From: Alex Ferguson (alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Wed 27 Apr 1994 - 00:13:57 EEST
Newton Hughes:
> I think Berserk should be the property of a bodyguard subcult
"Yes sir, we killed the assassins. Um, mind you, we killed the dignitary we were guarding, and twelve innocent bystanders, too." ;-)
Scott Haney:
> In Glorantha, the gods are REAL, PERSONAL, and INVOLVED IN DAILY
> LIFE, sometimes in a very tangible way. Our gods here in The Real
> World aren't.
I think this sort of distinction arrives more from a difference in perspective than anything else. Because we look at Glorantha from outside, we tend to form absolutist notions of how it works. In Real Life, we're mostly resigned to many things being inknowab
> by our myths, humans weren't present at the creation of the world
> nor do our gods seem to speak directly to us (at least nowadays).
Nor do Gloranthan gods. If you count oracles and divinations, there are latter-day earthly equivalents.
> Real Life: Christians, for example, don't believe that any of the
> Hindu gods exist at all, or ever. There is no pervasive mono-myth to
> tie any of our religions together.
> Glorantha: Yelm worshippers think Orlanth is a bumwipe, but they know
> that he's real. Even the G*d L**rn*rs believe that *something*
> happened, and although there are many differing myths concerning the
> birth of humans, there is also a common mono-myth in which
> practically everyone believes.
The God Learners would have you believe this, and to some exent they _made_ it (more) true.
> I'm not saying that one couldn't make a case against God Learners or
> against "X is really an aspect of Y," but I just don't feel that
> Earth religions are a good measure of how things in Glorantha work.
Then what is? What should we compare them to, Venusian religions?
> Hindu myths don't include the Christian god
That would be somewhat anachronistic.
> Christian myths don't include Zeus.
There are, however, clear elements of pre-Christian sky worship in Christianity, particularly since Roman times.
Pam Carlson:
> I remember a graph where relative number of cultures
> practicing polygamy correlated inversely with lattitute - most polygamous
> human cultures were in the tropics. As you move toward the poles, with
> harsher climates, you find increasingly monogamous groups. There are
> also species of birds which are sometimes monogamous, sometimes
> polygamous, depending largely on the availability of food. It all boils
> down to how many adults are required to raise young.
This is a less important factor than the degree of sexual dimorphism in the species, though of course one could argue that that too is conditioned bu prevailing conditions.
> (After all, a diploid critter has just as many genes in common with a full
> sib
While this is roughly the case on a statistical basis, it's not strictly true. A parent and child have half their genes in common. Siblings could have anything from all, to none in common (both admittedly rare, due to messy details of meiosis).
Alex.
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