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On what passes for thinking these days - Magical Realist - Aug 28, 2026
“An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you.”
"The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary, thanks to propaganda and advertising, are words that relate to visual reproduction. They are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying ‘fascism,’ ‘progress,’ ‘science,’ or ‘justice’ does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance. Make no mistake here: this is how modern people usually think. We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking.”
–Jacques Ellul
I see this. I saw it at my family reunion where my brother and brother-in-law emotionally bonded over their litany of conservative whines and bothers as if expressing something deep within themselves. They were not. It was just a little show put on a million times everyday across our country for each other where we recite all the cliches and catch words we are force fed thru the media locating us comfortably on some idealogical spectrum of concise and familiar political positions. I say positions again, and not real thoughts. When you recite and identify yourself with a public and broadly disseminated position or point of view, the last thing you are actually doing is expressing anything like real time thoughtful consideration. You're only parroting what the media has conditioned you to say, never breaking thru to anything new or poignant at any time. Real time thinking in fact does not suit casual socializing very well because it expresses ambiguity and reservation and restraint rather than things we can confidently claim to believe in or "tag" ourselves with. It complicates and raises disturbing questions instead of seizing upon pat and easily opined answers. Our beliefs and opinions always being the least individual thing that can be said about us.
RE: On what passes for thinking these days - Syne - Aug 29, 2026
Oh, the irony. 9_9
RE: On what passes for thinking these days - Magical Realist - Aug 29, 2026
Just as a postscript, all was NOT lost at my family reunion. I was privileged to have 4 good one-on-one conversations with various relatives. That's what's authentic to me--getting people aside and asking them about things they care deeply about.
RE: On what passes for thinking these days - Ostronomos - Aug 29, 2026
More of my unmatched intellect when ^:
We operate according to two things, truth (majority opinion based on society) or reality (a creation or an intent based on positivity and negativity, good and evil, God and the Devil).
We interact with the external world by perceiving or exchanging energy, the Hindus call this "chakra". When we exchange energy we perceive information/stimulus. The basis of the information or stimulus is reality. If you choose the reality of negativity, then evil will become the only logical solution to every problem within reality. There will be no conscience to dictate otherwise. Conscience is not a dictator of truth, it is a dictator of ethical action. Without it, brutally slaughtering your family members can be an equally fine solution to a problem as anything else. Conscience can only be accessible within the reality of God.
The denial of reality always leads to insanity. So if you exist in an evil reality and you attempt to deny evil, you will willingly cause your own insanity. That is why one must accept God if one wishes to be delivered from the evil reality.
Insanity happens when you deny reality, be it good or evil.
We create or conceive our own realities and we choose God to be the supreme creator of it or not. After this conceiving reality with or without God, our actions become deterministic again when we return to the object level of perception (note the distinction between conception/free will and perception/determinism). At a certain point of perception above the object level, we either conceive reality or we deny reality. At that point, if we decide to conceive reality, we either accept God as the supreme conceiver of our own reality along with ourselves or not, since there can be no compromise between realities, as there exists a reality of evil without God, in which every answer to every problem is an evil one. Conscience is destroyed despite everything we have ever been taught and the reality without God is isolated from the majority opinion of others. Hence, all things are regarded as intangible and meaningless objects and so are treated as such. Think utter brutality and disregard for life. Evil becomes a logical solution if God is denied because evil will be the only logical response in a selfish reality where majority opinion is disruptive to our perfect self-made reality without God. Your own survival becomes the one and only dictate of your actions and nothing must stand in the way, including ethics and morals. As the supreme creator of your own reality-without-God, every action despite being evil becomes beneficial and logical since it preserves your sanity. Put simply, without God, SANITY=EVIL since conscience is non-existent in a reality without God.
If you are an atheist, then you do not know the difference between truth and reality, and your perception is not above the object level. You accept mankind as not only the truth, but the only reality. Your conscience will become destroyed and you would commit true evil if you saw it as a solution to a problem in the event that you persisted in atheism at that point of perception above the object level. There is a point of perception that is so far above the object level where we conceive our reality (see above) and must choose between God's reality or evil reality. The third alternative is insanity (the creation of your own reality).
In other words, if a self-proclaimed atheist is living an acceptable life of materialism, it is because they have never persisted in their atheism beyond the object level, the point where perception becomes conception.
RE: On what passes for thinking these days - Magical Realist - Aug 29, 2026
The mere fact that there are sane, ethical, and even quite famous atheists all over the world refutes your demonization of them. As usual, religion attacks those it fails to delude.