We are a dying breed.
1 Like
I was an Of Mice and Men student.
3 Likes
I have no idea what I studied. That looks really bad on me and you know what? I donât even care.
Is it the book where 2 guys work at a ranch in America and one of them is a bit slow or something? Or is that Grapes of Wrath?
Neither were part of my school curriculum but Iâve read one or both some 7-10 years ago out of my own volition.
Yeah thatâs Of Mice and Men
Iâve no idea what that is but it sounds epic.
I think it was a tie in with Wrath of the Lich King that introduced the Nightborne and their arcwine.
1 Like
The name is a lot more Morbinâ than the content. Since Akamito confirmed that the other one was Of Mice and Men, Grapes is about American farmers dealing with drought, bad crops and the fast approaching industrialization threatening to put them out of business. You know, the usual, corpo comes and wants to take land, a machine gathers crops much more efficiently than manâs hands, etc. Thatâs what I remember, unless I made something up.
1 Like
Itâs true that there are puzzling passages in the Old Testament which the vast majority of scholars have taken as holdovers from a time when the religion of the Israelites was the polytheistic Canaanite religion. But there are two points to be made here:
(1) The Genesis 1 creation account, with its use of the plural form Elohim to refer to the one God, is emphatically not a holdover from those times. Since the 1800s on, most biblical scholars have assumed that the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament) is a composite formed of texts from many different times and places. Genesis 1 is usually assigned to the âPriestly textâ: a composition by the Jewish priesthood in roughly the 5th century BC, with a âtheologicalâ or âcosmologicalâ take on the history of the world which emphasises the sovereign action of God. By that point in time, the Jews were strict monotheists, and they would have employed any plural language for God in service to their belief in the one God.
(2) You have to look very far back to find any real evidence of polytheistic motifs: if theyâre really polytheistic in origin, Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32 would have to be among the oldest texts in the Bible, since the earliest consistent tranche of material in the OT (âYahwistâ source, ~8th-7th century BC) shows a clearly monotheistic belief in a single creator God.
When you say that those very early texts represent the true Israelite religion and everything that came after is a mistranslation, you fix that religion at one point in time, probably well in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC; you deny the possibility of any development in religious consciousness; and you deny the Jews who made the brave leap from polytheism to monotheism their historical agency. Leaving behind the pantheon and the materialist account of creation which left traces in the Psalms and the Prophets is not the kind of thing which happens overnight, unnoticed, because of a mistranslation.
Form critics tend to see verses like Deut. 26:5 as among the oldest texts in the Bible: in other words, the Israelitesâ covenantal relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is one of the oldest elements of their religious consciousness (von Rad, 1966, p. 3-4 ff.). In that sense, the Israelites were never truly polytheist, since their religious experience was always refracted through the lens of devotion to one God. It also isnât hard to see how, consciously, generations of Israelites might have viewed a more radical monotheism as more in line with their covenantal commitment to, and religious experience of, their one God - leading to the very definitely monotheist creation accounts in Gen. 1 and 2. Even Julius Wellhausen had recognised this by 1887.
It isnât destructive to the religious reality of Jewish monotheism to say it legitimately developed over time. Nor is it destructive to the religious reality of people of Abrahamic faiths today (see for example Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, ch. II, for an account which integrates this development into Catholic belief).
I know you said you were ânot gonna debate todayâ, but I thought your lazy characterisation of religious history, showing no respect for the mentalities of historical subjects, deserved a response.
4 Likes
Thereâs too much toe jam in Arcwine.
thatâs what gives it itâs distinctive flavour
Itâs supposed to be served with cheese, not with cheese in it.
This is how you cut out the middle man and just get straight to business.
Only if the cost is baked into the base price, which it isnât. Theyâre losing money and itâs still gross.
We bullying swedes now? Nice. They smell anyways
Iâd love to come back and play the game again, but two things prevent me: how intensive my studies are, and how much Blizzard has ruined the setting.
I seriously canât see the magic in a setting where the souls of dead characters go to be re-embodied in a realm where, if they âdieâ there, theyâre dead for good. The setting is just totally deprived of a moral core in this and other respects - I wrote up my feelings about this in No Warcraft without Christianity - #74 by Wrall-argent-dawn. And the recent lore which suggests that Elune is a construct on par with the Shadowlands âgodsâ almost completely strips her of mystery. Mystery is at the heart of religion, so I donât see how a properly âreligiousâ roleplay - which was always my interest, even back when I was an atheist and even as I mostly play mages - is possible anymore.
The Classic setting is untouched, but Classic servers were sadly dead on arrival for RP. I donât see a future for roleplay in the Warcraft universe as I remember it.
3 Likes
As practiced, abrahamic monotheism definitely developed over time as an outgrowth of polytheistic religious traditions in the levant and fertile crescent. The gradual shedding of henotheism in favour of staunch monotheism as a unifying force consolidated the power of local rulers over more decentralized clan societies and neighbouring polytheists and is a pattern throughout history.
I just donât think that legitimizing much later dogma with post-hoc theology is constructive but the real problem lies in modern monotheists considering historical reality an affront to their religious sensibilities.
I poke my head in here after getting tired of the PCU argument and find discussion about the Old Testament and religion. What on earth happened here?
4 Likes
Weâre talking destiny get in
Hottake: The golden calf in Exodus was direct worship of Baâal, inspired by the egyptian deity Apis and the alchemic representation of the sun in Gold
Iâm more of the mind that itâs allegory to the peopleâs constant straying from the true faith and the need for religious authorities to keep society stable.
Which is false, but consistent.
1 Like