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.

 

[DarkGrath]

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.