I deeply appreciate your ability to tease/spoof/validate/shatter the belief systems of your ragamuffin players.
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I was probably letting my atheism bleed too much into the game but I consciously constructed Honeydew’s religion to be mostly a veneer of tradition/practice/legend over some ill-defined actual fact (he has to have magical powers from Somewhere?) so his background + events in the game could precipitate a religious crisis. The particulars of the actual fact behind the veneer have been Tulpa but they’ve given me some room to fill in the corners and I get All The Veneer.
Mostly I think of things I should definitely bring up in chat as early as possible, forget about them for a month or more, spring them on a Tulpa at the last minute.
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It’s very good; constructing a perspective in which gods are learned to be real, from the mind of a lapsed faithful, towards an audience whose own secular perspective runs from a similar starting point, is two flips above chewy and interesting.
honeydew lives
oh right this is where I feel kind of alienated by having to struggle to process religious belief as interesting or nuanced in any way because it would just never occur to me
Meanwhile BJ is an atheist in a world filled with empirically demonstrable demigods just out of pure spite and ODD
This doesn’t add to this discussion it’s just funny to me
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I guess it’s a little strange that I spend so much time thinking about cultural Protestantism and cultural catholicism and so on but when it comes to faith itself my brain is entirely smooth
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Some of us just aren’t built for it, yeah.
I get ‘empathetic religiosity’ where I can understand and partake in religious art while holding it as entirely silly, and chafing under real-world ritual and tradition. When it intersects with heroic self-sacrifice which can exist as a strictly humanist virtue but is often found within religious stories, I’m all in.
Most powerful, most recently, was Scorsese’s Silence and its meditation on Christ-imitation and humbling, shattering climax of blasphemy as humility and sacrifice. I lost it, completely in a mindset of prideful belief and a lifetime of work to maintain it.
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yeah that’s exactly the part that makes me feel affectless!
I don’t think I’m actively judgmental other than in my total inability to engage, it just exclusively registers for me as sociological
How do you feel about history as a subject of interest? I became more familiar and empathetic to religious modes the more ancient literature I read and learned about, as a way to understand these cultures. I intuitively feel like they’d be correlated but I have nothing to back it up.
I love the 20th century, as well as any kitsch or noted idiots, but I lose interest pretty fast after that
well that’s 1.5 data points now
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I grew up intensely religious, and it’s still an inescapable part of the lens I view the world through even as an ostensible secular humanist who only believes in the material world?
The genesis of the Big Stupid Tabletop Game I will probably never finish was reading Esther Cohen’s The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture and recognizing my much-younger self in its description of medieval attitudes toward Christ (having been given Christ as their only real tool with which to deal with pain(s), in the same way that I was as a young Fundamentalist struggling with nascent depression, etc.). Thinking “ok, there’s an empathetic bridge here; these people are fucked up but they’re just folks like me and maybe other people can also relate to them as they were in their different context?”
I liked Silence because it’s a genuine devotional work but doesn’t shy away from the vanity of spider-man’s yearning for martyrdom.
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I learned how to use a computer because my mom got an illegal DOS-based autodialer from a woman she knew at church who was in a multilevel marketing scheme and my mom couldn’t remember how to do what she’d been told to do with it
so I think I’m kind of stuck with postmodernism here
I started reading Peace by Gene Wolfe and I am struggling a bit with the odd diction and the way things jump around so far but it seems rather interesting so far.
been feeling utterly atomised, more than usual, with winter coming on, so returned to ferrante’s neapolitan books. stormed through 2 and onto 3
theyre v good
master of the mysteries: the life of manly palmer hall
it’s a little sensationalist but it’s the only book i could
find on the subject that didn’t seem shady
i honestly am pushing through it so i can finally get to
the book of martyrdom and artifice
hopefully i’ll actually finish both
I mean generic Gene Wolfe advice, just be ready to read it twice.
I just started on Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer and it’s the most Tulpa thing I’ve ever read.
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yeah I quit after 50 pages, proving that torment marinara does have value if you can’t stand the source material