Making Religion a Real Organization in Fantasy Role Playing

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Callan S.:
Avoid naive relativism
Quote

One of the weird things about teaching nowadays is the way students no longer fit into Perry’s famed stages of ‘undergraduate development’: rather than arriving at university as naive moral realists with a dualistic, defer-to-authority attitude, they tend to be naive relativists. The bulk of them, I have found anyway, will say right or wrong depends on your cultural frame-of-reference, or something similar. To which I’ll reply, “So female circumcision is quite proper so long as it is practiced in Sudan.”

You can almost hear a “poof,” their naive relativism evaporates so fast. The point is this: our moral intuitions often don’t care about our ideas all that much. Humans, as social animals, are other-evaluating machines, and as such, there are very few consistent relativists out there (as I’m sure Grin and Theo would agree (thus the Nazi references)). Relativists are perfectly happy to live and let live as far as lifestyle choices go, but when it comes to acts of obvious harm, they are as censorious and as judgmental as a televangelist at a gay rights parade.
Look for that judgemental part of you and make play about those issues...since in real life how can one back down on female circumcision? Yet in a game, there's a little leeway to not yolk your entire mind to such judgement, since its not real - and thus you can reflect on that judgement and the sort of actions it demands, instead of purely being that judgement. Find your inner televangelist...provoke it through play...and observe...

Anatola:
Thanks for all the recommendations, I am seeing if any friends of mine have RuneQuest books.

As regards 'naive moral relativism', I'd say I'm pretty much a moral nihilist (I think morality is a psychological or rhetorical force, not a logical one).

Ron Edwards:
No more discussion until an external link is provided, please.

Best, Ron

editing this in: I really really hope to see the link appear, because the topic is primo. I just returned from leading a serious discussion on this stuff at InterNosCon.

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