Opus 2026-447: Click bait: A Misnomer

I think the label was “The Heretic”.  I really hadn’t paid much attention to the title.  I went there because he was interviewing someone I was interested in.  At this point, I can’t remember exactly who it was.  The conversation was interesting so when I saw him come up on my YouTube algorithm with a catchy title, I thought I would try it again.

The episode I watched involve the guy who called himself a heretic interviewing someone else who in a general sense, called himself a Christian.  They were talking about belief, and whether God existed and such things as that.  I found it amusing to watch two young men, who seemed to be intelligent, who didn’t seem to have any real contribution to make to society, discussing the big questions of life.  When I say young, keep in mind that I’m looking at it from the other end of the spectrum.  They were slender, tousled hair, measured voices, I assume that if I were a woman, I would think that they were relatively attractive.  They spoke carefully in well modulated tones that I imagine they thought were philosophical.  It was a good time of give and take.  What was frustrating was that as intelligent as they were and as articulate as they appeared, they obviously had a limited amount of interaction with people who have been wrestling with these questions for millennia.

Let’s start off with the title.  The program was labeled “The Heretic”.  The host, who seems to have had a Jewish background, was not a heretic.  He was an atheist.  You can’t be a heretic if you’re an atheist.  A heretic is someone who is a member of a religious group that rejects a key teaching or embraces a forbidden teaching, and thus becomes heretical.  If you are a Muslim, I may call you a pagan incorrectly, or I could call you a heathen.  I could not call you a heretic.  If I were a Sunni Muslim and you were a Shia Muslim I could call you a heretic.  The person he was interviewing, who in a generic sense called himself a Christian, was the heretic.  He wasn’t trying to be one.  He was just taking a lot of comments which would put him well outside the realm of Christianity while still trying to embrace it.

So you start off misusing terms.

Whether I click on it again or not depends on who the guest is.  The first conversation I listen to struck me as interesting because of the guest.  I find this is an attitude I’m developing towards these click bait hosts.  I think of Joe Rogan as a good example.  Most of the time I don’t bother with what he is saying.  If he has someone I consider worth listening to I might tune in for a while.  If they discuss things that matter or at least are interesting I will follow along.  If Joe gets into dropping the F-bomb on a regular basis, blowing cigar smoke at his guest, and refilling his whiskey glass then I’m pretty sure it’s degenerating into the kind of discussion that people who are high on marijuana think is really sophisticated, but it’s really childish.

I guess you could say the same thing about the things that I write, not the drugs but the childishness.

homo unius libri