I’d like to nudge a bit against opening our minds completely to what we read. As a number of my book reviews show:
Review: Source Field Investigations; Irresponsible rumors debunked
Short Review: The Holy Bible and its legacy
Review: An Imaginary Tale; Why irrational numbers are called that
Review: Origin by Design; Irrational science debunked
… we need to keep our wits about us so as not to be led by erroneous information. Several friends have given me books they raved about only for me to find that a great deal of the “facts” in them were completely fraudulent.
Source Field Investigations, for instance, was a 536-page tome which purported to investigate commonalities and truths found in melding ancient wisdom and modern science, only the information presented almost always failed to pass muster when checked or cross-checked.
Reading without cross-checking can easily leave us believing foolish things and passing this ignorance on to others.
The Holy Bible is another example which sounds so good that we fail to double-check the information and attitudes it presents. For example: the ideas that women should always be subservient to men and homosexuality is an abomination and all non-believers will receive eternal torment as a result of their doubt.
For seventeen centuries, by far the most reading was of this one book and the world languished in the doldrums of knowledge and insight. Only when the monopoly of thought by the Catholic Church was broken did science, invention, and intellectual freedom blossom along with new ways of doing things, some bad and some quite nice.
So, lifelong readers, I urge us all to check our own belief systems frequently and try ardently to see through the clouding influences of loyalty, dogma, moneyed interests, misconception or deception.
©David Dodson, Phoenix, AZ, September-December, 2019
Dave's World 