There is only so much telling, saying, communicating you can do before you have to let it be. Choice and free will must be paramount, even if you didn’t get the information needed to make a good choice.
Have I got it wrong, that there are repeatable occurrences that everyone can see that can be called facts? Like: a chair is a chair or fire is hot?
Facts are NOT opinion. I always thought that opinion was how you felt about a fact: like chairs are cool because you can sit in them – or not because they are in the way; or, flame is good for light on a candle, but not when it burns your house down. Those are opinions.
BUT! A chair is a chair… flame is flame.
However…
What would happen if someone convinced you that chairs were bad and fire could get rid of chairs?
What if you liked chairs and they worked just fine for you, but, Public Opinion said they were very bad and anybody who didn’t use fire to burn their chairs would be put in prison and your opinion that chairs were good was censored?
Further, people were burning their chair inside their homes and catching their houses on fire, but all they noticed amid the smoking ruins of their homes was that ‘No Chairs Existed!’ and they were glad they were not going to prison…
All the while you still have a home and all your chairs to sit in and you wonder how people could be so stupid – and what the hell they all thought they were going to do come winter with no homes to shelter in????
While you sit in your nice comfy chair inside your nice comfy home, you wonder if yelling louder at the beginning would have even made a difference. But a chair is just a chair and their opinion of it was just that, their opinion – free will, free choice. And they have a right to their own opinions don’t they? Then you wonder how long it will be before the opinion police come for you….
Ever notice how close the word Opine is to Ovine? One meaning opinion and the other meaning sheep. Just a thought.
In the Mind's Eye 