From: Alex Ferguson (alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Fri 14 Oct 1994 - 06:34:04 EET
Nick B. fumes:
> As for Shamans only getting Resurrect from "spirit cults", this is IMHO a
> grotesque God Learnerisation. The shaman is dealing with a "Great Spirit",
> but because the God Learners have decreed that this is in fact a "God" it
> doesn't count as bona fide Shamanism??
Eh? Someone seems to be forgetting that "spirit cults" are GLishly classified under _Horned Man: the Great Shaman_. How bona fide do you want? What was being argued about, I thought, was whether some arbitrary shaman, whatever his local belief system, should be able to "mechanically" plug spirits back into dead bodies.
In your titanic struggle with the Nysalors of this list, Nick, perhaps it'd be wise to bear in mind (at least one of) the (purported) fate(s) of Arkat.
> The ethical question is over
> whether an Evil Sorcerer could cast exactly the same spell by performing
> the same ritual. There are real-world arguments which suggest he could do
> so, incidentally: but nobody was interested last time I brought these up.
I assumed we all just quietly agreed with you. I did, for one. In particular, I think it's "impossible" to test the moral stature, or "initiatory status" of someone in a Western religion, much more so than in a theist cult. So yes, I think that if an Evil Wizard dupes a congregation into participating in his WIG spell, it would be generally held to have "worked" in the sense that it wouldn't invalidate the discharging of religious obligations by the plebs, or any consecrations or ordinations carried out under his auspices. Naturally, the original offender will still [verb] in Hell, but that's all beyond mortal Kenneth.
> Joerg writes extremely well in English, and I have told him so often.
He do indeed. Even were it the case that Joerg's TradeTalk were below that magical publishable 50% barrier, the amount of further work to make it so would be fairly modest. More so then some native scrawlers it'd be libellous to name. And personally, I'd settle for considerably worse yet in the cause of getting my paws on anything other than German in my paws. Mind you, if his protestations are just a ruse to avoid the tedium of enenglishing, my lethargic side can only empathise. ;-)
> His
> only problem is that after receiving a corrected idiomatic text for one of
> his articles, he bins it and continues to work from the old version...
Joerg's unidiomatic idioms are rather growing on me: as much as I'd like to be a zealot of linguistic purity, I think I turned up precisely 900 years too late to do English much good.
Slainte,
Alai.
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