Prepare your ears for the heavenly voices of Christopher and Adam, simply divine.
The choir can be heard here
Figure I’ll get this out of the way:
Like the episode, this is probably not a good thread to be in if you care about the nature of Fanatic’s powers and the spoilers behind their reveal. Spoilers or no, you’ve been warned.
Might be worthwhile to just put spoiler in the thread title.
Or we could do what we do and use spoiler tags so anyone can participate in this thread, rather than starting two separate threads every week.
[ color=white ]Delete the spaces next to the brackets and type your message here[ /color ]
Nope! No hidden message this time
Then this thread doesn't have much point since if you listened to it you know this and if you skipped it there is no reason to visit this thread. This is different than other weeks because a majority of the episode is considered a spoiler instead of just a few minutes discussing the future.
Does any thread have a point?
I can see a couple of things in the opening spiel that can be discussed, sans spoilers territory.
Well once I listen to the episode and can comment further I will not be avoiding posting spoilers.
The one where Christopher almost died. Or, well, revealed that he almost died earlier this week. Man, people would really get mad about Oblivaeon then. :V (I apologize for the tasteless joke.) Unrelated, I spent most of this episode singing the M.A.S.K. – err, sorry, S.H.M.A.S.K. – theme song with Lazer Ryderz-related lyrics. :B
I gotta say, the big reveal doesn't diminish her character at all. It's a cool twist, it's a cool state for things to be in, and most importantly, it lets Christopher and Adam, as storytellers, make a statement about the nature of faith in a non-religious context. It's not a subject I really have any experience with, but I think, by the end of the podcast, they made their point really clear. It makes me wish more people understood that concept in the real world.
#NotAllBloodMages
So, Plantverse vs. Animalverse Crossover Spectacular when? :V
I must humbly dissent with Christopher in that not all of us have faith in anything at all, even in a non-deity sense.
As such, it was kinda weird listening to this episode as a result because it inhabits a space that ends up being completely nonsensical to how I intrinsically think. (I won't say it's wrong to how I think because being different doesn't make something inherently wrong, but it definitely inhabits a space of "does not compute".)
I liked this episode and her motives make a lot more sense to me. She reminds me of Justice and Anders from the Dragon Age series.
I think C and A managed to somehow square the circle with the reveal about her origin. They left enough holes for someone to ignore the official story.
As for the idea of faith, I agree with Jeysie in that I don't consider myself to believe in anything, not even my own abilities. I don't think I lack self confidence but rather I have made an accurate assessment of my abilities. So I find the idea of a character like Helena very strange, a person who when shown the flaws in their logic who just then doubles down in their logic is anathema to me.
edited to add I just remembered that my question was asked, that was sent Thursday after I had listened to the interlude so I guess it's never too late
Yeah, my stance is pretty much that reality exists independent of what I think is true or what I want to be true, so I should try as much as possible to ensure my notions of what I think is true are based on what is indeed actually true. I can never have faith in anything, because the mere fact that I'm resorting to faith to determine whether or not something is true makes me feel an intrinsic need to now go and check to make sure the thing actually really is true before I continue believing it is.
So my reaction to finding out an unpleasant truth would instead be something like "well OK I really hate that this is true, but that obviously doesn't make it stop being true, so I need to instead see if there's any way I can salvage something good out of it".
I mean like you, it's not even a self-confidence thing, it's just the way I'm wired. I remember being confused as a kid in church because while I actually rather liked going to church and Bible study and agreed with many of the ethical teachings (since we were more of the "love and charity and affirming life and being good to each other" type than the "fire and brimstone to sinners" type), I never once managed to understand the actual "talking with God/Jesus" part. It was kind of a "well OK I'm praying and listening but nothing is actually happening really so I don't really understand what people get out of this".
So characters, and people in general who do get something out of it and do have that faith approach to their perspective of truth, end up just eliciting a sort of "well OK you do you I guess" kind of reaction out of me if they're being benign in the way they go about it because I have no real frame of reference with which to relate to or understand it.
It’s possible that we are working from different definitions of faith, but I would categorize this as a belief. You have no evidence that the universe exists outside of your perception of it. Assuming that it continues to exist when you aren’t observing it is a belief, albeit a very rudimentary one.
“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
-Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
I am by nature a skeptic, but I have too much evidence to not believe in my religion. At some point I had to accept that not understanding was fine, but ignoring what was happening wasn't.
That evidence isn't transferable though, asking someone to believe something based on experiences they didn't have and I can't prove happenned would be ridiculous.
As for the Fanatic podcast, I loved it. It wasn't so much the source of her powers being known was problematic for me, but the idea that her super powers were based on her faith (they aren't) and then removing the question of Faith from her (they didn't) that would have been the problem.
Growing up a conservative protestant and being drawn to philosophy and theology, I always had to deal with the "Faith is better when it is ignorant" crowd. By that I mean the people who tell you to believe and not think about it, and certainly don't question it. And yet Every faith has a rich history of people asking those questions and becoming better people for it. Which is one reason I ended up Catholic, was because for all the churches I attended that wanted to "get back to the early church," not one of them wanted to actually read the writings of the early church and discuss the questions raised by them.
Anyway, Loved all of the episode, esp. the impact of Ra believing in her. That would be one badass scene, I really want to watch that movie. Also love that her personality was exactly what I expected it to be, and now I'm really looking forward to Apostate.
That's not belief, that's having a developed enough brain to understand the concept of object permanence.
Since you're not actually arguing that I really do have faith, you're instead trying to argue that I should have faith in solipsism as a philosophy. To which I should probably note that I don't "do" philosophy, either.
I think "No Particular Night or Morning" is a more relevant science fiction story to the specific concept you've raised.
Because I think Orson Scott Card's quote more just exemplifies that unsurprisingly people who have faith as an intrinsic part of their being have just as much of a hard time understanding people who don't, as I do the other way around. They have to reframe it as meaning those people have faith after all, because that's the only way they can compute it.
I mean, you don't have to be defensive. I'm not arguing against faith. Just pointing out that I don't have it, don't understand what it feels like to have it, don't understand what people feel when they say they talk or listen to God, don't understand how you can convince yourself to think something is true if you have no evidence that it is, etc.
I should note that this occasionally has its downsides, too. Like therapy for instance has always been a useless mess for me because virtually 100% of therapy revolves around trying to make you stop being depressed/anxious/etc. by making you believe feel-good things about yourself and the world even if they're not actually true (and maybe even especially if they're not actually true).
They keep saying that Citizen Dawn does radiant damage.
Where? She doesn't have any radiant damage in her deck. Her main card and Blinding Blast both do energy, not radiant.
Maybe they intended her to do so
One thing I find hilarious about this episode is how closely the concepts at work with The Host mirror the concepts of Spren from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive.
It is so wierd how often something I just read comes out of nowhere to connect to other parts of my life, but I love those moments of "OH, it's like that" that tend to come with them
Also, I love the incredibly strange nature of her existence. A mortal body with an immensely powerful spirit, her whole being is a fascinating series of questions and possible answers. Had some follow up questions I already submitted, mostly about the moment she was "created".
Actually, for me, it helps that she is explicitly not human at her core, that helps square some of the things we know about her and why she has never had a proper answer to the "what does she do in her downtime". She isn't human, she doesn't do downtime.
Finally, to dip my toe into the current discussion on Faith and belief, I think it becomes a matter semantics and splitting hairs after a certain point. Dig down deep enough into the most fundamental aspects of humanity and we end up calling things by a bunch of different names, shaped by our subjective experiences. For me, the idea of knowledge or certainty canceling out Faith is weird and I've never quite accepted it no matter how it is explained to me. But then there is the difference between Faith, Belief, Assumption, and Hypothesis. Very similiar things that can diverge wildly. It... it isn't really that important though to our day to day functioning or understanding.
Still Fanatic is an amazing character and I'm really interested to see how her story continues to develop in the RPG
Faith is trust in those things unseen. It doesn't have to be about a God or anything like that. You can have faith in your friends, in your job, etc.
Faith about God or similar ideas usually comes from experiences people have in relation to them. Just like trust, it usually has to be earned and can be lost in a similar fashion.
Philosophy is, to me, like science. But instead of studying the physical, it studies the ethical. What happens when people act this way vs. that way? In most religions I have found the way they say we should treat each other is what they try to emphasise, but what often gets emphasized instead is the way to believe about life. Ifyou study most religions, you'll find that they have a core about treating others as you would like to be treated. And to me, the rest can be kept or thrown out, depending on the reader's preference.
I got more of a Cole vibe from Fanatic than Anders/Justice.