Plans for a religion - Tangent (gib)

I didn’t want to go more off on a tangent in Dan’s thread, even if Dan started a tangent about me on his thread, so I started one here, working with Gib’s post.

Yes, it is easier to be oppositional on the internet and this can lead to problems. It can also lead to benefits. We get to explore what we have problems with in ways we would not otherwise. IRL we might keep quiet. Let’s look at the specific context. A thread about a NEW RELIGION, with a concrete aim of creating a communal living arrangement. If one goes back early in the thread you see that amongst others Joker was being included as a possible member of the community. I think it would be seriously problematic to form a community without going into potential oppositions around ideas about morality, human nature, relationship to authority, epistemology, even. Joker, God love him, was then looking forward to the collapse of society when his rapacious nature would thrive in a more natural selection-ish, pure Darwinian post-apocalypse world. This is likely a slightly different vision of a positive future than Dan has. Perhaps, and I hope I am not being too pessimistic, there might have been some tensions, in the actual lived community, around who takes the trash out, how they would discuss problems, when one gets to play loud music at 3am, what one’s responsibilities are around the children, and so on. If oppositions and potential sources of tensions are not discussed in advance, this does not mean they go away and cannot arise in concrete life.
Here we are in a philosophy forum. Philosophy is very much about discussing the potential weaknesses of ideas. Critique is built in. Of course one could have as a heuristic to always find points of agreement in a post, and one could then only focus on that, potentially extending ideas. That complete agreement approach to participating is certainly valid. I’ve done it myself. In fact right now in another forum, what started for me as a reductio ad absurdum has turned into me agreeing completely in an exploratory way, just to see what it is like to be inside that very different perspective. But in the end pure agreement seems limited to me.