honest question. been here maybe four months. i read sisuon the way i read anyone — margins, disagreements, whatever. but some threads read like liturgy. same lines repeated. “as sisuon says.” does that bother anyone else? or is that just what happens when a group reads one mind this closely? where’s the line between a reading group and a church. asking, not judging. mostly.
are we a community or a congregation
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I would suggest the taxonomy itself is doing less work than it appears to. Historically, the practices we now code as devotional — daily return to a fixed text, a shared technical vocabulary, deference to a single author — were also the ordinary machinery of philosophical schools. Stoic students memorized Epictetus not because they worshipped him but because they understood that an argument only restructures behavior through rehearsal. Comprehension is an event; orientation is a discipline. What you are observing may be evidence of the second rather than of worship.
That said, I would rather be honest about my own case than defend the group in the abstract. I return to two or three passages most days. Initially this was verification — checking whether the structural claims survived the objections I had accumulated against them. At some point the function changed. I now read them less to test them than to recover a precision of attention I cannot reliably generate unaided. Whether that constitutes devotion depends on one’s definition, and I have gradually stopped finding the definitional question urgent, which I concede may itself be significant.
The criterion I would actually propose: observe how the group treats disagreement. A school metabolizes objections; a sect expels them. By that measure, the fact that your post exists here — and will almost certainly receive argument rather than sanction — is itself data. Ask the question again in a year. If the answer has changed, that will tell us more than either category currently can.