1) To Lie or Tell the Truth?
There are stories adults tell us as little kids that make telling the truth seem like the right thing to do, always, and where there is a bad guy and a good guy and the good guy is the one telling things the way they are. Think of Disney stories/movies, of course the good guy wins and they do so by being the best he or she can be and full-heartedly telling the truth when everyone else around them does not. However, this may not be the best approach to life. The truth can hurt and not all of us can handle the truth. People like me, for example, like to live in their sheltered world, only letting in small specks of truth at a time. If I were to know the specifics of the massive amount of horribly evil and corrupt things that go on in this world then I may spontaneously combust and never recover. I know about some things and I am a fairly good human being, but I can't handle knowing everything all at once about all the dreadful things that other human beings are capable of doing. White lies, for me, are better then the alternative. I liked Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It is hard to say if this world would be a better or worse place if everyone had to tell the truth all the time. (That concept was explored in the movie "The Invention of Lying.") Imagine if you woke up one day and suddenly could not tell a lie. Would it make your life easier or harder? I don't have the answers, in fact all I have is questions. It's something that I'll never know and maybe it's better that way. As for now, I'm comforted in the thought of bunnies laying chocolate eggs and a jolly old man giving gifts to those who deserve them.
So, remember the truth will set you free, but ignorance is bliss.
Think about Neo in the Matrix. Would you want to know that the world you'd been living in and everything that you had once thought was important to you was all just created by a computer? Or, would you turn into that guy that betrayed them in the first movie because he couldn't stand knowing the truth?
-images taken from http://www.fanpop.com/spots/christmas/images/2736333/title/santa-claus-wallpaper, http://yankeeschick.mlblogs.com/archives/2009/04/happy_easter.html, and http://www.pajamasandcoffee.com/?p=921-
