[about a man "not born of woman"]
> Nice one. It certainly beats the pants (or indeed kilt) off the
> rationale of its parent usage (and source of the phrase), which
> relies on snore-inducing sophistry about the word 'born'. (i.e.
> a C-section. Hope that wasn't a big spoiler for all of you that
> were waiting for the movie version to come out...)
Well, in Glorantha it's hardly a challenge -- I mean, Pavis half-elf might have had a mother who wasn't even an *animal*. As I recall, Sartar's Telmori tribe often has human babies born to wolves, too.
Then there are the surviving Original People of the Agimori, who were directly created by Lodril.
Andrew Larsen <aelarsen_at_facstaff.wisc.edu> wrote:
Here I'm going to seem to argue against my own points.
> Either Chaos is inherently evil or it isn't.
Sure, if you think that "evil" is a well-defined word, which of course it is not. I consider raping or killing someone in Bosnia because she's a Muslim, or Rwanda because she's a Hutu, to be evil, but clearly many hundreds of thousands (millions) there would disagree.
For a less extreme case, consider the U.S. debate about abortion -- I don't think it's possible to say that abortion is "inherently evil or it isn't."
> Either the Orlanthi are right and the Lunars are wrong, or vice
> versa. The two cultures hold incompatible beliefs on this issue.
> So the whole subjective issue founders here, because both positions
> cannot be true simultaneously. You've made an objective decision
> that Chaos is not inherently evil.
No, you (Andrew) have made the odd assumption that "wrong" has an objective definition. (Some real-world people do think this, mostly because their particular concept of an omnipotent Creator has told them so. Unless one accepts their faith, that argument fails.)
Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_bigfoot.com> wrote:
> >"Higher level of reality" generally means "This does not need to make
> >any sense."
>
> Physicists do not think so when studying quantum mechanics. Or
> is this analogy more appropriate for the Terra Digest?
I don't know of any physicists who consider quantum mechanics to represent a "higher level of reality". I've never even found it particularly complex or hard to understand -- anyone who passed calculus should recognize its simplicity.
Certainly the quantum isn't inherently contradictory. It does seem to contradict relativity, but for that very reason physicists assume that one or the other is flawed, which rather defeats your argument.
(Note .sig)
- --
Carl Fink carlf_at_dm.net
I-Con's Science and Technology Programming <http://www.iconsf.org/>
Also an ex-science teacher
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