Should We Make Profiles For The Divine Comedy?

[Antvasima]

Also, just a note that I do not at all mind Saman's counterpoints post to my own expressed viewpoints.

As I mentioned earlier, I am ideologically antitotalitarian. He has the right to his views, just as I have the right to mine.

In addition, I am well aware of that extremist twisted forms of faith that is used to justify atrocities and bigotry, and/or to twist God, the ultimate embodiment of all goodness, love, oneness, and light, into a tyrannical sadistic psychopath, to match and justify such mindsets, is extremely bad. What I have a problem with is sweepingly condemning positive genuine faith and hope itself to drown humanity in completely hollow and amoral nihilism and survivalism.

 

[Damage3245]

@Antvasima; you have the right to your views but there's a time and a place. Some of the content on earlier post had no real relevance to this thread no matter how well-intentioned it was.

 

[Antvasima]

@Antvasima; you have the right to your views but there's a time and a place. Some of the content on earlier post had no real relevance to this thread no matter how well-intentioned it was.

Well, I thought that it seemed relevant, as those were the associations that popped up for me, but I may be mistaken. My apologies in that case.

 

[Testarossa002]

Got permission from Ultima

My first interaction with Divine Comedy was when I read one of Dan Brown's books (who himself got a lot of flak from the Christians). I'm not against indexing it, but I feel it's something we'll be better off not doing.

Social media and all affiliated media run, sadly, on sensationalism. As much as media literacy is a problem, the ability to do basic research on anything before commenting on it is something that's rapidly declining.

All it takes is one reddit post or a bad YouTube thumbnail, and our reputation will be in hot water.

The site and its users will likely become a target for christian extremists (let's not kid ourselves. They exist).

2 years ago, a staff member here made a statement that was taken out of context. A YouTube video was made piling on him and the site by extension. The comments section was a mess, and people even made fun of him for it onsite.

I don't think said staff member was negatively affected by the video and its aftermath, but not everyone has that level of mental fortitude against cyberbullying.

This site, for better or worse, is top 2 in terms of battleboarding off popularity, so something like this will eventually make its way out.

I'm aware that there are other similar examples to DC, but this may be a case where we judge it in isolation regardless of our standards and let sleeping dogs lie.

This is my opinion as someone whose job requires him to somewhat predict the reaction of social media folks to a message.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

However, we would draw the line there and say anything that is fictional and substantially different could be indexed regardless of religious sensitivities. As is obviously relevant to this case: this would ban the depiction of God in the Divine Comedy from being indexed due to the fact we almost all agree this profile would be essentially identical to a hypothetical profile of the Christian God. Previous discussion makes me think this would also probably ban Journey to the West, but I don't know the verse well enough at all to say. I feel this is closer to the general consensus value that I have seen in this thread thus far, and I personally like it - it avoids the issue of someone making a profile for a highly-accurate but fictional depiction of a religious figure as a subterfuge for indexing the actual religious figure. But it comes with its own difficulties. It is more ambiguous than the previous suggestion (what qualifies as 'substantially different'?)

This proposed solution is probably the most tenable all-in-all, but as you said, it ought to be sharpened up if we want it to go somewhere.

For instance, both Narnia and Lord of the Rings have the modus operandi of "The Bible happened + This other stuff happened too." In Narnia's case, the "other stuff" is God the Son incarnating as a lion in another universe inhabited by talking animals. In Lord of the Rings' case, the "other stuff" is God creating elves and a whole host of fantasy races that get caught up in their own prehistoric drama outside of human affairs. Are either of those "substantial differences" as compared to what is in the Divine Comedy? All three go out of their way to not actually change the essence of the figure, and moreso just present themselves as narratives depicting other stuff that he did. So it seems that, by definition, they are not substantially distinct from the actual figure.

Testarossa's comment basically brings to mind the points I made yesterday: Like it or not, there does seem to be a difference between the Divine Comedy and something like Lord of the Rings and Narnia, which is why I think boiling down the controversy solely to "Proximity to IRL religion" is probably very a reductive way of looking at things, at the end of the day.

 

[Damage3245]

My first interaction with Divine Comedy was when I read one of Dan Brown's books (who himself got a lot of flak from the Christians). I'm not against indexing it, but I feel it's something we'll be better off not doing.

Social media and all affiliated media run, sadly, on sensationalism. As much as media literacy is a problem, the ability to do basic research on anything before commenting on it is something that's rapidly declining.

All it takes is one reddit post or a bad YouTube thumbnail, and our reputation will be in hot water.

The site and its users will likely become a target for christian extremists (let's not kid ourselves. They exist).

2 years ago, a staff member here made a statement that was taken out of context. A YouTube video was made piling on him and the site by extension. The comments section was a mess, and people even made fun of him for it onsite.

I don't think said staff member was negatively affected by the video and its aftermath, but not everyone has that level of mental fortitude against cyberbullying.

This site, for better or worse, is top 2 in terms of battleboarding off popularity, so something like this will eventually make its way out.

So we shouldn't have a profile on our site because of how negatively some people on complete different sites may react? That seems like a terrible idea to me; just conceding to hypothetical extremists. That's not our problem if sensationalists fail to do their research and decide to stir up controversy.

 

[Sir_Ovens]

In my mind, the easiest and most pragmatic way to do this is simply through the rules we already have: that is, we place the line at "real-world religions". We say you cannot index real-world religions because of religious insensitivity, but you can index any and all fictional depictions of real-world religions regardless of concerns over religious sensitivity. This has the simple advantage of being so readily definable in most cases that it shouldn't cause ambiguity, but I hope I'm not the only one who is discontented with such an amoralistic approach to such a touchy question. Something which is so readily definable is rarely comprehensive for real attitudes, as we've seen in this very thread where many feel indexing an accurate fictional depiction would be just as offensive as indexing the real thing.

I prefer this approach because it makes things black and white. There are clear and understandable rules that require no debate. If it checks all the boxes, it's fine to be on the wiki.

Going back to the cheese analogy, we can't appease everyone. I am of the proponent that religion is as much personal as it is communal. How we choose to express our faith varies between people, and it is not fair to devalue any one person's faith for being different from another's. Hard and fast rules make our stance on the matter clear and deliberate. There is no room for weaseling in what could possibly be offensive when WE define what is offensive.

I understand that this approach may seem blunt and heartless, but I believe that a hobbyist website shouldn't have the capacity to test your faith. What The Divine Comedy means to people varies, but what it is as a product is immutable fact. It is fiction. We index fiction. Round pegs go into round holes.

 

[Testarossa002]

So we shouldn't have a profile on our site because of how negatively some people on complete different sites may react? That seems like a terrible idea to me; just conceding to hypothetical extremists. That's not our problem if sensationalists fail to do their research and decide to stir up controversy.

We do not exist in isolation from the world.
It doesn't make sense to do something here without acknowledging the effects it'll have beyond this site.
Why then, do we restrict making profiles of real people if we do not care about what others think?
A significant part of the WWE verse was nuked because most people felt uncomfortable about spongebob beating logan Paul to a pulp
And no, don't reply with something something something legal. Because we are outrightly against making profiles of religious literatures (Bible, Quran etc)
Nobody is going to sue us if we did it anyway.
Not to mention that we have way more visitors to this site than members. Shouldn't we at least acknowledge the impacts it could have on that?

 

[Qawsedf234]

I prefer this approach because it makes things black and white. There are clear and understandable rules that require no debate. If it checks all the boxes, it's fine to be on the wiki.

Yeah. Even if the profile isn't made it would be a good idea to just make the ruling on IRL religions something iron-clad.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

I prefer this approach because it makes things black and white. There are clear and understandable rules that require no debate. If it checks all the boxes, it's fine to be on the wiki.

No, it forces things to be black and white

I don’t get the mindset at all with the whole it’s fiction so it’s fine argument when we literally have many times, changed something that is fully fiction to appease or be less controversial.

Is it ok to have literal hate speech all because it’s somehow “fiction”?

Also from what I’ve seen around the internet, I’ve seen that Dante himself viewed himself as a prophet, wanted people to take the same approach to his work the same way you do the Bible and tries to make fiction and non fiction connected in some way, idk why that’s never been brought up before in the thread unless they aren’t true

But besides that how would we know if something is fully fictional if they same fiction incorporates something that’s non fiction?

There’s a clear difference in a character meant to represent something similar to IRL, to something that just incorporates a thing from IRL to his “fiction” in my view

 

[Damage3245]

Is it ok to have literal hate speech all because it’s somehow “fiction”?

Who said anything about hate speech?

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

Who said anything about hate speech?

I don’t get the mindset at all with the whole it’s fiction so it’s fine argument

 

[Kachon123]

Who said anything about hate speech?

It's an example.

 

[Damage3245]

It's an example.

Okay, but it seems like a bit of a Straw Man argument; if Sir Ovens post didn't mention anything about hate speech being allowed - responding with "But literal hate speech would be allowed" doesn't tackle the argument. It's just inventing a problem that doesn't exist.

 

[Kachon123]

Okay, but it seems like a bit of a Straw Man argument; if Sir Ovens post didn't mention anything about hate speech being allowed - responding with "But literal hate speech would be allowed" doesn't tackle the argument. It's just inventing a problem that doesn't exist.

His point is that if we can allow profiles that are disrespectful and will offend many people because it's fiction then why can't we allow other offensive content in profiles such as hate speech? Where do we draw the line?

Like people said above, we need to have concrete rules because if the only real argument against the page not being added is due to it being fiction then that opens a very dangerous floodgate.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

Okay, but it seems like a bit of a Straw Man argument; if Sir Ovens post didn't mention anything about hate speech being allowed - responding with "But literal hate speech would be allowed" doesn't tackle the argument. It's just inventing a problem that doesn't exist.

Stop being disingenuous, saying something is fine because it's fiction is the whole argument he supported and others have as well, which I'm not inventing, it's something that is just illogical

In my mind, the easiest and most pragmatic way to do this is simply through the rules we already have: that is, we place the line at "real-world religions". We say you cannot index real-world religions because of religious insensitivity, but you can index any and all fictional depictions of real-world religions regardless of concerns over religious sensitivity.