ParaTulip

Same way William Blake created his mythology: Humans just sometimes hallucinate wild stuff.

It's the same text. I just had a copy with commentary from Jewish scholars included. I sincerely doubt this. I think you should look into more modernist, non-literal, readings of scripture so you don't have to ignore so much of the observable world in favor of blindly accepting narratives. I have no desire to engage in a conversation where the notions of science and faith are being twisted this severely. I do not have the care to go through the process of gathering resources to try to teach you why an eclipse can't last three days.

Yeah, so I actually have read most of that narrative recently, but it was a Jewish version with commentary. That's how I know that the current scholarship indicates that the first book of the Torah is pretty clearly a later addition made to act as a kind of rebuttal to the Babylonian account of the making of the world. That's why God is acting as a supreme crafter, because he is standing in for Enki, and why the waters of the deep seem to pre-exist him, since they are standing in for Tiamat. There's even a note of how the Hebrew word for "the deep" has it's etymology rooted in the name of Tiamat. Also, do you think a global flood literally happened? When do you think this was?

It would be pretty in line with Lift's whole deal to invent canned soda. First, it's really quick calories to gulp down a bunch of sugar water. Second, considering the weirdness which is aluminum and investiture movement, she might be able to cram towerlight into the can while at Urithuru and then carry it around. Also, I can't really figure what kinds of soda most characters would be up for, but I feel like Jasnah would be the sort to just drink club soda without the sweetener.

Huh, I wonder if Sazed trying to manage Harmony as something other than "Managed Decline" is why the durability of Scandrian souls went down? The ars arcanum of Lost Metal mentions that Hemalurgy basically can't make things like Marsh anymore because souls just can't stand that kind of violence, and I wonder if that is the compromise of Sazed going "Well, Free Will is non-negotiable, so I guess I will skimp on the Preservation juice that makes up Scandrian souls on other fronts." I guess any Lerasium he re-absorbs is being spent on minting souls.

Hiding the fact Lerasium can be be manufactured from Kelsier seems like part of Sazed just not trusting Kel that much. Being able to mass produce full Mistborn and engage in Lerasium Hemalurgy would be huge assets for Kelsier and his allies, probably to the point it would throw off whatever aspirations Sazed has for the development of Scadrian civilization. Also, it's probably not fun for Sazed to have his "body" exploded?

Okay, so I can't speak for everyone, but the big-bang theory isn't really an explanation for how the universe was made as it is the implication of a few observations. First, have you ever heard an ambulance drive by you? You might have noticed that the sound seems to get higher pitched as it is approaching and then gets lower in pitch as it goes away. This is a property of waves traveling relative to their observe that occurs in both sound and light. In light, we call the shifting towards a higher "pitch" blueshifting and towards a lower "pitch" redshifting. Second, there is a general trend among galaxies in space that, the further away that galaxy is, the more intensely redshifted the light from it is. Put these together, and we are effectively observing a universe where it seems like distant objects are traveling away from each other due to some kind of cosmological constant of spatial expansion. Since this expansion makes objects more distant as time move forward, then there is a clear implication that at some point in the past all of these things would have been closer together. This all is relatively recent in its discovery because we lacked the ability to observe distant galaxies or non-visible light. You can suppose God made the universe and set this up to happen like this, but that is the matter of faith. Do you know if I am typing on a phone, one a keyboard, or if I am dictating into a text to speech program right now? Does your conclusions that I must be somehow inputting data into a computer to send this message require faith? Does it require faith to think I must have woken up at some point in time prior to sending this message, even though you do not know when or where I did this? There are two possibilities: Either life has always existed, or it began to exist. I think most atheists tend to think it began to exist, and I might point out things like radioactive minerals to be a kind of evidence that supports that conclusion. But I think a lot of people would be indifferent, although maybe a bit annoyed over having believed something that later was demonstrated to not be the case, if an argument based on physical evidence could be made to demonstrated that life began at the very start of the universe. Let me explain to you the other way to see this all: A lot of Jewish and Roman Catholic believers in God have no issue with anything science says. They accept the whole of evolution, a cosmology where time and space began as the big bang theory describes, and they simply say "Ah, so this is how God made the world". They have simply accepted that their scriptures are not the literal history of the world. They accept that the stories contain truths that are of extreme importance, but also that various elements of these stories are simply not factual. It is even common for Muslims to believe that the prophet Mohammad incorporated local mythology into the Quran in order to ensure it would be accepted by the people around him, not because Djinn are real. Their faith is in God, even as they know the scientific account of the world to be factually accurate.

I second what @WordOfBrandonhere has said. I feel like being able to work Division on things like Identity and Connection would produce a lot more interesting results than just "cut up the molecules in the air or an object". I especially feel like Division applied to Fortune, someone's possible forms of being, would allow for some amazing/horrible outcomes.

Yeah, that makes sense in Japanese colorism. In Japan, tanner skin typically means masculinity while pale skin is a feminine trait. There are going to be exceptions, of course, but most straight relationship pairs in anime will have the boy be darker skinned than the girl, even if they are from the same town. Inuyasha is this really rough and manly kind of boy, so it complies with norms that he would be drawn with tanner skin.

It doesn't take conviction to be an atheist. Newborn infants lack a belief in any god, simply because they haven't encountered the idea. You are thinking of apostates, who are people who have been inducted into a religion and left it. As atheism is more and more common thene days, plenty of people don't encounter belief in anything supernatural as something to see as real far long spans of their lives, only seeing such things in fictional media or as quirks of history like a belief in malicious witches who ally with the devil. There's no more conviction there than your own understanding that Kaladin Stormblessed isn't a real person. There's many kinds of atheist, something I pointed out to you in an earlier reply. There are religions that don't center a gad in their beliefs, these are different from what most people mean by atheist.

Agnosticism is a stance one the knowledge of the existence of God/god. You can be an agnostic theist, supposing that the existence of gods/God cannot be known as one knows facts such as "does the sun exist" while still believing in gods/God. Soren Kirkegaard probably could be described this way, since his whole thing is that believing in God was to be done wholly without evidence and even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

I assume you mean the re-issue of it that went out. The theater I usually go to for stuff wasn't carrying it, but I actually saw it twice when it first was in theaters. I guess I am about the same age as @Use the Falchionhere, since I think I was in middle school at the time. It was actually the first movie I ever saw twice in the theater. I remember really liking how the Clone Wars cartoon (the Genndy Tartakovsky directed one) lead into the first scene of it perfectly. The action scenes in that movie still hold up pretty well, having done a watch of the whole franchise with some friends a bit ago. It's honestly the best movie of the whole prequel trilogy for me. I especially love how the hellish lighting of the final action scene on Mustafar leading into the black and grey of the first scene with Darth Vader in the suit. George Lucas is a kinda crap director of actors, but he knows how to compose images.

It simply happened on its own. You might ask where God came from, and you will eventually need to give the same answer of "it simply is". You might suppose God is beyond time, but then I may reply that the begining of the world is a thing beyond time. What you are echoing is Aristotle's notion of the unmoved mover. My response to this idea is not to say I know for sure such a thing is not, but to echo a version what the Buddhists say: It would only be a delusion of such a mover that their motion is something of supreme importance. Atheism is an attitude, not a religion. It doesn't describe particular cares (consider reading Heiddegar's "Being and Time" for thoughts on the notion of cares, it is similar to your wroship notion). There are humanist atheists, atheists who care for nature more broadly, and the buddhism is out there supposing all kinds of fantastic devas and asura but it's true care is for the process of karma and attaining Nirvana and as such none of them are it's central care. I personally give my care to beauty in it's twin forms of the sublime of nature and the excellence of art or craft. These aren't a god to me because they are without a will of their own. To me, all gods are ugly creations, hideous in how they blind people to their own creative potentials.

Oh, this becomes a lot point in the last arc of Orb: On the Movements of The Earth. I read the manga for that, huge recommendation to pick it up. I have heard the anime is good too. Imagine something like Fullmetal Alchemist with it's big dramatic search for the truth of the world, but the characters are even more intense yet believable and it's 17th century Poland instead of early 20th century Germany.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off (the) shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." - Blade Runner the character Roy Batty as played by Rutger Hauer (clip)

This kind of "Non-overlapping magisteria" notion is the death of God repackaged so as to cling to God as the source of answers to ought problems while surrendering the power to answer any problem of is. Science most likely can answer questions of why "life" (footnote 1) came to be, research into the topic of abiogenesis is just not given the kind of major project funding that things like atomic physics, medical science, and computer science have. Charles Darwin and Nicolaus Copernicus are both so profoundly remembered because they displaced humans, the beings which engage in religion, from the center of the order of the universe. The sensation that the world was made for humans, with our species (footnote 2) being the final creation of God or at least the gods' chosen servants, but Darwin showed a path by which our form of life would emerge via a gradual process instead of a singular moment of creation and Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center/bottom/fixed location in the cosmos that would indicate it was specially made. There is also the problem brought up in Liu Cixin's Three Body trilogy: Even if it were that there was intelligence that gave rise to the conditions of the world that we know, there is no reason to believe that intelligence meant those outcomes for us or that it is at all benevolent towards us. Character's in that book bring up two examples of this, called the Farmer and the Shooter. The Farmer story imagines the scholars of a population of chickens who live in a barn. One chicken scholar notices that food comes down the pipe in the ceiling and realizes it does so on regular intervals. This scholar thinks they have discovered a law of the universe that relates food and time. They announce this to their peers and the chicken scientist community prepares to verify the theory of food-time by measuring the interval between food arriving. But then the farmer takes the chickens to slaughter, because the cause of the food was not time itself but a will to consume the chickens. The shooter story is instead about termites, who are turning an abandoned barn into a burrow. Their entire world is this barn, and they, like the chickens, know no other world but it. One termite scholar notices that there are hole in the wall of the barn that are spaced 20 centimeters apart. Sure enough, this pattern continues all the way around the barn, extending as far as can be observed. The termites think they have found a law of nature, but they have simply found the outcome of the farmer who once owned the barn deciding to show off his rifle shooting to his friends once by shooting his barn repeatedly. (foot note 3) Notice that neither of these "whys" are the kinds of why that religion produces. No one supposes that their god is simply trying to use them as food, even the Babylonians who thought Enki, also known as Ea, made humans for their ability to labor. Even the Deists thought that God acted with purpose that related to the result of his actions being meaningful even if he no longer was among us. Now to turn this around. There are three German language writers who famously did yet more terrible wounds to God: Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Each came up with reasons why humans make God: Marx saw God as a way for the oppressed class of society to be assured that there would be a world where they would be fully rewarded for their service to a superior and this hope would ease the pain of their life. Freud sees God as a for the ego to console itself when confronted with the prospect that it will cease to be. Nietzsche sees God as a means by which humans abdicated the terrible work of having to use their own strength to assert the truth of their values, relying on the strength of a myth to do so. Rather than God explaining why things are, the question is turned around to ask why God is, and nothing mystical is needed. (footnote 4) Well, this sure got long. I could get into my sense of how Kant effectively answered the question of the Euthyphro dialog by making a case that universal morality follows the law of non-contradiction, but I can't even remember what wikipedia articles to point to in order to try to illuminate where I got those ideas from. 1. "Life" as a category is ideological. I once took a biology class which gave a definition of life with 5 factors, and I immediately noticed that stars satisfied them if understood in a certain way. That we do not see stars or rivers or many other things as alive is a contour of the notion of life, and thus why those things are or are not alive can be answered with "because we think it is so". 2. "species" is like life in that it is ideological. The use of the notion of interbreeding that produces young who can in turn breed on fails to produce clear lines when so-called ring species are considered. 3. It might have been ants in the book and they might have been walking along the surface of the barn. Not sure it matters. 4. This has been a variation on ideas found in a lecture by Rick Roderick.

I feel like there is a lot of epistemology and ontology that is weird about this notion. It feels Zahel has some kind of attachment to a Tolkien esque "Men's mortality is a blessing of a higher God that cannot be undone" but why he feels that way isn't being shown. There is a huge gap in the metaphysics of this situation that needs to be resolved: What is a soul? Often, the soul is simply the thing which is aware of the thoughts a person experiences as their own, when I think "an apple" the thing witnessing the thought of "an apple" could be called my soul, but then how is this different from the mind? In fact, the entire notion of an ontology where the mind is not the soul has always felt faulty to me, and I thus feel the soul is a false category; it is a thing like a four sided triangle or the corners of a circle. We can name them, but they can't exist. Suppose it is the reverse. Suppose the thing which is in the Beyond is the copy of the form of a collection of thoughts and potentials that whatever exists there copies to itself before the original can disperse as the material of the body will disperse after death. Then Kelsier as he exists in the Cosmere is the original version of himself which never had the repeating pattern that defines Kelsier-ness stop enough that the Beyond's process of making a copy would take it's own version of him. The sensation of "going into the Beyond" may simply be something injected into the mind as it is copied for the sake of making the copies feel more continuous and thus less prone to existential crisis.

What other TTRPG would you compare it to? Are there wound penalties, shock, or critical injury tables? I tend to like games having one of those, since they make damage have interesting consequences instead of just grinding down HP.

The thing to look into is the Tang Dynasty era of China. Maomao's medical knowledge is actually like that of someone from a later era, but the whole settup of the palace is evoking the Daming palace of the Tang. I recall this documentary on the history of the Tang and the Daming palace being interesting.

Building off some ideas I had here and thinking of the scene where Taravangian suffers the minor loss of not being able to capture the real Dalinar as his commander, I am wondering if we might see him try to craft an afterlife that all of his subjects will be let into as a way to circulate souls. So far, I think we have only seen the Beyond and Braize as potential destinations for souls after death, the former being seemingly the natural order of things and Braize being a kind of hellworld for the Heralds where the Fused play the role of demons. I assume he is going to need to create some kind of hell for the simple reason that he must carry out the Intent to bring down Retribution upon those he rules, but at the same time it is not as if he cannot dispense blessings. So, this is what came to me as a thought for how this might go, but I would love to hear other ideas from people if some variation or alternative makes more sense. The first part of this would be introducing something like Amitābha tradition in Buddhism. Those who worship Retribution would try to, as often as they can, and especially when they feel they are near death, recite a prayer to invite the power of Retribution to guide them to their souls to whatever destination his judgement deems fit. I thought something like this would be a fitting idea of what that prayer might sound like: I think this hits on key themes of pleading and begging humbly before a god and praises Taravangian's drive to remake the world as he wills it. I imagine this prayer invests the person with Investiture that carries the objective of ensuring their mind and soul are delivered as Taravangian wants, but it needs to be repeated regularly since the Light form Investiture will leak out of people over time. Each phrase also has two parts, reflecting Taravangian's nature as the one god who is two, except the final line which unites both phrases into a single sentence. The highest reward Taravangian can possibly give someone is to become a child of Kharbranth, as such a person is exempted from all of Odium's wrath by the oath between Taravangian and Odium. In order to ensure Kharbranth does not simply become a city of the mad, I would imagine that he could separate those given this form of reincarnation from their memories while they are children, having them relearn them by being read books which contain the stories of their past life. Combining this with sufficient therapy and time, this sort of gentle life could restore the integrity of souls without making them lose their valuable memories forever. Now, obviously being read a story about a thing and living through it are different, but I am assuming the magic that would be involved in this would allow the forfeited memories to return as experiences instead of just a telling. The end of this existence is something people would have to opt into, and that elective action would take the form of a prayer: This one extends the form of the prior prayer by also having 5 elements. Again the structure of a line with two parts is here, except in the ending where the praying subject's will is the third party to the prayer. The prayer is to Taravangian and Honor because Odium cannot be brought to do any form of harm, which might include the harm of sending into danger, to a child of Kharbranth. Now, there is the matter of the punitive outcomes. The first of these would be the punishment for those who have said the first prayer, seeking to escape death, but have failed to do acts of service. Those who say they wish to be servants of their god but fail to serve have minds which are impure and would be subject to divine punishment. Taravangian does not need to invent the form of this punishment from nothing: It would be a state or akin to slaveform. I imagine that the end of this form of life is given one of the souls departing Kharbranth is reincarnated using the body as a vessel. Assuming Taravangian is still the kind of person who turned the poor of his kingdom into a resource for extracting prophecy, I imagine him implementing something like stack-cullling (I think that is the name of the business practice), where he simply inflicts this on some proportion of the least productive members of society who are of adult age. Since he doesn't want to lose souls forever, I imagine there would be a prayer that parents would say either as their child is gestating or as a kind of baptism, where they ask to be allowed to be part of the perfecting of the world by having the chance to raise a soul which failed to be worthy of paradise up to be more able. I could imagine that most of their memories are wiped on each go around, to prevent souls being broken down by the pains of death or retaining bad habits, but some useful memories are kept in hazy ways to try to build something useful. Below that outcome would be turning people into shades which hunger for the investiture of other Shards. This is for those who are not just slothful, but either false in their faith or glutinous in their resource consumption. These spirits would be either let to die forever after they are dispersed or it's the same as the other modes of reincarnation where they are given to be raised by faithful parents. I admit, I have no idea where an actual hell besides Shadedom would be useful or meaningful, but it does feel a bit wrong that there is not such a place. I do feel like the Odium part of Taravangian would demand such a thing, but maybe the shade and slave punishments are enough for it. Thanks to anyone who read all of this, and additional thanks in advance to anyone who has comments on these ideas. Do you think you could come up with ways to make the prayers have good scantion or a more poetic form?

I think the interesting case for this is him seeking Mercy to try to balance himself better. A lord of law and punishment who cannot forgive is always at risk of becoming a nightmare to his people. But I could imagine the Honor-child intelligence getting really upset with any kind of inconsistencies or even just pragmatism that Taravangian brings to how he juggles Odium and Mercy around the lawfulness of Honor. I would imagine Reason is the 4th one that would be the "Oh no, I need something god-sized to make the practicality of this work and not be upsetting", but that one lacks the obvious counter-point of Odium that Mercy has, since WaT has made it clear Odium is synonymous with divine wrath.

Now, that's unrealistic. What's more likely to happen is that these horrible things which destroy all sense of what is life and what is death are made the foundations of the economic order and, while a lot of people point out that this is pretty atrocious and should be stopped, too many people depend on the status quo for easy access to commodities and also a lot of infrastructure will be based on them. Seriously, IRL we gave lots of people various amounts of lead poisoning so cars would run better. Human societies that adopt capitalist logics, which everywhere in the Comsere is heading towards, eg the state is creating the notion of intellectual property on Roshar, Scandrial is just done with the 19th century basically, and Nalthius has a fairly dominant system of people selling chunks of their souls for money, tend to be pretty bad about adopting horrifically dangerous technologies as the basic stuff of life. A spiked up lifeless might fly into a horrible rage due to realizing the sheer agony of its existence as a spiritual pin cushion and kill someone every so often, might even do it on the order of thirty thousand times a year in a given USA-sized country, but that would still not make them any more implausible to keep around than the car. But yeah, we don't use cars as units of economic trade. They are too big and have too many particular attributes for that.

Spikes make for a really bad currency since they aren't fungible or easy to assay. How does someone test how much investiture is in the pile of five spikes they just got for a boat or whatever? It's a mess. I recently watched some videos talking about the Marathon games by Bungie, and zombie super soldiers being bossed around by god-like intelligences seems to go... well it gets weird. I also feel like the tendency of piles of investiture to become sapient would mean that slave revolts are still liable to happen if there are too many spikes in a given Lifeless. This is especially likely to become a problem in a combat situation, since either the Lifeless will be slavaging spikes from each other in battle or letting those spikes in the destroyed Lifeless lose their charge.

Oh, if we are thinking about Taravangian trying to hoover up more Shards: Sel is just there with Dor hanging out in the CR. I get that moving a miniature sun made of god juice is probably a bit of a project, but Dominion and Devotion both seem like things Taravangian would see as part of his vibes. His self-perceived plan is to conquer the entire Cosmere because he cares about the people too much to not cause huge problems.

The Assemblage is going to try to attain a sense of continuity with their prior existence while trying to adapt to circumstances. After deciding that they will maintain their prior policy of communal land ownership, even if this is not the gifted realm of the greater vessel, they will try to collect as many artifacts from the crashed Greater Vessel as possible (action 1), realize they have heard of boats from surface dwelling cultures, and attempt to build a lesser vessel (action 2) in a somewhat strange hope that they can still satisfy their reason for being even on a smaller scale. They will then send off a voyage of both exploration and exhibition (action 3), to share the relics and cultures of the former guests of the greater vessel. Domestically, they are going to see if any local plant matter can be used as shell material and try to fabricate shells from that. Their basic biology allows them to excrete a kind of shell material from reprocessing cellulose from algae like lifeforms that were part of the air recycling system, so having access to grass is an interesting change for them. (action 4)