From: DevinC@aol.com
Date: Fri 10 Jun 1994 - 03:41:16 EEST
Devin Cutler here:
Alex writes:
"Oooo, imagine, the deadly sin of Not Giving Someone the Last Word."
It's the eighth deadly sin -)
"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."
My whole point is that those who believed the Red Sea parted still didn't witness it first hand. Therefore, their belief was less perfect, less complete than a Gloranthan's.
" 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."
And while I, too, believe there is some overlap, I feel that the overlap is much less than you do. Also, I don't see the fact that Glorantha is filled with "religious fanatics" as a bad thing. In fact, it lends a great deal of fanatic tension to the whole. And it gets away from the D&Dism of "Yeah, I'm a cleric of XXXXX. Worship? What do you mean worship?"
"Is this particularly different from the situation of the ancient Hellenes,
or
the pre-Christian Celts?"
No, but I still submit that the ancient Hellenes never witnessed en masse (or even individually) gods wielding their power in the way Gloranthans do.
"Not unlike the Malkioni, no?"
The Malkioni are an ENTIRELY different case, and I have never had a problem with them as they are being portrayed. And yes, I might find the average Rokari peasant less devout than an Orlanthi peasant...and more cynical too.
"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.)"
"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."
Nevertheless, I submit that they do display whole magnitudes lower, since they do not witness healings on the order of, say, that healing spring written up in an early TOTRM (I think it was issue 3 or 4). Wounds do not close up at Lourdes in a matter of seconds as you watch. Diseases and Poison do not disappear inside of minutes. The dead do not come back to life. In fact, I would doubt that anyone at Lourdes has actually witnessed a healing that has occured within, say, an hour. Terran miracles are so much less provable and more subtle. A person bathes at Lourdes and, say, 3 weeks later is cured. Well, who's to say the miracle occured at Lourdes? It could have occured 2 weeks later by eating a bowl of cereal.
"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."
First of all, someone's bad is another person's good. If I worship Ragnalar, I am good if a rape people. So there is really no such thing as a Bad God. In any case, I do not envision gods giving divine magic to anyone who pays the price. I play that they only grant their magic to those worthy of such. Yes, the Gloranthans have a wider variety of gods, but once they choose, they must be devout to that god, or switch and become devout to another.
One can say that the widespread use of magic, instead of causing people to become blaise about worship, causes them to be devout, since in a world where everyone else has magic, someone not attached to a god will have a rough time of things. Therefore, I don't picture Atheists and Agnostics doing too well in Glorantha's Theistic areas.
"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."
But they WERE less convinced in their deity's potency, simply because that potency was not hitting them in the face constantly.
"It does? Most afterlives aren't even (claimed to be) _in_ the spirit
world"
This is news to me. I preasumed that the Cat Spirits and the Plant spirits, and the other Spirits mentioned in a Different Worlds article implied that most spirits were the deceased cult members serving their god by becoming allied.
"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."
The simple fact that any schmo off of the street cannot walk up to an altar to Babeester Gor and get Axe Trance is a sign that a deity is involved. Also, the fact that apostates lose their Divine Spells is another. In any case, do you want to seriously argue that anything over 1% of the non-sorcerous Theistic ares of Glorantha believe that?
Also, I mentioned on the RQ monthly conference on AOL that I had heard somewhere that Gbaji was believed to be the Tongue of Wakboth. Anyone else heard of this?
Regards,
Devin Cutler
devinc@aol.com
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