Tuesday, January 7, 2014

The Wet Stone



There is a refrain you will hear from Satanists and it comes in many forms and has different terms used for it. 'The Fire', steel sharpening steel, putting up your ideas for peer review, etc. It's bullshit, all you do is provide yet another opinion in a sea of opinions. All I do is provide yet another opinion in a sea of opinions.

It's me who sits there with a wet stone slowly sharpening that blade so I can engage in another rhetorical exchange. It's me who figures out where my weaknesses are and turns them into strengths. It's me who applies the lessons, burns down my own paradigm over and over again to see what doesn't burn.

You don't do those things for me. You provide rhetoric. You provide a sparring partner. Someone that I can square off with to see just where my mental strengths and weaknesses are. You are not the one changing my mind or scrutinizing my ideas.

Rhetoric is the art of persuasive speaking or writing. It is not and never has been scrutiny. It's a way to win a discussion, it's a way to influence others ideas, manipulate the masses to agree with your ideas. Rhetoric is useful and all people you encounter in online forums use it to some degree with differing level of success.

Scrutiny is not the same thing. Scrutiny is critical observation or examination. When I present something and get hit with others rhetoric I have a choice to make. I can scrutinize my ideas or reject the rhetoric of others. I can hold onto something that hasn't held up to presenting it to others, or examine myself and the set of ideas in my head I am constantly walking around with.

Some thoughts I have are illusions and delusions I keep for one reason or another. They make me feel comfortable with things, they make me feel safe, I never really questioned the why and whatfors of that concept, whatever.

Other thoughts I have are based on my own personal experience. I lived through something and learned from it, an old idea I had about something was replaced with a concrete, this is how it is in reality concept.

The first kind can potentially be blasted away by someone else's rhetoric. Others will need more, they will need to actually get my hands dirty to get rid of that idea.

It is me doing the critical examination, not others. Others may be challenging me but it's me who sits down and evaluates if my ideas are shit or not afterwards. It's me who takes the rhetoric I encounter and digests it, puts it against my own ideas to see what is left.