MotherS-in-law

That is all.

_{He sails from world to world in a flying tomb, serving gods who eat hope.}

Glokta is an interesting anti-hero though, eh?  Abercrombie at least attempts to engage with his audience, too.

Have you got the third book queued up?

I have great difficulty understanding what is going on when people believe in Christianity or Islam. If I believed that my immortal soul was on the line I would studying the books to find out which religion to believe in and which, of numerous variants, was the true one. What do I have to do to be saved? Faith? Works? It is all terribly unclear and I would worry myself into a nervous breakdown within a month or two.

I look at the Anglican communion and its troubles with homosexuality and I don't get it. There seem to be only two choices. 1) God forbids it, so repress your urges. 2) What God forbids is OK, so give up Christianity.

People actually try to talk through their differences and reach a compromise, perhaps that pairing is love and God is love so that's OK, but cottaging is lust and that's what the bible forbids. So it seems to me that religion is a form of politics with power and negotiation. An odd kind of politics, cloaked by a polite fiction of divine revelation.

I think its a neuro-typical thing. One wants the emotional support of a divine revelation. God's silence makes this difficult. First you must talk among yourselves to decide the revelation. Then you must engage in double-think, believing it is handed down by God, despite one's own active involvement. Finally one engages in collective worship, each worshipper helping the others validate the collective suppression of the origin of faith.

Sometimes faith needs updating. This involves dangerous and painful diving into the depths of the subconscious. There lurks that truth of the human invention of religion and the possibility of change. The emotional support that religion offers comes in part from having the certainty of unchanging truth, so necessary upgrades are always traumatic.

We can imagine a sharp boundary between politics and religion, but in such an imagining, Hell is a place that you could actually visit. Questions of morality could be settled by visiting Hell and asking folk what they did, much as you could visit a prison and ask the prisoners: what are you in for. Such childlike faith strikes me as being both true religion and the socially marginal province of barely sane. Mainstream religion is a strange kind of politics, separated from the ordinary kind by a broad and fuzzy boundary.

Here's to his speedy recovery, mate.

This coomenat has be n soidnsord by hurricanbe ice malt liqur

I think it's a fair point about the political interests behind the success of the Reformation, and of course the Church itself had significant political power in that era, but it still seems to me the spark was religious, it just needed favorable political conditions for the flame to catch. What's the bit from On Liberty ... thanks Amazon ...

To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after the era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was successful [...]

_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}