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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