There once were two friends of very different and peculiar personalities. Adam felt there was more to the world than just what his hometown offered and that there were wonderful places to see, and new lessons to be learned, if he made the effort to experience them. So Adam, determined to visit Paris, studied hard, disciplined himself, secured the necessary funds and documents and one day flew from his hometown airport to Paris. It was as wonderful as he thought it would be and he couldn't wait to get back to tell his friend, Zed.
Zed was very different from Adam. He only believed what he could immediately see and learn in his hometown. He didn't trust the stories from those who had flown out of the airport to lands he couldn't imagine even existed. He insisted they were lying, or perhaps just a bit touched in the head. Even though many honest, decent people claimed these experiences were true, Zed continued to deny, and ridicule them, from a lounge chair on his porch.
Adam, ever the optimist, tried continually to convince Zed not only that Paris was very real but that he could see it too if he made the effort. One day, feeling generous and sorry for Adam's obvious mental challenges, Zed told him he would try to make the journey, to prove once and for all that Paris existed and was as wonderful as he had been told by Adam.
Soon after, Zed piled into his car with provisions for a long journey. Journals, binoculars, food and drink, recording devices...all to document what he was sure would fail to materialize. Zed drove to the airport and started circling it on the ring road around it. Around and around he went for hours and hours on end. He was persistent, that much you could say for him. But he never actually parked, collected his things, went to the terminal, bought a ticket and boarded an airplane. What he did do was use his scientific recording device to make notes about the utter futility, and ultimate stupidity, of believing there was any such thing as Paris in the first place.
Adam is spiritualized humanity. Zed is the materialists among us who believe that something they are unable to prove empirically, and for which methods they refuse to use as they have been directed, are the childish fantasies of deluded fools with no hope of higher learning.
The moral of the story: Don't get into a car with materialists. It's a long ride in circles and it ends up where it began.