I agree teodora. But this is too philosophical. Too generalized. And there are so many ways to categorize truth, like subjective - objective, minor - major, relative - absolute etc.

To put it differently, more concretely, I was talking about honesty. You see, when you notice that something is obviously wrong but you have to leave it like that, it is quite difficult. I deliberately did not brought the case of remorse. I was talking about the situation when you are truly involved. Because I think those situations carry a unique possibility of self knowledge. (Quite selfish, huh?)

teodora, I have a different view on this

Hopefully, when you said “you”, you meant “we”. If you meant you as referring to me, I admit that I might be mixing up things, a lot of them, quite often.

Still, I think that telling the truth to a friend who is close to you, is much more important than worrying about hurting his/her feelings. That would be hypocrisy.

The basic dilemma arose from the moral saying that not hurting is more important than saying the truth. But in this case, as you perfectly well saw it, if you tell the truth to a close friend, you are trying to defend him/her from an other influence that might hurt him/her. And that might hurt him/her more than your honesty.

Changing the world and others has nothing to do with what I meant. You brought this in.

PS. According to your frank attitude here, I like to think that you consider me a friend from your latter category.

There wasn’t the case to overemphasize the avoidance of verbal aggression. But I’m glad you made it clear. That won’t hurt for sure.

Also, you say that being congruent with yourself is the true meaning of honesty. Then consider again the situation presented in the post. How would you react if that was your friend we’re talking about?

A friend of mine who has some emotional problems recently got into many kinds of beliefs, basically everything she was offered she accepted. Buddha, God, ghosts, bio, science things, reincarnation, electric and magnetic waves, vitamins, whatever you can imagine.. I called her attention to being uncritical to these instead of starting a debate on the truth about ghosts. I made it clear that I think it’s very unlikely that her (relationship) problems come from the other world and I emphasized on how little control we can have over these things to change them so maybe it’s better to find some more down-to-earth solution. It’s maybe a different situation but I found it very useless to wake her up from any illusions or beliefs because that wouldn’t have changed anything.

HONESTY, TO BE OR NOT TO BE?

To me there is no doubt that in the long run honesty always pays. People are remembered and needed for this quality, HONESTY. But there are many kinds of honesty.

Have you ever had someone say to you, “ look I need help and I am looking to hire someone for this task, do you know anyone who is hard working and can do the job? My biggest requirement is they are honest”.

It is true that sometimes people really don’t want to know the truth about something. A good example of this in real life is the boss worker relationship. Most bosses want their subordinates to tell them what they want to hear and not be honest about the situation. They don’t want the employee’s opinion. They want yes people working for them. I have witnessed many times in my business career, cases where a boss gets rid of people who don’t agree with him, even when that person is right and tells the honest truth.

If we are to develop our character and continue our self development as adults we must make honesty one of the principles we live by.

But life always gives us tough challenges regarding honesty. Have you ever had to tell a friend or loved on that they are an alcoholic and need to get help? Or even a little thing like telling your girlfriend that she has bad breath and needs better oral hygiene? Yes, it’s so easy not to be honest in these cases, but in the long run both you and the other person will benefit from you honesty.

Yes it has been my experience that honesty always pays, whatever amount of honesty you give out in your life, you will always get back and then some.