Assuming for a moment that I live in fantasy, what should I do? I refuse to drink any kool-aid.
Everyone has drunk some amount of kool-aid.
If you want to drink
less kool-aid (which is a goal I wholeheartedly endorse, literally and figuratively - thats just too much sugar), you need to critically examine your existing beliefs. Not only new assertions other people make - you have to critically examine what you
already believe.
My Niece wants a younger option.
That seems more than reasonable, but here we are.
My conservative friend says that there is only one truth.
He's right - there is only one truth. The truth is what the facts are. The question is simply how your beliefs match up against true facts...and how they don't.
What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995...
"Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings
"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."
1 Corinthians 15:26King James Version (KJV)
Nihil supernum