> > but for the record, what 'rather larger affairs' have you in mind
> >when you say this?
> Considerably larger than the supply of mystics willing to undergo
> hideous torture for mystical improvement would suggest.
Considerably is still a tad vague; if the people in there for dubious reasons outnumber those there for valid mystical reasons ten to one it wouldn't negate the basic argument I'm making, though it would require being unrealisticly and pointlessly specific, and likely _still_ wouldn't actually 'settle' anything, if the argument to date is anything to go by.
> >> Harsh ascetism isn't even restricted to mystics. Ascetic theists
> >> are hardly going to meet with mystic approval.
> >AFAIK, ascetism, or what Greg would call 'Austerities' to be more
> >specific, are specifically mystical.
> Ascetism is not the same as what Greg calls 'Austerities', which is
> a somewhat more specific technical use of the term.
Yes, that's exactly my (subordinate) point. What you two were talking were specifically Austerities. And my main point is that austerities in particular and asceticism in general are mystical techniques.
> As Greg has decided that everything has a mystic core at its heart, though,
> it does make it somewhat difficult to actually prove anything as NOT
> being mystic.
I pulled him up on this usage at Tentacles (I think? perhaps the Convsulsion, before), following an earlier email exchange. To make a hopefully viable semantic hair-split, it was ordained that 'preferred terminology' was that all ("true") religions have a _transcendent_ element; mysticism is simply a particular method of approaching the transcendent. Naturally, Greg being Greg, he makes these distinctions and then forgets about or ignores them, some of the time, but that doesn't mean he makes them with no purpose (for example, to try and avoid confusion such as the above).
Cheers,
Alex.
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