Should We Make Profiles For The Divine Comedy?

[Mr. Bambu]

To be clear.

There are a great many verses with some form of the Christian God present. Many are less serious (South Park, Monty Python) and others are more serious (such as this here, His Dark Materials, or even verses I'm involved with, such as Good Omens or Barlowe's Inferno). Still, it is not the purpose of this thread to suggest a ban on anything depicting the Christian God, or any other religion's perception of divinity. The proximity of this particular rendition is what is held to be reasonably offensive to those of the belief.

This means that verses trying to portray "actual God" won't be banned anytime soon. We're not going to suddenly put an end to Narnia because C.S. Lewis presented Aslan as a God-figure, the notion of a figure being a rendition of the Christian God is far too widespread and vague to really approach that. But that also means that this case is considered different compared to spoofs or more creative or derivative interpretations.

Felt it necessary to make that clear, given the current trajectory.

 

[Damage3245]

Also, trying to equate South Park making bad jokes to Dante (in the words of Clover) slapping on actual God into his series is so embarrassingly ignorant that I don't even know how to respond.

It's not a bad comparison IMO. South Park did slap the actual Muhammad into their show - the depiction of which is considered by many Muslims to be disrespectful and blasphemous due to how revered their prophet is.

 

[Kachon123]

It's not a bad comparison IMO. South Park did slap the actual Muhammad into their show - the depiction of which is considered by many Muslims to be disrespectful and blasphemous due to how revered their prophet is.

This is the last time that I will say this because I don’t think you fully understand, from the way I see it tho

Something like south park making a Jesus character is disrespectful because we know what it’s directed at but the disrespect comes from the show, not anywhere else

We Christian simply don’t view that as our religion at all, the problem is the wiki indexing something so closely related to the one from the Bible, the disrespect comes only then from the wiki which us Christian like myself is definitely not going to support or be affiliated with

Hopefully you can see where I’m coming from

 

[Antvasima]

Well, I think that there is insufficient support for adding this page to our wiki in any case. Both DontTalk, myself, Bambu, Ultima, KingTempest, and likely other staff members oppose it, so it seems best if we avoid further potentially inflammatory arguments here with hurt feelings all around.

 

[Damage3245]

Well, I think that there is insufficient support for adding this page to our wiki in any case. Both DontTalk, myself, Bambu, Ultima, KingTempest, and likely other staff members oppose it, so it seems best if we avoid further potentially inflammatory arguments here with hurt feelings all around.

ArmorChompy, DarkDragonMedeus, Maverick Zero, Duedate8898, Qawsedf234, Planck69 and myself seem to approve of it so I think there is currently more votes in favor of it than against.

 

[Antvasima]

Well, this is too controversial to add without a clear strong consensus for it.

 

[CloverDragon03]

Also, no Bureaucrats support this while 2 oppose it

 

[Damage3245]

Well, this is too controversial to add without a clear strong consensus for it.

Fair enough, but it can be left open for longer to allow more staff to comment on it if they wish. It's not like there's any rush on this topic.

 

[Antvasima]

Fair enough, but it can be left open for longer to allow more staff to comment on it if they wish. It's not like there's any rush on this topic.

Well, the discussion is already quite hostile as it is. I am not sure if allowing it to potentially grow worse is a good idea...

 

[Damage3245]

Well, the discussion is already quite hostile as it is. I am not sure if allowing it to potentially grow worse is a good idea...

Personally I don't think there's a lot of hostility in here. I think we can trust it to continue, especially if we're focusing on staff giving their votes from now on.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

I did not realize Ultima U-turned on his own thread. I suppose I can switch being against the creation of the God profile, but I'm not necessarily against the rest of the verse's existence.

 

[Armorchompy]

There's something I'm a bit confused about here. People take offense to DC God being a direct mirror to the biblical one, but that's not such a unique case. Like, Aslan is a good example, he isn't just an allegory for the Christian God, he IS the Christian God, written by a literal theologist and Christian apologetic (adding a link to the latter cause without one it sounds like an insult but it's just a thing) who was 100% knowledgeable enough about the Bible to be very accurate in his portrayal, maybe more so than Dante (note that the lion bit is just Lewis' honest opinion of the form Jesus would take in Narnia, not some means of differentiating from the Biblical source). I agree they feel different, but if the meter by which we're judging is intent to portray the Christian God there really isn't much of a difference. Same does indeed go for Bruce Almighty, it's a 100-minute Jim Carrey comedy so they can't go and quote the whole Bible but it's definitely meant to be the Christian God, there's no question about it. Are we taking offense to the thoroughness of the inspiration, or the fact that it feels too similar?

To be clear, I'm not saying that a DC God profile wouldn't be offensive, or that that isn't reason enough to not make one. But I would want a coherent and solid justification to be what we put down as the reason for why we didn't make that profile, that way it can be more easily used as a precedent when similar situations pop up. Such, as, for example, making it clear that if something is supposed to be a parody, or a fictionalized version of a real life religious figure (SMT, Narnia, Bruce Almighty), it's allowed, whereas an attempt at a more direct transition of a religious text (Divine Comedy) isn't. Even then, it's a bit weird, though. Would I be allowed to make a profile for Zeus from the Iliad, even though it's just someone putting a deity from a religion they believed in in a poem of theirs?

However, I understand that religion is a sensitive topic, so even if the consensus is to make an exception for this specific version and not allowing it to avoid controversy, I'm in support of that (Especially since let's be real, we've lived our whole lives without a VSBW Divine Comedy God profile, we can live the rest of them without too). Here's a question, though. If we don't allow God's profile to be made, would the "original" characters of the Divine Comedy be allowed to be indexed? Most of the arguments levied against DC God wouldn't apply to a Dante profile. To continue the comparison I made above, even if the Zeus (Iliad) profile was disallowed, I don't think most people would disagree with the Achilles profile we have remaining, or for Gilgamesh from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Here's a question, though. If we don't allow God's profile to be made, would the "original" characters of the Divine Comedy be allowed to be indexed? Most of the arguments levied against DC God wouldn't apply to a Dante profile.

Probably not. The profiles that you could make outside of God (Dante and Beatrice come to mind) are largely people who are directly empowered by him and have him as the, so to speak, centerpoint of their abilities. They wouldn't really make any sense without God's profile serving as a reference.

 

[Armorchompy]

Ah, I guess if there's a logistical issue like that that's another thing. I'd like to see what people would think about it in a vacuum though, for posterity's sake.

 

[Sir_Ovens]

I don't understand what the big fuss is about. This isn't the God that we're indexing. It's an adapted version of scripture used to tell a story. We didn't make the story, we're simply indexing it. Why are people offended about us indexing a  fictional story? Like I stress this because it's  not scripture. We aren't making profiles for The Bible, we're making profiles for The Divine Comedy. Is this not a big enough distinction for people to grasp that we are not making light of their religion? Maybe the text itself is sacrilege, but then again, almost every fictional depiction of God is. To draw the line here, would be to draw the line for every other fictional depiction of God that even remotely follows The Bible.

The worst part about this I think is that The Divine Comedy isn't even a critique of God. It's not saying anything that would be of offense. It's not saying "God bad. Man good." It's literally just a depiction of the divine.

Put me under yes for allowing profiles.

Edit: Just wanted to add that it is not our place to say what is fictional and what is real. We go off what we're given, and if The Divine Comedy is deemed fiction, we aren't the ones in a position to argue. Perhaps get the Vatican to sign off on it being Bible canon then we can disallow it.

 

[Damage3245]

Just keeping track of the tally here for the sake of clarity.

For (7): , Maverick Zero, Duedate8898, Qawsedf234, Planck69, Damage3245, Sir Ovens, SamanPatou

Against (5): DontTalk, Antvasima, Mr. Bambu, Ultima Reality, KingTempest

Against God profile specifically (1): DarkDragonMedeus

Neutral (1): ArmorChompy

 

[SamanPatou]

I'm not reading 4 pages of comments, so please point the most relevant ones to me if needed, rn I'm going to address only the op and the first half of the first page.

As an italian, I won't accept any reference that doesn't draw from text in italian confirm Armor and Thanos in saying that's not treated as a religious text, although it goes pretty close because in the 1200 literature was pretty different from now. Still, it's not a canonized text in any christian confession, so it should be fine, it's fiction as a whole. It sounds very weird to me, but once I get past that feeling, I come to the conclusion it is technically fine.

Regarding how much it draws from the Bible and the controversy, the former should be addressed whenever it heavily hinges on interpretation (I guess a whole lot, knowing it) and it far from being the only piece of work to reference it or other holy texts, while the latter should straight up be ignored, as said, we host a number of fiction that have caused (and still cause) religious controversy, so I don't see the problem here.

 

[Armorchompy]

Just keeping track of the tally here for the sake of clarity.

For (8): ArmorChompy, Maverick Zero, Duedate8898, Qawsedf234, Planck69, Damage3245, Sir Ovens, SamanPatou

Against (5): DontTalk, Antvasima, Mr. Bambu, Ultima Reality, KingTempest

Against God profile specifically (1): DarkDragonMedeus

I'm not for- I would be, but if it's going to cause issues I don't think it's worth bothering with. Count me as neutral, or I guess not at all.

 

[Damage3245]

I'm not for- I would be, but if it's going to cause issues I don't think it's worth bothering with. Count me as neutral, or I guess not at all.

Okay, noted.

 

[SamanPatou]

I feel like we might be crossing bridges before coming to them, I think wouldn't be nearly as problematic as publishing actual religion, also because we are drawing just from a very specific text.
I understand God can be controversial and maybe it could deserve its own thread to sort out the specific bits which weren't explicity made up by Dante and that might overlap too much? Not to exclude them, but rather to figure out the best and safest interpretations, writings etc...

 

[Damage3245]

Yeah, there has to be ways of compromising here and improving the potential profile rather than being, "This uses God's name in vain, so it's a sin and shouldn't be allowed on the wiki."

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Quite frankly I have no idea of what such a "compromise" would even be, since the information in the profile is just factually what is in the poem. The most I can think of would be cutting off the three keys for the persons of the Trinity and leaving only one key, but that sounds like laughably little and would also basically amount to covering things up. So I don't think that road is one we'd want to take anyway, just go ahead with the straightforward voting process.

 

[KingTempest]

I understand God can be controversial and maybe it could deserve its own thread to sort out the specific bits which weren't explicity made up by Dante and that might overlap too much? Not to exclude them, but rather to figure out the best and safest interpretations, writings etc...

This could be a good choice to do

 

[Ultima_Reality]

To draw the line here, would be to draw the line for every other fictional depiction of God that even remotely follows The Bible.

The worst part about this I think is that The Divine Comedy isn't even a critique of God. It's not saying anything that would be of offense. It's not saying "God bad. Man good." It's literally just a depiction of the divine.

There's something I'm a bit confused about here. People take offense to DC God being a direct mirror to the biblical one, but that's not such a unique case. Like, Aslan is a good example, he isn't just an allegory for the Christian God, he IS the Christian God, written by a literal theologist and Christian apologetic (adding a link to the latter cause without one it sounds like an insult but it's just a thing) who was 100% knowledgeable enough about the Bible to be very accurate in his portrayal, maybe more so than Dante. I agree they feel different, but if the meter by which we're judging is intent to portray the Christian God there really isn't much of a difference.

Speaking as someone who hasn't changed his position, I believe these two points are worth to reflect on, if we want to arrive at a coherent reason for accepting or rejecting the Divine Comedy as an indexable verse.

To be clear, we need to determine what exactly "crosses the line" here, or in other words, to look at what makes this profile so proximal to actual religion. Obviously, this proximity is not caused by the character in question being an Absolute. Is it caused by it being Tier 0, specifically? Not that, either, since this is just caused by attributes that any generic philosophical god has, and any learned Christian will recognize that the attributes in question are only the preambles of the faith.

So, put bluntly, the line-crossing here is nothing more and nothing less than the fact that Dante's depiction of God is very uniquely Christian. And it's not just a nebulous "Biblical God" that ultimately doesn't have anything to do with the actual Christian God, which is what you find in 99% of fiction (Bruce Almighty, Shin Megami Tensei, Supernatural, His Dark Materials, most of DC, etc etc). It's the Holy Trinity presented in extreme detail, with all the relevant specifics of it. Dante draws so much from it that the Comedy has been called a prose version of the Summa Theologiae, before. That's what's ticking people off.

And yet, if we want to draw the line there, we have to bear in mind what precedent we are setting. Lord of the Rings had an author who was a devout Catholic, too, and Eru Iluvatar is very specifically supposed to literally be God in Tolkien's vision. People that he corresponded with in real life report him telling them that the Flame Imperishable is the Holy Spirit, and Tolkien himself has writings talking about how Eru will one day incarnate in human form to free Ëa from Morgoth.

Likewise, Narnia is another, very un-nebulous depiction of the Christian God, where Aslan is explicitly Jesus and The Emperor Beyond the Sea is explicitly God the Father.

So, yeah. Good to keep in mind.

 

[SamanPatou]

Quite frankly I have no idea of what such a "compromise" would even be, since the information in the profile is just factually what is in the poem. The most I can think of would be cutting off the three keys for the persons of the Trinity and leaving only one key, but that sounds like laughably little and would also basically amount to covering things up. So I don't think that road is one we'd want to take anyway, just go ahead with the straightforward voting process.

Personally, from the glorious height of my "not having read/not remembering", I refers to those parts (if there are any, I can't say) of the comedy that are subtle or direct references, quotations or such of the Bible or other texts, or at least things that require the reader to prevently have knowledge of an external source, or follow a determined interpretation.
To connect with an akin example, I remember a lot of the discourse on JTTW pending on the interpretation of Buddhist texts of the time required to fully understand what was being messaged.
Keep in mind that mine isn't a proposal on something that HAS to be done, but rather a possible form of damage control that could help.

To elaborate a little more on possible source of criticism that we have, look at SMITE, which at the time had become extremely controversial for the representation of Hindu deities featured in the game, such as Ganesha and Kali, to name the ones that raised the most turmoil, or the recently released Shiva. These are yet more pretty "accurate" representations of divine beings that are currently being worshiped in many parts of the world, yet here they are on the wiki.
Record of Ragnarok had lifted similar controversies, still because of their representation of Shiva.
We have a profile for the very literal Jesus from American Gods, which depicts all divine beings as a byproduct of the collective human will, implying this is the actual Jesus (let alone the multiple versions of him that are in the series).
I could go on for hours, we have profiles for the videogame adaptation of the subject of this thread, which by proxy references the same material.

Gatekeeping the Divine Comedy feels to me like cherry picking out of our sensibility being implicitly different from that of others, probably because of our western background idk, or at least that of several of us.
But as long as we refer to explicitly fictional material, without even making up our own stuff, I don't see why not featuring it.
You also have to consider that a very good chunk of the cosmology and overall setting of the Comedy is ultimately Dante's own invention, mixing or interpretation of the various ideological, artistical and theological currents of the time, which in turn come from previous ideas and which have greatly changed overtime.
Lastly, the Comedy has always been considered fictional material, since it's earliest diffusion as a scattered amount of different manuscripts, with various scholars and intellectuals forwarding praises or critiques on it, with multiple different opinions over the course of the centuries, and most of them were based on the structure of the writing, rather than the content. It was also far from being the only text taking inspiration from the Bible and other texts, we count novels and poetries in the thousands, because you have to remember how at the time religion was an almost absolute factor in the life of people.

 

[Sir_Ovens]

I wanna stress again.

"God" in the Divine Comedy, no matter how 1:1 his depiction is from the Christian faith, he is not God.

If I took Mike Tyson and his entire life story and put it 1:1 into a book, the fictional version of him is NOT Mike Tyson. Whatever is in the book is a completely new entity, and should be indexable. Again, a "God" profile is not a critique, insult, mockery, or trivialization of the Christian faith. It is a showing of our standards applied to a depiction of "God" from a fictional story. If people interpret that as us "tiering God", that is not on us. That is between them and their faith. If the Vatican decided tomorrow that The Divine Comedy is holy scripture then maybe this argument has legs to stand on.

Once again the issue is not "controversy", it is "media literacy".

 

[CloverDragon03]

By that same logic, we wouldn't have the restrictions on indexing Stage Personas that we do, since they're all just fictional versions of these real-life people

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

Speaking as someone who hasn't changed his position, I believe these two points are worth to reflect on, if we want to arrive at a coherent reason for accepting or rejecting the Divine Comedy as an indexable verse.

To be clear, we need to determine what exactly "crosses the line" here, or in other words, to look at what makes this profile so proximal to actual religion. Obviously, this proximity is not caused by the character in question being an Absolute. Is it caused by it being Tier 0, specifically? Not that, either, since this is just caused by attributes that any generic philosophical god has, and any learned Christian will recognize that the attributes in question are only the preambles of the faith.

So, put bluntly, the line-crossing here is nothing more and nothing less than the fact that Dante's depiction of God is very uniquely Christian. And it's not just a nebulous "Biblical God" that ultimately doesn't have anything to do with the actual Christian God, which is what you find in 99% of fiction (Bruce Almighty, Shin Megami Tensei, Supernatural, His Dark Materials, most of DC, etc etc). It's the Holy Trinity presented in extreme detail, with all the relevant specifics of it. Dante draws so much from it that the Comedy has been called a prose version of the Summa Theologiae, before. That's what's ticking people off.

And yet, if we want to draw the line there, we have to bear in mind what precedent we are setting. Lord of the Rings had an author who was a devout Catholic, too, and Eru Iluvatar is very specifically supposed to literally be God in Tolkien's vision. People that he corresponded with in real life report him telling them that the Flame Imperishable is the Holy Spirit, and Tolkien himself has writings talking about how Eru will one day incarnate in human form to free Ëa from Morgoth.

Likewise, Narnia is another, very un-nebulous depiction of the Christian God, where Aslan is explicitly Jesus and The Emperor Beyond the Sea is explicitly God the Father.

So, yeah. Good to keep in mind.

Minor detail, I am unsure if Narnia's portrayal is 100% accurate because while you are correct about Aslan and Emperor over the Seas, I am uncertain if Narnia even has a counterpart for Holy Spirit. Which it is quite important to list all three of them to be considered accurate.

 

[Damage3245]

Minor detail, I am unsure if Narnia's portrayal is 100% accurate because while you are correct about Aslan and Emperor over the Seas, I am uncertain if Narnia even has a counterpart for Holy Spirit. Which it is quite important to list all three of them to be considered accurate.

This may be relevant to that point.

 

[Sir_Ovens]

By that same logic, we wouldn't have the restrictions on indexing Stage Personas that we do, since they're all just fictional versions of these real-life people

Jesus Christ doesn't have an army of lawyers ready to sue us for defamation.

 

[SamanPatou]

By that same logic, we wouldn't have the restrictions on indexing Stage Personas that we do, since they're all just fictional versions of these real-life people

It's a false equiparation, and we do that to a certain degree under a notion of fair use. We have accepted WWE wrestlers (with some videogame/comics counterparts) after a long debate, and we host the likes of Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, two adaptations of Bruce Lee and I could very well publish profiles for Michael Jackson and Shaquille O'Neal's self-inserts in their respective videogames.

Once again, we aren't addressing the real thing, just a portrayal/adaptation.

 

[CloverDragon03]

Again, this is a "portrayal" that's dangerously close to the real thing. Show this to anyone who doesn't know about the Divine Comedy and I'm confident they'd mistake this for an actual God profile. The keys are literally The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit. I promise, the desire to index God is not worth it

 

[Damage3245]

If one of the issues is that users may mistakenly take it as a profile for actual Christian God, then what we can do is add further clarifications and information to make it clear that this is not the case.

 

[SamanPatou]

The profile wouldn't even be called God and for safety we could put (The Divine Comedy) next to it. If no one has gotten mad for profiles who bear the literal name of God, Jesus etc., they for sure won't assault us for this.
And still, the "desire to index God" doesn't even work, because you could go much, much farther by utilizing the interpretations from canonized text in real life, let alone that Dante's God isn't a 1:1 portrayal of anything, regardless of how much inspiration it takes.

 

[Armorchompy]

Show this to anyone who doesn't know about the Divine Comedy and I'm confident they'd mistake this for an actual God profile.

The profile title would presumably be "God (Divine Comedy)", and we'd definitely slap a big disclaimer on it, so i'm not sure about that

 

[SamanPatou]

If one of the issues is that users may mistakenly take it as a profile for actual Christian God, then what we can do is add further clarifications and information to make it clear that this is not the case.

I'm pretty sure there's never been the intention to catfish the users in this way and we can ultimately take all the precautions required.

 

[Sir_Ovens]

Again, this is a "portrayal" that's dangerously close to the real thing. Show this to anyone who doesn't know about the Divine Comedy and I'm confident they'd mistake this for an actual God profile. The keys are literally The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit. I promise, the desire to index God is not worth it

Assuming that any written word would come remotely close to the "real thing" is contradictory to the point of religion. It's called faith. You can't tier it because it's not fiction. When you put pen to paper a story of God interacting with fictional characters, you have removed autonomy from him. You have created an entity that is bound by an author. Do you really believe so little of the true Christian God?

Say it with me now,

M E D I A
L I T E R A C Y

 

[CloverDragon03]

The profile title would presumably be "God (Divine Comedy)", and we'd definitely slap a big disclaimer on it, so i'm not sure about that

I think the fact that this needs to be done and that the actual Powers and Stats section does nothing to suggest a fictional interpretation is very telling, as opposed to other "God" profiles that are very clearly fictional even in their justifications and such

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Minor detail, I am unsure if Narnia's portrayal is 100% accurate because while you are correct about Aslan and Emperor over the Seas, I am uncertain if Narnia even has a counterpart for Holy Spirit. Which it is quite important to list all three of them to be considered accurate.

To be clear

---

By the way. I've already covered one perspective, but as for the other:

Maybe the text itself is sacrilege, but then again, almost every fictional depiction of God is

Yeah, but, see: The issue in the opposition's mind is precisely that Dante's portrayal of God is as far from sacrilege as you can possibly get.

 

[Sir_Ovens]

Yeah, but, see: The issue in the opposition's mind is precisely that Dante's portrayal of God is as far from sacrilege as you can possibly get.

But it isn't part of the faith. Nor treated as such. At best it is a tool used to teach the faith, but it is not the faith.