Alex Ferguson <abf_at_interzone.ucc.ie>:
>In other words: "tough, I don't want 'em to exist, you can only have
>'Theyalan Pelorian myths'".
Again, that's harsher than I meant, more like "I wish it had been handled differently."
>How many people would really want to discard the accumulated
>knowledge of a decade and a half, in order to reduce the amount of
>contradiction by the simple expedient of reducing the amount we know?
Distortion. You're assuming, oddly, that nothing could have been written except what *was* written.
>Talking of viewpoints being misrepresented, this is a fairly
>presumptuous thing to assert about mine.
Perhaps it was . . . but it was meant to be a *humourous* thing to assert. I was trying to caricature myself as a God Learner, assigning a pattern to events and distorting them to force them to fit.
>1. What's the "primacy of logic", anyway?
The idea that, where it applies, you use logic rather than, say, political power to decide which position is correct.
For instance, Lysenkoists didn't recognize the primacy of logic.
>3. What makes you thing logic is the most useful tool for describing
> roleplaying games, the world, much less myth?
I think discussion of why logic is a good tool for describing the world is WAY off topic here . . . and you've answered my original question, that you don't recognize the authority of logic.
In Glorantha, again, you can't separate "the world" from "myth", or at least that's my feeling.
>4. What do you mean by a myth being "wrong"? Do you mean that:
Yes.
>5. We probably are wasting our time discussing this.
Yup, I posted the same yesterday. I just compulsively answer questions addressed to me.
> . . . as early as 1981 Greg
>was writing that the Mystics regarded deities as a "misconception"
>of reality. (CoT p11)
Language. My reading of the Mystics is not that they deny the reality of the gods, just that they don't consider them of vital importance. This is, for instance, the position of many Buddhists.
>In the above terms, almost every currently
>accepted scientific theory _is_ "wrong". (Certainly including both of
>two of the most remarkable of the century, Relativity and QED, which
>tend to somewhat stab each other in the ankle.)
Well . . . yes. And your point is?
Bill McCluskey:
Heisenberg did NOT demonstrate that truth is unknowable. Granted I only took one quantum mechanics course before switching to biology, but what old Werner demonstrated was that *certain particular bits of information* can't be found out in *certain circumstances*.
Don't overgeneralize, please.
Back to Alex:
>And you're telling me it wasn't? To wit that a reading of the
>Entekosiad, say, convinces you that the gods are "not real"?
>I find that reaction to be... surprising. After all, no one
>on _Glorantha_ seems to think so.
We have a different perspective from a Gloranthan. I don't think anyone claims that *Gloranthans* are troubled by these issues, except maybe a few scholars in weird settings.
We, the real folks, have access to non-Dara Happan materials that most ENTEKOSIAD readers simply do not.
>Carl Fink:
>> And yes, logically if one really cared about the origin of, say, the
>> Faceless Statue one could ask, e.g., Yelm, who witnessed its
>> construction. And, it still hasn't been explained *why this doesn't
>> work*.
>
>I honestly don't how what you mean by "why" in this context. Do you
>mean "what happens in Glorantha if this is done?";
Yes.
>"if it doesn't work, what's the Real Reason why not?"
That, too.
If you get contradictory answers from "the same god" (say two Yelm
priests ask), we have either the odd prospect of Yelm lying to his
followers, or Yelm not existing. Neither appeals to me. If Yelm *is*
a reliable source (at least from his own viewpoint) then all those
"how can they argue about doctrine?" questions come right back.
- --
Carl Fink carlf_at_panix.com
Remove AGIS from the backbone!
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