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Just read something about Richard Dawkins complaining that fairy tales are bad for kids because they're too supernatural and children must be taught to be rational and skeptical and ladeeda and really his argument is so stupid and so refuted by other people already (Relinking to this relatively recent blogpost that I really liked, for a start) that my only response to the person who tweeted the article was, "He seems like an absolutely miserable person."
But it reminded me of something I thought of a couple weeks ago while lounging upside down with my feet up the wall, wrestling with out-of-balance brain-chemistry, so come to think of it possibly I'm not the most dependable source for wise philosophical revelations, anyway what I thought was a way to sum up a particular worldview of my own:
EVERYTHING IS REAL.
Which definitely sounds like a line scribbled down by someone with out-of-balance brain chemistry. But it still makes sense in my head even when my brain chemistry's being ostensibly "normal," so let me explain. Even made up things are real. They are words, thoughts, ideas. They are emotions. They are things that can be experienced even if only in the brain. But they DO exist BECAUSE they can set off reactions, and it doesn't matter if the FACTS aren't quite right, because the results still... result. I can't confidently say that the results are the SAME. Who KNOWS what the results could be? But they ARE results.
It's what I think when people wonder something like, "How do I know if it's REAL love?" I'm like, SURE it's real. You're feeling it, right? It may be IMPERFECT love. It may be CONFUSED or even CORRUPTED. You may feel a love that's way more powerful someday. BUT IT EXISTS. IT'S REAL. RESPECT IT.
One of my old roommates had a bumper sticker on her wall that said "God is." I think that's what I'm getting at. "I AM what AM," is the exact Bible quote. EXISTENCE. BEING. THE POSITIVE. Creation is the process of bringing into BEING. But you can be creative without physically making something, and certainly without bringing matter itself into existence. Still SOMETHING had been brought into being, and what exactly it means, what exact effect it might have on the universe, maybe nobody knows, but it still IS.
To say "No, it ISN'T," is destructive. There's really no other way to put it. It's NULLIFYING. And that sucks. Even if you're denying something BAD, you're denying it instead of dealing with the very real implications it could be having. Now granted, people deny and disbelieve things all the time. But as long as somebody DOES believe-- then, you know, Tinkerbell lives. And maybe not even just if they believe. If they just consider.
Maybe I will never fight an actual living dragon, but knowing of the possibility of dragons better prepares me to face the world, whether it's in my head or not. I like experiencing the universe this way. I like knowing that Things ARE.
But it reminded me of something I thought of a couple weeks ago while lounging upside down with my feet up the wall, wrestling with out-of-balance brain-chemistry, so come to think of it possibly I'm not the most dependable source for wise philosophical revelations, anyway what I thought was a way to sum up a particular worldview of my own:
EVERYTHING IS REAL.
Which definitely sounds like a line scribbled down by someone with out-of-balance brain chemistry. But it still makes sense in my head even when my brain chemistry's being ostensibly "normal," so let me explain. Even made up things are real. They are words, thoughts, ideas. They are emotions. They are things that can be experienced even if only in the brain. But they DO exist BECAUSE they can set off reactions, and it doesn't matter if the FACTS aren't quite right, because the results still... result. I can't confidently say that the results are the SAME. Who KNOWS what the results could be? But they ARE results.
It's what I think when people wonder something like, "How do I know if it's REAL love?" I'm like, SURE it's real. You're feeling it, right? It may be IMPERFECT love. It may be CONFUSED or even CORRUPTED. You may feel a love that's way more powerful someday. BUT IT EXISTS. IT'S REAL. RESPECT IT.
One of my old roommates had a bumper sticker on her wall that said "God is." I think that's what I'm getting at. "I AM what AM," is the exact Bible quote. EXISTENCE. BEING. THE POSITIVE. Creation is the process of bringing into BEING. But you can be creative without physically making something, and certainly without bringing matter itself into existence. Still SOMETHING had been brought into being, and what exactly it means, what exact effect it might have on the universe, maybe nobody knows, but it still IS.
To say "No, it ISN'T," is destructive. There's really no other way to put it. It's NULLIFYING. And that sucks. Even if you're denying something BAD, you're denying it instead of dealing with the very real implications it could be having. Now granted, people deny and disbelieve things all the time. But as long as somebody DOES believe-- then, you know, Tinkerbell lives. And maybe not even just if they believe. If they just consider.
Maybe I will never fight an actual living dragon, but knowing of the possibility of dragons better prepares me to face the world, whether it's in my head or not. I like experiencing the universe this way. I like knowing that Things ARE.
