In a message dated 3/21/04 8:51:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, dfsolley@comcast.net writes: >>Pantheism is a worship of all gods >> >>Incorrect. > >I'm picking nits now but, for the record: > >Pantheism: 2. the worship of all gods. >Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1983 True enough. I've never seen it used properly with that definition though. [Corrected:] >This is significant only in that, because of this, pantheism IS NOT the >opposite of Monotheism. If a culture believes either (a) all gods are an >aspect of One God (such as the Eerith), or (b) there is only one god >(nuances of omnipresence), then they are both mono- and pantheistic. Websters: pantheism 1. The doctrine or belief that God is not a personality, but that all laws, forces, manifestations, etc. of the self-existing universe are God; the belief that God is everything and everything is God. monotheism 1. The doctrine of or belief in the existence of only one god. According to Webster's your (a) is polytheism, you (b) is monotheism. >Polytheism, by its very definition (Webster again), is the opposite of >Monotheism. With all due respect to Webster's, antonyms are one of those areas where they frequently fail. ----- However, everything above is really irrelevant and I won't discuss it further. I'm not talking about definitions, I'm talking about attitudes and assumptions. The FACT is that the situation on Celandra is different from anything in history or myth. That means the same terms _cannot_ hold the same meanings. Better to coin new terms than use terms which do not apply. As an analogy, consider a ringworld (ala Niven). It is a physical impossibility for such a ringworld to hold onto an atmosphere. Why? Because a ringworld doesn't have gravity, it has spin, and spin doesn't "grip." This fact is easily overlooked as long as you refer to the ringworld as having "gravity" or "pull." Because the situation is completely different you need to avoid using terms which lead to improper assumptions. That is _exactly_ what this group is group is doing when using the all the terms in this discussion. The thecology (divine ecology) of Celandra differs from our world's, and, like a ringworld's "gravity" and a world's _gravity_, the same term does not mean the same thing. >As another alternative, we can not use any of the confusing words and >take an extra sentence to be very specific about what we mean. Frazer >used specific phrases in his work; things like: known named deities, >known implied deities, theoretical pantheon, applied pantheon, etc. >Would it be that hard >to do something similar? Unfortunately this doesn't resolve the issue of people using the terms inappropriately, which is what I'm trying to address. [snip] >I just can't shake the feeling that we are needlessly complicating the >discussion (and I know I'm one of the worst for doing it). The discussion is being complicated because people are bringing up issues which have nothing to do with the point I'm looking at. >What are we actually after at the end of the day? A pattern of religious belief which makes sense within the existing structure of Celandra. This may be part of the problem. I don't really _care_ what the beliefs in Mir, or any other individual area are. Exquaestio has to deal with religion over an extremely large area and so I need to understand religion over a very large area. As it currently exists the pattern makes no sense. >Using a narrowed definition of Polytheism, we still actually only end >up with a list of gods for the website (per society). If that's all we >need, I don't care if we call it pantheon, polytheon, or Doug--it's >just a list. If we need something other than that, then the definitions >don't help us anyway. _Existing_ definitions won't help us, which is why I suggested coining new terms to get around the assumptions inherent in the existing terms. >I don't have a good answer but I can't shake the feeling that we've >overanalyzed the issue into a bigger matter than it needs to be. I disagree. We haven't "overanalyzed the issue" because no one besides me has even touched "the issue" in the first place. Jefferson http://www.picotech.net/~jeff_wilson63/rpg/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.
