An Old mystery ...

Jordon Flato · 04 Dec 2008, 20:37 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jordonflato at gmail.com (Jordon Flato)
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 12:37:20 -0800
Subject: (urth) An Old mystery ...
In-Reply-To: <93d4039f0812041221i77986fc9rb1d82af2688bccac at mail.gmail.com>
References: <W1937513687241361228419557@webmail7>
	<93d4039f0812041147r47b9674ek128ad05d9a15c16e at mail.gmail.com>
	<273409710812041155t7d29069apf12a1b7ba3a5f759 at mail.gmail.com>
	<93d4039f0812041159t6fefd7b7i12e53c41bcc45047 at mail.gmail.com>
	<273409710812041211h3f2df715ia9ce434bcb66f15a at mail.gmail.com>
	<93d4039f0812041221i77986fc9rb1d82af2688bccac at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <273409710812041237wf114a59oe60b35b2e6de8dd at mail.gmail.com>

And so I get frustrated when, on this list, many who are not
> Christians themselves sort of imply that this monstrous act in the
> book is something that I should just be gung-ho about because, well,
> the Christian God is pretty much a monster Himself.  I don't buy that,
> and I don't think Wolfe does, and I think it misses the mark in
> understanding the New Sun.
>
> Anyway, that's my take.  I've said it.
>
>
I can totally understand that.  I wouldn't say the Christian God is a
Monster at all.  In fact, I think that, for myself (admittedly a
non-Christian, but not an Athiest or even Agnostic really) part of my
understanding of the Absolute (for want of a better word) is an
understanding of the 'impersonal' nature of destruction.  That while the
Christian God, in his old testament form, destorys the world so Noah can
survive and give rise to a better humanity, or destorys Sodom because of
it's wickedness, or encourage the Jews to smash the infants of their enemies
upon th rocks...these things to not indicate Evil.  The situation is bigger
than that.  And the sorts of arguments where people try to 'disprove' or
'invalidate' God in these terms are juvinille and unsublte.  (And here, I'm
not attributing these arguments to you...the opposite actually).

So, for me, the destruction of Urth to create Ushas is not a monstrous act.
If there is no afterlife in New Sun, if the Increate isn't real (no matter
how conscious his servants are of his wishes), then the destruction of Ushas
is a brutal and monstrous one.  If the Increate is real, and there is some
sort of Life of the Soul in the books (of which textual evidence you've
asked for I would posit all of the discussion of the survival of Severian's
'personality' through so many types of death, and the corridors of time
themsevles) then this act, the destruction of Urth, the 'hitting of the
reset button' is no longer monstrous, but another instance of the Increate
hitting the reset button like he did with Noah, or Sodom, or countless other
examples.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081204/1ca15dcb/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net