> > But the myths are not solely about "moral behavior". They also
> > inform how its culture thinks, acts and does magic.
>Except becuase of both personal and cultural relativism, you simply
>cannot take a mythic truth and project it into the real world.
Wrong. Cultural relativism has nothing to do with this and personal relativism is merely the old discredited hypocrisy argument under a new label.
> > The actual injunction is far closer to "you shall not murder"
> > which is still a forbidden practice in virtually all post-
> > christian states and it does not preclude the "just war", the
> > existence of which can be deduced from other portions of the
> > bible. And yes, practice of the "just war" was something that
> > exercised legal minds in the middle ages.
>Exactly so - its the process of reification and relativism that makes
>it so difficult to go from the mythically ideal to the actually
>implemented.
It may be "so difficult" to you but it is not to me or to most other people active on this list. Most people on reading the bible with in all its glory would conclude that war is sanctioned by God in many circumstances and that the issue of the just war is a separate issue from murder.
Likewise to steer this back to glorantha, most people would understand from the myth of the Making of the Storm Tribe that tribes and clans are the best way for people to live in and so forth with the rest of the myth.
>So describe a post-mediaeval state, I would need to
>know much more than merely the content of its dominant myth
>- I need to know what it actually does on the ground.
Since we are not talking about post-medieval states, but ancient societies in which the gods are real, the relevance of this to the topic is?
> > So? The set of moral ideals is still useful for knowing
> > how people are expected to act and they also illustrate
> > examples of behaviour that would be considered bad.
> > Kinstrife in Orlanthi mythology is an example of this.
>Yes, and I have made it quite clear that I DO regard the material as
>a valuable description of Orlanthi psychology, and furthermore I laud
>the effort to make such a psychological description.
No, you haven't made it clear that the material is valuable. You've been complaining that the material is only applicable to psychology while making spurious objections to arguments that gloranthan myths are much more important than this.
--Peter Metcalfe
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