HOME | DD

Description
sometimes. Christians are allowed to lie (only they, of course)!

"A theory is called mental reservation, and it has been very widely followed. For example, the Society of Jesus (the Pope!!!)has been especially associated with various doctrines of mental reservation throughout most of its history.
An example may help. If you ask an attorney whether his client is guilty, he may properly answer "I don’t know," and intelligent people in his culture will understand that this means "I have no communicable information to impart." Hence the attorney uses a mental reservation about what he means by the words "I don’t know," but it is a mental reservation understandable by all parties (termed a "wide" mental reservation, because its meaning is widely available). Asking a friend, family member or secretary to tell a caller you are "not in" is another example of wide mental reservation. The statement is technically false, but social convention supplies a more ambivalent meaning.

One problem with mental reservation theory is that it can make truth-telling dependent on one’s capacity for spur-of-the-moment mental sleight-of-hand (often called "strict" mental reservation because it exists strictly in the speaker’s mind alone).

For example, if you’ve been playing baseball in the street (again!) and you break your neighbor’s window, the neighbor may run out and demand to know whether you did it. Under some theories of mental reservation, you can answer "no" if you are really thinking "No, I did not break it with my bat; it was the ball that broke it."

Such equivocations, whose true sense is determined only by the mind of the speaker, were condemned by the Holy See as early as 1679."

Description
sometimes. Christians are allowed to lie (only they, of course)!

"A theory is called mental reservation, and it has been very widely followed. For example, the Society of Jesus (the Pope!!!)has been especially associated with various doctrines of mental reservation throughout most of its history.
An example may help. If you ask an attorney whether his client is guilty, he may properly answer "I don’t know," and intelligent people in his culture will understand that this means "I have no communicable information to impart." Hence the attorney uses a mental reservation about what he means by the words "I don’t know," but it is a mental reservation understandable by all parties (termed a "wide" mental reservation, because its meaning is widely available). Asking a friend, family member or secretary to tell a caller you are "not in" is another example of wide mental reservation. The statement is technically false, but social convention supplies a more ambivalent meaning.

One problem with mental reservation theory is that it can make truth-telling dependent on one’s capacity for spur-of-the-moment mental sleight-of-hand (often called "strict" mental reservation because it exists strictly in the speaker’s mind alone).

For example, if you’ve been playing baseball in the street (again!) and you break your neighbor’s window, the neighbor may run out and demand to know whether you did it. Under some theories of mental reservation, you can answer "no" if you are really thinking "No, I did not break it with my bat; it was the ball that broke it."

Such equivocations, whose true sense is determined only by the mind of the speaker, were condemned by the Holy See as early as 1679."