| |
|
Oh dear. I am certainly not seeking to cause anyone upset, or indeed to ""wind up the nutter".
My point was that in the Temple we find long, source-supported, intellectually rigorous arguments around topics that are often entirely personal, and which cannot in fact be based on a mutual experience of the subject matter. One example of this, in fact, is Calvin's claim that there is a rational path to the acceptance of the ineluctable rightness of the Roman Catholic faith, which is a highly personal claim essentially invulnerable to peer review, subjected to a range of criticism. Another example might be Daynah's accounts from the front line of vampirism, or the chaps who are seeking peer review on whether they have indeed met on the astral plane, or indeed the fellow who was assembling a team of dream warriors, which he was thinking of calling the Invisibles IIRC, to... well, to fight evil in the dream world. These are the kinds of things that tend not to get this kind of going-over, I think, on the Internet and get it here as an unintended consequence of the social and personal factors that went into the formation of the board.
Films and books, on the other hand, have a very well-developed critical context and huge amounts of highly critical discourse, conducted across many media but not least the Internet. However, the discussion of these sharable objects on Barbelith - objects where you can replicate almost exactly another person's experience of the relevant parts (the words on the page, for example, if not the chair they were sitting in when they read them) is almost totally devoid of actual critical examination. The tendency in film threads to post trailers, rumours and speculate to about 12 pages, but then to stop dead when the thing actually comes out, at least until one can start puitting up links to rumours and trailers concerning the sequel, suggests that the shared experience of these cultural artefacts is primarily intended to be a social one, based around the sharing of links.
Really, I'd expect that if anyone was going to get upset about that it would be the bods on the other side of the scales, although since they are very easy to please that might not be an issue. The problem seems to be in my use of whether elves are susceptible to chaos majick as shorthand to mean a range of beliefs or arguments which are highly personal and highly resistant to review, for example that one is a psychic vampire, or has the power to make ladies go to bed with you with your mind, or that the Roman Catholic church is the rational choice for the spiritually inclined - or, indeed, the statements that we tend broadly to take as if not read then largely established, such as that there are a range of independently existent or created entities who function as deities and who can be interacted with in various ways. In doing so, I was inspired by your own words, Mordant, in your own depiction of highly personal and peer-review-resistant beliefs of the kind that you appeared to feel did not generally expose themselves to the bracing cold air of cross-examination on the Internet, and which would thus populate Barbelith without precisely the intellectual rigour experienced in the Temple.
I apologise that my very abbreviated representation of that position was not adequate, and regret that it was the cause of unhappiness. If the unpacked version remains upsetting, then I suppose we will need to go round again, or just abandon the enterprise altogether. |
|
|
