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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8528885" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I believe we're talking past each other, so I won't press it any further than this post (not least because it's off topic). But I think you are discounting an entire world of truths solely because they don't correlate to brute physical facts, as I said.Stories communicate to us these timeless truths. That's the whole point here. As Sir Terry Pratchett put it in Let There Be Dragons:“The morality of fantasy and horror is, by and large, the strict morality of the fairy tale. The vampire is slain, the alien is blown out of the airlock, the Dark Lord is vanquished, and, perhaps at some loss, the good triumph – not because they are better armed but because Providence is on their side. Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.”Or as G.K. Chesterton--in Pratchett and Gaiman's words, "A Man Who Knew What Was Going On"--put it:“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.”These things are truths, but which are revealed by the "falsehood" of fiction. There are many other excellent truths beyond and beside. Love--how we relate to other people, and specifically, choosing to relate to them by the guidelines given preceding that verse I quoted--is one of those truths. Thse things are not true in the precise way that "there is no present King of France" or "when the symbolism is properly understood, '1+1=2' is a necessary truth" is true. But they are true nonetheless, and I find them to be much more relevant truths for my daily life, in the sense of how I should conduct my behavior and affairs, than empirical factoids and mathematical necessities.</blockquote>

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