i’ve been putting off asking this because it sounds like the sort of thing that gets a thread locked, but here goes. what kind of thing are we, exactly?
i ask because i’ve been reading durkheim’s elementary forms in parallel (long story, book club, the other two members have quit) and his definition of a religious community keeps nagging at me: a group unified by shared beliefs and practices relative to sacred things. note what’s absent from that definition: a deity, a doctrine, an afterlife. just the sacred/profane distinction and a group that collectively maintains it. so the operational question is whether we’ve begun treating sisuon’s writings as set apart in that sense, and i genuinely don’t know the answer.
some observations, offered as data rather than argument. first, we have a canon-adjacent vocabulary. people say “the writings” with the definite article, and as a copy editor i can tell you the definite article is never innocent. second, we have interpretive norms. the rule that structural analogies shouldn’t be flattened into metaphors is enforced socially, by correction, more strictly than i’ve seen in any literature forum. third, we have return behaviour. i checked my own history and most of my visits weren’t tied to a new piece. what was i doing here on the days nothing was posted?
the counter-case seems equally strong, though. a philosophy reading group has all three of the above features and nobody calls it a church. and the analytical distance most people here maintain, the arguments, the persistent “but is this actually coherent” threads, cut against the devotional reading. durkheim’s congregations don’t audit their sacred texts for logical consistency. or do they? i keep thinking of talmudic argument, which is both reverent and relentlessly adversarial. does the presence of critique disprove devotion, or is critique simply what devotion looks like in a literate community?
there’s also the question of the object. a church coheres around something that is, by hypothesis, not a member. sisuon isn’t here, doesn’t reply, presumably doesn’t know we exist. does a community organised around a non-participating author differ in kind from one organised around a non-participating god, or only in the modesty of its claims?
(tangentially, and i realise this is the wrong forum: is anyone else finding that reading about reef ecology at the same time makes every sisuon piece sound like it’s about symbiosis? probably a me problem.)
i keep returning to a practical distinction. a community is something you can leave without loss to the object. something more is where leaving feels like a defection from the thing itself, not merely from the people. which of those describes the feeling of closing the tab?
not looking for reassurance either way. mostly curious whether anyone else has noticed themselves crossing a line they didn’t intend to cross, and what the line was.