Should We Make Profiles For The Divine Comedy?

[Antvasima]

I think that Ultima makes very good points here.

So what kind of rule-wording would you suggest as a solution to ensure the greatest stability for our community as a whole, preferably including by not overly offending religious people, and avoiding that valuable staff members quit in protest?

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

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)

All of which from what I've seen behave and are meant to behave completely different to the ones in the Bible still, via not sharing the same powers, names and more...

For instance, in the old Tiering System that recently got replaced, Dante's God would have been... Low 1-C, which manages to be even more offensive than the sandbox that people are already finding disrespectful.

The difference in tiers in the end doesn't matter, the indexing of it does, since it has nothing that would differentiate from the one in Christianity, and we are trying to powerscale it

Even if the tiering somehow was: As strong as the biblical god, it would still be disrespectful, as that is not the main problem but the allowance of it existing in a ranking based and battle based system

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.

I think you might be overcomplicating things for the most part here and adding very small exception with low chance of it being problematic/disrespectful in my view

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.

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.

We simply aren't tiering an attribute of God though? as we aren't capable of such, those "abilities" are something the wiki has created via their own understanding and overall agreement between each other to how we would view said ability across fictional verses

This isn't something that would disrespect anything religious besides science and or our brains I think


Overall tho... I don't think I fully understand your post, idk if it is a language thing or mindset or me just being too tired currently

 

[Damage3245]

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

To clarify, I don't want to index it at all. I've no interest in Dante's Divine Comedy and will likely never work on profiles for it.

But on principle I believe that other people should have the freedom to do it if they wish.

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.

A mindset of "If I don't stop this disrespectful thing from happening then it's as bad as if I'm doing the disrespecting" is not acceptable to me. Using religion to justify that opens a door to where anyone can use their personal beliefs to claim that any profile should be removed from the wiki because its existence is sinful to them.

Religion - any religion - is not immune from being disrespected. Ideas, beliefs and ideology are not protected from that. Individuals? Of course. I don't want any individual on here to be insulted or attacked over their faith.

But indexing a fictional character is not that. I don't get how some people can't see that see that a profile existing is not oppressing them, but removing/banning a profile is actually oppressing others because you're restricting what others can do. Nobody is being restricted by the profile simply existing.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

A mindset of "If I don't stop this disrespectful thing from happening then it's as bad as if I'm doing the disrespecting" is not acceptable to me. Using religion to justify that opens a door to where anyone can use their personal beliefs to claim that any profile should be removed from the wiki because its existence is sinful to them.

the existence is disrespectful to them, them viewing it as disrespectful yet still continuing to ignore said bad thing is the thing that's sinful... which is why you saying to just ignore it isn't a thing a Christian can do unless they go against their religion and also isn't something a person would do unless they tolerate the disrespect of what you are doing or about to do

Religion - any religion - is not immune from being disrespected. Ideas, beliefs and ideology are not protected from that. Individuals? Of course. I don't want any individual on here to be insulted or attacked over their faith.

Sure, but then you can't act surprised when the individuals themselves also feel disrespected/attacked when attacking/disrespecting their religion

But indexing a fictional character is not that. I don't get how some people can't see that see that a profile existing is not oppressing them, but removing/banning a profile is actually oppressing others because you're restricting what others can do. Nobody is being restricted by the profile simply existing.

By allowing the indexing of something that's basically the god from the Bible is showing disrespect to the religion which is disrespect to the ones connected to said religion

If a site allowed the indexing of one of your family members to be powerscaled since they somehow were placed inside of a fiction and you felt disrespected by that and then told you to ignore it since it's fiction, would be completely unreasonable in my view

You also are assuming it's a fully fictional character whenever it's not

 

[KingTempest]

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.

Fire Force has a character with a virgin birth who is supposed to be the savior of the planet directly modeled after Jesus. Take ideas from religions.
Riordanverse literally has the gods of myths coexisting in his own world

 

[SamanPatou]

Tbf I see a lot of hypocrisy and bias towards christianity, we host a number of profiles that would be utterly disrepectful and have caused such turmoils in real life on the publish sphere. The aforementioned Krishna profile that me and Milly have mentioned comes from a serial that for all intentions and purposes is a very direct adaptation of religious texts and stories, which we allow here in a contest where the entity can be argued to be duking out against others in a fashion that would indeed be extremely offensive. Having such profile for Krishna isn't different from, idk, DreamWorks's biblical cycle, yet I bet everyone would whip out pitchs and forks if tomorrow I were to publish profiles for Jesus, David, Moses etc...
We have a dozen+ pages utilizing the tetragrammaton, whose use in judaism is an extremely sensible topic and matter, and yet we hurl it around with extreme liberty and carelessness, even mingling in with other topics and things.
A number of our high tier profiles straight up refer to those entities as the exact god from the abramitic religions, leaving literally zero room for interpretation.
We have other figures from faiths, creeds and religions whose depiction of use for combat would be extremely offensive and yet we don't care.
Here are some first-google-search results for the controversies caused by SMITE and RoR, you have no idea how blasphemous it is to represent Ganesh and Shiva in such fashions.

If we go full respectful, then we have to acklowedge the moral damage we are implicitly causing even with just the most notable examples, and only because people don't voice it over a thread, it doesn't mean we aren't being offensive in their regards, otherwise we are only a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites.

 

[Antvasima]

I obviously agree about that if we are going to attempt to not cause extreme offence to major current faiths, Christianity alone should not receive special treatment.

 

[Damage3245]

A number of our high tier profiles straight up refer to those entities as the exact god from the abramitic religions, leaving literally zero room for interpretation.

Yeah. It's hard to imagine that the Supernatural profiles would be completely okay.

 

[SamanPatou]

I'm afraid that treading down this path would cause more problems than else, because why stopping at religious respect? What about all our profiles for characters that racial and caricatural stereotypes? Bearing features you don't see anymore in media for the heightened sensitivity of the current times. What about the most blatant example of political profiles that intertwine with other topics, like Hitler or various nazi characters, which we arguably glorify?
The rysk of this having a snowball effect is very high and whatever we do that strays too much from neutrality will always put us at one or another extremity of the scale.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

Tbf I see a lot of hypocrisy and bias towards christianity, we host a number of profiles that would be utterly disrepectful and have caused such turmoils in real life on the publish sphere.
We have other figures from faiths, creeds and religions whose depiction of use for combat would be extremely offensive and yet we don't care.
Here are some first-google-search results for the controversies caused by SMITE and RoR, you have no idea how blasphemous it is to represent Ganesh and Shiva in such fashions.

If we go full respectful, then we have to acklowedge the moral damage we are implicitly causing even with just the most notable examples, and only because people don't voice it over a thread, it doesn't mean we aren't being offensive in their regards, otherwise we are only a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites.

Yes... The same thing it is done with Christianity as well in the wiki, those are in nature very disrespectful to the religion but not something I can get mad at/blame the wiki for

It's becomes very different when you allow the real religion to be indexed in my view as then it's only the wiki that can be blamed for trying to index the real thing

Otherwise idk for those specific profile of what we should do... Either just blame the makers and say it's fine or we do something against it which I don't know how

 

[Antvasima]

I'm afraid that treading down this path would cause more problems than else, because why stopping at religious respect? What about all our profiles for characters that racial and caricatural stereotypes? Bearing features you don't see anymore in media for the heightened sensitivity of the current times. What about the most blatant example of political profiles that intertwine with other topics, like Hitler or various nazi characters, which we arguably glorify?
The rysk of this having a snowball effect is very high and whatever we do that strays too much from neutrality will always put us at one or another extremity of the scale.

That is a very good point, but we do not want religious members, especially staff members, quitting in protest either, and they have not seemed to react nearly as strongly regarding, for example, either Jesus from American Gods, Chuck from Supernatural, Shiva from Record of Ragnarok or SMITE, Bhunivelze from Final Fantasy XIII, Yhwach from Bleach, or YHVH from Shin Megami Tensei, so I have been hoping to find a balanced solution that makes them sufficiently satisfied without butchering our wiki with out of control censorship.

 

[KingTempest]

Tbf I see a lot of hypocrisy and bias towards christianity, we host a number of profiles that would be utterly disrepectful and have caused such turmoils in real life on the publish sphere. The aforementioned Krishna profile that me and Milly have mentioned comes from a serial that for all intentions and purposes is a very direct adaptation of religious texts and stories, which we allow here in a contest where the entity can be argued to be duking out against others in a fashion that would indeed be extremely offensive. Having such profile for Krishna isn't different from, idk, DreamWorks's biblical cycle, yet I bet everyone would whip out pitchs and forks if tomorrow I were to publish profiles for Jesus, David, Moses etc...
We have a dozen+ pages utilizing the tetragrammaton, whose use in judaism is an extremely sensible topic and matter, and yet we hurl it around with extreme liberty and carelessness, even mingling in with other topics and things.
A number of our high tier profiles straight up refer to those entities as the exact god from the abramitic religions, leaving literally zero room for interpretation.
We have other figures from faiths, creeds and religions whose depiction of use for combat would be extremely offensive and yet we don't care.
Here are some first-google-search results for the controversies caused by SMITE and RoR, you have no idea how blasphemous it is to represent Ganesh and Shiva in such fashions.

If we go full respectful, then we have to acklowedge the moral damage we are implicitly causing even with just the most notable examples, and only because people don't voice it over a thread, it doesn't mean we aren't being offensive in their regards, otherwise we are only a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites.

Is your point genuinely just "why does this stretch only to Christianity"?

 

[Ultima_Reality]

All of which from what I've seen behave and are meant to behave completely different to the ones in the Bible still, via not sharing the same powers, names and more...

The only "differences" are completely incidental ones, as said. Really just "God also did this, btw." Not very different from the Comedy at all, in that regard.

The difference in tiers in the end doesn't matter, the indexing of it does, since it has nothing that would differentiate from the one in Christianity, and we are trying to powerscale it

Even if the tiering somehow was: As strong as the biblical god, it would still be disrespectful, as that is not the main problem but the allowance of it existing in a ranking based and battle based system

You're missing the point. The crux of the matter is precisely "By that metric, it's disrespectful no matter how you treat it. And so the only way to avoid the issue would be to not index it at all. And yet, applying this logic consistently would result in us refusing to index all sorts of things that otherwise would be perfectly indexable, due to tangent association with religion and theology."

So, tell me:

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?

This is the centerpoint of this conversation.

Fire Force has a character with a virgin birth who is supposed to be the savior of the planet directly modeled after Jesus. Take ideas from religions.
Riordanverse literally has the gods of myths coexisting in his own world

This suggestion cannot be correct, because to apply it would effectively be to delete Riordanverse off the wiki, and any work that features mythical and religious figures in it (Since the only permissible things would be characters that are inspired by religious figures but aren't meant to be the figures themselves). Yet, we are not doing that and the Comedy is demonstrably distinct from such cases.

 

[Qawsedf234]

But on principle I believe that other people should have the freedom to do it if they wish.

More or less my view.

To be honest I don't really see anything constructive going on anymore since its going in circles. It may be better to just count the votes, close the thread and opening another staff thread about what is actually allowable for religion based profiling over the current system.

 

[FinePoint]

I don't really understand the perspective that we can't index them because their existence is disrespectful.

They already do exist. They are published works.
Us indexing them or not does not change the fact that they were published and exist.

I don't think us ignoring their existence actually makes up in any way for them having been written in the first place.
Teaching people that something exists is not the same as endorsing it, and in general I heavily oppose censorship like that.

 

[MonkeyOfLife]

I don't really understand the perspective that we can't index them because their existence is disrespectful.

They already do exist. They are published works.
Us indexing them or not does not change the fact that they were published and exist.

I don't think us ignoring their existence actually makes up in any way for them having been written in the first place.
Teaching people that something exists is not the same as endorsing it, and in general I heavily oppose censorship like that.

The existence of the publish work is not disrespectful from what I know in the case of Divine comedy. The disrespect only comes from the wiki by allowing it to be indexed

You are not just teaching people that it exists, you are allowing the existence of a religion to be in a place that’s meant for battles and powerscaling, saying it’s just censorship is just disingenuous and would be bias against religion or Christianity as we already do the same for real life people in the wiki

 

[Antvasima]

@Ultima_Reality

Should we have a vote about DarkGrath's suggested three alternatives, or do you have any better solutions in mind here?

 

[Ultima_Reality]

@Ultima_Reality

Should we have a vote about DarkGrath's suggested three alternatives, or do you have any better solutions in mind here?

I've requested Grath to look over my latest points, earlier. Would like to know what she has to say about what I brought up, before anything else.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. No problem. DarkGrath is also free to write up revised suggested solutions if she wishes.