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I'd guess the Japanese people are really religious in their actions but not their intent or in their veneration, if that makes sense. Like, best equivalent I can give is if the bombs fell and global society collapsed and took us back to the Bronze Age, four hundred years from now there would still be people in South America wearing funny hats and burning incense. It'd be a cultural expression rather than an explicitly religious one, based on ancestral knowledge. am I close, mo tzu, I'd defer to you on this.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:19
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The Phlegmatist posted:I'd guess the Japanese people are really religious in their actions but not their intent or in their veneration, if that makes sense. it's more like how we in america define being religious doesn't map onto how a large majority of japanese people identify and act, and our definition can feel foreign as a result
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Jan 6, 2017 05:30
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The Phlegmatist posted:e: I'm the Cyberpunk culture
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Jan 6, 2017 05:45
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Yoga, Vegetarianism, Halloween, Church of Satan, Necromancy. All the same thing really. HAW HAW
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Jan 6, 2017 06:07
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The Phlegmatist posted:Yoga, Vegetarianism, Halloween, Church of Satan, Necromancy. All the same thing really. HAW HAW Of course Christians shouldn't be playing Dungeons and Dragons because Dungeon World is more streamlined and enjoyable.
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Jan 6, 2017 06:08
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Caufman posted:Of course Christians shouldn't be playing Dungeons and Dragons because Dungeon World is more streamlined and enjoyable. you don't play dnd for streamlined gameplay you play it for the jank
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Jan 6, 2017 06:10
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Catholics play Warhammer 40K RPGs because the books are hard to parse, the rules are dense and we hate fun.
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Jan 6, 2017 06:31
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Mo Tzu posted:i don't even believe there is such a thing as "human nature' my man and the reason i don't talk about individualist factors when it comes to being religious in japan is because like... that doesn't give you an insight into why so much japanese pop culture views the catholic church and churches/religion in general as suspicious?? I'd assume that the pop culture thing is influenced by western pop culture, where organized religion is almost universally portrayed as evil, suspicious or filled with hypocrites. I think our definition of "religion" is supposed to be some universal concept, but really it only describes Christianity, and maybe Islam / Judaism. So in societies where those religions aren't common, it's easy to think they're not religious, even if there are other factors that could be considered very religious. One really important factor is that in the three Abrahamic religions, there's a clear distinction between believers and unbelievers, and everybody knows exactly what side they're on. In many other religions that's just not the case, so you can go to the temple and pray a bit just in case, without making an ideological commitment. In the case of Japan specifically, there's a popular discourse about the national character that goes on about how Japan is so different and foreigners just don't get it. This is a called nihonjinron in Japanese, and it's actually kind of dangerous, but sadly also very popular with western students of Japan. So whenever you read about how x thing is so different in Japan, maybe don't immediately accept that.
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Jan 6, 2017 08:10
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pidan posted:I'd assume that the pop culture thing is influenced by western pop culture, where organized religion is almost universally portrayed as evil, suspicious or filled with hypocrites. quote:One really important factor is that in the three Abrahamic religions, there's a clear distinction between believers and unbelievers, and everybody knows exactly what side they're on. In many other religions that's just not the case, so you can go to the temple and pray a bit just in case, without making an ideological commitment.
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Jan 6, 2017 08:15
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HEY GAL posted:i really am not sure this is the case when you start looking at the popular level before the modern period. or hell, even after--look at how practices from one religion ooze into another one nowadays Ahhh Syncretic faiths, truly there is no more divine good fortune than by going to every temple you can and keep praying. And if we are talking good game books might I suggest "Heroquest Glorantha" as my own personal favorite. You can play virtually anything and can get to play in a world where the Gods are 1) Real and 2) Not Real and actually just concepts of reality that grew sentience all at once.
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Jan 6, 2017 08:51
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The Phlegmatist posted:I still wish I had that book that was basically "Chinese legends about dogs" drat, I'm only septuple-possessed.
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Jan 6, 2017 10:41
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Josef bugman posted:And if we are talking good game books might I suggest "Heroquest Glorantha" as my own personal favorite. You can play virtually anything and can get to play in a world where the Gods are 1) Real and 2) Not Real and actually just concepts of reality that grew sentience all at once. Ah, Josef Bugman, I always knew you were a good person with good tastes. The Glorantha series has the most thought-provoking depictions I've encountered of mythology and its role and its relativity between cultures. The Invisible God is Glorantha's closest approximation to the monotheist god, but as far as I'm aware, there is no Gloranthan approximate of Jesus Christ, the material presence of the Invisible God, who "has chosen not to eliminate suffering, but to suffer with humanity." But of course, players, you can fulfill this role  edit: this whole thread should play Glorantha together. I know that in death, we most certainly will.
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Jan 6, 2017 11:54
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Glorantha owns. I dug that game where you an ancestor ghost possessed your house, and you could try all kinds of insane ways to get it to leave. I sued it, but it won a counter-suit and I had to move out  JcDent posted:Catholics play Warhammer 40K RPGs because the books are hard to parse, the rules are dense and we hate fun. Also, the massive spaceship cathedrals covered in skulls, surely?
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Jan 6, 2017 13:09
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Valiantman posted:drat, I'm only septuple-possessed. Git gud scrub, I'm counting at least eleven  So, a couple of days ago my family and I went for a tour of "Krippaleschaung", as it is called in the local dialect, i.e. visiting various churches in the vicinity and looking at all the mangers and other traditional Christmas decorations etc. almost every church and chapel around here puts up for the time between Christmas and Epiphany or even Candlemas. Some of these are really cool and I'd like to share it with you  Big shout-out to my brother (who reads this thread too I think) who took all these great photos!   We started our tour in the gorgeous neo-Gothic church of my grandma's village (consecrated in 1881). I really like going there not only because it's great looking, or because I love how the sunlight falls in through the windows, but also because the priests almost always take care to properly heat the building during the winter. A warm churchgoer is a happy churchgoer!  The manger there is very traditional and also used to be a lot bigger until very recently - the parish got a new priest last year who apparently decided that the old manger was taking away too much space. I can't say that I really blame him for that (or that he cut down the number of Christmas trees in the church from four to one).  They also got a bigger Christ Child next to the manger that's always properly incensed during Midnight Mass  Next stop was St Stephen's, a small chapel in a small village that's actually only like half an hour by foot away from where my family lives, but we still never managed to look at the church from the inside because normally it's only open for Wednesday evening services. The choir and sanctuary date back to the 15th century, while the nave seems to have been rebuilt or added sometime during the Baroque and was again expanded in 1868. The church's bells can also still be rung by hand and it took all my willpower to *not* pull the rope that was hanging down from the ceiling just like that, tempting me   St Stephen's also boasts a lovely little manger that apparently used to be a tree stump or something? In any case, I liked it.  They also had a very old Christ Child which dates back at the very least to the early 19th century, possibly even back to the 18th. The older ones are generally made of wax and, as you can see, are decorated lavishly. When the body is wrapped tightly into a piece of cloth like that they are also called Fatschenkinder. This swaddling, or (ein-)fatschen used to be a very common way to tuck infants in for bed that fell out of use sometime after the war and is making something of a comeback now because apparently it makes them sleep better? Only it's called "Pucken" now for some reason. I also wanted to show you a specific type of Christ Child that's very common in Bavarian churches, the Augustinerkindl, but apparently my brother didn't get a good shoot of one so I'll have to post something I found elsewhere instead:  The Augustinerkindl was made somewhere in Italy in around 1600 and acquired by the Augustinian church in Munich. According to legend, in 1624 the church's sacristan accidentally dropped and shattered it when removing it after Candlemas. Afraid of being punished, he hid the fragments instead and pretended that nothing had happened. When Christmas rolled around again, he feared that the day of reckoning would come, but instead he realised that miraculously the Child had repaired itself. News of the miracle started to draw thousands of people to the church, and the Augustinerkindl became a much adored and oft-copied object of devotion and pilgrimage. Copies of it can be found all over Bavaria, and they all make sure to show the break line across its face (you can see it in this image too if you look closely)  I also liked the fresco of St Stephen here, he looks like he's not a day older than 12   We went on to "Our Lord's Rest", my hometown's beautiful pilgrimage church (consecrated in 1753). They don't display the same manger here every year, but try for new ones every now and then. This year, they chose a wonderful manger in the Neapolitan style that shows an Italian street scene of the 18th or 19th century.  Just look at all that detail!   Our Lord's Rest also has a Bittrichkindl that is traditionally put onto the high altar. The figure itself was a votive offering given to the church sometime during the early 17th century, I forgot when exactly. It is a copy as well; the original can be found in the Franciscan nunnery of Reutberg south of Munich. It is clothed in red, both showing the majesty of Christ and hinting at the blood he would eventually have to spill (some Christ Child figures around here are carrying a little cross in their hand or are even laid onto a small cross too, but we didn't visit one of those this year). The current clothing was made only a couple of years ago by the women of the congregation because the old one was starting to fall apart.  Two churches to go! Our next stop was St Magnus in Kühbach (1687/88), a little town of maybe 3,000 people in the north of the county. It used to be a Benedictine nunnery until the secularisation of 1803, which explains why it is so large and splendiferous when compared to the town's size.  St Magnus boasts a rare "year-round manger" that shows not only the events of Christmas but also, depending on the time of year, other events in the life of Christ. Despite the name it's only displayed with its various scenes from early December to Ash Wednesday. To my knowledge, there's only two "true" year-round mangers left in my county.  The manger in St Magnus was built in 1933 by Simpert Breitsameter, a local artist. I only mention this because his first name (St Simpert is one of three patron saints of the diocese of Augsburg) has grown super rare nowadays. As mangers are wont to do, it isn't static but instead always growing and changing. You can't see it here (I think it's only displayed after Epiphany), but part of it is also a sweet wooden elephant that was recently gifted to the church by an Indian priest who served in Kühbach until recently.  In St Magnus I also saw this wonderful statue of Mary and Jesus adorning one of the side altars. Just look at their faces!  Okay, we've reached the last church in this long-rear end post, I promise. The little village of Oberbernbach actually boasts not one, but two churches directly facing each other. In 1982, the old parish church dedicated to St John Baptist had grown too small for the congregation. instead of simply expanding it, they decided to move into an entirely new church instead. Right across the street of the old church was a huge old stable that belonged to the parish but wasn't in use anymore. They refashioned this stable into a gorgeous new church and gave it the fitting name "Birth of Christ".  Oberbernbach's manger is of the "Alpine" style, i.e. it doesn't try to recreate the birth in the manger as it may have actually looked (that would be the so-called "Oriental" or "Nazarene" style), instead putting the birth into a setting that would be more familiar to the Bavarian pashioners.  The Holy Family now found refuge in an Alpine cave...  ...whereas the herdsmen wear the traditional clothing that could still be seen in the mountains until the war.  That's a bit of a bad image to close this post on, but it's interesting nonetheless: what you see here is one of the very few remaining "Nickneger" or "nodding negroes". In the latter half of the 19th century, many churches in Germany started to display those figures where you could put money for missionary work in Africa into it. As a sign of gratefulness by the black man, the figure would start nodding after a coin had been thrown in. These figures were closely connected to the German colonial ventures of the 1880s, but were still kept around even after those colonies were lost in 1918 because noone was thinking of them as racist. Virtually all of them were removed or even destroyed in the 1960s, but in rural regions some still remain, being seen as a traditional part of the Christmas mangers that's actually not used anymore for money collecting purposes. I hope I didn't bore you to death, because I think mangers are really neat... and because I plan to do a similar post next Easter, because many churches around here also display Holy Sepulchres. So you better prepare!
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Jan 6, 2017 13:42
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Naw, it's all cool and good. Mangers here aren't usually noteworthy.
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Jan 6, 2017 14:31
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JcDent posted:Naw, it's all cool and good. Mangers here aren't usually noteworthy. I was late getting home from work on Christmas Eve because a huge Nativity display in my town caught fire and shut down a couple of the big roads through town. Fire department subsequently said the display was a known fire hazard and they'd been trying to get the owners to make it safer for weeks.
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Jan 6, 2017 14:45
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Thanks for reminding me how ugly my church is, sheesh. I think my parish is too diverse to have unified culture or traditions, so everyone just kinda defaults to "whitebread." I did get to hear a Mariachi-style rendition of Hallelujah once, though. That was an odd Mass. e: vvvv these are pretty awesome The Phlegmatist fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 15:56
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Nativity scenes are also a pretty big deal here in the Czech Republic. I visited an exhibition in a small Bohemian village a few years back and - amidst the many garish and kitsch interpretations - found myself enjoying these more abstract displays:  
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Jan 6, 2017 16:25
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i found myself in milan during advent last year, and in italy they have a thing where parishioners make little nativity scenes and display them in the church or church hall. i saw one with empty shotgun shells for Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child, it ruled
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Jan 6, 2017 19:21
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HEY GAL posted:empty shotgun shells for Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child, it ruled We...are very different people in this regard.
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Jan 6, 2017 19:25
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Last year i bought a Fisher-Price nativity set for my older son, and this year my younger son is mobile enough to get at it, so my older son hid all the figures as soon as I put them out. Then he spotted the Fisher-Price robot and said, "You can come too, robot! I have information about the baby Jesus for you!" (I kept putting the nativity set together every single morning; I still don't know what information the robot received while hiding with Mary, Joseph, the shepherd, three sheep, a donkey, a cow, and a peacock and peahen.)
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Jan 6, 2017 19:25
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zonohedron posted:Last year i bought a Fisher-Price nativity set for my older son, and this year my younger son is mobile enough to get at it, so my older son hid all the figures as soon as I put them out. Then he spotted the Fisher-Price robot and said, "You can come too, robot! I have information about the baby Jesus for you!"
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Jan 6, 2017 19:26
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zonohedron posted:I still don't know what information the robot received while hiding with Mary, Joseph, the shepherd, three sheep, a donkey, a cow, and a peacock and peahen. The Good News, obviously.
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Jan 6, 2017 20:01
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Mo Tzu posted:first of all, my teacher's a woman. way to be all sexist and whatnot So because she's a woman, she can't be addressed as a he? Why put that sort of limitation on zim? Way to be all sexist.  I'm actually reading into it a genetic/materialist argument, it sounded to me like you thought there was something intrinsic to being Japanese that had a sort of universal quality that was testable. If that reading of your words is mistaken, then I apologize. We know historically that when Christianity came, it did develop a popularity, particularly among the poor. If it wasn't for the historical circumstance of the Shimabara rebellion, who knows what would have happened?
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Jan 6, 2017 20:45
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The Phlegmatist posted:I still wish I had that book that was basically "Chinese legends about dogs" In all seriousness, my personal experience with postmodernism is what's driving me back towards Christianity.
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Jan 6, 2017 20:49
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CountFosco posted:So because she's a woman, she can't be addressed as a he? Why put that sort of limitation on zim? Way to be all sexist. Shogun 2: Total War has fun with this. Almost everyone starts Shinto-Buddhist, but sooner or later the Portugese will come calling and among other things bring Christianity with them. Going Christian enrages every other clan that's not Christian, cripples your economy for a while due to internal unrest, and can lead to outright rebellion, but your reward if you pull it off is that priests are flat-out better than monks, churches better than temples, and you get all the guns.
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Jan 6, 2017 20:50
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Tercios vs samurai 
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Jan 6, 2017 20:55
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CountFosco posted:So because she's a woman, she can't be addressed as a he? Why put that sort of limitation on zim? Way to be all sexist. StashAugustine posted:Tercios vs samurai
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Jan 6, 2017 21:00
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StashAugustine posted:Tercios vs samurai The guns are fun in Shogun 2, but the real mayhem of going Christian comes from the ridiculous amounts of money you make and how good your priests are. You get religious peasant uprisings more or less on demand!
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Jan 6, 2017 21:04
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CountFosco posted:So because she's a woman, she can't be addressed as a he? Why put that sort of limitation on zim? Way to be all sexist. quote:I'm actually reading into it a genetic/materialist argument, it sounded to me like you thought there was something intrinsic to being Japanese that had a sort of universal quality that was testable. If that reading of your words is mistaken, then I apologize. We know historically that when Christianity came, it did develop a popularity, particularly among the poor. If it wasn't for the historical circumstance of the Shimabara rebellion, who knows what would have happened? i may have been raised in a white supremacist society but i don't think anyone is genetically predisposed to religion.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:11
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Mo Tzu posted:i may have been raised in a white supremacist society but i don't think anyone is genetically predisposed to religion. Personally, I think there's a credible argument to be made that an impulse towards spirituality - if not religion per se - is baked into the human psyche.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:14
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Cythereal posted:Personally, I think there's a credible argument to be made that an impulse towards spirituality - if not religion per se - is baked into the human psyche. The idea of a basic impulse towards God and Good is more or less the foundation of Catholic catechism.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:32
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HEY GAL posted:shut the gently caress up aw yeah, that liberal acceptance in action
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Jan 6, 2017 23:05
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The Phlegmatist posted:aw yeah, that liberal acceptance in action
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Jan 6, 2017 23:51
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Cythereal posted:Personally, I think there's a credible argument to be made that an impulse towards spirituality - if not religion per se - is baked into the human psyche. Viktor Frankl thought that symbolic thinking was both near-universally human and an inalienable component of spirituality. Thirteen Orphans posted:We...are very different people in this regard. I am a little curious about your interest in weaponry, Hey Gal, but neither is it too much my business. Mo Tzu posted:i also mention silence, but shusaku endo has written a lot about japanese identity and catholicism Silence is on my to-watch/to-read list, I'm curious about the spiritually narcotic mudswamp of Japan as Shusaku Endo describes. It reminds me also of Kenji Goto and the public apology his mother made to her fellow Japanese. Or more personally, it reminds me sadly of my parents' generation of Chinese Indonesians who prefer to live quietly oppressed and scarred instead of seeking justice for the killings in the 1960s. Caufman fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jan 7, 2017 |
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Jan 7, 2017 00:27
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Mo Tzu posted:you realize you said this to a trans woman right Yeah. You do realize that you called someone sexist who is both a feminist and a supporter of trans rights, right?
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Jan 7, 2017 00:38
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HEY GAL posted:i never read anywhere that liberals had to tolerate insults, where did you? dunno, the Bible maybe. John 15:18 Look, the left is hosed up right now and I refuse to work with any of you. It's thoughtcrime central. I support giving to the poor, re-homing the homeless (in fact I've organized this before) but as soon as you say "I'm pro-life" the loving knives come out. I've endured many insults in my time working as a liberal in Calvinist circles because they're libertarian as all gently caress but guess what I don't care. I don't let my feelings get hurt over someone else's opinion of me, which is apparently something the left has yet to understand. So actually, gently caress you unless you've done something for the least of these, who have the face of Christ.
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Jan 7, 2017 00:45
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The Phlegmatist posted:dunno, the Bible maybe. John 15:18 calm down
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Jan 7, 2017 00:48
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CountFosco posted:Yeah. You do realize that you called someone sexist who is both a feminist and a supporter of trans rights, right? me: *makes a joke about how my sensei is a woman and not a man like you assumed* you: uh actually for all you know they identify as zim lmao yeah we are truly equally poo poo tell you what take a sociology class then talk to me about this poo poo
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Jan 7, 2017 00:55
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That's a pretty interesting way of remembering what you said. What you said was: "first of all, my teacher's a woman. way to be all sexist and whatnot" This, this was a joke? I took it seriously. I thought you were seriously offended that, not knowing the gender of a person, I used he instead of she. I honestly thought you were seriously calling me a sexist, which is a tremendously serious offense. I had a disagreement with you, and I was trying to make reasonable arguments because I thought that there was a dialogue and then out of the blue I'm being called a sexist. Now, you say that you were joking, but I didn't know that. How was I to?
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