A friend's Facebook post: [paraphrase] "This scriptural study of Job was a good reminder ..."
Whatever the strawman around which you want to wrap a personal reflection, it's your wrapping around it in which the benefit lies, not the strawman. Whether you take a moment of intentional analysis of one of the universal conflicts of the human condition using the Bible, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, an episode of Sex In The City, or a scholarly article by a clinical psychologist, your throw your life experience and natural attitude up against some idea or principle and compare and contrast, judge, butt and rebut, accept and deny and so forth. It's particularly useful when there's another thoughtful member in the room making it a threesome (you, them, and the literature) or three or more (with diminishing returns).
An open dialogue with the expectation that you will come away from the encounter with a better understanding, able to understand and incorporate a heftier hunk of some small part of the universal whole.
I've come to believe that it's sometimes useful to deconstruct the universal principles of human existence to appreciate in explicit detail the nuance of any given circumstance, and later reconnect it to the singular octopus, to remember that for certain, it really always abuts the oneness of all.
About the strawmen: for any individual, different strawmen may be more accessible (a literal minded person may struggle with something spiritual or metaphorical, a Christian may find their history with scripture richer), but it's also a great exercise in expanding our perspective by branching out to less natural strawmen. For a scientist to spend more time with a piece of literature to explore selflessness and altruism, or an acolyte to dissect the implications of kin selection in evolutionary psychology to explore how "goodness" can be baked into the human psyche through the invisible hand of our genetic drive to replicate itself. Either way, it's in the ping-pong of ideas that we grow.
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