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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6860306" data-attributes="member: 4937">Keep digging the hole you are in.Again, your argument for charisma and against wisdom has been repeatedly based on asserting that various biases and opinions of yours are incontrovertibly true about real world religion, and even more ludicrously therefore must also be true of fantasy world religion.  I took no liberties with your posts.  For example, you assert that I'm the one that brought real world religion into this, even though I can quote you doing so on the first page, for example: "Regardless of whether gods are real or not, FR religion (using your example) more or less works just like real world religion."   You are taking no responsibility for what you have actually said.  I didn't bring the discussion to this point; it's right there in your first post.Your argument has been from the beginning predicated on people accepting your personal views regarding religion, even where they are in the particulars debatable, skewed, or outright distorted.  You repeatedly keep offering up as your evidence "how religion works".  It comes up in every single post you've made.  But the problem with that is that they are all from the perspective of someone who has explicitly rejected religion, and is evidently hostile to it, so at the very least, they aren't the perspective of someone for whom religion is incontrovertibly real - as it must be in a typical fantasy setting - and valued, as it must be for a cleric.  So that perspective is not very useful for understanding is it?One can't really draw inferences about fantasy religion based off real world religion, since the two are self-evidently not the same - even from what must be your viewpoint.  You are the one spouting self-evidently irrational nonsense like: "Regardless of whether gods are real or not, FR religion (using your example) more or less works just like real world religion."  Really?  You can't even imagine how the reality of a hypothetical deity might change how religion actually works?  I don't even have to assert anything in particular about reality to note how wrong that is.  And, you don't know as much about how religion works as you think you do, as you seem to have a background versed in just one religion that you are drawing all your inferences from, and your bias from explicitly rejecting that background is at least as large as mine is for not doing so.  Just a few examples, you assert: That's certainly not true of Mithraism, Gnosticism, or any other number of mystery cults.  Real world religions are highly varied.  Some are entirely about esoteric knowledge.  Just because the one religion you are reasonably familiar with denounced mystery cults doesn't mean they are all like that.  "Usually simple" is a good laugh, as I invite you to study Buddhist sacred scripture or Thomas Aquinas, but many real world cults religions - like the Shakers or the Yazidi - do not accept new converts at all.  They certainly don't see their primary goals as evangelizing or spreading the faith to new followers.  Others, like many branches of Judaism, only rarely and passively proselytize.  Indeed, Catholicism traditionally has not seen the highest form of service as serving the goal of spreading the faith, which is why they have monasteries and seclusion.  Most Buddhists would not assert their primary duty is to evangelize, but rather to seek personal enlightenment.  Let me guess, you come from an evangelical Christian background, or at least that's your primary exposure?  You realize don't you that the vast majority of fantasy religions would have nothing in common with American Evangelical Protestant Christianity, right?  The vast majority of real world ones don't either.So perhaps you might back down from lecturing people on the particulars of what is a forbidden topic on these boards.  How is anyone supposed to discuss this topic as you continue to frame it without debating real world religion?  You've made the argument of wisdom/charisma right from the beginning a proxy argument about the nature of religion, and you did it again in the latest post I'm responding to.</blockquote>

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