Appearances of Inire

António Pedro Marques · 01 Jul 2010, 23:53 · from 2010-July.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: entonio at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ant=F3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:53:34 +0100
Subject: (urth) Appearances of Inire
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTilyImVO8SgGf1P48sNAzfNbWBHL82lZhHvPnswZ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W896FBC5C32F4238BC96E9CFCB0 at phx.gbl>	<4C2C0586.7090503 at verizon.net>	<487d2869bcbbd06452a6633012d86d83.squirrel at brunians.org>	<4C2C06E3.4030806 at verizon.net>	<1362277e8ba9279d24e4bc37d6ab862a.squirrel at brunians.org>	<4C2C8387.5010304 at verizon.net>	<AANLkTimVPuEiDXtuPejpVrcqVQUxust0ZazZ-9KU8-r6 at mail.gmail.com>	<4C2CB0C2.3010607 at gmail.com>	<AANLkTikeKBWxPqCxHMGwpRuIib7Itw_3-6rg-3JAHcrv at mail.gmail.com>	<4C2CB798.3080009 at gmail.com>	<51e717b6635d7c586255898bf2ba5d61.squirrel at brunians.org>	<AANLkTilZ8KjBX-M-TGqgGID15p4KXRCy80w0gedUOEv0 at mail.gmail.com>	<4C2CCC61.8030304 at gmail.com>	<AANLkTikVOQBjEyu5SKm54p2kWCqy9_h8F2ZDuCyTh8PJ at mail.gmail.com>	<4C2CD8E7.4010407 at gmail.com>	<AANLkTikpr2XRUer1EmiE_OxLWQTJpeVU3d-4izb8qg5f at mail.gmail.com>	<4C2CE80E.4030909 at gmail.com>	<AANLkTil-qBt6xeKXyY9Av26BuhE8MbgfRuKpyl7aF-4f at mail.gmail.com>	<4C2D1C23.6060102 at gmail.com>
	<4C2D1F62.2090205 at gmail.com>
	<AANLkTilyImVO8SgGf1P48sNAzfNbWBHL82lZhHvPnswZ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C2D2A7E.4010607 at gmail.com>

John Watkins wrote:
> I"m confused by this too.

I'm confused as to why you don't write your remarks below the part of the 
message whcih they address.

> Certainly Pas is evil. Certainly many of his servants (Silk) are good.

But I didn't say evil masters can't have good servants. I said that in the 
books, if Tzadkiel were evil, you'd have an evil master whose servants would 
be better than his opponents - i.e., those who oppose the evil master are of 
a quite lesser moral standing than those who serve him - and would actually 
consider the master to be good. I don't recall Silk ever considering Pas 
good, nor actually any of the Whorl gods. In fact, from what I recall, the 
people in the Whorl are fed up with their gods.

> And of those servants who aren't very good, they tend to be improved
> by greater service (Incus). Wolfe seems to believe and in fact very
> nearly states in canon that good service to even a false god is
> sanctifying.

Quite sure, inasmuch as the false (here the issue is 'evil', not 'false') or 
evil god is also ultimately bound to God's plan for the world. It's not 
because of Pas's evilness that Auk or Incus improve (I'm not even certain 
their Incus shows much of an improvement, but that's another matter).

What salvific elements are there in the Whorl's religion are due either to 
the community's appropriation and improvement by serious reshaping 
(motivated by individual episodes of englightenment or not) of the basics 
they were primed with, or whatever of the originals shows through the 
transvestite. It's not from Scylla's demand of 50 children that the good 
people of the Whorl got their morals.

> On 7/1/10, Ant?nio Pedro Marques<entonio at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I mean, it's not the parallel between BNS and gnostic christianity that
>> fails, it's the parallel to a BNS in which an evil Tazdkiel had wide moral
>> control over mankind, such that those who opposed him were of dubious moral
>> stature, that does. For such is the option offered by 2 - it hypothesizes
>> that Tzadkiel is evil (let's not go to Machen's The White People's
>> prologue), but it doesn't remove the fact that those who serve and revere
>> him tend to be good, whereas those who oppose him tend a bit to the thug
>> side - at least if I remember the text (put aside the ones who were merely
>> fighting for their lives).

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