There haven’t been any? At all? There is nothing to suggest otherwise.
Both, honestly. Neither the light nor void have any conscience, consciousness or sentience to speak of, there is nothing to suggest that.
If there are no sentience there is no alignment.
A gun does not have an alignment.
A sword does not have an alignment.
The person wielding either, have an alignment.
To have an alignment, you need conception of morality, to have a conception of morality, you need sentience. Neither the light or the void have any of that, they have no alignment.
Just like fire has no alignment.
Just like oxygen has no alignment.
Just like water has no alignment.
I’m not anti bible, nor do I think it has been maliciously manipulated all that much over the years. I feel like you have to believe there was some original divinely inspired version of the real true word of God out there being obscured, for that to be true.
The original writers had agendas. Look at the archeological evidence about the line of King Ahab, versus the story of Jezebel in the Old testament and you can see pretty clearly that it’s political propaganda and xenophobic nativist culture war stuff.
Yea, she was a person who was extremely hurt and traumatised and tried to distance herself being vulnerable again, she constantly denies feeling anything and then is shown right afterwards that isn’t true, she claims bringing back nathano’s is simply buisiness but then spends literal months trying every method to bring him back to her, She claims no love for the forsaken but then does a bunch of little things that make no sense if she didn’t. But while i do like that characterisation, i am incredibly unsure given what’s been revealed about blizzards writing process if that was intentional or not
Rome definitely had influence on the early Catholic church and dogma, but I don’t think its anything remotely like what happened to Nordic paganism where we literally don’t know the original myths because of how much things were shifted around to support Christian syncretism.
Most of the books I’ve heard of which didn’t get compiled into the NT were weird Gnostic books, which… I absolutely get why they weren’t added to the list.
I think if the early Vatican really was that interested in defending Rome that much, they’d have left out Revelations, as the non literal interpretation of it is often seen as a massive condemnation of Nero and Rome.
Yeah, I’m not suggesting some Dan Brown psuedo-historic conspiracy. It’s just that Paul was a Roman citizen. By the time the early church fathers had to decide what would or would not be canon, like Disney getting a hold of Star wars, they chose whatever books were in wide circulation (among the Romans) and didn’t contradict accepted doctrine.
On revelation, many originally wanted to exclude it but it was already very popular and widespread (even though its basically an homage to Jewish apocrypha).
But the essenes (which very possibly were led by Jesus’ brother James who was hunted by Paul) hid a bunch of scrolls in Qumran. They had books that they found very popular that might have been included in canon, had the Jewish people been more accepting of Christianity. Had it not been adopted by the Romans and romanized. The book of Jude even quotes 1 Enoch. Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew (I think) references a story about Micheal fighting with Satan over the body of Moses (which we can only assume is from a forgotten text that was once popular but has been lost to history). The gospel writer didn’t think the reference was so obscure that elaboration was needed, but it’s the only known reference to the story.
The point being that there were likely plenty of Jesus fan-fics that sucked that didn’t even make it into the Nag Hammadi library, let alone canon. What did make it into canon were the Gospels and letters that the Romans liked enough to transcribe and distribute across their impressive roads. (And that were acceptable to some Coptic church leaders if I’m not mistaken. I don’t want to claim it was all Romans).
Yeah, that’s fair, I think Paul’s outsized influence on Christian dogma despite not being one of Jesus’ actual disciples (even being a self-described enemy of his) is a little suspect if one isn’t a biblical literalist. Especially since his own letters state that he didn’t get along well with the original apostles.
Personally I stick to the gospels for that specific reason.
That’s where we disagree, and I think we might as well leave it there. Especially since this thread is going down roads that are likely to get it locked soon, just like all the other “Light as villain” threads.
most of the gnostic texts have some pretty sketchy ontic claims (cf. gospel of judas’ claim of a spiritual master race) and were written in large part to replace the hebrew origins of jesus’ doctrine with grecian stuff (origen was also busy with this project, but did it better)
do you mean ‘jewish apocalyptic writing?’ there are books which fall outside of the hebrew bible, which have largely to do with unfulfilled prophecies, but the acceptance of these books by christians isn’t necessarily down to their hebrew origins.
if later you speak of the dead sea scrolls, your history is once again sorta spotty there: the scrolls do contain copies of books which would become adopted into canon, and even deuterocanon. none of the scrolls were stored by james or any other disciple. whether the essenes even stored them in the first place is also not settled fact by scholars.
By the time they got to that, Paul had been dead for two centuries. It’s not until the 3rd Century Council of Nice that a consensus would emerge as the first edition of what we now call the Bible. By then, there was already division in the ranks.
that was the council of rome. the council of nicea gave us the creed.
edit: boy, i’m rambling abt christianity in forums chat. terrible hypocrite.
follow-up edit, while it’s cooking: speaking of the council of nicea and its fruits, it’s probably notable that the crucifixion in the creed is attributed to pilate. the adversarial role of the pharisees in the gospels is, i think, much more about christ’s role as the fulfillment of the covenant with god, and a representation of a new covenant, for the hebrew people.
anyway. the light is neat and the updated spell fx are fun. i wish some paladin spells were updated. morality is beyond blizzard.
In the First Century, Messiahs promising the redemption of the Hebrews and the restoration of their nation were a dime a dozen. Hebrew mystery cults were in fashion among Roman intelligentsia who were looking for more sophisticated alternatives to those tired gods they imported from the Greeks, whereas more common folk, especially soldiers were drawn to the Cult of Mithras from whom the early Church would steal it’s winter birthday holiday celebrated on December 25th.
I agree. That’s a nice surprise for Diablo. As for WoW, I didn’t mind the Scarlet Crusade or even villainous paladins or Light-wielding priests. My problem with the former now is that they’re cliche and poorly written. They’re like Team Rocket from Pokemon (but without the excuse that the show’s rating won’t let them be killed off). The dreck I have a problem with first cropped up in Legion (I’d bet money whoever wrote that cinematic was subscribed to r/atheism).
But you make a good point. More than likely if anyone did have that bias, it was one of the people who “left” the company when a certain lawsuit hit (and I’d bet one of them had the initials AA).
Like you.
Choosing that date was more a compromise for peace between different religious groups. Keep some familiarity to appease the pagans.
The Roman Empire did not have freedom of religion pre-Christianization (hence Christians being fed to lions and Jews being second-class citizens). If anything, it was those early Christians who laid the groundwork for religious tolerance, Christians like Tertullian (AD 155 - 220) and the nobleman Lactanius (AD 240 - 320) - Lactanius was a survivor of the Great Persecution (the most severe presecution of Christians by the Roman Empire, enacted by the Emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius in AD 303) and argued against coerced religiosity in his book Institutes after Emperor Constantine restored him to favor.
Even when Christianity became legalized and endorsed by the powerful, it wasn’t all or immediate “oppression time!” (plus, the Cult of Mithras was stealing a bit from Christianity).
The early days of warcraft wasn’t that much beyond Orcs vs. Humans. Since then there have been changes of companies and authors and then all of a sudden they found themselves building a world.
If you weren’t a Roman like Paul you were at best second-class And again much of the oppression was in response to Jewish revolt, kind of like how Israel reacts to Palestinians today.
You were pretty much allowed to believe what you wanted as long as you acknowledged that the Emperor was supreme and you paid your taxes. Not everyone was onboard with that though.