact with others, the Litany of Gendlin is obviously the wrong thing to do in some circumstances.
Perhaps having these beautifully phrased things with a person's name attached is a liability. If I add a caveat that it's only about one's internal process, or it's only about communication with people that either aspire to be rational or that you have no meaningful relationship with, then it's not beautifully phrased anymore, and it's not the Litany of Gendlin anymore, and it seems hopeless for the resulting Litany of Tim to get enough mindshare to matter.
I'm not curious about that, and in the absence of financial incentives I'm not willing to try to answer that question. There is no simple description of how to deal with the world that's something a reasonable person will actually want to do.