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Cooked Auto posted:Is it wrong that I could immediately see this being preached by someone in real life? Today's political climate moreso. I've been calling MAGA hats the Mark of the Beast as a half-joke but seeing Beto O'Rourke do a town hall in a church had an almost apocalyptic tone in that "we need to be doing this poo poo now before it's too late" way.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:26
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Young Freud posted:Today's political climate moreso. Yeah I won't deny it.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:28
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Night10194 posted:If I recall correctly (and I'm a lot less confident on modern theology) a big part of pre-millenial theology (where the Rapture comes from) is that there's no way to actually make the Earth good, because that is only the province of God and the kingdom that comes after the end times, and that there is thus no obligation to try. Yup, it's called Pre-Millenial Dispensationalism, and holds that all the stuff in the Bible about loving your fellow man and turning the other cheek are meant for when Christ returns, not for our world today. 
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Oct 23, 2018 17:33
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Cythereal posted:Yup, it's called Pre-Millenial Dispensationalism, and holds that all the stuff in the Bible about loving your fellow man and turning the other cheek are meant for when Christ returns, not for our world today. I liked it better when the loving heretics were just whining about how the eye of the needle is totally a gate in Jerusalem, guys. (It is not).
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Oct 23, 2018 17:35
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Night10194 posted:I liked it better when the loving heretics were just whining about how the eye of the needle is totally a gate in Jerusalem, guys. (It is not). Most modern theologians, incidentally, are pretty confident Revelation is mostly a thinly veiled story and warning about surviving Rome. Daniel was about the Babylonians and Assyrians.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:39
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The thing with Rome is barely veiled at all. The Seven Heads of the Dragon as the Seven Hills of Rome is pretty clear.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:40
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Daniel was straight religious propaganda, as I said, specifically about the war with the Selucids under the Maccabees. Drawing back to the older stories of the Babylonian exile for inspiration. The Apocalypse of Daniel is also very important because it's the first ever mention of the resurrection of the dead, partly because it was trying to come up with a theological reason to ask people to be willing to die for Judaism, which was kind of new. Daniel has the Babylonians and Assyrians as a way to talk about how even in the worst of situations one should endure and stay true to the covenant with God, hence the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abengego. It is about how a very powerful king who seems to have defeated the Jewish state will eventually be overcome because it's drawing that parallel for the religious rebels fighting the Selucids. Also why do we never get RPGs about like, the Maccabees Rebellion. Why's it always Revelation and Christapocapunk. Where are my second temple judaism RPGs.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:45
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Night10194 posted:Daniel was straight religious propaganda, as I said, specifically about the war with the Selucids under the Maccabees. Drawing back to the older stories of the Babylonian exile for inspiration. The Apocalypse of Daniel is also very important because it's the first ever mention of the resurrection of the dead, partly because it was trying to come up with a theological reason to ask people to be willing to die for Judaism, which was kind of new. Because the typical response even from Christians would be "Selucids? Maccabees? Assyrians? Second Temple? What on earth are you talking about?"
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Oct 23, 2018 17:51
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Night10194 posted:I liked it better when the loving heretics were just whining about how the eye of the needle is totally a gate in Jerusalem, guys. (It is not). if there's any particular version of christianity that misses the point harder than Prosperity Doctrine, i haven't seen it Night10194 posted:Also why do we never get RPGs about like, the Maccabees Rebellion. Why's it always Revelation and Christapocapunk. Where are my second temple judaism RPGs. there was that D&D 3.X open source adaptation of the Old Testament, which was reviewed in the FATAL thread years ago (pretty sure it's in inkless' archive)
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Oct 23, 2018 17:54
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Yeah but when you tell it as 'The rear end in a top hat overking of this country arrived to fight a war, found the Romans had allied with his enemies, and on his way home from running away pillaged Jerusalem (which he already owned) and in a fit of pique sacrificed a pig (considered unclean) on the highest altar of the land and then found himself hit with a religious rebellion' it's a lot simpler. rear end in a top hat king, powerful state, rebels having to recruit and manage foreign support (the Maccabees got support from Rome because Rome saw their rivals, the Selucids, bleeding money and men fighting the Jewish rebels and thought why not lend a hand) and you've got your game about a messy political and religious rebellion right there. Freaking Crumbum posted:if there's any particular version of christianity that misses the point harder than Prosperity Doctrine, i haven't seen it Jesus literally and canonically beat the poo poo out of people himself for what the Prosperity Gospel guys do.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:55
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The New Church a/k/a Swedenborgism (the Christian off-shoot faith I grew up in) doesn't preach a physical End of the World with 'last judgments', but a spiritual one and there have been a bunch of them. The purpose of these last judgments is to separate good from evil in the intermediate spiritual world between heaven and hell. Reading the straight Christianity Revelations for the first time was a massive ' is with these lunatics?' to me.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:04
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Bieeanshee posted:It might be in the monster manual? I remember using a rule that magic resistance went up or down 5% per difference in level, but I also remember a spell called Lower Resistance, so I can't be sure that wasn't a house rule. You're thinking of 1st edition where for every level you were over/under the baseline of I think 10th? level (might have been 11th) MR went up/down 5%. So monster with 50% MR. 5th level caster, effective 75%MR 10th level caster, effective 50% MR 15th level caster, effective 25% MR. In second editon it was just the flat MR unaffected by level.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:09
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:The New Church a/k/a Swedenborgism (the Christian off-shoot faith I grew up in) doesn't preach a physical End of the World with 'last judgments', but a spiritual one and there have been a bunch of them. The purpose of these last judgments is to separate good from evil in the intermediate spiritual world between heaven and hell. Reading the straight Christianity Revelations for the first time was a massive ' Someone posted the alternate theories of how Revelations came to be, but my favorite is John tripping off wormwood during Nero when he came up with the chapter.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:32
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Freaking Crumbum posted:if there's any particular version of christianity that misses the point harder than Prosperity Doctrine, i haven't seen it Where does the Children of God cult rank?
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Oct 23, 2018 18:38
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Jesus specifically said that idolizing money was bad; I don't remember him taking any official position on loving your grandpa.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:40
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Halloween Jack posted:Jesus specifically said that idolizing money was bad; I don't remember him taking any official position on loving your grandpa. I feel like it doesn't get enough emphasis that not only did he say this, he actually whipped a bunch of people over it. The Prince of Peace, the 'turn the other cheek' guy, beat the poo poo out of someone over this specific thing. I think it is safe to say it particularly annoyed him. Hell, one thing my old professor used to talk about in his Jesus and the Gospels class was that Jesus' outburst at the temple is probably what specifically got him arrested and executed, from a historical standpoint. He likened it to someone starting a fistfight at the Easter Mass at the Vatican; of course the authorities would take notice of you. Especially when Jerusalem and the entire province are a powder keg of possible religious revolt (which happened eventually anyway) and there are plenty of radical preachers and zealots preaching revolt against Rome.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:46
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What's scarier is there are literal Revelation-is-real-and-gonna-happen-soon types who have been elected into higher offices and these fuckers believe it's their god drat jobs to accelerate the second coming.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:48
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Night10194 posted:I feel like it doesn't get enough emphasis that not only did he say this, he actually whipped a bunch of people over it. The Prince of Peace, the 'turn the other cheek' guy, beat the poo poo out of someone over this specific thing. It may help that the King James, while very popular, is a terrible translation and uses 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' Which, mammon is a transliteration of a word meaning 'money' but the middle ages assumed it was an actual, like, being or demon or god. (It's not.)
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Oct 23, 2018 18:50
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Mors Rattus posted:It may help that the King James, while very popular, is a terrible translation and uses 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' Another interesting problem for the King James is that the style of English it's written in isn't really spoken anymore, which makes it harder to read for a modern audience. It's a beautiful translation to read but I'd never do academic work with it or base my theology on it.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:52
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I absolutely despise the King James because its translation is aggressively bad, and in fact is barely a translation - it was put together from a selection of other translations, with no consultation of primary sources.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:53
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It's pretty to read and got popular at the right time, though, and with the whole Scripture Alone thing and whole churches latching on to it as the inviolate word of God we'll never be rid of the thing. I suspect for some sects that the 'difficult to decipher for modern audiences' is a plus, too.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:56
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Mors Rattus posted:I absolutely despise the King James because its translation is aggressively bad, and in fact is barely a translation - it was put together from a selection of other translations, with no consultation of primary sources. Yet fascinatingly in the states you have people argue it is divinely inspired to the point of superceding source texts
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Oct 23, 2018 18:56
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Barudak posted:Yet fascinatingly in the states you have people argue it is divinely inspired to the point of superceding source texts I think the worst part is how infuriatingly smug those people get when they tell you about how their church only uses the "original King James translation."
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Oct 23, 2018 19:01
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American political Christianity is possibly the most dangerous religious heresy in human history. To that end, even from a religious point of view, and even speaking as a Christian, I think my ideal Rapture Ready Revelations game would be about dealing with the existential horror of those assholes and the necessity of struggling against whatever Demiurge is claiming to be Christ in their cosmic horror torture festival. Playing the world after the Rapture apocalypse just doesn't seem like it would leave you any real objectives, whereas trying to stop something that is currently intent on murdering every last human in an orgy of violence while elevating its cultists is classic gaming material. Alternately, just the first Shin Megami Tensei. E: Basically, less an 'Inspired by the BOOK OF REVELATION!' apocalypse and more an intentional 'Inspired by those loving lunatics and what they've been told is in the Book of Revelation!' apocalypse. To put it another way, Revelation as it is written is not a particularly gameable scenario, since it's about the inevitable triumph of God (by which I mean John of Patmos's particular interpretation of Christianity in the 70s AD). There's no objective to play towards. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 19:04
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Catholics aren't immune either - Google the Americanism Heresy
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Oct 23, 2018 19:46
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Night10194 posted:Alternately, just the first Shin Megami Tensei. Always a good bet.
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Oct 23, 2018 19:59
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Tsilkani posted:The main use of Heat is to create Complications, throwing unforeseen difficulties into the path of the PCs. 1 Heat buys a minor Complication, a nuisance that will probably only need a Minor Action to fix. 2 Heat is a standard Complication, the same as if a player had rolled a 20. Standard Complications can involve loss of resources, or inflicted stress, and usually take a Standard Action to fix. Major Complications cost 4 Heat, and are serious issues that require massive effort to overcome, sometimes even causing damage. If the Complication involves one of the PCs traits, the cost is reduced by 1. Seems kinda pointless to have a resource that allows the DM to DM as well as do mechanic shenanigans. At least in WnG, Ruin is specifically for the DM to gently caress with mechanics (rerolling dice) and fire NPC abilities and not narrative stuff. Granted, I'm 113 posts behind...
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Oct 23, 2018 20:17
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Barudak posted:Yet fascinatingly in the states you have people argue it is divinely inspired to the point of superceding source texts
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Oct 23, 2018 20:52
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This, incidentally, is the literal source of any apparent reference to the Devil in the bible. It's a mistranslation. Satan in Job is a title, ha-Satan, the Accuser. The Accuser is an angel whose duty is to test the faith of those who have not faced actual crises of faith and thus might just be complacent. 'The light-bringer' is a reference to a Babylonian king in a chapter that is basically just ranting about said king that gets mistranslated as a name for the devil.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:14
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Mors Rattus posted:This, incidentally, is the literal source of any apparent reference to the Devil in the bible. It's a mistranslation. Satan in Job is a title, ha-Satan, the Accuser. The Accuser is an angel whose duty is to test the faith of those who have not faced actual crises of faith and thus might just be complacent. 'The light-bringer' is a reference to a Babylonian king in a chapter that is basically just ranting about said king that gets mistranslated as a name for the devil. An important thing for understanding the relationship between The Lord and Ha-Satan in Job's first part is to examine how Ha-Satan requests God's permission for his every action, and how God initiates the question of Job by asking Ha-Satan to consider his servant. Also everyone should read the book of Job because it's a marvelous work. E: Also important to understanding why God's court includes a tester/prosecutor in Old Testament contexts is that God is not Omniscient nor Omnipotent in the Old Testament understanding, rather the term I would use is that God is Omnicompetent. If there is a value, God is the maximum of it, the best, the strongest, the one able to do what humans are not able to do, but not infinite. Thus, asking questions about the nature of human piety and morality is a good pursuit for God and a reason to keep a prosecutor around. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 21:25
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Night10194 posted:An important thing for understanding the relationship between The Lord and Ha-Satan in Job's first part is to examine how Ha-Satan requests God's permission for his every action, and how God initiates the question of Job by asking Ha-Satan to consider his servant. Yeah, there's a body of theology, mostly Jewish, that holds that Satan is, no pun intended, the Devil's Advocate for God. For that matter, there's some thinking and speculation that Judas turned in Jesus to the Romans on Jesus' own orders - that Jesus knew what had to happen, and that Judas made a sacrifice like no other disciple ever had to make.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:28
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If God wasn't just trying to gently caress with us, why would he make Caine a vampire? It's obvious when you think about it.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:28
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Night10194 posted:Also everyone should read the book of Job because it's a marvelous work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPg3kjKBRc Otherwise there's the, now over a decade old, Goonbible video for it.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:32
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Cooked Auto posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPg3kjKBRc This is wrong from like it's first point. They're 'forgetting about the casting down to hell thing' because it had not happened in the mythology by the time it was written. And again, God is not Omnipotent nor Omniscient in this story; it's really, really important. Also, Job sure as hell does get mad eventually during the second part of the story that takes place entirely in the human realm. When God challenges Job in the Theophany at the end it is partly because Job spent the entire second part of the story asking for a legal accounting with God. Which he sort of gets, but he's already set up he isn't going to get the full answers to his questions because the author legitimately doesn't know the answer as to why awful things happen to good people, he just knows it isn't a result of a mechanistic universe where sin is instantly answered with suffering and righteousness with presents. Also, at least this was my thesis, Job still profits from having demanded an accounting with God, because God actually does settle his argument with his friends, which confirms for him from divine word that he was correct in maintaining his innocence and that his suffering had not been on account of sin. E: I'll stop on this because RPG thread. I just devoted well over a year of my life to studying this exact thing for my thesis so whenever it comes up, it comes spilling out like a reflex. Also, Ha-Satan as he exists would be a good name for the GM in a biblical RPG. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 21:41
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Cythereal posted:Yeah, there's a body of theology, mostly Jewish, that holds that Satan is, no pun intended, the Devil's Advocate for God. For that matter, there's some thinking and speculation that Judas turned in Jesus to the Romans on Jesus' own orders - that Jesus knew what had to happen, and that Judas made a sacrifice like no other disciple ever had to make.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:47
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Way late but I've always loved this picture
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Oct 23, 2018 21:50
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I really prefer the goofy old D&D art style to the weird 'dungeon-punk' thing they tried to pivot to in 3e.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:52
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Judaism is honestly really into the idea that you can argue with and hold God accountable. Job does it, Abraham does it, there is at least one rabbinical story/parable about a dude maintaining that even divine miracles do not matter in an argument of the law without citation of sources and being correct.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:20
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Talking about The End and how we'd do a Christapocapunk game has broke my brain that I want to make my own heartbreaker. But I'm already got three in my brain I'm trying to work out that I don't need a fourth. So I'm going to just vomit this out. Just imagine that we're in the mid '90s on a hot leather couch, talking about this between bong rips: There's three factions that operate in a loose rock-paper-scissors fashion: the Divine, who are your Angels, supernatural holy entities, and highly religious folks. The Profane, containing demons, devils, and the others. The represent the peak of the material world in its bestial and emotional aspects. Then you have man with their technologies. The idea is that the Divine can trump the Profane easily, since its supernatural power over the material, but the Profane can overpower, manipulate, and corrupt human bodies and minds gaining an edge over mankind. But mankind's technology can, in most places, dispel or usurp the Divine powers (like Angels are TERRIFIED of nuclear weapons, since it's God's power), so mankind can fight the Divine or be manipulated to. I'd take inspiration from Wayne Barlowe's Inferno, Devilman, DOOM, Megami Tenshi, that episode of American Dad, Legion, etc.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:21
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You could also get a lot out of the old Enochean sect and their idea that the universe was fundamentally disordered by the destruction of the Flood and specifically by the fact that the Nephelim were partially immortal (being the offspring of angels and human women) and thus the immortal part of their spirits could not die, and became demons and evil spirits bent on loving everything up. The idea being that even God could not set the universe back to order (and as a result, good things happen to bad people and vice versa) without restarting all of creation. A flawed creation that wants to continue to exist rather than hoping for destruction to bring about perfection could be a fun RPG setting.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:27
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