From: Alex Ferguson (abf@yeats.ucc.ie)
Date: Wed 26 Jan 2000 - 06:03:14 EET
Phil Hibbs:
> Is the modern concept of faith applicable in a Gloranthan sense? Nowadays, it
> means "There's no evidence, but I believe it anyway", and the atheist (eg. me,
I'd question this as being the 'correct' definition of faith, though
certainly it's one one often sees. (Indeed, people on occassion
describe their own 'faith' in roughly such terms, even more perplexingly.)
Other sorts of definitions one sees bandied about, though, are
(and I forget the source for this one -- anyone help?) 'honest doubt',
the idea of faith as the desire to religious enquiry, a la Jnana yoga,
or equally, the viewpoint exemplified by Job or Thomas, in one's
preferred testament. Another notion is that of 'emotional truth':
it's so because I feel it ("know" it) to be so, regardless of Positivists
banging on about the meaningless of said claims.
> I swing between atheist and agnostic these days) would say that faith is an
> invention to keep people loyal to a non-existent fantasy. In Glorantha,
> however, this kind of faith is unnecessary.
Given that Greg is a not irreligious person (to say nothing of Sandy),
I'm always a little disconcerted by reasoning that contrasts the
RW and Glorantha this sharply. If one has a religious experience,
then 'blind faith', of the sort you describe, isn't necessary. If
you argued that it was easier to have such religious experiences
in Glorantha, bordering on being hard _not_ to have them, perhaps,
and arguably harder to 'refute' when they do occur, compared to
the RW in general and very especially the modern world in particular
-- then I'd be less inclined to quibble.
Cheers,
Alex.
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