That's a very cute argument, knasser. Obviously not proof, but it would be a very neat argument for a Christian character to make in the Shadowrun universe. I'm definitely going to have to remember it.

I t is an incorrect arguement. Templars summon angels as do many other Christian magicians. Check out Threats 2.

And a satanist mage could summon up demons and devils, just like a shaman can summon up spirits of earth and air, and so forth and so on.

The shape your summons take is only indicative of your part6icular view. It does not mean you have called for and been sent an Angel to help you, it means you have wrested a spirit from the Astral, and it projects onto the world through the lens of your mind. Your mind, in this case, has little Angels printed all over it, so the spirit takes the shape you want it to.

It's no more and no less than that.

And here's the ultimate reason God does not exist. Given that God is infinate, and Omnipotent..

There would be no athiests and agnostics, because He would imprint on each and every one of us the overriding and unshakable truth that He exists. A back-water heathen with no religious training whatsoever would not be able to quote the Bible, but his belief that the Lord our God existed would be absoloute.

Since this is not the case, then we can safely rule out that possibility. If the jeuedo-Christian God does exist, then He is not omnipotent and absoloute. Why is this? I don't care. I simply do not care, it is enough for me that I do not believe He exists, and since I have seen nothing else that could convince me, I am left to the only conclusion that I can draw; there are no Gods, singular or plural, and life's only purpose is life itself.

Heh. Them's fightin' words I just posted. Ah well, my point stands. Don't bother arguing or trying to convert me, it'll just get a flame war started.


In any event, that's the argument I use against religion in 2006, and it'll be just as applicable in 2050, 2060, 2061, 2062, 2063, 2064, and 2070. Even moreso, because now the athiests will be able to point at all of those improbable things that previously they had to stretch to explain, and say "It was a spike."

And if God really believed in free will, Ge wouldn't punish people for not believing in him. And if He was perfect, he wouldn't give people free wil just so that their worship would mean more to him.

But why would a perfect being give us free will for any reason other than the desire to see us free? For God to go all Paradise Lost on us seems very selfish and imperfect of Him.

I have officially grenaded this discussion; I don't know whether to be horrified at myself or to be very, very happy.

Dude, oppression makes belief stronger.

Durr, God is testing me.

everybody makes mistakes! DON'T JUDGE ME!

at any rate, as i said, your logic is flawed. you don't take into account the infinite number of possibilities for why YHWH wouldn't use his omnipotent power to force everyone to worship him. to me, any attempt to divine the most likely course of action that an omnipotent, omniscient being might take is doomed to failure from the outset. how are you going to get into the mind of a being that purportedly knows everything?

Does a Spirit take on the form that the summoner believes that it should have or does the viewer see the spirit in the form that she thinks that it should posses?

The spirit's form frequently conforms to what the summoner believes.

Dude, you've never summoned an angel and had it beaten by a great form air spirit. That did not target you in any way.

...sweet Jebus, help me.

H. Simpson

Hmmm. Well I had never read Threats 2 so I was unaware of that. I'd skip it in my game as it confirms that spirits are derived from the summoner's pre-conceptions and I don't want that confirmed in my game. I like to play spirits as independent entities. Secondly, it can be quite offensive to many people's own beliefs. And though I'm able to see it for the fictional-game it is, to a very little extent that includes me. For the record I do believe in God, or Allah if you like, though my beliefs are very personal to me and so at odds with mainstream religion that I'd probably get stoned in some parts of the world. I'm closer to Sufism or Gnostic Christianity than any mainstream religion. Two sects that are regarded as heretical by their parent religions. Actually that's not accurate. In both gnosticism and sufism, these are closest to their respective religions in their original forms whilst the major streams of Christianity or Islam are the ones that have actually branched / evolved. Not saying either is wrong or right though.

This has gone beyond Shadowrun now, as I've gone into my personal beliefs. I'm okay with that. I think the standard of debate and maturity on these boards is pretty high so I don't expect lots of "d00d, my elemental can pwn ur g0d" but I'm not going to be offended by people telling me they disagree with my faith or (preferably politely) think that it's nonsense.

Regarding the question of God "going all Paradise Lost on us" (which I've read, by the way, and love), I don't personally believe that. I identify far more with the Devil in that book than I do with the nauseating Almighty and his sugar-sweet Son. I don't believe in a God that would punish someone for beigin ignorant of him or choosing not to believe when no evidence had been provided. Sin has a basis in logic and is its own punishment. It requires no outside agency or father-figure.

Incidentally, the Hebrew book of Genesis does refer to God as plural (elohim, I think) and I'm pretty sure I learned once, that the hebrew name of God is actually without plural or singular form, or rather it has both, which is interesting.

-K.

Btw. If anyone hasn't read Paradise Lost, you should. If for no other reason than it's the ultimate source of quotes for bad guys. I used to have mounted on my wall two lines from that book:

"Let him surer bar his iron gates, if He would have me stay in that dark durance."

Basically, Lucifer telling Uriel you can't keep him in Hell.

...in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "it's all a pack of foma"

...no damn cat

...no damn cradle.

Or Dumpshockers.

You know you all spend way too much time arguing about whether the world should use SR3 or SR4 rules, and way too little playing the actual game.

Burn the heretic!

It's funny some of the things that you manage to come across at the exact right time.
http://www.errantstory.com/archive.php?date=2003-01-08

James will have a response tonight ... busy at work today.

Oh. See, I took it as being like "durr" as a rough equivalent of "I ride the special short bus!" Now I see that I propably misinterpreted.

I like Babylon 5's view of Angels. The Vorlons came to earth millenia ago and became a part of our legends. One of the main characters postulates that they did it to condition us to accept them as saviors when they finally revealed themselves, but of course the Vorlons never confirmed or denied it (or even heard about it).

Perhaps I should draw attention to my post about In Imago Dei again. Now, if Pope John XXV wanted to establish that spirits are meant to be understood as angels, he most likely would have written something like "Spirits are angels," and not "Spirits are living manifestations of nature." Therefore, I'm pretty sure that spirits are not considered to be angels in Catholic doctrine, and that the same is most likely true in Orthodox and (most of the) Protestant doctrines.

while that's true, i'd like to point out for the sake of clarity that it doesn't necessarily mean that Catholic magicians can't summon spirits and call them angels. they would simply be creating a false division between angels and spirits, the way psionicists create a false division between magic and psionics.

in other words, a Catholic mage might summon up a spirit of man and call it an angel. his Badger shaman chess partner might summon up a spirit of man, and the Catholic would call it a spirit. the Catholic would view them as being completely different types of entities, despite their similarities.

It would probably tend to be the more whacky denominations that would go the shamanic route and summon "angels" and "miracles", while most other Christians would far likelier be hermetics, and view the former with great skepticism (if not contempt). They would generally not accept some crazy shaman's spirit as being a real "angel". The angels in the Bible are pretty hard to mistake for anything else - they're terrifying. Ever notice the the first thing that nearly any angel says after revealing itself is "Fear not" or the equivalent?


I doubt that the awakening would have any conclusive affect on religious debate, although keep in mind, for your game world, that not everyone in that game world will know all of the facts about magic. You will have smug, ignorant people on both sides claiming that the awakening proves/disproves religion.

the shamanistic vs hermetic split, in Christianity, is partly true. but it's also true that there are both hermetic and shamanistic Catholics in SR.

Man, and I thought that canon evidence I cited on how spirits are viewed in SR's Christianity would help resolve the question on how spirits are viewed in SR's Christianity, but it's just made things more complicated.

*sigh* I feel so ignored. And depressed. And stabby.

However, I might just make a Sylvestrine as an intellectual exercise for my dedicated character thread in the SR4 forum. He won't have any skills or qualities that aren't plausible for a member of the clergy to have, but I hope you will like him anyway.

indeed. Catholicism is not the only version of Christianity out there--and not even everyone who calls themselves Catholic agrees with it.

Especially the branches of Catholicism that broke off from Rome - you know, in Westphalia, Ireland (officially), Aztlan (officially), Euskal Herria, Spain (for all intents and purposes when it comes to magic), as well as probably not a few splinter groups that would exist in North America, Asia, Eastern Rite, and the rest of the world.