Radical Honesty

This post is not original to me; I copied it and literally pasted it from Emerging Penses. The concept of Radical Honesty is really attractive and intriguing to me, though--it is so far from how I live my life each day that it seems revolutionary to me! It is though-provoking, at least. Anyway, all of the green is Mike's post:

AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically, recently wrote an article for Esquire about a movement called Radical Honesty. According to Jacobs:

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough -- a world without fibs -- but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path to authentic relationships. It's the only way to smash through modernity's soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

It's an interesting theory, and this guy apparently seems to really live by it. Jacobs describes his initial contact with Blanton:

I e-mail Blanton to ask if I can come down to Virginia and get some pointers before embarking on my Radical Honesty experiment. He writes back: "I appreciate you for apparently having a real interest and hope you're not just doing a cutesy little superficial dipshit job like most journalists."

I'm already nervous. I better start off with a clean slate. I confess I lied to him in my first e-mail -- that I haven't ordered all his books on Amazon yet. I was just trying to impress upon him that I was serious about his work. He writes back: "Thanks for your honesty in attempting to guess what your manipulative and self-protective motive must have been."

Blanton is not a Christian, in fact he doesn't believe in the categories of morality--only in pragmatism. He simply asserts that radical honesty is the only way to true relationships and real communication--it provides you with a better life. No hiding, no masks, no pretension. He says that even all the little white lies we tell in order to not hurt other's feelings are really harmful, and that people would be better served if we just told them the truth and allowed them to tell the truth to us as well. But he also says the point is relationship. After you tell the truth, even if it's offensive or hard for them to hear, you stick with them and help them work through it until the tension is resolved.

So here is a guy that is taking literally the bible's command to not lie, and yet how many Christians would be willing to adopt his lifestyle of radical honesty? Would you? And if not, what are the reasons we give ourselves for why we shouldn't be completely honest all the time? (In other words, why we shouldn't do exactly what the Bible says.)