I think this is an issue where you have to agree to disagree, neither side has concrete proof one way or another, because it's a thing we have no experience of and cannot measure accurately.
Personally I'm on the this-is-not-possession-anymore-side, they are the person inside the body now... Hmmm, I guess the "best" test I can think of to answer this question is whether the spirit could be exorcised.
That's just the God of the Gaps fallacy, though.
The stance from Catholicism, at least, is more like "God created the world, and this is how He did it and what rules He gave it". Evolution is part of Catholic doctrine, for instance, because it's basically like "this is God's manual for how He created life".
There's also an element of, science teaches us how the world works, but religion teaches us what to do with it. Science can show you how to harness the energy of the atom, but it doesn't tell you if you should build power plants or build nuclear bombs. Religion (or ethics, for non-spiritual people) is what addresses that part.
That article is from a site that is explicitly anti-religion, though. Wikipedia gives a more nuanced view of [url= God of the gaps - Wikipedia]God of the Gaps[/url], including the view of the theologicians who originated the phrase. I quite like Bonhoeffer's quote:
It's not a matter of nuance, though, "God of the Gaps" is flat out based on a lack of understanding how science and knowledge work.
Ironically I think your phrasing gets into the crux of the matter. You reject a source based on it being "anti-religion" because you are instead in favor of a statement about reality that is "nuanced" and "fair" to religion. When it's actually perfectly possible that the truth of reality could end up being anti-religion, because reality has no obligation to care about how well it matches any of our ideologies or what we want or don't want to be true. Reality is what it is whether you want it to be that way or not. Your choice is instead about what you want to do with that reality.
Fanatic's episode actually kind of gets into that, even. Instead of accepting what ironically were Apostate's truths and then making a choice to still find ways to do good with them, she blocks them out in favor of having faith in lies.
I wonder how Fanatic would react if it had been a benevolent Spirit that didn't insert lies into those truths instead of one of deceit. Would that put her where the RPG timeline is heading much earlier?
TBH, I feel like on a purely literary level, "personification of judgment stuck in a mortal body tries to figure out what is the best way to translate the core of their being into mortal society and ethics systems" would be way more interesting to me than "character goes around figuring out what they want to believe is true and then how to really, really believe it's true in face of any and all possible contrary evidence".
Especially since we already have the Celestial Tribunal to showcase what "pure" judgment with no consideration of mortal society actually looks like, as a potential contrast.
I came away feeling the first statement you made is what Fanatic is. That translation came in a form of their faith and not a set of programming like the Tribunal. Redeemer Fanatic also makes more sense to me because she comes out being blind and Justice is supposed to be blind. So despite seeming like she is ignoring what was said she is personifying Justice even more.
Except the framing of the story isn't "Fanatic is struggling with squaring the core of who she is with the system of ethics she's developed" it's "how strongly can Fanatic blind herself to the truth of who she is in favor of still believing she's an angel".
As someone whose core revolves around facts, logic, and honesty rather than faith, the former to me is interesting: Since something being true doesn't automatically make it morally good or morally congruent, how do we deal with that possible dissonance as people? But the latter doesn't add anything interesting to me regards an exploration of ethics or human nature.
We will just have to disagree there as I didn't come away from the episode feeling that way.
Except Apostate isn't telling her the facts. Apostate wasn't trying to convince her that the were both spirits of the host who exist as personified versions of emotions or concepts.
Apostate is using the fact that she doesn't know the truth to try & shape her perception of reality to his own ends. Apostate isn't presenting objective facts to her to help her know who she really is. He is presenting half of the facts to try and abuse the gaps in her knowlege for his advantage.
From my interpritation she isn't blinding herself to the truth of who she is. Becuase the Facts of who she is are that she has a calling to judge, punish the wicked and protect the innocent. Weather she is an angel or a spirit is irrelevant to that calling she feels from her core, which is a fact. The context that she recieves from worldly religions shape her perception as experience does to anyone. However, it does not clip her wings(sorry) in terms of making up her own mind. She feels that her role in judgement must be more active, so she leaves the convent and fights for what she believes. While what form she takes might have changed had that initial Christian context not been there, i doubt she would've been unrecognizable as the same "person".
Yeah, but she doesn't even try to find out the other half of the facts and incorporate that new knowledge into herself, she just goes lalalalalala and does her best to reconvince herself of her original beliefs.
It just pattern-matches too strongly to many bitter fights and other problems I've had in real life with people who stuck their fingers in their ears and clung to false narratives rather than deal with reality, for me to find the matter anything but headshake-worthy at best.
This is why Fanatic disturbs me. I have had arguments with moon landing conspiracy theorists where I offer to bring them to my workplace and bounce a laser off the laser reflectors we left there to prove we went, the offer is never accepted , and the person will something like , "I believe that they didn't go, let's agree to disagree", and I'm like "No, I can prove they went" but they walk away
I had a best friend/roommate who once abandoned me while I was broke and unemployed after a layoff because he refused to believe I was actually sending out resume after resume each week to no avail versus believing a narrative where I was lazy and not trying hard enough to find work and especially not trying hard enough to find full-time work. Among other strange narratives he had built up about me over the years.
I have a mother where it's an ongoing thing my entire life where she will get very very weird and contradictory-to-reality ideas about how things work, want things done according to those weird ways, refuse to listen to me trying to explain how things actually work and therefore what is and isn't actually possible (since often what she wants done is frustratingly difficult or even flat out impossible), and hurl verbal abuse at me about how stupid/useless/lazy/worthless a daughter I am because I can't just do things the way she believes they should work.
And that's just personal issues with individuals I've dealt with, let alone community or wide-society issues I've dealt with.
Shaking my head at Fanatic's obstinance is the most benign reaction I can summon up, as a result.
Something I want to point out is that although we do now have an explanation for Fanatic's powers beyond 'miracle,' that doesn't necessarily rule out divine intervention or design in the process. We've got this reason now, that she was a spirit from The Host - hey great, cool. But even in the world of Sentinel Comics, with its superheroes and aliens and what-have-you else, there are still religious people of all kinds, and nothing we've seen has in any way proven their faith wrong or unfounded. That puts Fanatic's abilities more or less in the same place as avowed 'miracles' from the real world, as incredibly unusual or improbably occurances that nevertheless are somehow consistent with physical reality.
Obviously, the rules of physical reality are a little different in a comic-book world where people can fly even without wings, but the point stands. Even if her original source of information hadn't been someone obviously evil and deceptive, it would probably have still troubled her, and she probably would still have gotten past it, because being this angelic figure is a big part of who she is as a person.
@Jeysie, @padcurtin
In this case though, Fanatic has no way of "investigating" Apostate's claims. There are no philosophical or scientific arguments that she can read up on, and she can't excatly ask The Host. So far as we know, the only person with any actual knowledge about the Host that Fanatic is able to interact with is Apostate, and like any good deceiver the few truths he's sharing are mostly half-true at best a nestled in with a whole bunch of lies. Having no alternative source of information to turn to, nothing else against which to weigh her beliefs, Fanatic has few real options...
She could choose to beleive everything Apostate is saying. But the core of her being and her own experience tell her that Apostate is being deceitful, that on the whole his words represent a lie, and so this hardly seems like an honest option. Choosing this option would be to blind herself to, herself, and choose blind faith in Apostate instead.
Or, she could admit that there is some truth buried in Apostate's words, but with no actual way to seperate the truth from the lies, how is she to know? The result would be to question her very self and to know nothing for the rest of her life. This option wouldn't result in blind faith, but it would have rendered Fanatic blind.
Finally, she could stick to what the core of her being, her experience, and her faith have taught her, and choose to blind herself to everything Apostate is saying, viewing it (correctly, actually) as a distraction preventing her from achieving her true purpose.
This isn't a case of "there's evidence for this thing but I'm going to choose to ignore it". This wasn't a case of Fanantic picking the facts she like best. Faced with competing and (thanks to Apostate's deceitful presentation) mutally-exclusive facts and no "logical" way to weigh them against one another, she made the best choice she could.
@dprcooke:
I guess I just felt irritated at people in this thread not accepting that no, I really don't feel faith in anything, and I also have strong reasons why I feel more comfortable engaging with other people (or characters) who focus on facts and logic and truth instead of faith.
I have no issue accepting that!
To obtain knowledge about the state, history, and governing mechanisms of the universe, there is really no substitute for scientific inquiry. One of the incredibly powerful things about science is its stress on repeatability - anyone with the necessary equipment can investigate the same question, produce data with the same properties, and infer the same result (with much time in peer review, reaching a consensus, of course), which totally throws to heck the whole idea of relativism. It's not logical, nor does it really stand up to any kind of argument, to say "let's agree to disagree on this Moon landing thing." Moreover, saying that would countermand the whole way that every human learns about the world when we are young - trial and error, investigation, curiosity, and the resulting induction.
Unless you're Fanatic, and you can just change the world by believing it should be a different way.
Ironically Fanatic would therefore be pretty powerful if she should realize what she's doing!
And going back to the moon landing thing, yeah, I always feel bewildered when I state a fact of some sort and someone says "I disagree" or "we'll have to agree to disagree" and it's like, I kinda really hate to break this to you, but, you can't disagree with a fact.
You can, mind you, disprove a fact and show it's not actually a fact, but that's not the same concept as disagreeing with it (and the sort of people who say they disagree with a fact rarely ever actually do that disproving anyway).
The way I look at it is, even if Fanatic knew the truth was the truth, that she was a spirit from this realm inhabiting the otherwise-dead body of a little Peruvian girl...
... there's nothing at all stopping Fanatic from concluding that this happened because God willed it. Who's to say that spirits from the Host aren't as much under a God's purview as human spirits?
“faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.”
I just figured I should put this here to clarify what faith is.
Of the things I like about this quote for discussing faith is that it talks specifically about knowledge and that faith isn’t without it, but rather is a belief in something that is true but you don’t necessarily have the means to make a repeatable experiment to prove it. In order for faith to really have power, it must be in something that is true otherwise it remains a simple belief. Fanatic believes she is an angel. She has faith that she has the power to smite transgressors. There’s a distinct difference, and the lines definitely blur for her since her beliefs inherently change what is true around her.
As to her character, I actually felt the discussion on the podcast was refreshing and I am much happier understanding her power source than not. She’s way cooler because of it and I would love to make a Sentinels RPG character who is also a member of The Host.