Posted the following on a Buddhist bulletin board thread about lying this morning and thought I would paste it here as well:
I have come around to the view that
precepts are not descriptors of what anyone could or would actually do.
Rather they are descriptors of good advice everyone will ignore or act
contrary to from time to time.
By this yardstick, it is impossible not to lie ... not least because
language describes experience and there is no such thing as experience
that can be adequately described. By this yardstick, everyone is lying
all the time and the best anyone could do about it in a search for truth
would be to shoulder the responsibility and recognize that living life
in approximate ways (lies) is neither satisfactory nor pleasant.
But even here, there is a fly in the ointment: How is it possible
that life -- yours, mine or anyone else's -- could ever be approximate?
No one is 'approximately' alive. Even those who fall victim to so-called
living-in-the-moment and all the chit-chat that goes with that are
constrained to admit it: No one is 'approximately' alive.
And if any of this holds actual-factual water, then truth and lies
are not so very different. Not the same, mind you, but not so different
either. This is the realm of what the Hindus call "the razor's edge."
It's much too sharp for me .... and besides, I need another cup of coffee. 
Part of the quantum physics problem is the approximation of where an electron might be. Or when does a particle become a wave or vice versa? And here it comes, the observer effect. It all supports the idea of a subjective only universe with no objective reality, making everything approximate to the viewer. I suspect the trap in recognizing this is the thinking that this makes the viewer somehow important. Maybe it's not that the viewer changes an outcome so much as it just looks different from point of perspective. Why should viewer be more important than viewed?
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