Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
I do not think so..I still think lying is a pestilence in all but a few very special situations - like to save someone's life or the like. I do not believe in 'white lies for the sake of the person lied to' - I think it is patronising.
More than patronising, it's arrogant.

I'm reminded of an episode of "Voyager" we saw recently. The holographic Doctor discovers a gap in his memory a year and a half old, apparently related to a vanished crew member. It turns out (SPOILER WARNING)















that the crewman died on the operating table in circumstances which sent him into a cybernetic breakdown, and Torres deleted the memory to save him. So now they have to decide whether to do it again... and the conclusion is that the Doctor has become a person, and when people have problems, friends help them cope, not decide unilaterally to keep information from them for their own good.