|
|
God-Forsaken Answer
by Monolycus on Aug 14, 2003 - 12:48 PM
(User info | Send a Message)
|
"Horribly well written"...? I was all prepared for a negative review. Tease.
Anyway, I am not entirely sure that I understand what you are asking, so I am going to ramble out a response while my coffee kicks in and hopefully I will touch on it. If I have missed your point by the end of it, just wash-rinse-repeat until we're on the same page.
I showed this story to a few friends before it showed up here, and the majority accused me of Christian bashing, so I expected that I would have to defend myself from that charge here as well. I'm both encouraged and disappointed that nobody seems to have misread my intent that way. Actually, I was handing out some bitchslaps pretty indiscriminately in this piece, but the only groups who I think have been really given ground for offense would be athiests and secular humanists, because of my heavy-handed suggestion that human beings would be lost entirely in the absence of divine guidance.
There were two basic reasons for my failure to provide representation to the Christians. First of all, they shouldn't have any. They have borrowed their pantheon whole-cloth from Judaic myths and historical figures, and I wanted to demonstrate that the figure of Christ was a rabbi and not a Christian.
The second, and more important, reason that I chose to write it that way was to demonstrate an odd point about religiosity. Do you recall a forum in which we discussed the difference between science and Scientism? Same basic principle here. Just because a person or group of people are disgustingly ostentatious about pushing an agenda or belief system, it doesn't automatically follow that they, themselves, actually subscribe to it. Let me quote from Erich Fromm's "Psychoanalysis and Religion" (1950):
"If man's highest value is success, if love, truth, justice, tenderness, mercy are of no use to him, he may profess these ideals but he does not strive for them. He may think that he worships the god of love but he actually worships an idol which is the idealization of his real goals, those rooted in the marketing orientation. Those who are concerned only with survival of religion and of the churches may accept the situation. Man will seek the haven of the church because his inner emptiness impels him to seek some shelter. But professing religion does not mean being religious." (pp. 99-100)
I used Christians in my first example, but this practice is not restricted to them, and I never meant to imply that it was. I probably should have made it more clear that the Seven Deadlies had not just usurped the followers of Christianity, but the followers of ALL the religions represented, which was why Mithras proposed that the Assembly abandon ALL of humankind. If I were to rewrite the story, I would try to clarify that.
As for why I had Orenda proffer charges... it was expedient. He comes from North America, where I wanted to imply the problems were concentrated. I could have used any North American deity, but Orenda seemed to me to be most apt. The conception of Orenda is not so much an individual, but the primal force that permeates everything, and his "domain" of followers has been usurped by force by Europeans. This was supposed to foreshadow the usurpation that we find out about later from the Nasty Seven.
Hope that I have at least touched on an answer here to what you were wondering.
~M.
|
|
|