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Originally Posted by escapeplan  It's not a tool though is it- it's a religion. |
Well for me, it isn't.
Being someone who is educated, likes playing devil's advocate, is a researcher by nature and training, I hardly take anything at face value and I LOVE to understand how things work, pose questions, point out loopholes, see various sides and angles to situations and questions etc. That's me.
The biggest thing for me though is understanding and realizing there are really different angles to look at things from and that angle will determine what you're seeing. Your understanding, language capabilities, personal history and other personal nuances will also affect your explanation of what you see. Describing a building from the frontal view and from the back you will get different descriptions that may seem contradictory but nevertheless it is the same building and still 100 others could try to do the same and come up with various other descriptions, some more colorful, boring, etc than others. An architect will describe it differently than a realtor and so on and so forth.
With that being said, I am OPEN to various theories and philosophies as such is life, variety is the spice of life and there are many ways to skin a cat, if you will. But as one poster said, and I also agree, while I do enjoy scholarly discussions and theorizing and I love a good debate; that has nothing to do with how I actually live my life. I don't have to understand something in its entirety in order for me to put it into practice and my understanding of it doesn't affect it's usefulness. I have no idea the actual mechanics of how the internet actually works and to be honest, while it would be interesting to know and certainly fun to find out, at this time I don't really care, so long as I am able to use it and navigate it and get what I need to get from it.
I am knowledgeable in it's use up to a point that I need to be. Everything else is not really necessary at this time.
I certainly am not into proselytizing. I can share personal experience and encouragement and advocacy about ANY area (not just LOA) if asked to do so; however, it doesn't bother me if someone doesn't find it useful. It is not anything to "believe" in and and certainly someone else's belief or value in whatever it is, won't affect my own. One can take whatever path one chooses, most times none is right or wrong, although I do find certain things MORE useful than others. As you've said, you do not find LOA efficient for your purposes...good. Some others may find it useful for theirs, good. I have my way of doing things that work for me and my abilities, talents, mentality etc that are completely useless to someone else.
So yea....LOA isn't my religion but these discussions do remind me of many of the discussions on Christian vs. Atheists discussion boards. All I have to say is, you "believe" or practice what you will, and you engage in debates and discussion because it is good to flex your thinking muscles and articulation skills, but when it gets to the point of being hung up on attacking and disproving this or that is when one's reasoning behind what one claims to be doing is skewed and not coming from a place of simple curiosity and need to expand one's mind....but the same exact place that wars over religion comes from i.e. BOTH SIDES believing they hold the ultimate truth and are right...that is the simple answer. Being agnostic is better off or being open at least and realizing your way is one of many and not the ultimate. If one believes that then there would be nothing to argue over, since no one in real life argues about whether chocolate is better than vanilla, since it is one of many many flavor preferences and neither is right or wrong.