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Is it immoral to lie about my principles?

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skap35

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As an Objectivist I am an Atheist. I was raised as a Catholic and most of my family is religious (though not very much; they really don't even go to church). If I ever told them what I think, I know they wouldn't necessarily disown me, but I do know they would be horrified. So when my family does go to church (Christmas and Easter only) I go through the motions and get my communion like everyone else, even though I don't believe in it one bit.

Another issue is with my ex-girlfriend. On our first date she asked me my religion. I gave a non-committal answer of "I was raised Catholic but I don't go to church or anything." Not exactly telling her the truth though. Immediately after I said that, her response was "oh I'm glad you said that. I'm Catholic too. Although, I would have been able to deal with it if you were some other religion. But if you said you were Atheist, I wouldn't be able to pursue this relationship." From that first date until we eventually broke up (for reasons unrelated to religion) turned out to be the happiest time of my life (despite our religious differences). So if I told the truth I would have missed out on all those wonderful memories.

I tried to think of this as a hierarchy of values. Clearly I valued my overall happiness above standing by what I believe in. So was there anything wrong with how I have handled those two situations? Is it morally wrong of my to fake my belief in the ritual of communion so my family isn't horrified by me? Was it wrong of me to lie to my girlfriend so I could have all those wonderful memories?

Edited by skap35
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You sound exactly like me. My family does not know that I'm an atheist. My Catholic fiancee does, and she doesn't seem to mind, but I don't plan on ever telling my family. I go to church when my parents ask me to, but all Baptists do is just sit there...I also go with my fiancee, but her family knows I was never Catholic, so I don't take communion or go through any of the motions.

I personally think it was wrong to lie to your girlfriend, especially if you were considering something long-term. As far as your family goes, I don't necessarily think it's wrong. It would not be in your self-interest to have your family be horrified by you.

By the way, I used to live in Dayton and am the same age as you. How long have you lived there?

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I tried to think of this as a hierarchy of values.  Clearly I valued my overall happiness above standing by what I believe in.  So was there anything wrong with how I have handled those two situations?  Is it morally wrong of my to fake my belief in the ritual of communion so my family isn't horrified by me?  Was it wrong of me to lie to my girlfriend so I could have all those wonderful memories?

It is not wrong to not make a big deal of your beliefs in front of your family: I will say grace at meals when my family does so, I have gone to church with my family (for weddings and such). If all you are doing is avoiding inflicting serious unpleasantness on yourself, and you have legitimate reasons for spending time with your family.

Lying to your girlfriend was wrong. Yes, you have some nice memories, but was the purpose of dating her really to be able to remember it? Even if everything else had worked out, that lie was a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. It can be hard sometimes, but it really is better to be honest; the things you gain by lying can come back and bite you in the butt. The things you gain by telling the truth are YOURS and no one can take them away.

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I always read about it, but I never believed that this religiousness is so strong in the US. That's truly weird.

I have something that is not that strong, but it's related:

My parents are strong believers in socialism or what they consider 'helping the poor'. But every now and then I confront them with my opinions. My mother thinks she raised a monster, but my father tries to argue with me. But since he started losing the arguments, he doesn't want to discuss anymore and avoids the issue altogether. But everytime there's an election I get a new chance.

About the girlfriend-matter:

I didn't do what you did. I always rejected women then. But it didn't make me very happy, because I had my morals, but I didn't have a girlfriend. I'm still torn between waiting for the right one and just taking my chances (of which I have enough, but I always dismiss them). So this issue is of interest to me, too.

How can a moral life lead to unhappiness? This can't be. But still I have to choose between standing by my convictions and accepting a girlfriend. This is torture.

But I believe (and I did that even before I was an Objectivist) that I give up everything I want to stand for if I give in. I always believed that I had to stand by my convictions, because in the end that's all I have.

Is that wrong?

Edited by Felix
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But I believe (and I did that even before I was an Objectivist) that I give up everything I want to stand for if I give in. I always believed that I had to stand by my convictions, because in the end that's all I have.

Is that wrong?

What to you would make a girl "good enough" to be your girlfriend (outside of looks of course)?

For me there is only one qualifier, she has to love life and what it has to offer. That's it.

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What to you would make a girl "good enough" to be your girlfriend (outside of looks of course)?

For me there is only one qualifier, she has to love life and what it has to offer. That's it.

Pretty much every woman I have met was, well ... boring.

They didn't know what to do with their lives. Of course some liked life. But all they did was party, in the end. No plan, no goal, nothing. I met some women who were interesting, but they all had a boyfriend.

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"Skap35", I have a question. Now that you are older and wiser by the experience, is there anything you would do differently if you found yourself in the same situation again with a girl saying that she didn't want to pursue a relationship with an atheist.

PS: You could tell her you're an "extremely religious person though you do not believe in the existence of an entity like God". With the right gal, that might lead to some interesting conversation. :sorcerer:

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How can a moral life lead to unhappiness? This can't be. But still I have to choose between standing by my convictions and accepting a girlfriend. This is torture.

You think being alone because you haven't found the right person yet is torture? Just try compromising with yourself and "accepting" someone you really shouldn't. Try it. I dare you. Not only will your relationship be a living hell, you'll hate YOURSELF, too, because you know that you destroyed your own integrity for the sake of something you don't even want any more! Worse, depending on how far you go, it'll become murderously difficult to get OUT of the bad relationship!

This isn't to say that you shouldn't "take a chance" on what you think may turn out to be a good relationship. You can't fortell the future: what you can do is introspect and be honest with yourself about your motivations, and honest with your PARTNER about your motivations. That way you can tell her, truthfully, what it is you want from her, and she can decide whether she wants that, as well. Having a good relationship is a lot of work; it isn't something you can just fall into. The best way to learn how to really appreciate your fullest capacity to love may be to have a few lesser relationships. If you are honest about them, and don't try to pretend that they are more than they are, you will be glad of them. :)

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You think being alone because you haven't found the right person yet is torture?  Just try compromising with yourself and "accepting" someone you really shouldn't.  Try it.  I dare you.  Not only will your relationship be a living hell, you'll hate YOURSELF, too, because you know that you destroyed your own integrity for the sake of something you don't even want any more!

That's precisely why I don't do it.

The best way to learn how to really appreciate your fullest capacity to love may be to have a few lesser relationships.  If you are honest about them, and don't try to pretend that they are more than they are, you will be glad of them. :)

Thanks. :)

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I just have to comment on this, because the issues involved are really important.

What matters is not a person's set of beliefs, but rather how he or she arrived at them. To find that out, you have to spend some time with that person.

You may find that a so-called "God-believer" isn't really religious in terms of having an irrational psycho-epistemology. In my own experience, a lot of self-proclaimed "religious" individuals, especially if they are young, are actually very value-seeking subconsciously. They merely have a wrong conscious framework (religion) for the right (rational) subconscious values.

But what if you are single and meet a lovely person, whom you are attracted to, and that person really thinks it is important whether you believe in God or not -- what do you do?

You lie.

You lie and say that you believe in God and then, when you are a couple, you constantly inject rational values into the relationsship. Give it a few years and you'll win, if you believe in free will.

I have tried this myself. When I first met my wife, she was very religious. It was important for her that I believed in God. Since "God" is really a name or concept that doesn't mean anything to me, I said to her that I believed in "God" -- treating it as meaning "Existence" or "Love". And that was no lie -- I actually explained it to her that this was what God meant to me. And she was happy with that.

However -- and this is important -- ever since I met her, I have managed to stimulate her mind in such ways that today she is actually a serious student of Objectivism.

So what's the best situation out of these two alternatives:

1) Today I am a single man who is unhappy because a very important value is absent in my life (romantic love). I blew it when I had the chance, just because I acted on a very short-range view of what constituted "integrity". Rather than showing confidence in my own mind, I just had to slam my atheism in the open -- an issue that wasn't even important to me. The lovely girl I was once dating, who could have been mine, is now married to another man who insists that she attends church every Sunday together with his family, who practice BDSM with her, who breaks down her rational judgement and makes a doormat of her. She is living in a 24/7 relationsship. Her husband is now her master. Sometimes I wake up in the night. The nightmares are becoming more frequent these days. The thought of another man ramming his dick down her throat every day (which she accepts out of a sense of duty or "love"), drives me insane.

2) Today I am in a really great romantic relationsship with the woman of my dreams. I was strong enough to embrace her, to wash out the destruction that got to her first. She was mentally raped by evil through her childhood. Consequently, she was calling herself "religious" when I first met her. But I saw through that. I won, because I believed in her rational judgement over time. I believed in free will, I believed she would change her mind. She did. She is now my lover, best friend and fellow student of Objectivism.

Of course, I chose the second alternative.

Edited by Soulsurfer
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Oh I SEE. So, it's okay to bend the truth a *little* because other people don't KNOW what they want and they don't have any integrity, either!

It ever occur to you that there are other ways to be diplomatic than an outright lie?

You know what the word "God" means: it refers to an invalid concept of a supreme being. Don't pretend that you can "shade" that meaning in order to escape responsibility for your own moral default.

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Oh I SEE.  So, it's okay to bend the truth a *little* because other people don't KNOW what they want and they don't have any integrity, either! 

It ever occur to you that there are other ways to be diplomatic than an outright lie?

You know what the word "God" means: it refers to an invalid concept of a supreme being.  Don't pretend that you can "shade" that meaning in order to escape responsibility for your own moral default.

I don't know if the quoted text above was adressed to me. But, assuming that it was:

No, I don't know what the word "God" means. I still don't know what that little name refers too. And you don't, either. Since it is an invalid concept, it has no cognitive meaning whatsoever (nor any value whatsoever).

You are wrong in your conclusion that I "bend the truth a little" -- that's not what I am doing, nor have done. It would be true if I did it in my own head -- yes. But one doesn't have a moral obligation to tell people the "truth" if that telling is contraproductive to your own long-term rational interests. Check your own premises!

Granted, if my wife had specifically asked: "Do you blindly believe in a supreme consciousness, that have created existence out of thought, and who can change natural facts on whim?" -- I wouldn't have answered "yes". But she didn't ask this. She asked whether I believed in God, which is exactly the same as asking "Do you believe in &#¤!#¤?"

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You are wrong in your conclusion that I "bend the truth a little" -- that's not what I am doing, nor have done. It would be true if I did it in my own head -- yes. But one doesn't have a moral obligation to tell people the "truth" if that telling is contraproductive to your own long-term rational interests. Check your own premises!
You're right that you don't "bend the truth a little"; you bend it a lot.

Granted, if my wife had specifically asked: "Do you blindly believe in a supreme consciousness, that have created existence out of thought, and who can change natural facts on whim?" -- I wouldn't have answered "yes".
See, you know exactly what people are asking when they ask whether you believe in God.
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No, you don't have an obligation to tell them the truth. But you DO have an obligation NOT to tell them a FALSEHOOD, assuming of course that you have some integrity. Honesty is not a coat you can put on when it suits you. It requires an absolute commitment, just like any other virtue.

Your stated point is not that it's okay to refrain from telling strangers things that they have no right to know, as you attempt to pretend, but that so long as you stand to "gain" by doing something, anything goes! Lie, cheat, steal, murder, whatever! It doesn't matter. You did not simply refuse to answer your girlfriend, you actively told her something that you knew to be untrue.

And now, as Dufresne pointed out, you're trying to convince us that you don't know what "God" refers to in order to preserve your own twisted semblance that you are correct. News Flash: even invalid concepts have referents: they refer to a certain manufactured bit of mental content (thanks Mr. Laughlin), a fact of which you are clearly, by your own words, aware. So, now you're lying even to yourself. Well done.

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You're right that you don't "bend the truth a little"; you bend it a lot.

No, I don't.

See, you know exactly what people are asking when they ask whether you believe in God.

No, I don't.

The descriptive phrase I provided was based on a view of "God" that is derived from an Objectivist perspective. In reality, the conclusion that "God" ultimately is nothing but a consciousness is a viewpoint that religious people don't necessarily hold. When a person says he believes in "God", therefore, it is a huge mistake to equate his professed belief with a primacy of consciousness metaphysics.

I have found that in most cases, especially in young people, the concept of "God" refers to some portion of what others want it to stand for (often some kind of authority figure that can be used to rationalize for despotism here on earth). But it also stands for a misintegrated set of esthetic abstractions (and values) pertaining to what they value most in life: exploring this earth, integrating knowledge and seeking happiness and love. Of course, this belief system is communicated through poetry and metaphors rather than scientific facts. However, in terms of a deeper psycho-epistemology it could be translated to imply optimism, confidence and trust.

If this is not what other people on this board have experienced, then all I can say is: too bad for them.

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Again: you advocate that you assume other people don't know what they're talking about. If they misuse a word, then they have to accept responsibility for that fact. If I tell you that the dishes are "in the dishwasher" when I really MEANT that they were "in the cabinet", it would be utterly irrational for you to go first to the cabinet, assuming that I was talking about something other than what I said.

The solution is to first ASK PEOPLE what they mean by "God", not just assume that they are insane and thus you have every right to abuse them.

By what standard do you assume that people have a GOOD psycho-epistemology if they use words to refer to a completely random set of ideas, rather than something identifiable and coherent?

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I've been a lifelong atheist, and far from lying to a woman about it, I always made it a point to mention that I'm atheist and that I despise religion, but have a strong philosophy. More than one relationship disintegrated because of the conflict over religion, but so it goes - I certainly wasn't going to change. Based on the experiences, I suggest that any Objectivist man simply not get involved with a religious woman.

I think it would be a major disaster to lie to a girlfriend about being religious (which is exactly what is meant by "I believe in God"). First of all because it's a lie generally, but more specifically, because anybody capable of taking ideas seriously would certainly not want to be lied to about a philosophic matter. In a sense, it is literally the biggest lie and biggest fraud that you could perpetrate!

Turn the tables around and imagine that a would-be gf/bf said "I'm not religious and I find Ayn Rand's ideas fascinating" when the real truth was: They were Baptists and really hated Ayn Rand's ideas. Exactly how long would that "work"? And how much trust would be left in the relationship after they tell you this? (Or you figure it out via induction.)

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It is not wrong to not make a big deal of your beliefs in front of your family: I will say grace at meals when my family does so, I have gone to church with my family (for weddings and such).  If all you are doing is avoiding inflicting serious unpleasantness on yourself, and you have legitimate reasons for spending time with your family.

Lying to your girlfriend was wrong.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying that it is ok to keep this from my family but not my girlfriend. Could you explain this a bit more?

"Skap35", I have a question. Now that you are older and wiser by the experience, is there anything you would do differently if you found yourself in the same situation again with a girl saying that she didn't want to pursue a relationship with an atheist.
I'm really not sure about that. I do feel guilty because I probably should have told the truth. But one reason I'm reluctant to do so is that, in my experience, people tend to be very tolerant of other religions. But when it comes to Atheists, they are openly hostile toward me. But then again, I suppose if I am building a relationship based on trust, I should be honest about things.
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... in my experience, people tend to be very tolerant of other religions.  But when it comes to Atheists, they are openly hostile...
Are you assuming that the girl's idea of what constitutes an atheist is different from your own conception in much the same way as a girl you meet might say she does not like selfish people, and might mean something different from what you mean by "selfish"?
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If I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying that it is ok to keep this from my family but not my girlfriend.  Could you explain this a bit more?

There's a difference, as I said above, between not telling someone something they don't really have a right to ask (i.e. keeping something from your family) and lying to someone about something they DO have a right to ask (telling your girlfriend you are religious).

For example, taking communion. Have you actually gone and told your family, "hey, I can't wait to have communion! I love sharing the body of Christ!" I'm betting no. (If you have, I'm wondering why.) Or do you just blandly go ahead and take communion, knowing that it has no bearing on what you, personally, think? I don't take communion on the rare occasions when I go to church, but I do put up with the whole stand-up-kneel-sit-down folderol.

Familial relationships can get weird, because although you don't get to PICK your family, you are dependant upon them, particularly when you are young. Prudence and reason dictate that you may have to do some oddball things in order to keep the peace, and biting your tongue is one of them. In return, your family should have the grace to not try to intrude upon the privacy of your thoughts on the matter. If they DO, (i.e. by asking straightforward yes-or-no questions) then you actually can legitimately lie in order to prevent a fight that you have no interest in carrying on.

Lying to your girlfriend is different. You're not avoiding a pointless confrontation; you're actually seeking to gain a value (her company) by means of a deception. Now, here's where an important point comes in. The loss of a potential future value (i.e. her choosing not to date you) is not the same thing as a disvalue. I think many people make this mistake, especially with relationships, because losing someone hurts, and they take that pain as a sign that they are worse off now than they were before they had the relationship; i.e. that they have experienced a "net" loss. This is not true. In fact, quite often they realize a net gain (having learned something about relationships in the process). This is what motivates people to imagine that they're justified in lying to prevent this imagined loss.

There is no justification for lying to attempt to gain a value. It is all right to lie (although you should avoid it if possible, because it usually isn't necessary, and it's a bad, bad habit to get into) in order to avoid a disvalue, such as being robbed, or having an unnecessary fight with your nosy family.

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Are you assuming that the girl's idea of what constitutes an atheist is different from your own conception in much the same way as a girl you meet might say she does not like selfish people, and might mean something different from what you mean by "selfish"?

Yes, she has a very different concept of Atheism. She equates it with "absolute evil." At least when it comes to someone like me...

Having been brought up Catholic, then rejecting it is a major sin in that religion. If I had been an Atheist simply because I never heard of Christianity, it wouldn't be a sin and I'd still go to heaven. But since I was exposed to the light of God, and still rejected him, I am evil and will go to hell for it.

That's the logic of Christians, and it's also what they went around teaching me in my religion classes when I was a kid.

Would she have been your girlfriend if you hadn't lied?
She claimed she wouldn't have been.
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JMeganSnow:

Generally when it comes to relationships, I tend to avoid talking a lot about politics, religion, and anything else controversial because it is an easy way for a relationship to go sour early on. For example, if one person is extremely liberal, and the other is extremely conservative, chances are that political discussion can only lead to a negative result. In the long term, obviously people can't be too polarized when it comes to their values, but I think that for casual dating it isn't necessarily worth jeopardizing the fun and other things you have to gain from the relationship.

In the past I have been asked, by friends and girls alike, about my religion. What do I tell them? I have told them that there are too many possibilities for me to sit down and just agree with one theory about "god". Some people would call it agnosticism. Since I have become more aware of Objectivism and have heard better arguments for why there simply is not a god, I have started moving closer and closer to atheism. At the moment, I haven't really studied Rand's arguments for how the existence of the supernatural can be disproved, so I don't want to really make that conclusion until I'm convinced, but even if I were a declared athiest, I would probably not give friends or girlfriends a definite "I'm an athiest" declaration until I knew that it wouldn't put them off at all.

If the girl is religious, but not to the point where its a central theme in her life, then I don't think it is too hard to give a vague excuse and not have to worry about it too much in the future. If she is very religious, I probably wouldn't want to date her in the first place. I don't know if I would call it lying, per se, but if it is, I think it is a lie that would be worth telling. As long as she knows that you both have your differences when it comes to religion, I think the topic can be put away pretty quickly without problems.

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