Where Conviction and Insecurity Collide: Religious Overtones (Part 5)
A person’s epistemology—how they define truth—dictates what they find decent vs. morally reprehensible. For instance, if someone believes that truth is defined by their own personal history (say, a record of wrongs committed against them), then their morality constitutes a sliding scale stretching from injustice to the justifiable. In other words, that which is not allowed to happen to them, but might be allowed to happen to someone else. Whereas that same scale doesn’t compute for someone who lower on the pyramid believes that their gods will punish acts of retribution. Conversely, should a person make offerings to a goddess who is heralded for seeking the revenge of her cosmic lover, then all’s fair in love and war.
People are not numbers, Luscia tells Hachiro at the open of HOBL.
But people sure do take the shape of their ideas.
A Symphony of Syllables: Why fictional languages have meaning
Language speaks beyond its translation. It speaks through inflection, accompanied hand gestures, how sentences are structured and how things are phrased. It speaks to the region and those who are rooted in its soil. Thomas Aquinas understood this nearly a millennium ago. His philosophy of language suggests that the relationship between words, concepts, and objects is essential for comprehending the structure of reality. That language is not only a tool for communication, but also a means for conceptualizing and understanding the world.
This is why Orynthia needs its dialects. They make it more real.
If we are to see the world-build through the eyes of our characters, then we need to first understand how they verbalize what they are seeing
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