But they are properties of the text itself, just like the emotion you get from watching the Super Tengen Toppa Giga Drill Breaker is a property of the text (which just happens to be in an audiovisual format). That those properties are heavily dependent on context (the videos I linked to probably won't provoke much of an emotional response in anyone who hasn't followed the narrative up until that point, and will probably not have the same effect on someone who is familiar with anime and humongous mecha as on someone who is only familiar with House MD and How I Met Your Mother-type serials: however, they can trigger extreme emotions, up to and including what can only be qualified as nerdgasm, when the right contextual conditions conditions are met) does not mean the properties do not exist in and of themselves.
Notice also that, as Super Robot series and Frank Miller stories (the good ones at least) egregiously demonstrate, repetition and redundance and stock footage are not necessarily incompatible with awesome, and, to a receptive mind, might even strongly and positively correlate.
To think that one day I would illustrate a point about the Qran by comparing it to Gurren Lagann... This reminds me of how funny it was when I tried to explain the premise of Evangelion to my uncles the day they mentioned that according to some Hadith or another Adam was a 40 meter giant. Teh lulz...
If a christian reveres a bone of long-dead person and believes that it has all sorts of magical healing powers, this strange disposition is not caused by some property of the bone itself that makes people believe in its healing powers.
In the previous comment, I argued the possibility and implication of such situation; it's also not completely out of the question that the text itself has nontrivial probability of brainwashing people even in the absence of the huge social infrastructure currently surrounding it.
There is no point in demonstrating examples where something has an effect on its own perception, we all know such examples exist.
(It's my first time posting an article, so please go easy on me.)
I wonder if anyone ever fully analysed the Qran and all the resources it uses to tug at the feelings of the reader? It is a remarkably persuasive (if not at all convincing) book, even if I say so myself as an ex Muslim. I've started recognizing some patterns since I started reading this site, but I'd like to know if there is a full-blown, complete, exhaustive deconstruction of that book, that is not dripped in islamophobia, ethnocentrism, and other common failures I have seen in Western theologians when applied to Islam. Not a book about "How the Qran is evil" or "How the Qran is Wrong" or "How IT'S A FAAAKE" but "How, precisely, it manipulates you". Can anyone here point me towards such a work?
And where is the markup help in this blog? I can't seem to find it and it frustrates the hell out of me when I'm commenting usual posts.