Argent Towers, a moment of your time.

[Argent_Towers]

@DianaG

You’re right. You only made a point of contacting him to recommend it, you refrained from actually sending him a copy. You’re a fucking hero.

I’m just going to go ahead and paste here the content of the PMs I sent, just so that people will have a good crystal-clear notion of what went on:

(Is it that Hogg novel you talk about?)

It is!

The reason I recommend it is sort of as an endurance test. If you can make it through that book, you’ll realize that words and ideas don’t have nearly as much power as people make them out to. And this is separate from your religion - if your faith is true, then you’ll be able to read the book in a detached way and not be affected by anything in it. (The Bible never says, “don’t read any obscene material.”)

A lot of people in this world will try to shock and jar you and rattle your confidence with words. The best thing you can do in life is to become immune to them.

And later…

See, the issue here is, why do your parents not want you to read that? Think about it for a minute. Do they think that if you read it, you’ll turn from a nice kid into some kind of evil monster? Do they think it will corrupt you somehow? If so, then they are doing a disservice to your own intelligence. Shouldn’t your parents assume that you have the free will to do with information what you want, and that you have the intelligence enough to take in a book without the book altering you?

Since I know you’re religious, look at it this way: the Bible is the one true book, and God is the one true voice. Anything else is powerless. So theoretically you could read or look at anything else, and not be affected by it because you have the intelligence and the free will to prevent certain ideas or words from upsetting you!

So this is what I said to him, and it’s keeping with my own personal philosophy. I think some of you might have in your heads the idea of sinister and sleazy “come-ons” and “grooming” going on in this PRIVATE message, and that I was regaling the lad with stories of child rape. Far from it. I was trying to make an intellectual point to him.

His responses to me were civil and gentleman-like.