{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/355",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 355,
    "subject": "\"False\" Gods",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1997-06-18T08:40:55+00:00",
    "last": "1997-06-18T08:40:55+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0006-0370@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Straight",
        "address": "straight at email.unc.edu"
      },
      "date": "1997-06-18T08:40:55+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) \"False\" Gods",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "On Tue, 17 Jun 1997, Kevin McGuire wrote:\nSilk's paganism (though certainly more technological than Latro's)\nstrikes me as similar in some ways to the Soldier books, in that\nGene seems to be making Silk at the start of the Long Sun a \"virtuous\npagan.\"  Which is to say a good person who died before Christianity,\nand thus without the salvation of the Church - these were the folks\nthat Dante consigned to the first (and not altogether unpleasant)\ncircle of Hell.  Wolfe believes that those who came before us were\nintelligent people whose ideas about their world were entirely\nreasonable given their circumstances, and in the Whorl, what could\nbe more reasonable than believing in gods who actually appear.  Silk\nis the transition state from Latro's vivid pagan world-view to\nSeverian's christian one. "
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Both Latro's and Silk's pagan gods are false not because they don't exist\nor because they aren't very powerful, but because they aren't good.\n\n-Rostrum"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}