I disagree with the ontology that reality is a point of view. Reality cannot be created by you. Your (and my) point of view is the result of getting exposed to reality, but it's not reality itself. Even if people live up with different experiences, reality is still the same and the outside world that you have no control of will still continue to bring you challenges. In social context, striving to gain more experience, thinking about your experiences and accepting your experiences is a humility required to live together and to improve your surroundings.
I'd imagine there is an objective reality. I'm not claiming that there isn't. I'm just saying that we
all only experience a model of a reality that our brain puts together and should ALWAYS bear that in mind before making blunt pronouncements about how "reality" IS.
A worldview that is inconsistent with new experiences is a cause for distress and conflict rather than comfort. Our culture is unfortunally set up more about avoiding problems entirely than accepting and dealing with them, with the result that we aren't prepared to stand up again if and when we fallen down. Buddhism is a religion that is taught to children. It does'nt take a strong mind, but it leads to a strong mind. We westerners tend to see that worldview as brutal, depressing and cold. They see that worldview as calm, soothing and peaceful. It's applications within therapy is today leading science in psychology.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for buddhism among other non religious world views, but then I would be because
those are world views that work for me. I have observed however that some people take genuine comfort from, even if not full dogmatic as scripture faith, an indefinable concept of some form of higher life, some kind of faith. And there's plenty of people with a kind of faith that doesn't come into conflict with experiences, and plenty of people without faith who come into conflict with experiences that any amount of rational tools for self realisation don't really deal with all that well. A lot of old people become more religious for example.
I usually do not care what people think, as long as they continue to be open minded. Some teachings include being closeminded and this thread is an example of how some such ideas can be exploited as tools of politics and manipulation and that's where I draw the line.
So it's okay for people to not completely agree with you so long as they remain open minded as to just how WRONG they are and how RIGHT you are?
Trust me, you come across (for all your occasional qualifications about how open minded you are) as very, very closed minded on some issues (apologies but your qualifications don't really ring true in the light of the other things you say and the way in which you say them, and it looks like there's a big discrepancy between how your conscious thinks you think and how your subconscious is actually thinking, could well just be poor communiction or poor comprehension on the part of everyone else on here, just saying that's how it comes across to me at least)
What works for you and not have alot to do with your upbringing and past experiences.
Indeed. Same for everyone. And for some people religion is what works for them even if you think they
should prefer what you prefer.
That's usually how school works. Except that such teachings have a corrosive effect on faith which is why some groups do not like it.
In my experience most schooling does a piss poor job of giving pupils critical analytical facilities to make up their own minds. I do some marking of professional exams, and basically everyone taking the exam I mark will have a good degree from a good university, several years of professional experience and have passed about a dozen exams from one of the most challenging exam systems in the world, and only a VERY small percentage of them show
any capacity to actually think and respond to unique situations (less than a 30% pass rate and most of those pass simply because they've learnt everything off by heart).
Schools know that the way to get good results is to teach pupils the answers to questions, not to teach them why or teach them how to find out for themselves or how to challenge what they're being taught, just to teach them how to say the things that they're meant to say.
In the UK at least, unless you're fortunate. My school was great, it rather resented exam league tables and made sure we whizzed through the course quickly so that they had some time to go off piste and get the class arguing with each other and stretching themselves. That's by no means the norm though