Virtuous Reality
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Aeryn (as a blonde lisping southern belle princess inside a virtual reality game): Why do you have to be such a monster?
Crais (as the Ogre): At least I don’t spend my days redecorating. What is it with women and change? Nothing is ever good enough! … (John and Chiana run out of the room) Aeryn: Every time we meet someone nice, you scare them away! -John Quixote, Farscape Season 4 Episode 7 As I mentioned before, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing any kind of research, it’s that nothing fits into a neat definition: not an ancient mythology or the events of history or the progression of a society or the development of a nation-state. If one person proposes a theory of how something happened, at least three other people will have evidence of how it could not have happened in exactly that way. This is especially true when the thing I’m looking to define happened over many years and involved the interactions of many people -- and even more so when the subject is emotionally-charged. Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God is a good example of this. The author draws on history, anthropology, psychology, sociology -- and probably other -ologies that I don’t even recognize -- in his attempt to flesh out a timeline of how the concept of a supreme being evolved in the Abrahamic religions. One of my favorite lines from his book is something that he quoted: About a century ago, the psychologist William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” That quote seems to encapsulate the basic reasons underlying everything that has ever come about in mythologies and religions. For me, it explains why the ancient myth-makers began their stories in the first place. From that beginning, the author journeys through the history and politics of the various times, and explores the changing and often contradictory nature what people believed through the centuries. One of the most interesting parts is the discussion of the belief in only one god, which is shown in opposition to many ancient cultural and political environments of tolerance of different mythologies and many gods. And I think fans of the ancient pantheons (or maybe even fans of Neil Gaiman) might enjoy the mentions of old friends like Enlil and Inanna. Aeryn: So, can I help you find someplace to sheathe that sword?
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