Kindness is a tricky proposition. Anyone trained in tough love knows the doctrine that you have to stick to the truth in order to dispel the obsessive rationalizations and justifications the mind manufacturers in an effort to somehow integrate its delusions with its more accurate data.

But it is ALSO true that the growth of a changing mind finding newer, richer, or wiser ways to see things only comes about in spaces where the individual's sovereign ownership of his own world view is not challenged or choked off. It is extremely hard to change a point of view WHILE you are having to defend it.

In the strange mixup of universes that leads people to generate religious propositions, there are some facts and some speculation and some downright inventions, just as, for example, there were all three present in the borning of the phlogiston theory, the caloric model of heat, or the invisible-ether explanation for the transmission of waves through vacuum. Intellectually, we outgrew all three of those models as we acquired better knowledge through experience (or so it seemed).

So -- both the learning and growing mind AND the mind that wishes to help and be kind, have to proceed with a modicum of appropriate humility just to be effective at what they are setting out to do, and for no bigger reason than that.


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WHose-mouth-is-on-another-damned-roll...