Luz:

> The Truth Steiner say's he See's, lets roll it all up together and call it
Spain. Now, he's a travel agent devoted to telling people about his beloved
country.

That's a charitable interpretation. What if he's a con artist, using tales of
this non-existent "Spain" to take people's money, or just enjoys the ego trip of
having devoted "followers"? What if he's well intentioned but delusional, from
drugs or drink or mental illness? What if he's just gullible and repeating tall
tales? Can we even corroborate that he's even been on these "trips to Spain"?
Hm, suspiciously not.

Or ... more to the point ... "Spain" is, as you later acknowledge, a religious
belief. Maybe it has symbolic meaning, but to take it literally is dangerous.
Just because lots of people, over the millennia, have believed in it literally,
doesn't make it so. Lots of people believe in Spain, but lots of others believe
in ... Mozambique, and Kathmandu, and Svalbard ... and historically they fight
about which is real. Millions of people have died in these fights. Today, those
who believe literally in these so-called truths still tend to be dangerous
zealots, very keen on limiting other people's freedoms if they won't act, dress,
speak, and worship exactly the way it's supposedly done in "Spain."

>We all know of Spain and acknowledge its existence (except for my first
friend). And we all have different experiences and our relationships are of
varying degrees of intensity. Is only one of us Right?

Yep. There is only one right answer as to whether Spain actually exists, as a
physical place (not a myth or story or religious metaphor), and this question is
what is at stake. (No one doubts that stories about Spain are very interesting,
but the claim the travel agent is making is that you can actually visit it.)

You allow for one person to doubt, Luz, but you describe her as naive and
provincial, an uneducated peasant. In reality maybe some of the doubters would
just be stubborn, unimaginative types; others would be more sophisticated than
this, not people who had never left home, but people with rational reason to
doubt the existence of Spain, not least if there's absolutely no credible
evidence for its existence.



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