For the use of Teal Terror and Inverarity

[fpb]

Teal Terror, you can post on my LJ as Anonymous. The comments will remain screened (invisible to anyone except me) until I unscreen them or comment on them. From what I've seen, that is not something that should worry you. One thing only: I suspect we are on different time fuses. The last time we debated, I was having a sleepless night, which is unlikely to happen regularly. So I may take some time ro respond to something you said, and I apologize in advance.

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My first point is that when I make a comment I don't look for responses, and most often I don't get them. If my comment dissents from something or someone, I make it in order to place my dissent on the record. Of course my dissent is worth the same as my assent - that is, precisely nothing. I am not a judge, not a rich man, not a politician or a columnist or a celebrity. I have nothing to offer except my consent or dissent. However, being a free man, I reserve the right to offer them.

If you respond, however, you must be prepared for a tilt with men. As far as I am concerned, debate is a serious thing, because ideas are serious matters. Nothing could possibly be more serious. Ideas kill people.

Ideas kill people. I grew up in a place and time when they were killing them in great numbers and in front of everyone's eyes - Italy, the seventies: the golden age of terrorists, many of whose worst crimes are still unpunished (and some of which have been certainly punished on the wrong person). If anyone thinks I am too ferocious in attacking, say, the notion of inevitable national doom - which is a chickenshit evasion from personal and group responsibility - or the idea of inventing religions to fit this or that notion of what would be good for society at large, I suggest that they first stop and think whether there is nothing about such notions that would lead people to justifying the shedding of blood. Of course, if you think bloodshed in the service of an idea or "right" or "future" or "quality of life" or any other reason whatsoever is ever justified, then there is nothing more to say. Thou shalt not murder, says my God. Yours, or whatever you may take for God, may say otherwise, in which case our most likely meeting is on the battlefield.

In the second case, the case of inventing religions to fit, I have a still more personal reason to loathe it. There is, everyone knows, a well-known modern religion that was invented by a science fiction writer purely for his own ends. I have been near it as I have been near Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and one or two other murderous cults; I have seen its results from close-up, as I have seen the results of paedophilia, physical and mental child abuse, organized rape, Mafia, dope addiction, and alcoholism; and I have no hesitation in saying that it is the most evil thing I have ever met. If it killed smaller amounts than the rest, it is because it is so far, God be thanked, smaller in reach and power; but I can tell you from having seen it with my own two eyes, that they managed, and managed routinely, what only the fevered and terrified imagination of a West staggered by Communist power could ascribe to Communism - brainwashing. It's what they do. They regularly brainwash human beings, destroying and rearranging their minds. I have seen this, I have had to help save one of their victims, and I hope I never have to do it again, because I never want to see again anything so evil. And that is an inevitable result of the notion of creating religions to fit certain purposes, because it amounts to intruding from outside on human minds to reframe the very frame of their thoughts. Religion shapes thoughts; a religion dedicated not to its own purposes, but having its supposed purposes designed purely to shape the thoughts of the faithful, will do exactly that, and do so with an instinctive efficiency, an innate ability to go for the most damaging strategy of demolition, that would stagger anyone who did not know of it. You, of course, could not know I'd had that experience; but to imagine that I get angry at ideas for some strange bizarre vice of my own - that I enjoy it or something - does not do honour to your imagination.

My comment about trying desperately to respect, etcaetera, was based on the point from which I started: that I neither demand nor expect a reaction from anyone to anything I publish. The only thing I want to do with it is do my free man's office of recording my view, especially when it is in disagreement with something. The only thing I really want is to make it known to anyone who'd made the statement, not so much that I disagree - that means nothing - as that disagreement exists, that it is possible to take a different view. I simply want their and their readers' attention brought to that. But, f someone resolves to take it on, then I expect them to play the game according to the rules: answer questions, avoid the infantile strategy of sneering and pretending that something is beyond the reach of intelligence (that only proves that it is beyond the reach of yours) and defend your views like a man. When that fails to happen, I may, according to how and to what extent it fails to happen, be angry or disappointed; but I will be twice as disappointed if the person who behaves so foolishly also and at the same time happens to be the author not only of some of the most judicious and valuable reviews I have read in a long time (and I am a great lover of reviewing and of criticism as literary forms), but also the onlie begetter of some of the most beautiful, valuable and vital fiction to have yet been written in this new century.

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There is still another point I want to make to inverarity in particular. You have missed something utterly fundamental. Reflect on the different treatments I gave to Teal Terror and to a certain friend of yours with a fox-based name. Think on their different results and reasons.

Comments

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

I'll have to think about this and whether or not I want to respond. You have repeatedly invited me to debate you on various issues, and my bad experiences with you are the reason I usually respond dismissively. I just don't trust you not to explode in an insulting, bilious explosion of rage when we reach an impasse.

More problematically, usually you are completely misunderstanding the point in the first place (such as this one, which to provide context for those who have no idea what you're talking about, was my review of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (http://inverarity.livejournal.com/77409.html)). You seem to think Butler just "invented a religion" to provide a plot-driven motive for people to leave Earth, and in so doing, demonstrated a complete ignorance of religion herself. And that in praising her construction, I was doing likewise. I may have explained this aspect of her book poorly in my review, and that's my bad, but I assure you, you're doing Octavia Butler a grave disservice. At the very least you should read her book before you pass judgment on how well she understands and treats religion based on my review of it.

Lastly, to your point that you can distinguish between "reasonable" people you're willing to be reasonable with and those you're not: I'm very happy you're willing to be polite to Teal Terror now, but I distinctly remember in previous skirmishes on my blog, you blew up at him, dismissed him, and swore never to speak to him again in exactly the same way that you've done to anthonyjfuchs. So either your memory is bad, or your discerning nature is neither so refined nor so immutable as you think.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say that I invited you to debate; in fact, on one occasion I remember pointing out that you were intervening in a discussion (I seem to remember it was on my blog, but I might be wrong) after saying that you did not want to take in political discussions. If you can point to expressions of mine that directly challenged you or anyone (except that highly ill-judged one, which I did not mean seriously, about taking any measure to defend JKR's reputation as a writer), I'll raise my hands and call it a fair cop, but I honestly can't remember it. I certainly did not intend it, if so. I repeat: my sole purpose in putting my opinion on record is to put it on record.

I will take your word for it that Octavia Butler does not design her new religion for manipulative purposes. It's highly unlikely that I shall ever read the book anyway. But my objection to the artificial creation of new religions stands, and not only for the reasons I gave - which are only the most dramatic, and indeed tragic, of a whole roster.

Teal Terror seems to have been as willing to forget that episode as I was. But as for the Animal, I neither have nor will forget his assumption that a man who shares his views with Beethoven, Dante, Shakespeare, Boethius, Francis of Assisi, Michelangelo, Tiziano or Thomas Aquinas is a vicious moron, an accomplice in paedophilia, and everything else despicable. If you cannot see in that a permanent impediment to any kind of communication, I can. In that person's view, I and mine are something less than human. In my view, I am quite happy to agree that one of us is.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

I agree with you about the religion invented by a SF writer *looking around uneasily; his spies are everywhere*. However, I've been reading Betty Webb's mystery novel Desert Wives, which grew out of her journalistic investigations of outfits like the "Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints" and other polygamous LDS offshoot groups, and I'd say those groups were worse than the SF writer's group in quite a few ways. The FLDS themselves are the largest, but by no means the worst, of these groups; Ervil LeBaron's "Lambs of God" had and has a hit-list, and surviving people who were on that list still have to be very careful, even years after the sect was ostensibly squshed.

Not to mention, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON/Hare Krishnas) was, for many years, run by gurus who were at least as abusive and greedy as the SF writer and his high-ranking followers. ISKCON was linked to all sorts of out-and-out crimes, from trademark infringement (largest single case up to that time in the US) and drug-smuggling up to at least several murders. This was in no way the fault of Prabhupada, the guy who brought Krishna Consciousness to the West, but very much the fault of a lot of his earliest, high-ranking disciples. They basically went crazy with power, particularly after Prabhupada died.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And I read accounts of the Children of God,a.k.a. The Family. My point was not that the wickedness of Scientology was unique, so much as that they way it manifested itself was something I for one had never seen elsewhere: manipulation and destruction of the personality, expertly done by a sort of perverted psychiatry. The bullying and emotional blackmail of most sects don't seem to me like the same sort of thing.