Rhetorical strategies

Hummm....we've discussed the Aforementioned Video of Stupidity before, but I want to take a look at rhetorical strategies.  For instance the entry a little bit down with the spoiler space - some of that really should go behind a cut, honey, please?  Or be "euphemized"?

But I see your point, and I also see that (gah) some if not most of that is *not* outside of the realm of things that have/are happening.  Sadly.  Terrifyingly.  But can we lighten that passage a little?  I'll tell you why - and it's not just me being prim.

As history shows us, hell has been described in terms like that before.  It's not outside the scope of *some* "people of God" to write or say things that would have made Sade blush.  At that point, the layering of imagined depravity (to say nothing of the enacted depravities, then and now) becomes one long scream of insanity, a meta-tactic that overshadows any hope of rational thought or questioning.  Erases any possibility of alternative, stifles any other approach that could theoretically lead someone to A) that religion or B) a moral life, god-optional.

The only problem is that by using the layered-depravity, image after horrible image, to show this problem, to disagree, kind of takes us down to the level of using that tactic to "recruit".  And I am perenially concerned with the morality involved in torture-talk (from things like texts to movies to museum exhibits) because so much of that stuff, even stuff with a whiff of it has been used for so many horrible things.

When I went to England years ago, we visited a castle, and started out in the dungeon, cynically laughing, "ooh, devices!" mad scientist-kinda thing.  Now, I bet those were reproductions (I'd hope, for the wear the visitors put them thru!) but the oubilettes, the barred windows - even the forms of the reproduced racks and chains - in all the joke-S&M, joke-evil fluff, these were places and forms actual evil had touched.  People were stuffed into things *just like that* and horrors were done to their bodies and minds. 

Was it right of us to gawk?  You know my love for the morbid and strange.  I have no problem with the crypt ot the ruin, but I wonder if the dungeon is the right place to go.  I'm not advocating silence for places, or texts, or refrences to depravity, but more mindfulness of them, since it's so easy to feel comfortable in the distance of time, or words, *even* for a good idea, like railing against that damaging and sadistic view of the salvation/damnation cycle that guy espouses.

That being said, I'm gonna run, and go about my day ;)  Just giving you something to consider.