Recent content by Sepulchrave II

The glamour of the 60s/70s era is very well done, with scenes like the astronauts racing their corvettes to the bar. Almost had a kind of Mad Men in Space vibe in places.

I loved S1, and, like you, enjoyed each successive season less than the previous. Still worth watching, though. S5 promises a , so might be pretty cool.

Mary Wollstonecraft was definitely a deist, or a rational theist - she often framed her feminist arguments in religious language. Although she despised the clergy and superstition. Mill called himself a “non-believer” but was not militantly atheist. In Three Essays on Religion, he allows that...

I'd actually go further - at least in Europe. Even in the Renaissance, the idea of a supernatural reality prevailed overwhelmingly. We didn't get whispers of Deism until the 1560s (Pierre Viret). Bruno and Spinoza (although accused of atheism) were pantheists. Deism began to gain traction as a...

It really depends on your divine ontology. Maybe if the war god is killed, people can no longer commit acts of violence. Maybe if the Sun god is killed, the world is plunged into darkness. Maybe if the storm god is killed, it stops raining etc. Maybe another deity will step into the deceased...

Mostly, yes. But a fair number of Greek and Roman philosophers were either atheistic or theomachistic, and it's not hard to envisage a world where their ideas either prevailed or became more widespread - i.e. backed by a sympathetic imperial power. (While it's fair to say that imperial polities...

A few thoughts, FWIW. I don't think that looking to modern expressions of polytheism (e.g. Hellenism, Asatru, Romuva) is particularly useful in trying to illuminate the - rather odd - D&D religious worldview. Nor do I think that looking at certain aspects of contemporary Hinduism has much to...

Hindus may identify with a wide array of worldviews, including polytheism, pantheism, panentheism, pandeism, henotheism, monotheism, monism, as well as agnostic, atheistic, or humanistic perspectives. Only 7% of Hindus identify as polytheistic- i.e. believing in multiple discrete gods.

The worship of otiose supreme deities is often replaced by more glamorous war gods and storm gods. Aztec – Ometeotl to Huitzilopochtli Norse/Germanic – Tyr to Odin/Thor Rome – Jupiter to Mars Mesopotamia – Anu to Marduk/Ninurta/Nergal Canaan/Israel – El to Yahweh

I think the conflicts evidenced by Worf and Nog contra- their cultures are precisely because of their exposure to human values and early immersion in human society, not because of any strains of ideology native to their own species. And in the case of Spock, a half-human genetic heritage: Spock...

I wasn't thinking in terms of ideas as specific as nazi-analogous xenophobes, but more in terms of a general sweep. Different peoples represent different functions of the human psyche (e.g Tolkien orcs=wanton mechanized brutality; hobbits=inhabitants of a bucolic idyll. ). Or the Star Trek...

I have no doubt I'm in the minority here, but... I have no problem casting different groups (whichever nomenclature you prefer) with certain embedded characteristics. I think that - for me - the game works best as a kind of psychomachian, mythopoeic, anthropopsychic, ethnopsychic allegory...

I was introduced to D&D in 1981-2, after I had read The Hobbit, LotR and Silmarillion. I hadn't really branched out into other fantasy literature; rather I had read Tolkien twice and was probably on my third pass by then. Up until the age of 10, LotR had been a mysterious tome sitting on the...

Another vote for Blakes 7 (sic - the original title sequence was missing an apostrophe). A relatively obscure show I feel obliged to commend is Survivors (1975-77): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072572/ Set after a global pandemic which kills 99% of the world's population. It was written by...

Me with my wife — who isn’t called Gertrude II.