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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8729383" data-attributes="member: 4937">As I said before, this seems to be in large part a problem that exists internally to you, and not with the language being employed.  Atua in the modern usage is also cognate to the English word 'God' and is used by those employing it to mean 'Divine' in every sense you could possibly want.  Are they misunderstanding the concept?  Considers statements like the following.  Atua is the atua of the everything.  Tangaroa was the atua of the sea.   My aumakua is an atua that manifests to my family as a shark.   There is a richness in the different words that might be subtly different, but I don't feel like it's a stretch to see that word as a synonym for the English word 'god'.  I get what you are saying with removing meaning from words.  It's a pet peeve of mine as well.  But I don't think it is going on here.The trouble with the word 'god' or 'divine' or 'sacred' is that those words don't mean much of anything until you know what they are pointing at.  They are pointers that require referencing. We're talking about fantasy universes here.  These are invented alternative realities.  And the words 'god', 'divine' and 'sacred' in the context of those fantasy universes mean exactly what they point at within those alternative realities.  The idea that 'god' is always a properly term for something cosmically big is a modern bias based on real world understanding.  It's not applicable to how ancient peoples saw the world or every fantasy universe.  The idea that we ought to only submit to the ultimate is also a modern bias.  In the ancient world with its complex socio-political hierarchies the idea that we ought not submit to anything but the ultimate isn't something you're going to run into.  It might be a historical precondition to widespread elimination of complex socio-political hierarchies in as much as we now have a distaste for someone demanding awe, obsequious and homage from others which is in at least some part created by that idea, but in an imagined universe with all the things believed of in antiquity: magic, fairies (kami, atua, etc.), four elements, monarchies, dragons, heroes and pantheons of many active gods manifesting human qualities, and all the rest I think you have to put aside your modern biases if you want to get at how people in that fantasy world think.</blockquote>

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