(urth) Bringin' it back to Wolfe by the long road

brunians at brunians.org brunians at brunians.org
Tue Apr 17 09:51:31 PDT 2007


>                           The "Latro" books seem to baptize the
> gods of Greece, Egypt, and the ancient Middle-east, portraying them
> as creations of the one God, more powerful than humans but still
> creatures.

That's a fairly standard view, in Greek religion and in 'heathen' or
'pagan' religions generally. There is one God, normally sort of distant,
who creates subordinate gods.

As an aside, in India, Vaishnavism (for example) is strictly monotheistic
(Krishna being the One God), with all of the other gods either being
aspects of Krishna or 'demi-gods' (basically angels). Vaishnavism also has
the concept of salvation, which is not actually all that common in
religious thought. This has led a lot of people to speculate (along with
the striking similarities between the names Krishna and Christos) that
Vaishnavism antedates the introduction of Christianity to India, but that
seems not to be the case: it was well developed several hundred years BC.

The easiest answer (for me: atheists might find it more difficult) is that
God has done the incarnation thingie numerous times. You can even fit this
into an orthodox Christian worldview (sort of) by insisting that Christ is
the original and pattern of all of these avataras. It just requires an
extra time dimension, and there do seem to be several timelike dimensions
(in my personal experience, anyway).

I had really hoped that Gene would get Latro to India, and maybe it will
happen.  I'm less enthusiastic than I was for lots of Latro books after
reading Sidon, which was good, but not the same as the first two.

I think I will just sit back and enjoy what the man chooses to write.





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