The Wizard

António Pedro Marques · 12 Mar 2012, 10:51 · 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: Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:51:47 +0000
Subject: (urth) The Wizard
In-Reply-To: <1331520091.41246.YahooMailClassic at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <1331520091.41246.YahooMailClassic at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4F5DD543.8040505 at gmail.com>

Marc Aramini wrote (12-03-2012 02:41):
>
>
> --- On *Sun, 3/11/12, Ant?nio Pedro Marques /<entonio at gmail.com>/* wrote:
>
>
>     From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
>     Subject: Re: (urth) The Wizard
>     To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
>     Date: Sunday, March 11, 2012, 7:39
>
>     As I've stated boringly to tears, it's the knowledge that Wolfe is a
>     catholic that makes me almost certain that either Briah's Jesus wasn't
>     the Son of God or Briah's Humanity is fundamentally worse than us. I
>     can't envision a world that has already been visited by Christ
>     degenerating into Urth. Iow, it's the knowledge that Wolfe is a catholic
>     that makes me believe the Christian trappings of Briah are more form
>     than substance.
>
> I don't want to go around and around, but, unlike many mystical religious
> writers, Wolfe is a keen observer of the world. He has lived through a war
> personally, has seen men killed, has passed through DETROIT and Chicago. He
> knows that there is hell on earth and on urth, in this day and age, and
> still believes in Christ.
> There are some things going on in the inner city that make Urth seem not
> that bad at all. How could Christ be Christ with all the bad things that
> happen today? this is why i don't find the argument convincing - terrible
> things happen to good people and vice versa in reality, but that doesn't
> deter Wolfe from his beliefs. there is no reason to posit everything is the
> same except Christ in Urth when the real world is so ugly at times, too.

It's not a matter of evil existing or not. Evil has even been done in 
Christ's name, and arguably continues to be. It's a matter of there 
appearing to be no generally available path for salvation on Urth. I don't 
mean 'no christian path' - I mean I don't see evidence for achievement on 
Urth being more than urthly pursuits, one or two characters excepted. And 
unlike our DPRK or similar places, Urth has *devolved* into what it is. But 
I'm not saying it must have been that way - no Christ -, I'm saying it's 
either that or a failed Humanity. Perhaps my reading is coloured too by the 
interview one of you just quoted - from the onset I've looked at Urth as 
what Earth 'may become' if we are not up to the challenge of making it 
better. In that perspective, it doesn't matter much whether Urth is Earth or 
not - it's a possible future, at least as far as our abilities are concerned.

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