Analysis Of Sartre: Lying And Bad Faith

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Sartre: Lying and bad faith are inherently intertwined, not mutually exclusive as you so wish to assert. Bad faith is our refusal to acknowledge the innumerable amount of options that we constantly and forever have at our disposal. We have the ability to exercise any one, or more, of these options at any point in time, yet the large majority of people, if not all, continually refuse to even acknowledge such options, let alone exercising any of them. This denial of choices is a form of lying, and it is responsible for the continuation of bad faith in modern society.
Kierkegaard: Faith cannot be truly practiced if one is lying to oneself about one’s choices; at the very least it cannot be an authentic faith. The only choices that one has
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While I agree that mainstream Christianity is not the ideal faith or even a logically coherent one, I disagree with the notion that each one of us, alone, has to realize the objective truth regarding an authentic way of life. This says explicitly that people cannot be convinced about the truth; that they are forced to be alone in their journey, or lack thereof, to discern the objective truth of reality. Hardly any people, other than perhaps a select few and me, truly understand the immediate reality that faces us. History, as well as contemporary society, is not exactly full of examples of people who understood that they have more options than they realized. The way I see it, if people are unable to be convinced of this objective truth, then it is unlikely that vast swaths of humanity will suddenly come to realize, each by oneself and oneself alone, that they have been practicing bad faith. This would be an incredibly unlikely deviation from recent history if this were to happen. Considering this, it seems apparent that, if what you are saying is true, humanity has very little hope of escaping bad faith and living

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