>>92
Yeah, well, I don't really want to get into it again either.

But I don't post here with the intention of annoying you or anybody else. Since you are clearly one of these people - like the tedious infant who is currently spamming the fuck out of Crackyhouse - who has got the obviously erroneous idea into his head that he can speak in the name of ALL users of a board, I don't suppose you'll be able to accept or even register this, but: to all appearances, at least, there ARE people who come here who find this thread nutritive and enjoyable (I mean the photos of and writing about Kimi, not the bickering and flaming with me, or so I would hope.)

Again very obviously and predictably, your retort is going to be to dismiss these people as "heathens" or whatever and to return to the old and unbelievably monotonous refrain of "Cracky, Cracky, Cracky..." It's very difficult to discuss this matter with you, or to try to reason with you, because in your last post you've set the terms of the discussion YOU want to have in such a manner that even the expression of any position that is not your own is ruled out of court. To "argue RavRav's and Kimi's place in the Crackyverse" is - for you - to "get sidetracked". That pretty much boils down to saying: "If you don't accept MY view on this topic, then you're CHANGING the topic, you're talking about something else."

After our exchanges earlier in the thread,I suppose it should be clear to me that I am wasting my time if I expect of you any sort of sophistication or subtlety of reasoning. If you are who I presume you are, you talk a lot about "religion" and frequently use "religious" concepts and terminology. But you proved utterly unable to take a position or make a response in any way to the very concrete religous questions and problems that I raised in posts 16 and 18 on this thread, for example. It's pretty obvious, I would say, that - for all your posing as a "monk" or whatever - you actually totally lack anything that could be called genuine "religious feeling".

It's only with someone with at least a glimmering of genuine religious feeling in them, though, that one could possibly discuss the question of what has been going on in this thread in any constructive or at all rational and sensible way. Anyone who knows anything about the Christian religion, for example, will be aware of how it has, right from the start, been forced by its own logic to engage with THE WORLD IN ITS ENTIRETY and to consider how it relates to this entirety. You'll find this absolutely central problem addressed right through the corpus of Christian religious writing, from The Acts of the Apostles down to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And all that I, at least, am trying to do in raising certain themes connected with RavRav and Kimi in the "Crackyverse" is to set the "religion of Cracky" into some sort of relation to my own, and other people's, real lived experience.

It's true that I do not believe that I see any evidence here that you people are practicing anything even resembling a genuine religion, so it is hard to describe myself as even a potential believer in it. But if I WERE to draw an analogy with Christianity, I suppose I find myself in a position similar to a sincere, modern Christian who has stumbled on some purportedly Christian church somewhere in the Boondocks. In it, he finds a few people who spend every waking hour smashing their head against a concrete floor and screaming the name "Jesus!" They do absolutely nothing else: create nothing else, discuss nothing else, just that over and over and over.

I would guess that this guy, if he really were a sincere Christian, would persist for quite a while in trying to introduce to these people some of the more complex and various practices that the Christian religion has actually developed in the last 2000 years. For a long while, I think, he would find it impossible to believe that they are quite serious in constantly snarling and grimacing at him and screeching: "No! No! You must smash your head against the floor 1000 times a day and shout 'Jesus! Jesus!' That alone is true religion!"

But in the end maybe he'd accept that there really are such people and that there is nothing to be done with them or about them: people who somehow got hold of a religious term or concept without having anything in themselves that enables them to understand the life and the soul of such concepts, and are going, to use your image, to "bang at it like a pan" for as long as it soothes their pained and stunted little egos to do so.

Bang away, then. So be it.