02-01-2019, 05:14 PM
(02-01-2019, 04:14 PM)taramarie Wrote:(02-01-2019, 03:08 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(01-31-2019, 05:30 PM)taramarie Wrote: There are many different standards of intelligence. I have always felt that an open mind certainly can help and knowing that there is always something to learn. To question everything.
There still is core reality, and people deny certain realities only to show themselves as fools, fanatics, or liars. I am anything but open to the concepts of a flat or hollow earth. We all learn a body of truths against which we judge new, and often unattractive ideas. That is one way to defend oneself against extremism, bigotry, superstition, pseudoscience, and often self-harm.
I am not going to question that an atom with forty protons in its nucleus is zirconium, that Abraham Lincoln was born on April 12, 1809, that Macbeth is doomed in Shakespeare's dramatic play of the such name, or that the large body of water to the east and northeast of Chicago is Lake Michigan. I am not going to deny the scientific evidence that the use of tobacco does unmitigated harm, at least statistically, to those who use cancerweed products.
We have education so that we do not have to relearn what people from antiquity first learned the hard way by finding out that such is so the same hard way.
You seem to have missed my point unfortunately.
I'm just showing the limitations to open-mindedness. People have more real intellectual freedom if they are not burdened by superstition, and bigotry.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.