Good Comment from "Loff56" on Creating Reality from Beliefs & PL's response

Loff56:

"I always find this discussion fascinating in what ever context it is in. The Dogma of religion, of course is always at the forefront of this discussion for obvious reasons. Beliefs are based on what other people tell you. Of course that is, has been and always will be such a destructive force in this world and fodder for constant debate about Reality versus Beliefs.

But here's the more interesting philosophical question that I always think about when pondering this idea of Reality versus Beliefs:

Before humans had the tools to figure out that the earth revolved around the sun, were the people living in that time actually not "living in reality" because they believed that the sun revolved around the earth? The fact of the matter is the only observation they could make is that the sun came up on one side of the earth and went down on the other side. Without telescopes and other tools to figure out this enormous blunder could they really be held accountable for being ignorant to reality? Then again the facts remain that their entire "reality" was completely wrong.

So is reality completely relative to what we can actually observe? Or are we always just going to be ignorant to the one true reality of it all?

Obviously science is continuously discovering new realities every day, so perhaps all of us are doomed to constantly live in a world where the sun revolves around the earth."

PL:

I would say that the less you hold onto beliefs of any kind, the closer you are to knowing the few simple truths that constitute Reality with a capital "R." (For me, so far they are: 1. Love is the essence of All That Is; 2. We create our own reality; 3. We are all one.) In the meantime, the wiser and more enlightened one becomes, the more beliefs are replaced with questions or open-ended statements. One of the hallmarks of a wise person, then, is the capacity to say "I don't know."
In response to your question: "So is reality completely relative to what we can actually observe?" I would say, first, I don't know, but I would also say that rarely would an enlightened person assume that reality consists only of what can be observed, although if the legend is true, Christopher Columbus concluded that the world wasn't flat by observing that ships appeared to be sinking slowly as they approached the horizon. In other words, he wasn't stuck in the popular mass belief of the time.
Thanks, Loff56!

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