Greetings! A long overdue cheerio to my friends on the net! :-) Sorry for the sustained absence! On celebrities as Gloranthan deities: L. Bobbit gets my vote for the dark Earth goddess! ;-) On suicide in Glorantha . . . It seems like a counterproductive notion for a society or a religion to condone suicide except under the most dire of circumstances. Things can always get bad, and you want your society to survive calamities. For example, if suicide was accepted in Orlanthi society then why weren't there more recorded mass suicides when the Lunars crushed the rebellion originally? Instead the Orlanthi fought back. On the Christian aversion to suicide, my pre-seminary studies in the area indicated that in the early church there was not a proscription against suicide, and in fact, many families committed suicide to escape from the toils of this life and go to the paradise beyond. Christianity like most religions is anything but a static mass of doctrine. The church suddenly realized ``hey, we've got the potential here to lose a lot of our good folks,'' and suicide was decried as a venal sin. On the religions of war . . . a lot of the training military officers get in our professional forces mirrors the duties of the priesthood. You receive training in how to: counsel, lead, and educate your subordinates. There is considerable amounts of legend and lore to be learned and shared to include ceremony and circumstance. Ecclesiastic promotions I have observed are mirrored pretty closely what I observed in terms of military promotions as a career military officer. It seems completely reasonable that a god of war could be ``worshipped'' by observing the strictures of the profession of arms. In service, Rich ------------------------------
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