domain:moultano.wordpress.com
OliveTapenade
11m ago
I apologise for obsessing over this, but I can't help finding it strange and interesting. This is not how the "sneak it in through fiction" gambit works. That trick requires two things: firstly, that the story be independently compelling, enough for people who disagree with its conclusions to enjoy it anyway, and secondly, for the conclusion to be sufficiently subtle or concealed for the reader not to notice it. The goal is to slowly initiate the reader into this world, and get them subconsciously accustomed to a logic other than their natural one, so that eventually, without even realising it, the reader notices their view has been shifted.
This is why, for instance, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe isn't that good at it. It's too obvious. If the lion just comes out and says "by the way, I'm Jesus", the gambit fails, because all of our pre-existing beliefs and assumptions around Jesus appear again. The best Narnia books are the ones where the religion is mostly implied. However, The Lord of the Rings is good at it. The mask never drops; Tolkien never tells you that the value-system underlying his whole work is Christianity, or more specifically Catholicism. The Lord of the Rings therefore has a large number of non-Christian fans - most famously atheists, but plenty of lukewarm agnostics, and I believe even a fair share of fans of other religions entirely. Once you know to look you can see the points Tolkien's making, and you might realise that Christ was in there all along, but the presence must be hidden to be effective.
Even LotR isn't a great example because Tolkien did not intend it to preach Christian or Catholic values - he just wrote a book that expressed what he believed was good and true, and because he was a devout Catholic, that was reflected in the work. The point, at any rate, is that it needs to sneak in - even in a work intended to proselytise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16m ago
Nobody is expressing that idea. You are making an unwarranted assumption.
Most of human communication operates through these sorts of assumptions. Why would they be unwarranted? Are books not inanimate objects? Are letters and the written words we assemble out of them not inanimate objects? When someone waves a rainbow flag or a hammer and sickle flag, Are they not specifically inviting everyone watching to infer their message? If not, why wave the flag? And sure, this can be abused by assuming a message that was not the signaler's actual intent... and yet, flags exist as a tool of communication because such malicious interpretation is orders of magnitude less effective than the primary signal.
If your standards of rigor are that communication should be happening with no assumptions being made either way, I'll note that no actual human communication works or has ever worked this way.
Not just to be able to state an idea, but be able to defend it in open debate.
Can a book defend its ideas in open debate? I mean, sort of. It seems to me that a flag can as well. Who's invoking the message and its associations, and how?
Moreover, I can put a flag in my store for trolling purposes, or just as a freedom of speech prop. Why are you assuming intent from inanimate objects?
I'm not assuming, I'm inferring. Inference is a necessary and irreducible part of human communication, which is necessarily lossy, compressed, and unreliable in the best of times.
Wait I’m confused. Wasn’t creationism just being suggested here because it’s a right-wing theory with roughly equivalent public support to the core wokism (like the actual serious all whites are racist etc type) and with roughly the same level of grounding (which is to say, a lot of circularly cited papers and few ground facts that don’t have better alternative explanations) and so would be a ‘fair’ replacement?
I don’t think the point was ever that there’s actually a 1-1 prevalence of every single problem between the two of them.
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