tracker7 | Entries tagged with religion

Dad texted me this morning to let me know that he and Mom were back home. Surprising - I figured that they would have stayed until this evening at least, or tomorrow even. I didn't pry, but at a guess, Mom is still sore from her fall last week and for once decided to take care of herself.

Lent begins this week, and for this happy atheist, that means Friday fish fries at the Catholic and Catholic-ish parishes around here. Six weeks of tasty whitefish and fries and cakes before game nights! This is pretty easily my favorite cultural appropriation. Need to check in with my Catholic friends to see which parishes they belong to.

I started reading Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country a few nights ago. Very good writing, and the weird is ... just a part of the world these characters live in, like their family ties and errands and the ungodly racism. I've had to slow my reading speed with this one. Ruff slips in some subtle details, and if I'm just tearing through the text, I miss things.

In a similar vein, I'm reading Sandy Petersen's Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos for D&D 5th. Good writing, to no surprise at all, and it treats the gods and Old Ones and such of the Mythos as destructive environmental effects with material anchors instead of giant piles of hit points and a checklist of attacks. Plenty of ideas on the obligatory cults and other servitors, too. It's a good read, and if I had any energy left for playing, some of this material would for sure show up in the D&D game.

We're back on Eastern Standard Time as of today, and that means that sunset was as 5:42PM this afternoon. After a too-long summer that saw 90F+ days into early October, I welcome the long cool nights of the past few weeks. It's time to shore up the defenses, though - our old foe Seasonal Affective Disorder is lurking in these early dark hours.

Halloween was mostly quiet and relaxing. Mostly. Dad called around 4, The Niece's car had broken down and he wanted me to see if I could fix it. I did, by having it towed to my place; Dad came up Friday morning and made a field-expedient repair, which held together for about half of his drive back to Liberty.

Gaming Friday night was ... well, it was experienced-player-and-new-GM, so somewhat frustrating on my end. Saturday was much better, with nine people showing up to play Armada. I think we're going to have enough players for a Rebellion in the Rim campaign, if we can ever organize ourselves.

A few nights ago, an episode of the Lore podcast (101, on shapechangers) got into my head and for whatever reason, it really messed with me. I'm talking long minutes of my arm hair standing on end and pumped-up adrenaline and everything. Something about the stories and the telling just got to me.

In a less-spooky and more thoughtful manner, the Cults episode on Victor Paul Weirwille and his weird-ass branch of Christianity called The Way got into my head, too. I can remember seeing a copy of that group's printings of the Protestant Bible floating around the house when I was a kid, and reading the commentary on the books, if not the scripture itself (and I don't know why exactly, but I hate the word "scripture"). I can't recall ever going to any The Way events, but they may have just gotten lost in the melange of tent revivals and singings and whatever other "special" worship events I was dragged to over the years.

An hour after sunset, and it is full dark here in Louisville, Kentucky. Dear reader, that's sign enough for me to wrap up this entry and turn my eyes elsewhere for a while.

I’ve made a few relatively deep dives into old Spycraft material - Dark Inheritance and the Shadowforce Archer core and the 1960s Decade Book - in the last couple of weeks. DI is still a little bit of a heartbreaker for me; it just fascinated me from the jump and I think it had such fantastic potential. But, the creator had gotten in bed with a distributor that badly overextended itself, and a lot of product got lost or destroyed, and that was all she wrote for DI.

Anyway, there was some fantastic stuff in those early d20 system days, and a whole lot of promises that didn’t come to pass. I’ve lost count of the Spycraft/Fantasycraft stuff that was announced and fizzled for various reasons. Goodness knows that I’ve come up with some promising ideas and let them wither on the vine. I’ll probably do it a hundred more times, if I’m honest with myself. Finally putting some real effort into the PMC thought experiment has felt pretty good, and overcoming the Word collapse from a couple of weeks ago was quite satisfying. I would love to recapture some of the heady vibes of that time in the hobby - and not just in my game writing.

Working overnight - obviously, I mean, the posting time is something like 2:45AM - and listening to Coast to Coast AM. First half of tonight’s show was a survivor of some kind of abusive cult and wow did she have some horror stories. One tale felt a little familiar, if maybe even close to home - being punished for not being enthusiastic enough in her worshipping. I won’t say that I was ever physically abused for a lack of churchy vigor, but not wanting to go to church was a notable sin in my childhood. Don’t want to go? Well, then no Sunday dinner out or since I don’t want to go to services, I clearly can’t want to go see friends or whatever. I don’t think it really had anything to do with some kind of concern about my spiritual well-being; more like social pressure and tut-tutting at Mom&Dad if my brother or I weren’t there. I don’t miss it, that’s for sure.

I learned something new this week. In modern Islam, there is some disagreement as to when months begin and end, due to the use of a lunar calendar. Does the month - specifically, the month of Ramadan and it's required fasting - begin when the crescent moon is seen locally or when it rises over whichever site is considered relevant somewhere in the world? From what I've been told, individual congregations just make the decision on their own, and plenty of observers go by whatever date is on their kitchen (or other) calendar. I noticed that sometime during the week, my macOS calendar changed the Ramadan notification from May 15 to May 16.

The Dodgers are maybe turning things around. Finally got things together against the Reds and won the first game of today's rain-delay doubleheader against the Nationals. Max Muncy has put on a hitting clinic in the last few games, and at the end of the third, LA's up 1-0.

There are two synagogues within an easy walk of the house. I vote at the Jewish Community Center that's closer than either of the synagogues. No small number of Jews in this part of Louisville, and sometimes that means getting some strange drive-by evangelism. Wednesday afternoon, I came home to find a large Zip-Loc bag in front of my door, containing a couple of flyers, a booklet in Hebrew, and a New Testament - the latter titled as the "New Covenant." All of this courtesy of a group called Jews for Jesus, which I'd heard of in a peripheral way. Not really an organization with anything to offer me, since I'm atheist out of a generic rural Protestant upbringing.

Lousy day, weather-wise. Cold and rainy, generally miserable and a good day to stay inside. It turned out to be a good day for a demonstration, though. Several thousand participants in Louisville's March for our Lives. A lot of kids and young adults, angry and determined. Bring the change - there are now more of you able to vote than baby boomers.

Continuing from yesterday's entry ...

Pathfinder. I have to give Paizo this - they're either giving their fans exactly what the fans want, or the fans want exactly what Paizo's producing. Either way, Paizo is making plenty of money and they're doing some creative things with their setting. Golarian is chock full of gods, with every intelligent species having a whole pantheon, and semi-regular appearances of these gods and their avatars - no sane thinking person can deny the existence of gods in this setting. Yet in Golarian, there are atheists - they don't disbelieve, they just have no use for gods in their lives. I get that. Before I admitted to myself that I just didn't really believe, I was very comfortable with Yahweh and me not interfering with each other.

Trail of Cthulhu characters can have their religion as a pillar of stability, something they can (almost) always fall back on when things have stopped making any kind of sense; the new edition of Call gives investigators a similar resource as a shield against unyielding horror. There's good role-playing and storytelling to be mined out of a character trying to reconcile their faith with exposure to the monsters and other entities of the Mythos, and it can be handled with respect.

Since starting the rewatch of Battlestar Galactica (2004 edition) and catching a few episodes of the original on one of the local digital side-channels, I've been thinking about the role of religion and/or faith in my gaming and related writing.

I'm, for sake of labeling, a post-Christian atheist. I grew up in a pretty mainstream rural Methodist church, and was somewhat involved in youth groups and things like that, but never really wanted to be warming a pew on Sunday mornings (evenings, at Wednesday night prayer meetings, revivals, you see where I'm going). To be honest, I think I learned more about being good and doing right from episodes of Star Trek on WAVE-3 than I did from most of the preaching I was exposed to - I sure enjoyed them more and loved Sunday mornings when I didn't have to go to church.

I remember a Palladium Fantasy game in high school, where the PCs were crusader-missionaries, spreading their faith by example and at the point of the sword. There was a World of Darkness game in the mid-90s, with the PCs caught up, indirectly, in angelic and demonic machinations. My D&D 3 historian/lawman/wizard was devoted to his goddess, if occasionally angry with her, and cared little for the beliefs of others. Currently, my Pulp Cthulhu investigator was raised a Quaker, left that belief for something between non-specific Protestantism and agnosticism, saw some weird shit while part of the occupation of Haiti, and is now confronting Yig's cultists. My CP2020 solo was a lapsed Catholic, more so in stories I wrote about him than in play. In my current Star Wars game, there's no real discussion of religion, outside of the Force.

[Error: unknown template qotd]Not seriously, but of late I've been slowly but steadily abandoning even the faith I kept when I quit religion.

Yesterday's storms were much more intense than Monday's round. A lot of rain, hail in some parts of the city, and a very brief tornado warning in Franklin County. It was really something to watch. By the time I left work, it was all over, and I had pretty blue skies for the drive home.

With every new piece of information about the Holsinger nomination for USSG, I'm growing happier that I never joined the startup church a few years ago. The "recovery from homosexuality" ministry formed sometime after I quit attending services; I guess if I'd still been around when this came together, I'd have bailed instantly.

Seems like the Jesusland plague is spreading outside the US, too. Alberta's got some kind of "Creation science" museum coming along, I think in partnership to the one that opened up near Cincinnati. And just a little while ago, over on

cybogoblin's journal, I read about New Zealand's far-right Christian conservative movement making a big ol' ruckus. Craziness.

Doesn't keep me from accepting paychecks from kilochurches, though. Hypocritical? Maybe. I own up to it, though.

Current Location: The Bunker

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