Tradition

 

We all know how a lot of people will dig their heels in and refuse to learn cartomantic traditions, instead choosing to rely on "intuition." That would be fine, but for the fact that they push their views on the public, thus polluting the waters. Or they might make a deck, but choose to "innovate" rather than design the cards according to the reading tradition. There's a metric fucktonne of unreadable schlock out there.

I've been hanging out at cast iron discussion groups and found quite the opposite, in many cases. Let me explain first that a long time ago, people washed dishes with lye soap. Lye is used to this day to strip the seasoning from cast iron cookware. (Sometimes seasoning gets really crusty and needs to be stripped and done over.) The lye turns it to sludge and it washes right off. So you didn't want to wash your pans with soap then. People wiped their skillets with a rag, or scrubbed them with salt. But our modern dish detergent like Dawn is safe for washing pans. Still, some people still try to say you "should never use soap." I call bullshit. Wash your damn pan.

A lady at one of my cast iron groups said she knows this, she just doesn't use soap because her grandmother didn't, or told her not to. It's a way of keeping her grandma with her, I get that. Others will strip their pans by throwing them into a fire, risking cracks, warping, red scale and general heat damage. There are safe, inexpensive methods available but they choose to risk ruining their pan. They do it because a family member used to.

So people will follow a tradition for sentimental reasons, even if it's fatally flawed. But if there is no sentimental attachment, they want to tear it apart in spite of the value it has.

It makes no sense.