Ultimately strong practice is just an outward sign of strong belief, since lacking omniscient view it's not like you can ever know for certain how strong a belief is. I was probably too oblique, but the issue at hand is the justification of religious practices even when those practices might be seen by an outsider (such as myself) as barbaric, backwards, or just plain hurtful.
Like, say, you have a character who objectively is the best person for the job, but he's missing part of a finger. For a long time in the Catholic church, he would've been barred from the priesthood based on a certain interpretation of a single line of text. If you're a believer, then there's not much to discuss, here. If you're not a believer, then you're going to be saying: wait, you're dismissing him solely because of the overlap between some childhood accident and a single line of text? But that text is sacred -- and yet the sacred doesn't translate across cultures, it seems. We tend to value our own and devalue others, which makes it hard to value any (even in writing) when I value none. Or just don't value any quite as much as most, let alone as much as the characters I'm writing.
It's like an exercise in empathy with an added helping of, uh, something. Damebred.
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Date: 8 Mar 2013 05:05 am (UTC)Like, say, you have a character who objectively is the best person for the job, but he's missing part of a finger. For a long time in the Catholic church, he would've been barred from the priesthood based on a certain interpretation of a single line of text. If you're a believer, then there's not much to discuss, here. If you're not a believer, then you're going to be saying: wait, you're dismissing him solely because of the overlap between some childhood accident and a single line of text? But that text is sacred -- and yet the sacred doesn't translate across cultures, it seems. We tend to value our own and devalue others, which makes it hard to value any (even in writing) when I value none. Or just don't value any quite as much as most, let alone as much as the characters I'm writing.
It's like an exercise in empathy with an added helping of, uh, something. Damebred.