Ophiolite said:
I just invested ten or fifteen minutes in reading this entire thread. Robanan, help me make that investment worthwhile. You have been at pains to counter objections by Squeak and SkinWalker and others. I know, therefore, what you are against. It is not at all clear what you are for. Care to elucidate.
[And thanks for spelling monetary correctly. The illiteracy of some of the posters was bringing me close to vomiting.]
"Learning" has always been a wonderful experience for me, throughout my whole life. The point that I'm making is very simple. "None" of us, no matter how intelligent we think we are can say: "Hey, I've learnt everything, I know everything, and everything I've learnt and everything I know is true".
The reason is also very simple. The more you learn, the more you understand that you have to learn, new horizons appear in front of you. I agree with everyone who says and understands that "we are only limited by our own intellect and imagination" since
the more I've learnt in my life the more I've understood that I really have an unlimited potential to learn
I demand elementary respect to and/or understanding of the fact that anyone may decide to experience conscious learning at any moment of the life they are living. Let me add that It "also" depends on the "thing(s)" that can give you a good motivation to start with.
Currently there is not enough phisical "evidence" to justify that what is written in the book we are discussing is either "truth" or "lies". The "proof" may never be enough... (to either prove the contents of the book to be "truth" or "lies")
By considering "all" the information written in the book (fantasy or not), I think of it as a good motivator toward very specific things. The lable "Believing is not enough, you need to know" is more of a warning rather than a claim. The book covers a vast amount of topics, and it's readers naturally are not experts of all those topics and in most cases the information and knowledge they have is either limited or it doesn't match with what is written in the book. So throughout reading the whole book they are "naturally" led to believe in some of it. Some people notice it right away some people don't. In general
It is relied upon the individual responsibility of the reader toward him/her own self so as to take care about what they understand from the book as "fiction" , "knowledge", "belief", "reality" etc.
SkinWalker doesn't know what I had for breakfast today, If I tell him/her by phone or in a post, he/she will need to believe in me, If he/she trusts me there is a relatively high probability that he/she will, If he/she does not trust me there would be a relativelty little probability that he/she would believe me.
But if we had breakfast together he/she would have had known, no matter he/she trusts me or not.
[It was the first time in my life ever, that I came across the word "Elucidate", English is my third language, I speak five languages and I understand more than 8 languages in written form, I found the word a very beautiful one, thank you...]