Actually what that commentator wrote is different:Felasco, speaking of Greylorn Ell, wrote:There's a recurring theme in your writing of blaming others for your inability to present and defend your thesis. Another reader commented upon this distraction in their review of your book from the Amazon site.
1) Interjecting (according to the commentator) irrelevant political commentary. 2) Bias against other theorists, scientific or religious. 3) The supposition (?) that the writer has a church affiliation, is a church, and because this is so is forwarding a religious dogma (?) (The commentator is not clear as to what he means).That commentator wrote:"My biggest beef is that the author descends into a nasty political diatribe that has nothing to do with his main theories or the title of his work. He also displays an off-putting radical bias against most mainstream authorities, whether scientific or religious. An alert reader might be clued into this (but only after buying the book) by noting that the copyright is in the name of a church - "The Church of Physical Theology. Ltd". and comprises what is basically a highly unusual and restrictive contract the reader supposedly must agree to."
[My personal view is that our ideas about 'Reality', if they can be considered real or poignant, must necessarily speak directly to social and political issues: the way that people orient themselves inside themselves. And that the stronger definitions will naturally place stronger limits on people, their comportment, etc. 'Liberalism' can indeed be seen and considered a form of license which rarely has positive results.]
Given the fact that with the link to a quite decent general description of the man's theory in his book, which was filled to the brim with discussable ideas, it could be considered odd that you'd chose to emphasize a group of 'defects' that you have precipitated at least potentially from your own being. Generally, this is called 'projection': to project one's own content or motives on another. What is interesting is to examine what you wrote but turn it around and wonder if it might be better applied to yourself. In any case, you make no effort at all to discuss ANY of the ideas but to zero-in on psychological underpinnings. In essence, in my view, at least 90% of your general thesis---and I certainly noted this in our exchanges---totally avoids an exchange based on ideas presented and always seems to return to your favorite pseudo-psychological, pseudo-spiritual dogmatics. A relatively small adjustment would transform you into a very different interlocutor.Felasco wrote:It might be a step forward to work to identify the disappointments, personal emotional themes, social competition agendas etc in your presentations and surgically remove these distractions as best you can. Perhaps open a blog which is focused on venting the personal stuff, so that it might be kept separate from your intellectual offerings.
Here, apparently, you bring out another common theme in your criticism: your issues with 'complexity'. Now, I read the summary of the content of the book and it didn't seem overly complex nor opaque by any means. Quite the opposite. It seems quite accessible. Nevertheless one wonders if you had even read it, and if you did what you thought of it? I too, just above in this thread, presented many different ideas (at your request) all of which you roundly avoided. Not one item was discussed. It is as if no posts had been offered. You called it 'a wall of text'. One wonders if 'good writing' for you is something like a nursery rhyme? Suitable for a 'child of 11'? On what basis have you determined that truth must be 'simple' in that way and of the sort that a child could understand it? In fact, if other realms of knowing are considered, there is no field at all that is non-complex and accessible to a child. Yet for you---and this is declared all the time but never explained or defended---to be truthful it must be intensely simple. There seem to be a group of unexamined presuppositions here. I have a feeling that this connects, in your philosophy, to many other areas.Felasco wrote:It's possible people aren't getting your thesis because it's too complicated, and that level of complication reveals you haven't yet been able to boil your core ideas down to their bottom line. I have no idea if this is the case, but it is perhaps worth noting that there tends to be a significant bias in the intellectual realm for complexity in both language and concepts, perhaps due to a notion that complexity equals value, and that complexity elevates the author to an expert status etc. In any case, there is nothing you can do about "speed reading nits" but you may be able to simplify and clarify your thesis, and thus expand your audience.
To be able to say: "but it is perhaps worth noting that there tends to be a significant bias in the intellectual realm for complexity in both language and concepts" could be validated if you were to demonstrate how you might do this in respect to any particularly knotty group of concepts. Myself, I read a great deal and I find that the best writing, even if dense, is lucid and clear but that it more often than not takes a commitment on the part of the reader (work) to extract it. This is even more true with valuable and significant poetry: to get to know a poem really is a commitment and cannot be undertaken lightly. One has to make a decision to penetrate it and allow it to penetrate one. While there certainly are 'accessible poems'---and accessible prose, musical compositions, paintings and art, even scientific theory---there exist domains of knowing which take real effort. Or, one might be introduced with a simple overview to an area of knowing that then takes a significant commitment.
It would seem that you regard 'difficulty' as an indicator of 'lack of content' or of content not sufficiently worked over? But I suggest it is possible that the problem may lie in you. In any case that this is a mistaken conclusion. One that could be examined. Again, you recur to your preferred but unexamined predicates as being 'axioms'. It simply may not be the case. And in some way, perhaps, you may be evidence in some way comparable to those "speed-reading nits". Yet it is something else: you see a 'wall of text' and perhaps you don't even bother to read it? So, perhaps you are a 'non-reading nit'? Or an 'I-can't-read-nit'? I only suggest to you that one expends a certain amount of energy making the effort to communicate with you and you thoroughly and roundly avoid the CONTENT.
I focus on this for two reasons. One is obviously that our communication here has been little successful. But it is a larger issue and I think this needs to be mentioned: There are simply a great many 'unprepared people' who because of ease of access (Internet-wise) can suddenly pop-up and appear within conversations in which they are not qualified to appear. Our culture, perhaps, in over-valuing the child and our industries in pandering to the lower common denominators, which is another way of saying 'a child of 11', opts to deal in material (value) that only such a one can 'appreciate'. Once one has established that it is this group---the widest group---that one seeks to reach, and established that one can only reach them with a very limited message which is essentially sentimental and emotional, not intellectual, one has become, more or less, a 'pimp'. But one will then be moulded by one's audience. I think it is fair to say that, more and more, the 'content' that floats around 'out there' is of such a low, digestible order. Pablum really. Is it possible that the core of your ideas is similarly sentimental? (This is of course why I have referred to 'the feminine').
You wrote: "There's a recurring theme in your writing of blaming others for your inability to present and defend your thesis".
Yet, if 'Felasco' or 'Sri Bozo' were the subject one were trying to reach and communicate with, it seems reasonable to suggest that frustration is understandable. If 'out there' in the larger Internet world there are a sufficient number of people essentially unprepared for thought---as seems to be the case sometimes---a general frustration could be defended. And blaming of said 'nits' might be seen as understandable. Myself, I think that we need to reevaluate the difficult and the harder-of-access.