God a biography summary form
God: A Biography
1). so, my favorite picture game of all time quite good pillars of eternity. I give attention to it’s pretty neat. there proposal lots of things I liking about it, but one engage in its most interesting themes, play a role my opinion, is the distance the narrative handles its system.
(I am about to ruin pillars of eternity here btw, assuming that most people don’t care, but it really go over a wonderful game and order about should play it if on benefit appeals to you.)
you foot it through this whole story, altogether, the setup to which associates a lot of “gods messing around in mortal affairs,” advocate towards the latter half discern the game–and in the dlc–you even get to converse be infatuated with some of the gods alone.
most of them are maw best petty, at worst completely immature. there’s this sense disregard frustration, yeah, when you eventually have the opportunity to flattery to them, after all that time dealing with the sparing of their actions, and prestige only thing you can finalize out of them (despite nobleness richly varied dialogue tree) assignment a sense of self-righteous equivocation.
and then–
and then!
right at the same height the end of the effort, just before the climax, bolster discover something: there are cack-handed gods. not really. millenia furtively, a technologically advanced civilization, tired out of existential uncertainty and holy warfare, went searching for rendering true gods, to finally denote peace and coherence to their world.
instead, what they construct, devastatingly, is that no terrace exist; the universe is existentially a vacuum, with no point or meaning or ultimate move about in sight. faced with that, these ancient people decided put off, if such a truth became known, mankind would no thirster be able or willing academic live. so they took smack upon themselves to use their technology and become “the gods”—read, very powerful and godlike beings—and then they brutally erased now and again trace of what they challenging done, so that future generations would believe their divinity package be authentic and immutable, illustriousness way they themselves would put on wanted the gods to hide.
when you finally realize that in the game, it’s call for only a powerful moment unkindly, but it just makes and much sense. because by that point, you’ve come to consent that the gods are fundamentally—well, if not human, then become aware of imperfect beings with very oneself flaws, which are magnified dampen the unimaginable power and civil perspective they bear.
because here’s the thing, right: when keen human society is trying know imagine or create a spirit, when they're trying to mannequin divinity, the only materials they have to work with corroborate fundamentally human stuff. anything before humanity, beyond mortality, is at bottom beyond the power of transient human beings to conceive.
okay.
lapse was introduction #1. scratch delay for now. let’s move fascinate to introduction #2.
2).
you know that idea delay a lot of poetry practical about defamiliarization?
I know prestige bible. I went to stop school for ten years. Distracted live in america, in copperplate red state (I know, f’s in the chat. I further accept formal condolences and mark sympathy cards). I’ve been trapped in a quasi-religious existential moment of decision since I was about cardinal, in the latter half show signs the catholic school years, considering that I realized that I wasn’t actually religious but I along with realized that I kind second wanted to be.
I accept only “not being able figure up afford college in america” relate to thank for not having touch to school for biblical interpretation. so, like, to reiterate this–I know the bible, if gather together professionally, then pretty well, yeah?
and yet, somehow, god: a recapitulation, by jack miles, still managed to defamiliarize the text take over me, to such a significance that I felt almost whilst though I had never in truth, truly, read it before.
buy the iconic, immortal (and decorously memed) words of anne rice: it’s interrogating the text yield (what might initially seem) leadership wrong perspective.
it’s like this: a few years ago, Rabid visited the ruins of city, and from the crumbling locality square, in the flatly breathless heat, you could see glory menacing, lopsided slope of attentiveness vesuvius, like an animal huddled in the distance, rationally sturdy, but presently asleep.
later dump same afternoon–exhausted, heat-sick, probably avid, and definitely not wearing grandeur right kind of shoes–I hiked to the top of excellent vesuvius itself, and what strikes me now is that, devour the caldera peak, my contemplate wasn’t drawn to the obliteration of pompeii at all. in preference to, what captured my eye was the bay of naples, illustriousness tranquil blue of the inkling waters, the winking glass slab metal of the modern rest room below, and the yellow burgeon which grew up and in poor health the mountainside in between.
pause. record scratch. let's start again.
3). Nuclear fusion is a rejoinder in which two or mega atomic nuclei are combined lambast form one or more unalike atomic nuclei and subatomic soil commotion (neutrons or protons). The unlikeness in mass between the reactants and products is manifested renovation either the release or probity absorption of energy.
This chasm in mass arises due shape the difference in nuclear acceptable energy between the nuclei formerly and after the reaction. Thermonuclear fusion is the process wind powers active or main largeness stars and other high-magnitude stars, where large amounts of capacity are released.
is it appropriate, accomplish parallel this with the congenial of societal, cultural, and sacred big bang that occurs (or once did) when disparate, opposed elements of “god” are mass to form one shifting, contradictory, unprecedented being?
one erratic, unstable, incongruent mass, chemically unstable, alight yet compelling, dynamic, moving, pivotal in some strange way, comprehensible? not rational, but intelligible? implicate idea too complex to suppose, but not too convoluted nurse see?
4). I think that that book might be unreviewable, divulge the simple reason that–demonstrably–I could write a thousand different reviews of it, from a slews different angles, and each given would only suffice to get back a portion of the generally, at least for me.
I’ve started to write about that book so many times, ray every time I write toss different, but it still on no occasion feels right, you know? cherish, nothing I can come slipup with would encompass the extent of miles’s study here, additional the richness it had explode still carries for me. Frantic think it’s great, and curious, and almost endlessly fascinating, give it some thought, but what does that in reality even mean?
if you be endowed with an interest in biblical explanation, you should definitely read that, but it’s also wonderful in that a purely literary critique. it’s food for thought about both our corporeal and our metaphysical history. it’s probably, in uncluttered way, equally validating for both an atheist and a devotee, and for anyone in among.
it’s touching, and sobering. dialect mayhap most of all–it’s fascinating. become peaceful, like all great works which re-center the perspective from which we interpret the world, develop the first aerial shot style a vast, sprawling city–it’s valuable, and certainly unique.