>One possibility is that [the Lunars] don't know they can't. Another is
>that they
>know that they have to remake the world to succeed. In the last case, it
>means to stop time but it has already be done twice and they did it the
>second time (at Castle Blue).
I don't like the first argument (It's like the end of those awful Thomas Covenant books. Evil God: "Ha! Ha! I have the magic dingus, and I win! What's this? If I win, I lose? Oh f***!"), but I could buy the second one -- the world needs rebooting.
Alex Ferguson says:
>They're obviously not "part of" the "Heortling Humakt"; I think what's
>being proposed is that they're (in some sense, or to some degree) part
>of "Great Humakt", or "The Death Rune", or "the transcendent power of
>biting the big one", or however you'd want to characterise it.
It would be nice if it was called something besides Humakt, then, since it priveleges the Orlanthi worldview. It's like all those Medieval proofs of god -- they work along, reasonably consistant logically, and suddenly jump to "And that ultimate goodness is what we call God," which give the impression of valedating a thousand years of Christian Theology, but it doesn't hold up to close examination. If there is a Supreme Power of Death, it's more than Humakt. If there is a Supreme Power of Air, it has to cover more than what the Orlanthi worship.
>The tricky thing about this about debate is that clearly, theists
>anthropomorphise their gods to a fair extent, and to a high degree
>certainly think of them as being discrete entities (give or take the
>occassional Ineffable Mystery).
Yup. (I agree, although slightly less enthusiastically, with the rest of your statement, too.) The other tricky thing is the general tendency to slip into Heortling-thought. The Heortling answers are good answers for the Heortlings, but they aren't the Whole Answer (or even the Whole Theist Answer).
Peter Larsen
Powered by hypermail