From: alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Date: Wed 08 Jun 1994 - 11:14:54 EEST
Paul Reilly, quoting me, quoting John Hughes quoting Chaosium:
> >> "THE FIREBRINGER: many people agree that Trickster, in one form or another,
> >> stole fire from the darkness. [...]
> >While contrariwise, the Dara Happans certainly don't.
> I think that the DH might agree that Rakenveg, the carrot-headed Trickster,
> snuck in and stole Fire during the Darkness - FROM THEM.
They might: a FirePincher is an amusing varient that hadn't occurred to me.
> Eurmal is definitely a Murderer. No question. Who unleashed Death?
Was Oppenheimer, then?
Devin Cutler:
> Alex writes (forcing me to keep this debate public):
[...]
Oooo, imagine, the deadly sin of Not Giving Someone the Last Word.
> 1) The gods on Glorantha are more active and manifest more often, more
> overtly (i.e. provably), and more repeatedly than any Earthly deities. When I
> say this last sentence, I do not mean "than any Earthly deities ever did in
> Terran mythology", I am saying "than any Earthly deities ever REALLY did in
> any sort of verifiable sense". Now, I suppose we are heading into dangerous
> territory (i.e. do Terran gods (or God) really exist), and this is a subject
> that I would like to avoid.
I doubt we are. What I maintain is merely that people have a fairly impressive record of believing that they do, and acting accordingly. For my money, one parting of the Red Sea is worth quite a few "wasn't that a lucky escape from apparently certain death"s.
> 2) That assuming a person knows for a fact that a god exists and has direct
> effect on their lives/souls, that they would worship and revere such a god to
> a great extent.
But the issue isn't just "great extent", it's "an extent so much greater than with earthly religions that it ceases to become even comparable, so we should bin everything we know about earthly religions, and start from scratch". I find it more credible to believe that there's a range of faith on both Glorantha and historical earth, which at the very least overlaps substantially between the two. Earth has thrown up quite enough religious maniacs that to suppose Glorantha has many, many times more of them is a rather off-putting idea.
> Therefore, I suppose Gloranthan worshippers can demand more of their gods
> than earthly worshippers can of their one Supreme Being, because if a
> Gloranthan doesn't like one god, he/she can simply worship another.
Is this particularly different from the situation of the ancient Hellenes, or the pre-Christian Celts?
> In a
> Judeo/Christian mythos, you have no choice, it is worship THE GOD or burn in
> Hell.
> Also, while in Glorantha the relationship between god and worshipper is a
> two-way street (i.e. the god gains something from the worshippers and vice
> versa), Terran monotheistic religions are more of a one-way street. Id est,
> worship of God is less a trade (of POW for benefits) and more of a parental
> type situation (i.e. love is a major factor).
Malkioni get no magical or material benefits from their worship, either. If they were all unaligned sorcerors, they'd get _more_ magic per worshipper, in fact. (Neglecting Saint Cults for the moment.) This seems to make Malkionism in the same ballpark of provability to mediaeval earthly religions, against a background where pagan deities are manifesting all over the place. Isn't this an argument in favour of them becoming thoroughgoing backsliders, if not apostates to a man, by your logic?
> 1) Every Gloranthan knows that there is an afterlife. They know it for
> certain. How? They can regularly talk to their ancestors, they SEE spirits,
> etc. While many on Earth claim to believe in an afterlife, few can really
> claim to believe it with the kind of non-faith intellectual proof that
> Gloranthans have.
I don't believe Gloranthan afterlives are "provable" in any meaningful sense. I fact, I'm inclined to believe many of the claimed afterlives in cult writeups are downright false. At any rate, determining whether any particular person has gone to any given afterlife, and whether they're having a great time there, is at the very least exceedingly difficult. (Beyond afterlife claims like "you become a spirit", which is somewhat provable, but not relevant to most of the afterlives marketed by the various cults.)
> I don't care how gullible and faith-full someone might be, hearing about a
> miracle second hand is not as effective as witnessing it firsthand or, better
> yet, performing it oneself.
How many people believe they've seen a Real Miracle at Lourdes (sp?) say? Now, perhaps you think their standards of proof are shoddy, or that they're plain ol' gullible, but it seems improbable to me that they display whole order of magnitudes less faith than the "Glorantha's different" school of thought appears to maintain.
> "After all, Gloranthans know that
> people worshipping Bad Gods, and even no god at all, get magic, too."
> Why does the fact that Bad Gods give magic mitigate the devoutness of
> Gloranthans?
Because it means you don't have to be Good to get magic. You don't have to believe any particular thing to get magic, or indeed anything at all. Indeed, you can be be fairly lax and cynical and get at least some magic from your god. Magic is fairly "routine" stuff in Glorantha, compared to earth, so the mere fact that gods can evidence and grant it isn't likely to make them quite the objects of universal and unquestioned awe you seem to envisage, and as they might if they manifested in the middle of Piccadily Circus tomorrow, and started lambasting the hapless residents with unaccoustomedly irreproducable, but painful, results.
> Yes, Sorcerors get magic, but it is regarded as unholy and soul destroying.
> In any case, just because magic exists in a non-Divine form doesn't suddenly
> convince Gloranthans that their deities are impotent.
Clearly not, but that wasn't my point, was it? Rather I argue, just because you don't think religious people should have believed in their gods, due to their inablility to produce magic on a regular basis, they weren't convinced that their deities were impotent.
> "Spirit
> magic certainly isn't "evidence" of divinity of any sort, much less one
> who believes and promulgates his own GoG writeup chapter and verse. More
> like a kind of cultic Predecessor Worship."
> Yes, but spirit magic does prove that the spirit world exists, that an
> afterlife exists, etc.
It does? Most afterlives aren't even (claimed to be) _in_ the spirit world.
> Furthermore, Cult Spirits would tend to be a
> manifestation fo a god's powers.
Or of spirit magic which one's predecessors in the cult just happened to know. That it resembles the putative powers of the god in question is hardly surprising.
> But in any case, so what? Divine Magic in
> and of itself is enough to prove the Gloranthan deities' manifestations.
Doubtless why the aforementioned Malkioni deny it. (Deny the divinity, that is, rather than the manifestation). What precisely does Divine Magic prove, other than that worshipping at the altar of Orlanth Adventurous is a precondition to casting a Shield spell? Its very reliability could lead one to the alternative conclusion that it was just some form of sorcerous manipulation of the requisite elements, backed up with some POW sacrifice, rather than the conscious intervention of some entity.
I'm half-tempted to bring up Illuminates.
Alex.
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