The Great Uberslacker

 

So why would adding mystics to your culture be suicide?
 

1) is the magic really magic, or is it scientifically plausible occurances attributed to a "magic" source?

2) is it really necessary? it will totally change your story. even if it is minor what these mystics can do, your readers don't know that. whose to say you couldn't throw something else in later? magic only works for me if it's integral. otherwise it just seems like cheating.

jmtc

TTFN & lol

Cosmi
 

The Great Uberslacker
 

Although, I'd like to see someone do the exact opposite and make a world for of all sorts of bizzare shit---kinda like Carol's Wonderland.

JOHN!
 

I've been toying with writing about a post nuclear-war/biological-terror sort of world. The idea I've been playing with is that with something like only .001% of the world's population alive and well, those that remain would have no industrial base to draw on in ordre to repair this world that's falling apart around them. While there might be some exceptions, mainly centered around Universities, where the (theoretically) smarter people would be able to restore SOME technology on a LIMITED basis, the general remaining population would revert to something similar to pioneer life.

In the meantime, a pocket of survivors (perhaps with some inherent genetic predisposition which allowed them to survive . . . still toying with that.) begin a more 'metaphysical' research. (for lack of a better term. Eventually, they found the Academy of Metaphysical Sciences, which basically leads to 'magic' in a very scientific way.

The theory of it all revolves around the idea of coversion of energy to/from different forms, simply by act of will. It's a bit more complicated than that, and definitely more thoroughly rationalized. (with even a bit of philosophical pondering thrown in.) For example. What if you could convert the kinetic energy of a moving car into raw heat . . . we do that all the time with brakes, but what if you could just near-instantaneously channel that energy into the ground. Now think speeding bullets.

Okay, so we're starting to sound a bit like the Matrix here, I realize that. I want to avoid that, but at the same time, what if somebody developed the mental discipline/perception to be able to DEFLECT bullets or beams of light at will. Hmm . . . now there's a thought. Lots of cool stuff you could come up with.

So . . . thoughts?
 

In a larger sense, it needs to be understood that "magic" simply refers to any technology that is not well understood in its underlying theory and mechanics by people outside of some elite (note that this includes all cases where the practicing elite themselves do not understand the underlying theory well).

In many primitive cultures, the shaman is called a medecine man (or woman) because herb lore is easily learned but less easy to understand, and therefore usually is treated as a sort of magic (we are not so far from our primitive ancestors when it comes to medicine, judging by the state of debate over our health care system). Alchemy was not different in many of its methods from early chemistry, but rested on a fundamentally flawed theory of the physical world it dealt with.

I would suggest that for the Eastern Empire in Uber's story, gunpowder be treated as a form of magic (it was not until the gunpowder formula had ceased to be a closely held secret in China that it migrated West, so we tend to forget that it was seen as magic for centuries). Indeed, many Chinese inventions were seen as magic for centuries, and many have never been fully explicated by science to this day. The martial arts disciplines that allowed Chinese heroes of legend to perform such feats as carving a path through an army of ten thousand, catching a dozen enemy arrows in clenched teeth while shooting all the opposing officers fatally, or breaking an enemy sword with the blow from the index finger, were all considered somewhat magical.

My advice to Falken would be to make the explaination of his magic as fantastic as he likes, but not to move too far outside the constraints of known (if sometimes unexplained) phenomena. There really are people that have developed acupuncture skills to the point of being able to open the human body and treat internal illness with their bare hands (admittedly, this is much easier and more lucrative to fake, and as far as I know all such practitioners in the civilized world are just that, fakes, but what they fake is a real skill that has been documented, but not explained). There are martial arts practitioners that can lie down in flames and not be burned, recover from a stab wound with no apparent ill effect, anticipate an attack with such perfection as to prevent its initiation, and so forth. People have even been known to die and then revive, though I've never heard of this being a formal discipline.

I would avoid going the road of using a simple act of will to effect direct physical events, not because I believe this to be impossible per se (though nothing in my religion requires me to believe that even God has the power to affect the material universe directly by simple act of will [Mormons believe that God has a physical body, and therefore doesn't need to use simple acts of will to affect the material universe] and I don't ever permit myself this possibility as a forensic tool [i.e., I don't base any argument on the premise that God or anyone else might perform some physical act by simple act of will]). The reason that I would avoid it is because there is no good reason for people (meaning your audience) not to discount it. It may be an appealing idea for a fantasy, but if humans had even a slight ability to reliably affect gross reality by simple act of will, then there would certainly be plenty of evidence of it by now.

Also, I like to stick with the principle of parsimony, or using the smallest change possible to get the largest apparent effect, for another reason. 'Tis not just more believable, but also is less likely to involve the rule of unforseen consequences. Your audience will probably include at least a few people with fairly fertile imaginations, and some of them might come up with things that would be undeniable logical consequences of some premise you invent, which would have a major impact on your story. This is interesting input prior to publication, when you can accommodate changes in the story, but an irritating distraction after publication (just the time when this is most likely to happen) because it makes your story logically impossible (to wit, a main premise of your story has logical consequences that contradict the events of the remainder of your story) after you've cast it in its final form.

The less consequential your story premises, the fewer of these pesky unforseen consequences.
 

In particular, I'm interested in how we deal with our own made up religions in fantasy and science fiction, and how we relate our own religious and spiritual experience to that of our characters.

My own habit is to limit religious experience (for POV characters at least) to the feelings of transcendant meaning that characterize religious experience in a neuro-physiology.
 

Personally, I think there's a BIG difference between a religious experience and a spiritual experience, both in real life and in fiction. The fact is that ALL religions in the end boil down to a structure that is intended to provide security to people whose lives are in turmoil. The fact is that ALL religions in the end become self-serving . . . the exist to perpetuate themselves as their main function. No, that doesn't preclude members of that religion from having a genuine spiritual experience, but I think most times that experience is slightly separate from the 'religious organization' as a whole. I could be wrong about this, and I know people will disagree, but there it is.

I think what makes characters interesting, provides depth to them, is to see the difference between their religious experience and their spiritual experience. Whatever god, religion, ritual, system of magic, etc. you create for your world, what really defines the characters is the comparison between their own TRUE spiritual convictions and how they relate that to the expectations of the religion they're involved in.

There are a few examples of this I can come up with, but no specific stories I can relate it to at this moment, but if you look at the way ethical vs. non-ethical characters are defined, you find some of the following patterns in storytelling.

1) Benevolent god vs. Evil god - Bad guys mindlessly follow the evil god, following to the letter every wicked ritual/tradition there is. Good guys are the same for the benevolent god, yet are pacifistic in nature because of their religion. Hero is the one who breaks the mold and says "I can follow Ben(evolent God) and still be aggressive in fighting evil. Villian is the leader of the evil ones. (Star Wars - light/dark side of force)

2) One God - Good guys follow all the rules. Bad guys follow the rules when people can see them, but no other time. the villian determinedly breaks the rules, maybe/maybe-not putting on a facade in the meantime. Hero doesn't care a whit for the rules, but follows an ethical code which at its heart conforms with the spirit of the religion.

3) Plethora of gods - Good guys follow natural, peace-loving (though not necessarily peaceful gods. Bad guys follow violence-loving gods. Hero follows the god who on the surface is the weakest, most pacifistic, though below the surface (and after spiritual exploration) turns out to be the most powerful. Villian worships the most powerful, oppressive God he can find, even if the cost is rather hideous at times.

And these are just a few examples. I think if you look closely at most Speculative Fiction, or even just fiction in general, where religion is part of the story, and you'll find that characters' characters . . . s (um . . . ) are defined by the contrast between their religious experience and their spiritual experience, or lack thereof.

And perhaps . . . the same goes for real life.

Anyway, that's how I look at religion in fiction. That what you were after, Survivor?

[This message has been edited by Falken224 (edited April 03, 2002).]
 

CASE STUDY: The Mote in God's Eye, Niven and Pournelle.

The frictions between the Imperial Orthodox Church, The Church of Him and Islam all add to the tension of the story. The Orthodox Church almost leads a revolution against the Viceroy at the climax of the story.

Even the different sub-societies behave differently within the Orthodox Church. The Russian-descended crew of the starship Lenin and the Anglo-American crew of the MacArther seem to go about their Orthodoxy differently.

All this adds to the rich background of the novel, which has the best-conceived, most original, most well-executed background of any I've ever read (Tolkien included!)
 

First, whoever brought up the chinese heroes doing all that crazy stuff like breaking swords and catching arrows: THANK YOU! I may not do exactly that, but it's the same idea. I needed a way to put religion in and of course the first idea I thought of was "act of will" magic. But this is soooo much better. I just finished the first of the three stories and my main character just went to the empire in the east. He was a sorta brash, but depressed guy. The priest-warriors of the Eastern religion get ahold of him and transform him. The Unforgiven (if I haven't explained they're sorta like the ultimate bad guy, banished from their homeland) will be tied to their religion. I'm going to be flipping the society over in my head, but I think it's important that religoin be involved. Again, I'm not sure who said it but, religion is incredibly important. Every society has a religion of some kind. Even communists that banished religion had their own religion; the religion of state itself. Religion has become nescessary to every kind of human society. Magic and it's related concepts are almost always tied to that religion. Thanks again for giving me the starting place to jump the religion. My character needed a reason to fight, so he's gonna "get religion" :-D.

The Great Uberslacker
 

Personally, I don't subscribe to the mystical explainations people propose for how we martial artists do what we do; I think it can all be explained in terms of biophysics and neurochemistry. But, if your character is from a pre-scientific culture, you can surely use the whole Zen and Shaolin jargon to explain what he does.

Perhaps try "MArtial arts for Beginners" (Not a great book, but it'll have jargon), Bruce Lee's "Tao of Kung Fu" and "Tao of Jeet Kun Do" or anything with "Zen," "Way," or "Path" in the title.

The best book -- speaking as an intermediate martial artist and a poor writer -- is, by far, "The Book of Five Rings," by Mushashi. (The Japanese call him Kensai: Sword-saint). Great stuff for "The way of the Warrior." I have Stephen Kaufman's translation. He seems to have taken a few liberties, but it reads very easily.

[This message has been edited by chad_parish (edited April 03, 2002).]
 

The Great Uberslacker
 

And as I always tell the junior students at the Dojang: blow out the knee!

(If he wants revenge, he'll have to come for you six months later, and in a wheelchair.)

 

I take it here that Falken refers to the individual's interpersonal experience with the social and cultural institutions of religion as they affect the behavior and relationships among others that our POV character meets, as well as the intellectual experience of understanding the underlying doctrines and conceptual framework that members of the various religious communities subscribe to as part of their religion. For instance, in the first case, portraying certain holidays or customs as basically religious observances, denoting alligience to a particular religion or god. In the second case, I suppose that we are dealing with the POV character's understanding and opinion of various doctrines, and the conflict that may arise from attempting to deal with a religious doctrine outside of its underlying conceptual framework (i.e. many formulations of Neo-Platonic Christian theology, such as the God without passions or parts who is inconcievably three persons but only one, and so forth, cannot make sense outside of an understanding of Platonic Idealism and anti-materialism, which were influenced by, but not explicitly stated in, the traditional Christian Creeds).

I'm not really all that concerned about that, since I would lump all external religious traditions, attitudes, and morals in with the general socio-cultural background. For instance, much of what constitutes the "Christian" world is actually leftover cultural relics of the Greeks and Romans (I personally think of Catholicism and Orthedoxy as the heirs of the Roman Empire, rather than of the disciples of Christ). Of course, there is not only tradition, but core beliefs. Tradition cannot define the cultural response to a fundamentally novel situation, whereas core beliefs can be the most important factor in determining how such situations are eventually dealt with. But religion is not the only element of culture in which core beliefs play such a critical role. All sciences are founded on core beliefs, as are most political ideologies (magic, as I explained before, is not founded on fixed core beliefs, though it does adopt them ex post facto, to explain what is inexplicable). Since both the level of technological advancement of a society and its political (and economic) ideology both influence the externals of a society in much the same way as the religious expression and institutions, I don't see any particular need to seperate them as elements of cultural background.

What I am interested in is the individual's experience--not with religious intitutions, doctrines, or even core beliefs--but with God or gods as perceived in life. For example, does the POV character ever actually "hear voices" or see visions that communicate revelations from God (or gods)? Does the character believe (in Falken's words)

quote:

---

The fact is that ALL religions in the end boil down to a structure that is intended to provide security to people whose lives are in turmoil. The fact is that ALL religions in the end become self-serving . . . the exist to perpetuate themselves as their main function.

---

Or do they believe that religious experiences, reported by charismatic and admired individuals, often lead to the "core beliefs" on which doctrines and traditions come to be established (this is a view that is also commonly held, particularly in ecumenical communities)? And if so, have the characters themselves ever had similar religious (or as Falken would say, spiritual) experiences?

By the way, I make the distinction because I don't view all spiritual experiences as being religious. I see spiritual experiences as applying to all perceptions that extend beyond the physical senses (including formal logic as one such sense). Religious experience is that experience that deals directly with the relationship between God and the individual. As such, while it is most likely usually spiritual in nature, it is also possible that such an experience would be recieved through the senses. Thus, sensing the presence of a ghost would be a spiritual experience, while being saved from death by an angel would be a religious experience.

Now, as I mentioned, I usually present religious experience as a subset of spiritual experience, and spiritual experience only within the confines of what neurophysiology has explicated about how humans percieve spirituality. But I myself don't believe that this is the only way, or even the best way, to present such experiences. I am therefore reiterating my query.

How do you (each and all) deal with religious experience?