The Wizard

António Pedro Marques · 08 Mar 2012, 15:17 · from 2012-March.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 (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:17:17 +0000
Subject: (urth) The Wizard
In-Reply-To: <A6BB736DBCF647E3BB9DE62D15648B56@Rover>
References: <SNT123-W3758C2B58C68F0E5B2AF92CF570 at phx.gbl>
	<A6BB736DBCF647E3BB9DE62D15648B56@Rover>
Message-ID: <4F58CD7D.8090707 at gmail.com>

Gerry Quinn wrote (08-03-2012 14:42):
> *From:* Lee Berman:
>> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>>> *From:* Lee Berman:
>>>> As Dionysus was precursor to Christ on earth, so I think The
>>>> Outsider and Silk are the precursors to Blue/Urth's version of
>>>> Christianity. We see the signs that He is coming but in the
>>>> narrative we are given, He has not yet arrived.
>>>
>>> Gerry Quinn: Only if we ignore the clear references to Him, e.g.
>>> Palm Sunday. Why would Wolfe have put that in, if he wanted us to
>>> think that Christ had not come? Easier to leave it out altogether,
>>> surely?
>>
>> Well, I answered that before, but apparently not suffiently. I take
>> this as Wolfe's way of saying that a Jesus-like figure appeared on
>> Urth but it wasn't Christ. The concept of Christ does not reside in
>> such material items as a cross or palm fronds or even in the flesh and
>> blood body of a guy named Jesus. This makes some sense if Wolfe
>> conceives of Christianity to be a principle which is applicable across
>> the unviverse(s), not just a utility reserved for the human race on
>> planet earth.
>
> The big problem I see with this interpretation is not the interpretation
>  itself but that Wolfe mentions Jesus and yet seems to give no indication
>  at all that this is the interpretation he is promoting. Suppose you were
>  writing an alternate history where Hitler became a monk and WWII never
> occurred. Would you gratuitously insert a clear reference (and old piece
>  of newsreel, say) to Hitler orating at a Nuremberg Rally, while never
> ever making any reference to Hitler taking vows? To me that seems
> analogous to what you are proposing as a ?secret history? behind the
> Solar Cycle.

I don't know that I like to see *this particular* comparison between Jesus
and H?ttler. For some reason I can't explain, I find that more offensive
than, say, comparing religion to belief in the tooth fairy.

But aside from that, I think Lee has a point. Taking 'our' Jesus for granted
just because there seems to have been *a* Jesus on Urth is legitimate but
not unquestionable. I find it unchristian to think the 'real' Church could
have failed (but of course that's a catholic view). Rather, either the Jesus
was the same but Humanity was fundamentally worse, or Humanity was more or
less the same but the Jesus wasn't really Jesus.

Think of it - if God has already come to this world and it still ended up 
the way Urth did, then what hope is there of it ever becoming right, Ushas 
or no Ushas?

I was so glad I was sitting this discussion out.

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