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.

 

[Damage3245]

Is the argument that the depiction of God in Dante's Divine Comedy is now on the same level as hate speech?

I think it's a pretty simple line to draw; we just don't allow hate speech like we already currently don't. There are no floodgates or slippery slopes to be had as far I'm concerned.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

Is the argument that the depiction of God in Dante's Divine Comedy is now on the same level as hate speech?

No... Not at all, the argument that since it's fiction, it's allowed regardless of that same fiction being hate speech is incredibly faulty

 

[Damage3245]

No... Not at all, the argument that since it's fiction, it's allowed regardless of that same fiction being hate speech is incredibly faulty

Okay, but I'm sure that the earlier proposal wouldn't by default erase any of our other existing rules that would prohibit hate speech.

I get being worried about potential issues, but this just doesn't seem like a likely scenario that would come up.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

Okay, but I'm sure that the earlier proposal wouldn't by default erase any of our other existing rules that would prohibit hate speech.

I get being worried about potential issues, but this just doesn't seem like a likely scenario that would come up.

But the current rules are to not index things from religion, how aren't you indexing something that's religious just because that same religion is within a fiction?

That is the problem with the argument that since it's fiction, its fine

Also by way the rules have this statment as well on the wiki

• At the very least, the setting should be entirely fictional in nature, with no true bearing over the real world.

Which from Dante's book, isn't I think

It's not meant to be just entertainment and fictional in the eyes of the creator from what I've seen

 

[Deceived3596]

I got permission from @Damage3245

I will preface my statements by saying I'm not Christian, but I would consider myself a Theist.

I believe a compromise is inevitable, but requires further grounding before a conclusion can be reached. If we're to have a compromise in the first place, we must have in place what is and isn't allowed for situations similar to this one; that is where the difficulty sets in, I believe. We have profiles that do, in one way or another, take attributes explicitly tied with the Abrahamic Religions interpretation of God or other important figures (such as, but not limited to: Oneness, Modality, etc) and extending from that, even use specific wording that's connotatively or without vaguity, connected to these particular interpretations (such as referring to the entity as "Jesus Christ", "Allah", "YHVH" etc, or describing them in similarity with these important figures). These profiles currently exist, unimpeded, as they aren't the actual depictions of those religious figures, but are merely fictional - drawn and written by an author not trying to have their work contain the literal depictions of these religious figures.

Dante's Divine Comedy is explicitly separate from these depictions as explained extensively by other users; so we can't assume it falls under our current requirements or not as it's substantively different and would require a seperate set of or an addendum to our current requirements. Either way, we now need to form a set of conditions that can address issues like these, and I believe the simplest way is two-fold.

Either we only allow fictional depictions of mortal beings from these religious texts; allowing for freedom in indexing most of the fiction in question without trampling on the emotions and faith of our more religious members, at least to a degree that isn't completely disrespectful, or we completely disallow characters that are explicitly fictional depictions of religious icons with extremely similar, boarding on exact, characteristics as their biblical counterparts. This would surely safeguard the emotions and faith of our members, but will limit the freedom of expression on our platform and can be construed as theological pressure on our more Atheistic members.

Because of the situation at hand, this will negatively and positively impact our members simultaneously depending on their personal beliefs. Ultimately, we have to make the judgement call that will negatively affect the least amount of people, both numerically and personally (as you have members like @KingTempest, an important member for multiple verses and a Mod, declaring he will leave the site if this thread does in fact go through without proper limitations being set in place)

Personally, I believe the secondary option is the easiest to accomplish, both in terms of workload and mental pressure received, but ultimately might not be the best for our members and their ability to express themselves on the wiki.

It's ultimately up to the people in power, so I'll allow them to ruminate on these propositions and come up with a conclusion most befitting the situation at hand.

 

[Antvasima]

I think there is another broader approach here which may be more agreeable, which is that we should draw the line at "profiles which are insubstantially different from real-world religions". That is to say, you cannot index real-world religions, or fictional depictions of real-world religions which would be nearly identical in indexing to a hypothetical real-world religion profile. 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'?), and perhaps more importantly, it would likely sometimes require us to debate over what hypothetical religion profiles would look like to define what does and doesn't fit the criteria. I don't think this is as much of an issue as some people have argued it to be - to me, I think it would usually be obvious if a fictional depiction would be overly reflective of the real world religion by seeing if it, say, directly quotes the religious texts or is essentially a direct retelling of the religious story, and that it therefore shouldn't require discussion more controversial than the alternative of allowing such profiles to be indexed. But it is still such an obviously questionable line of inquiry that I feel it should be given due consideration.

Thank you greatly for your in my mind very sensible analysis, DarkGrath. I also think that your outlined second (compromise) solution seems like the most workable for our purposes.

I still think that DarkGrath's second solution seems like the most balanced approach here.

 

[Damage3245]

It doesn't seem like much of a compromise to me as it would completely forbid the profile for Dante's Divine Comedy as opposed to a solution where we allow the profile but remove elements from it which would cause offense.

 

[Phoenks]

It doesn't seem like much of a compromise to me as it would completely forbid the profile for Dante's Divine Comedy as opposed to a solution where we allow the profile but remove elements from it which would cause offense.

I don't think it is even possible to do that. The entire character is tied to being God, like, fundamentally. If you removed that aspect then you wouldn't even be properly indexing the character at that point. Honestly, I don't even think you'd have anything left to index.

 

[GrathOfLux]

It doesn't seem like much of a compromise to me as it would completely forbid the profile for Dante's Divine Comedy as opposed to a solution where we allow the profile but remove elements from it which would cause offense.

What I think is simply that it's the closest thing we have to a compromise solution. Under such a rule, I would argue we'd not be very restrictive on what profiles could be made (that is, we wouldn't be ruling out a whole lot), while still ultimately capturing the things that may be more 'obviously' insensitive to followers of religions on our site.

To be clear on this - I recognise this is not a compromise for this individual case. I don't think there is a meaningful 'half-way' solution to the question of the thread; we either allow the profile or we don't, one side gets their way or the other side gets their way. I refer to it as a compromise solution as above in regard to the broader question of profiles with religious elements, and where we draw the line on them. That question has a lot more room for variability, and for more or less extreme approaches. I suggested that the second approach I mentioned in my comment is a compromise between the split values of this thread (the freedom of indexers to make their profiles, versus, the sensitivity of religious topics) because it rules out the most obviously sensitive matters while allowing freedom on all others.

 

[Damage3245]

Thanks for clarifying DarkGrath.


Personally I don't think it's a satisfactory outcome; assigning a higher priority to religious individuals to have the power to restrict what profiles anyone else can make on the site due to fictional characters too closely resembling their God.

It seems to me that the obvious solution is that the religiously sensitive individuals simply don't look at or work on profiles that cross the line of their personal beliefs. If someone makes a profile for a fictional character who shares some similarities with a god from the "real world", then what business is it of someone else? How are they negatively impacted by its mere existence? Nobody's shoving it in their face, or restricting their freedoms or beliefs. Nobody's forcing them to work on something that makes them uncomfortable.

If another person came forward and said they were personally offended of Morgan Freeman's depiction of God in Bruce Almighty, and claimed it was blasphemous and heretical, and they didn't think it should be allowed.... Are we now going to say they don't have a right to be offended and it doesn't matter how uncomfortable they are? To me, the situations are identical. It doesn't matter how much more similar Dante's God is compared to Morgan Freeman's God. Both are fictional.

If someone on here is getting offended by indexing a fictional character, then that's their problem. Don't make it our problem.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

To reiterate:

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.

People might say "Well, Narnia and Lord of the Rings add a lot of fictional fluff ontop." Yeah, so does the Divine Comedy. I don't believe Dante Alighieri actually went on a trek through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven before attaining the infinite bliss of union with God, back in the 14th Century. There's obviously also how the cosmology of the poem's setting is a layered geocentric cosmos in which each celestial body outside the Earth is a sphere of Heaven. Those are all incidental changes that don't actually change the substance of the figure of God, in any way. Same with God incarnating as a lion in another universe or God creating elves and Middle Earth.

The thing that does set the Comedy apart from other works, though, is probably that this setting is not actually intended to be fictional. The events are, certainly, but they're basically framed as things happening to real people in what, to Dante's mind, was a reproduction of the real world, to the extent that Dante writes it in first person, and references things that happened to him in real life. The characters of the poem are all either real people or religious figures, even.

 

[FinePoint]

I've only vaguely skimmed this thread, since it's kind of long- but based on the op:

I think it's perfectly fine to index fiction even if its cosmology happens to be similar to real religions.

Basing one's cosmology off an existing religion is an immensely popular and common trope, and so I think to bar anything which is similar would ultimately destroy half of fiction from the site.

 

[Milly_Rocking_Bandit]

Well, my impression of a large part of popular Japanese "entertainment" authors, including, but far from limited to, those of "Berserk", "One-Punch Man", "Bleach", "Undead Unluck", "Shin Megami Tensei", "Final Fantasy XIII", and "Record of Ragnarok", as well as those of many transgressive western verses such as "Family Guy", "Preacher", "God is dead", "Spawn", "Supernatural", et cetera, is that they have an extremely obsessive, onesided, and recurrently extremely malicious and dishonest pure hatred of any forms of faith whatsoever, especially Christianity,

I got permission from Dark Grath to comment.

I’ll preface by stating: I am an atheist, but I’ll attempt to remove any bias I have over this topic and my own beliefs towards religion.

I believe this comment, in essence, is the core of the problem here. Your stance is based off of an absurd hasty generalization a random smorgasbord of eastern fiction, many of which intentionally, and by law, explicitly claims any and all references to living, dead, or any events as purely coincidence, but the act of merely depicting Christianity in any manner that isn’t entirely positive is “extremely malicious”, and “a hatred of any forms of faith”, and the possibility of offending users is enough to dismiss a profile being made. The problem with this is that it’s literally just an appeal to emotion, the entire argument against indexing it is.

When exactly does the line become drawn when it comes to indexing anything with any form of relativity to religion and myths? What determines what is “more akin” to the actual faith than not? Since it was mentioned so frequently, Shin Megami Tensei’s depiction of YHVH is described as the One True God of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, called the Tetragrammaton on occasion, yet is a multiversal tyrant in certain games. Far from an accurate historical interpretation, and yet, still meant to be God all the same, should that profile be removed?

All of this discussion is focused on Christianity (as that is the topic, but I ask please walk with me here), why has this never been suggested for anyone who subscribes to other myths? There’s a Krishna from a tv show appealing for tier 0, which is essentially as close to “God” as you can get by definition, and yet, despite it being from a explicitly fictional verse (again, literally a tv show), no one has suggested, even much less asked if the profile should be made. I’ve never seen anyone denounce profiles from Final Fantasy’s depiction of Odin, the Nordic god. I’ve never seen anyone reject Fate’s incarnation of Zeus, and so on, so forth. Why is there an emphasis on only Christianity? This argument just seems to be an inevitable track down a slippery slope, because it forces us to asks do we remove religious based profiles off their proximity to accuracy or inaccuracy, and what’s the threshold before deletion? Which faith is more “real” than the others? I’ve never seen anyone who praises Zeus before, but Pagan people do exist, do we simply say **** them, “God” is more important? What even makes indexing “God” offensive to begin with?

I understand from the pages that I’ve read that several mods will be willing to depart should this profile be added, but I fear there isn’t much that can be done, if that’s the case. Because, at least to me, whether the Divine Comedy is added or not is ultimately irrelevant, but what has happened is an opening of Pandora’s Box: one that forces the community to decide if religious insensitivity should actually be enough to discredit profiles from being made, that’ll affect a massive set of verses, if people actually care about being consistent about it.

 

[Antvasima]

Just a note that I am something akin to a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu nowadays, not a Christian, and I was making general observations in your quoted text, not making an argument for banning all negative fictional verse interpretations of God from currently prominent active religions, whether the name used for God is Parabrahman/Parashiva, Nirvana, Allah, YHWH, or Jehova.

However, as I stated elsewhere:

"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. "

That is my core issue, both regarding certain types of religious people and anti-religious people.

Regardless, as I also stated elsewhere, I am ideologically antitotalitarian, so I do not want to go too far in terms of censorship, but I also need to consider the overall wellbeing of our site and community as a whole, which is why I currently think that DarkGrath suggested compromise solution seems like the most balanced available approach here. However, I am not extremely committed in that regard if somebody else comes up with a seemingly better solution.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

It seems to me that the obvious solution is that the religiously sensitive individuals simply don't look at or work on profiles that cross the line of their personal beliefs. If someone makes a profile for a fictional character who shares some similarities with a god from the "real world", then what business is it of someone else? How are they negatively impacted by its mere existence? Nobody's shoving it in their face, or restricting their freedoms or beliefs. Nobody's forcing them to work on something that makes them uncomfortable.

So you want to index basically the God from the Bible from our religion by getting it from "fiction", which is no doubt disrespectful by powerscaling and adding it to a battle wiki. To then say to the Christians that feel disrespected by it that they should just ignore it and act like it's fine would be like saying to them to go against their religion. As Christians like myself, ignoring something you know is bad and acting as if it were fine would be the same as if you were doing it yourself

If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.

I personally don't see in any way how this would be welcoming to Christians or even any other if this is the mindset of how we are going to do things. I, as a Christian, simply won't stay and tolerate in a place that's so fine with allowing the disrespect of my religion

This is also clearly way different from the other verses of our "god" people have brought up in the thread, which are fiction in nature as opposed to putting real world religion in ones fiction, which shouldn't be fine as it's no different to indexing real world religions.

 

[KingTempest]

Thanks for clarifying DarkGrath.


Personally I don't think it's a satisfactory outcome; assigning a higher priority to religious individuals to have the power to restrict what profiles anyone else can make on the site due to fictional characters too closely resembling their God.

It seems to me that the obvious solution is that the religiously sensitive individuals simply don't look at or work on profiles that cross the line of their personal beliefs. If someone makes a profile for a fictional character who shares some similarities with a god from the "real world", then what business is it of someone else? How are they negatively impacted by its mere existence? Nobody's shoving it in their face, or restricting their freedoms or beliefs. Nobody's forcing them to work on something that makes them uncomfortable.

If another person came forward and said they were personally offended of Morgan Freeman's depiction of God in Bruce Almighty, and claimed it was blasphemous and heretical, and they didn't think it should be allowed.... Are we now going to say they don't have a right to be offended and it doesn't matter how uncomfortable they are? To me, the situations are identical. It doesn't matter how much more similar Dante's God is compared to Morgan Freeman's God. Both are fictional.

If someone on here is getting offended by indexing a fictional character, then that's their problem. Don't make it our problem.

Making a character similar to someone in real life ≠ Making a character who is literally just the person in real life

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention this earlier, but: We actually have avoided making a profile for SCP-5004, before, specifically on the grounds that it is quite literally just Donald Trump with no alterations whatsoever beyond the addition of supernatural abilities. (Of course, SCP is long gone, but the point still stands)

That sounds like a useful enough piece of precedent. If we don't treat religious figures similarly, then it certainly does feel like we are acting as if religious figures are in a lower order than more "palpable" IRL persons. Yet, I don't think I need to explain that, generally speaking, people tend to see God as more important than Donald Trump. And I'm not sure that the "Jesus Christ doesn't have an army of lawyers ready to sue us" quip is that effective here, given the aforementioned reasons for us refraining from making that profile.

This is also clearly way different from the other verses of our "god" people have brought up in the thread, which are fiction in nature as opposed to putting real world religion in ones fiction, which shouldn't be fine as it's no different to indexing real world religions.

That's a step in the right direction for this discussion. The matter, really, is ascertaining what exactly is it that makes this a case of "putting real world religion in one's fiction" and those, not.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

That's a step in the right direction for this discussion. The matter, really, is ascertaining what exactly is it that makes this a case of "putting real world religion in one's fiction" and those, not.

Well this might seem to be a case by case thing to know if its a "putting real world religion in one's fiction"

But the accuracy and intention from the creator/setting would be the starting foundation in knowing if the fiction does/is meant to include the real world religion in their setting

Similar way we do with figuring out Stage Personas, we do with figuring out if the setting does put said religion into their settings.

That makes it so that it won't affect fictions that only take certain inspiration or ideas from religions instead of straight up adding something from religion to their fiction, this would be my recommendation for a safe way if doing it

 

[Antvasima]

Well this might seem to be a case by case thing to know if its a "putting real world religion in one's fiction"

But the accuracy and intention from the creator/setting would be the starting foundation in knowing if the fiction does/is meant to include the real world religion in their setting

Similar way we do with figuring out Stage Personas, we do with figuring out if the setting does put said religion into their settings.

That makes it so that it won't affect fictions that only take certain inspiration or ideas from religions instead of straight up adding something from religion to their fiction, this would be my recommendation for a safe way if doing

I think that this seems reasonable.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

That makes it so that it won't affect fictions that only take certain inspiration or ideas from religions instead of straight up adding something from religion to their fiction, this would be my recommendation for a safe way if doing it

Where exactly is the line between "Take ideas from religions" and "Adding something from religion in their fiction"? Those two do seem to be effectively the same thing.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

Where exactly is the line between "Take ideas from religions" and "Adding something from religion" in their fiction? Those two do seem to be effectively the same thing.

I don't personally think they are the same thing? Plus, we'd know that by knowing the accuracy and intention from said setting the same way we do with stage personas.

But for example, taking an idea from religion means creating something else based on real life religion, like the Lord of the Rings god, while "Adding something from religion" is simply putting something in their fiction with no intention of being differential to real life religions or by visual differences to real life religions

It's something that would need to be a case by case thing for a reason, in a similar way we do stage personas

 

[Ultima_Reality]

I don't personally think they are the same thing? Plus we'd know that by knowing the accuracy and intention from said setting the same way we do with stage personas

But for example, taking an idea from religion means creating something else based on real life religion, like the Lord Of the Rings god, while "Adding something from religion" is simply putting something in their fiction with no differences to the real life religions

But you still haven't really drawn a defined criterion dividing the aforementioned two things. For example, Eru from Lord of the Rings is not just "based on" the Christian God. He simply is the Christian God, and Lord of the Rings' setting, as said above, works on the basis of "The Bible happened + This other stuff happened too." He is less detailed of a transposition, sure, but a transposition, all the same.

And I mean: There are verses that lift concepts wholesale from religion and theology out there on the wiki, already. Sometimes as very central to their cosmologies, even. I actually am of a mind with FinePoint here, in pointing out that what you seem to be suggesting would destroy quite a lot of verses. Including modern works that were never intended to have the same spiritual gravitas that Dante intended for the Comedy.

I get that it can be a case-by-case thing, but we still need a rough outline of what to do, before going case-by-case.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

Eru from Lord of the Rings is not just "based on" the Christian God. He simply is the Christian God, and Lord of the Rings' setting, as said above, works on the basis of "The Bible happened + This other stuff happened too."

How?

Eru is the God of Lord of the Rings, who created all the Ainur with his thoughts and taught them music. Together, they sung a Song of the Ainur, but the first harmony was destroyed by Melkor. Eru introduced a second harmony, with Manwë, brother of Melkor, as the leading role, however Melkor destroyed this too. Eru finally introduced a third harmony, seemingly just a ripple of music, but that could not be destroyed by Melkor. For a time there was a war of music, but then Eru put an end to it. He showed all the Ainur a vision of Eä, bringing it into being by declaring "Eä!" Many of the Ainur went into Eä after this, but not all.

Where in this is the Christian God? There are clear visual differences everywhere..

I get that it can be a case-by-case thing, but we still need a rough outline of what to do, before going case-by-case.

The rough outline can be based on these two reasonings: accuracy and intention.

When I say intention, for example, Dante wanted to add his Christian religious views of God from the Bible into his story from what I've seen on the internet, and it has the visual accuracy with barely any differences that would suggest that it is something else that's not from the religion in real life.

Unless I'm missing something else, this would ensure us if it's putting real world religion in one's fiction or not

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Where in this is the Christian God?

Eru is God. The Ainur are the angels. Melkor is Lucifer. And as mentioned prior, the Holy Trinity is generally acknowledged as existent in-verse (The Flame Imperishable, which resides in Eru as that which ensouls and enlivens beings, is explicitly the Holy Spirit. Later writings mention that Eru will one day incarnate in human form, too). It's supposed to be Tolkien's own Catholic faith seen through the lens of a prehistoric mythic civilization, without making the conventional view of the figures nonexistent in-verse (Since the modern times exist in Tolkien's Legendarium, too)

The rough outline can be based on these two reasonings: accuracy and intention.

When I say intention, for example, Dante wanted to add his Christian religious views of God from the Bible into his story from what I've seen on the internet, and it has the visual accuracy with barely any differences that would suggest that it is something else that's not from the religion in real life.

Unless I'm missing something else, this would ensure us if it's putting real world religion in one's fiction or not

Yeah, that is precisely what I am concerned with, since, as said prior, this has the potential to mutilate quite a bit of verses if applied. Furthermore, there is also the question of exactly which part we don't want the verse to be "accurate" to. Would a verse acknowledging God as the Holy Trinity mean its "God" character is now disqualified from being indexable, for instance? What aspect of the IRL figure is a verse not allowed to cover without getting the axe?

Of course, given the primary concern here is "It's the same thing as tiering the actual religion!", I'll rip off the band-aid and cut down to the logical conclusion of that line of thinking: What we wouldn't want the verse to be accurate to is the metaphysics underpinning the tier of the God character. This leaves us with an interesting scenario: Religion and theology are linked to the metaphysics, but the metaphysics themselves are wholly separable from religion and theology, which means that those same attributes that make the fictional "God" a certain tier can also be found in characters that have little to do with actual religion.

An example that I often like to use is probably the following: It is affirmed by any classical theist that God is above space, and furthermore that God is above time. These are the attributes of Immensity and Eternity. Obviously, though, in fiction you will find a great deal of characters who are above space and time. Are we to just, refuse to tier these characters, then? Under the accusation that, when we do so, we are technically tiering an attribute of God.

An objection that may be raised is "These attributes are fine to be tiered when they're attached to characters who don't correspond to any particular religious figure." Yet the cries of controversy largely boil down to "This will upset people," as Grath pointed out up there. So even if the character is not "Religious figure + Metaphysical attribute," but instead is "Wholly fictional being + Metaphysical attribute," it could still be called problematic, insofar as people can feasibly just make the connection in their heads and complain anyway.

So, as far as I see, this whole line of thinking leads to a pretty slippery slope where we just... refuse to tier or index any metaphysical thing whatsoever, because all metaphysics has been incorporated into some religion, in some way, shape or form. And frankly this is just an utter mutilation of the wiki.

And when I say "refuse to tier," I don't actually mean "Refuse to tier it highly," mind you, but refusing to even index it in the first place, since "Well, let's tier it differently" would just lead to arguably much worse scenarios. For instance, in the old Tiering System that recently got replaced, Dante's God would have been... Low 1-C, which manages to be objectively even more offensive than the sandbox that people are already finding disrespectful.