iambiguous wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 2:31 am
Note to others:
As most of you know, I engage IC here as a form of entertainment...something I do to amuse myself. I basically allow him to post things [like the above] such that I am able to expose how, in my view, no one makes a bigger fool of him here than he does himself.
Still, others actually engage him as though he really does have intelligent things to say about God and religion.
And I'd appreciate it if they would take the time to explain why. How can anyone here take him seriously?
What do I keep missing? Please cite something he posted that you deemed to be a challenging or a thought-provoking point of view.
Thought-provoking is fairly rare, I think. It does happen. Sometimes someone will come at an issue from an angle I haven't encountered - thought-provoking meaning here something that provokes new thoughts in me directly due to its for-me-novel-nature. Usually what you get in most online forums is the rehashing of memes and viewpoints/attitudes that are 'out there' (in some way making things the way they are) and also find inside ourselves. I mean, most of us, regardless of our beliefs, if we've grown up in much of the West cannot have avoided taking in something like the Christian idea of sin. Even if we don't believe in God or are Buddhists, etc. So, we can in encountering an IC deal with those kinds of memes, that kind of attitude, in a kind of slow motion. What happens if I say _____________? Can such an attitude actually respond to point _______________?
Can I reduce the influence in myself of meme 234 by a slow motion encounter with an advocate?
What is the psychology of an advocate of viewpoint 35B?
I envy you in a way if you actually simply find it entertaining. I mean, wow. Not being annoyed or triggered at least part of the time by people whose idea - I am assuming in this case - bother you and have a great deal of power 'out there' and possibly 'in there' also (for you).
On the other hand I think it's missing out on the possibilities of what one can gain from dealing with someone (who, yes, is not fully capable of responding to what people actually say and who, likely without realizing it, makes assumptions and leaps and leaves glaring lacunae in 'responses') here in old PN.
For entertainment alone, well, perhaps playing an online chess computer or even earning some money while being entertained in an online poker site. But, to each his own.
Just adding a third option for consideration.
Can one reduce, if only locally, the effects of viewpoint 35B or meme 234, and also what is really going on in the carriers of these things? The latter not scientific, but still I think we can learn a lot about at least how and why individuals align with, take on, get used by, seek to be contagious with their now favorite ideas. And what allows them to hold them in place when faced with opposition of various kinds.
But if you really want thought provoking, you're probably not in the right place. At least percentage wise.
There are a couple of ways of taking someone seriously. I don't take IC seriously in at least one of the main ways one does this. But attitude/memes riding him, well...that's having real affects out there though their nearly all gone, in here.
I use ridden (riding) in the anthropological sense....
The term ‘possession’ has been applied to Africa, the African diaspora (especially Brazil and the Caribbean), the Middle East, the Pacific, and sometimes South and Southeast Asia in contexts in which humans are said to be temporarily displaced, inhabited or ridden by particular spirits.
Criticizing the functionalistic approach that focuses on the functions of the practice for the medium or the society, she pushes for an understanding of spirit possession as a collaboration of the possessing agents and the possessed. Other scholars argue that the metaphor of
‘being ridden as a horse’ does not acknowledge sufficiently the agency of the medium by putting too much emphasis on the possessing entity. Roberto Motta, for instance, argues that mediums are not transformed to helpless victims but remain vital for the body trance, as he describes mediumship (Motta 2005). Supporting Motta’s argument Mark Münzel compares mediumship with the performance of a dressage horse which the rider guides through the elegant and difficult routine: without the rider the horse would not accomplish its complex task as well as vice versa, without the horse the rider could not carry on