Ori hammer and tongs

Ori Kowarsky · 20 Nov 1999, 13:55 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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: "Ori Kowarsky" <orik at sprint.ca>
Subject: Re: (urth) Ori hammer and tongs
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1999 13:55:10
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0486 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0486.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Nicholas Gevers:

>I agree with Ori in some ways, in particular re the
>inexcusability of many of the Increate's actions, such
>as the immolation of the Commonwealth's people that
>Ushas may arise. But Ori, aren't you approaching the
>matter of whether the Hierogrammates serve the
>Increate or themselves rather unsubtly, with a
>curiously RELIGIOUS hammer-and-tongs zeal? Surely a
>striking attribute of Catholicism, in contrast, is its
>theological subtlety, its emphasis on the mediation of
>all Divine influences through sacraments, priests,
>etc.; so why not aliens? Wolfe is hardly going to show
>us the Increate giving Tzadkiel his instructions for
>the day; such a process is necessarily presented by
>remote implication only.

Hmmm ... well, you may have a point.  I'm not a Catholic, and so I've never
had to reconcile myself to the worldly actions of an institution which I
believe to be holy.  As I wrote in a previous post, perhaps that is the
"bridge" which some readers bring with them to the book and some others
don't.  As a result, then, if you do not believe that crimes on the material
plane are exculpabale or even laudatory on the metaphysical plane, then
TBOTNS serves equally well as a critique of such an institution as it does a
defense for those who do.

Ori

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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