Chapters 4&5

It's true the truth can hurt, ch.4, and at times we may feel like we were better off knowing a lie or nothing at all. Ignorance is bliss? Is it? In this chapter he mentions cheating in a marriage as one of the things that we may want to just be lied to about or a health condition but I can't say that's true for me. Even though the truth hurts I would rather know the truth than be living a lie. Maybe knowing the truth in these situations could fix something in your life, rekindel a relationship or a miracle cure. Nothing will happen if you do nothing. I would have to disagree with Meredith when you talked about Iraq and the WMD not impacting our lives. We went to war in search of a lie and whether you have a personal tie someone there or an issue involved I think that we are all highly impacted by the fall of our economy that is partly because of this extremely expensive and untruthful war. This is percisely the reason why we have to seperate truth from power because once the powers at be are at work establishing what our truths should consist of there is no rationalizing or critisism that can quickly intercede.

I like the very last lines of ch.5 (74) and though this summarized Lynch's point well and even made me chuckle, "I do hope my claims made withstand refutaion, certainty, but that is not my only hope. I also want them to be right. To think otherwise is to confuse the love of truth with the love of winning." We would all love to win all the time but then we would be reverting back to simple minded relativism and we would be infallible. Nice idea but this is impossible to achive. I could understand where the utilitarian ideas about truths come from after all knowing the truth can produce a lot of good things for us. However, I feel like the truth is bigger than that and I'm going to have to agree with the truisms that the truth is worthy of inquiry. This book has taught us that we are not perfect and the truth is not perfect but seeking the truth can help us to become better and more knowledgeable people and still be good just because it's the truth at the same time.