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Clara Stillwater's avatar

New Pillar merch: "No. No. And you know why. We’re done. We’re done. JD, we’re done."

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Bridget's avatar

It is imprudent to have a cult of personality on social media, because it is ipso facto a near occasion of sin; it is not an accident, this is how social media is deliberately designed.

How shall I know whether I have a cult of personality: a simple test case: If people start paying attention to things that I say because of who said them, rather than objectively on the merits of the things themselves. This is a danger to me because of vanity (I do not think it is necessary to go into depth on that) and because of the next-door temptation to activism (see The Soul of the Apostolate, etc; anything that has a visible impact is an excellent way for the enemy to draw me away from a life of faith and prayer which is frequently apparently completely fruitless), and it is a danger to them because what if I am wrong? Perhaps they have come to trust me because I know a lot about theology and they slide into assuming that I also know a lot about which is the most reliable brand of used minivan to buy, or, vice versa (it will usually be two subjects that seem more closely aligned, but I can easily give instances in which it is not.) Perhaps I am wrong sometimes even in the area where I seem to know a lot; or, perhaps I am just good at sounding very sure of myself; or, perhaps I have very solid pragmatic experiential observations that are well grounded in reality, and so they also trust my theories (which happen to be wrong because of one wrong assumption; I think the clearest example is Zen Buddhists who rule out the existence of God and therefore cannot solve the mystery of who is *doing* the spring cleaning (perhaps not even seeing it as a whodunnit?) even though they have very reliably observed that spring cleaning *happens*); or, perhaps I am well versed in theoretical knowledge but give terrible pragmatic advice. In short, you, my readers, are fools to have read this far, but I am a greater fool to post comments at all.

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