> The examples you use to support this rather extreme statement are
gathered
> across a wide arc of history and culture, and embody God-Learnerish
> perspectives that would be totally foreign to most Gloranthans. A
Yes, but this is irrelevant for a work which is supposed to be explicatory in the real world i.e. the HW boook on the shelf.
> Heortlings are ever going to be surprised by the actions and
> reactions of Storm/Earth pantheon cultists, even from other tribes,
Exactly. So a work written to describe these people would, I thought, benefit from describing who they actually are and how they actually behave, rather than limiting itself to the ideal of moral behaviour. If I applied the same logic to thew real world, I would be obliged to conclude that no christian state ever waged war, certainly not on another christian state, becuase if the injunction "thou shalt not kill." But this is manifestly false; I might know that any given culture values the injunction as a moral ideal, but that in the day to day experience real people recognise the the moral ideal is an ideal and they do not, for the most part, feel overly bound to honour in any and all circumstances. And thus christian states do go to war with one another. My argument is that the concentration on the myth means that we are getting the nominal rather than the actual; we are getting data on the idealised psychology of the culture rather than the actuality of the culture.
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