Problems with rituals

[StefanPravda]

spiritual nonsense so they can cope

Excluding a talk on religions, the placebo effect of believing in God, Allah, Budha, can be a strong support for anybody. If you believe in you, you know that a million thousand accidents can kill you in a second, or your job can be affected by a zillion factors you can't control. If you believe in money, you'd be pretty ignorant not to understand that many of the previous factors can affect you radically, including burying you, your family, etc. So on.

Bottom line, I'd be slow to judge other people as stupid because any given person can have a very limited amount on information about what is and what isn't, no matter how much time did we have to think about it.

And regarding the mindless panic, we see pretty clear what happens in the countries where people were "courageous" and hot witted. Check New York, Italy, Spain, the British PM whom is the best example of punished ignorance.

Medically speaking, when you have a virus that expands so quickly and kills so many people in such a short period of time, the smart decision is to take precaution measures. People tend to forget that in December it was present officially only in China, and in a couple of months it reached all the world.

[Kararas]

I think the rituals are believable. I didn’t use the rituals when I nearly died of starvation. But using the ritual for fishing, I caught a bream!  This is probably an accident, but my brain, like the brain of my ancestors, concluded: Rituals work. So it works in reality. This is also facilitated by the community of the game and the hillbilly with their shamans. I am skeptical about the ritual in this game, but somewhere in my soul  during the hunt, the thought is brewing — That bread was donated not in vain.

[jonottawa]

Since everyone's being political, I will too.

I was once a know-it-all punk atheist who thought I was oh-so-clever for rejecting supernatural beliefs. But now that I see the incredibly harmful, nihilistic and insane ideologies that people believe in the ABSENCE of Christianity, I would much rather see a widespread return to that relatively benign belief system.

As for the Coronavirus, the overreaction to this flu-like bug has been insane, and the hysteria being fanned by the media has been incredibly harmful and will likely cause a worldwide depression. Nations like Sweden, while insane on various other issues, have responded perfectly: Old and sick people should quarantine themselves, but the rest of us should wash our hands more frequently, avoid massive gatherings and then carry on with our lives.

[JP_Finn]

@Tinker, as long as your character doesn’t try to hunt in small region only, he/she should do fine. Couple hunting camps some days apart from each other* and throw some farming, forage & fishing in the mix and the “spirits” shouldn’t be too much off whack.

*kill game, smoke it. Pack it, move to next cabin/cave, move kota. Winter time is easier as you only need to build shelter and dry the meat. Drying does take longer though.

Maybe that’ll be my next character. Nomadic, agnostic, Koivulais woodsman.

[JEB Davis]

My point was that just because some people believe something to be it does not make it true. The egyptians had to perform a ritual every evening to get the sun to return the next morning. They believed the sun returned because of their ritual, we of course, know better, but they probably felt good about their influence with Ra and possibly this made their life feel better.

I have studied comparative religion and superstition for about 30 years, the main conclusion I have reached is that most people, throughout history and alive now, are to stupid to understand the realities of life and death and fill their minds spiritual nonsense so they can cope. Being over 70 now I am quite looking forward to the end although I am quite interested in the current mindless panic worldwide, hopefully 7 billion will die and thus save the planet, though the survivors will probably all have invented rituals that they swear saved then.

As I said I will play without rituals and see if I can get a character to outlast me.

I respect you for being my elder.

There is one inescapable fact for all of us... you and me.

We will all die.
It is only after we die that we individually learn the truth about what happens to us after we die.
Nothing... or something, for better or worse.
Until then, all any of us has is our beliefs on that subject.

[Night]

From my point of view, unprovable concepts are a product of the interaction between our limbic system (primal brain, survival rules) and our prefrontal cortex (planning, predicting, complex rules) when the limbic system outweighs or is equal to the reasoning of the cortex, concepts with any type of unprovability can be statistically reasoned (ie: any chance). Given that, we can never determine what the "truth" is, only make educated assumptions based on that interaction. In my personal opinion, given what I've been exposed to during my lifetime, concepts in Buddhism are the closest "truths" I could lean towards as far as, statistical reasoning with unprovability, of course we can't argue with wisdom about unprovables, only make 'educated' assumptions, really bringing this down to a preference of belief based on those educated assumptions and prior knowledge, if I had to think about it from the point of the brain.

With that said, religion obviously has secondary consequences mentally as such, reinforcing concepts generated by the practitioners true belief, (obviously people have different ideas and levels of their beliefs despite religion).

Anywho, thats my morality on it. As for ritual implementation in the game, I have used them sparsely in the past, But have not really experimented with the new ritual system, as I understand it most of the rituals simply apply modifiers to activities you're doing, as with a lot of the games mechanics, so it probably equates to +- x% chance of x when all is said and done, which in terms of representing what I said above, seems reasonable. However, obviously the argument here is even if it is reasonable maybe its lacking power in how it impacts the game, in which case we're talking about exaggerating the functionality a bit to make it "feel" like the rituals practices MUST be real. So, this boils down to preference I suppose, particularly the developers, as this probably falls under the overall feel of the game as the primary focus and ritual functionality as the secondary focus.

Personally I think its fine the way it is, I do understand how people might feel its underdeveloped or lacking though, I wonder however if that all ties back to our individual perspectives of what belief is.


On a secondary note, as we seem to have developed two topics here, in regards to the virus;
One human, twenty humans, ten thousand humans, no amount of experts, leaders, or people who knew before hand, would have created a situation that any of us would be pleased with. On the scale of military power, mother nature is many many many many magnitudes higher than we are technologically (funny but true?). I don't think there's any amount of protection we could have applied within our species arsenal of power that would have prevented or stopped this virus once patient zero was infected, so putting blame on anyone in this case is just a waste, in every regard (time, thought, emotion), as it solves nothing.
However, I believe that as a result of our species having no short-term answer in terms of "controlling nature" (as we pride ourselves in doing, if you were out of the loop), we have all lost our minds and have put ourselves into flight/fight mode, which instinctively so is probably reasonable, but once again, is causing the situation to be worse in most cases - (disregarding areas that have high death/infection rates currently, as they have a pretty good reason to be more alert). - Meanwhile, the rest of the world is trying to prepare for the future by depleting the present, based on the needs of the individual, which is probably also not a good thing with less and less people working, which in term produces less and less of these things you are purchasing to prepare, not that you shouldn't prepare, but maybe think about regulating your rate of preperation so that the system in which you rely upon doesn't decline into a state of no-return, in which you're fucked anyways when you run out of that future-ready assets, which could have been strategically used. Now that said, we obviously can't blame any person in particular, but we can blame ourselves as a whole for not having acted as one, rather than dividing ourselves and allowing weaknesses to arise within our system, which we depend upon, a lot. Further more, the political powers that are in charge of the "organs" and "clockwork" that makes our systems work (you know, our anthill), are in what seems to me, to be a scramble for power by putting irrelevant information out in relation to what is actually important and should be focus'd on, if we were at all interested in persevering the health of our species as a whole rather than the individual - (which, clearly, we aren't a majority of the time, for good reasons, and terrible ones, albeit this concept as a whole is probably more important than the individual, as one day mother nature will put its crosshairs on us (such as right now...)). - And I'm not going to sit here and tell you which side is right, because all sides are wrong right now, the fact that "sides" are even a thought right now, mainstream and beyond - (because yes, there are people out there right now who would rather point fingers and cry because yes, the human factor i mentioned above wasn't able to stop mother nature *gasps* try executing POSSIBLE solutions like the experts? Oh wait, damn, billbob and jimtim over there are in control of implementing those solutions and have political sway , so even if you did have a viable solution that may, or may not, work (which if it didn't, yes, you would receive the criticism of people who have worked on this less than you have.) it may not even be used at all) - is a huge flaw in how we organize as a species. I'm thinking I could go on about quite a few more things that's causing secondary problems we don't need to have while a pandemic is going but, I think I've pointed out enough to highlight the complete train-wreck we are inflicting upon ourselves. I'd like to say everything will turn out fine in the end, and I'm leaning towards it given the reported statistics, - (the disease isn't the deadliest (under 4% mortality rate last numbers I evaluated from the statistics), but there hasn't been enough elapsed time to know how this is going to play out down the line, you're also talking about a high infection rate which freaks people out, especially when applied to a population of 7 billion people world wide, that't a lot of dead people, despite survivors) - But that could be completely wrong and we're on a fast track to hell on earth for a good chunk of our future time here on earth, maybe a solid 10-30% of this centuries human's life time could be spent rebuilding what we're going to lose due to our immaturity. Maybe more if we completely collapse.

Hopefully if all else fails, AI will be our up rise from the future ashes of our wack system.

[Labtop 215]

spiritual nonsense so they can cope

Excluding a talk on religions, the placebo effect of believing in God, Allah, Budha, can be a strong support for anybody. If you believe in you, you know that a million thousand accidents can kill you in a second, or your job can be affected by a zillion factors you can't control. If you believe in money, you'd be pretty ignorant not to understand that many of the previous factors can affect you radically, including burying you, your family, etc. So on.

Bottom line, I'd be slow to judge other people as stupid because any given person can have a very limited amount on information about what is and what isn't, no matter how much time did we have to think about it.

And regarding the mindless panic, we see pretty clear what happens in the countries where people were "courageous" and hot witted. Check New York, Italy, Spain, the British PM whom is the best example of punished ignorance.

Medically speaking, when you have a virus that expands so quickly and kills so many people in such a short period of time, the smart decision is to take precaution measures. People tend to forget that in December it was present officially only in China, and in a couple of months it reached all the world.

The virus spread because China wasn't forthcoming about the pandemic in the first place and deliberately silenced people who where actively trying to warn everybody else in order to protect their public image.  Beyond that, everybody else has to try to contain the panic first and foremost.  The more people panic, the more people die.

However, trying to get back to the original topic.  As an atheist if access to the internet, it is easy for me to dispel superstition and belief in the supernatural, as well as religions in general.  The information is easy to find and those who provide it are proving harder to persecute as time goes on.  This is a good thing.  However it has only been this way for that 25 years or so.  I can't fault people who don't have access the knowledge that we possess today for believing things they can't substantiate.  The world was harsh back then (and in many ways still is today).  The thought that you might freeze to death tomorrow, or not have anything to eat for a month was scary.  The idea that wolves can come along and rip you limb from limb was scary.  The fact that people died for seemingly no reason was scary.  There was nothing you could do about it back then.  Religions and rituals gave people hope that something could watch over them and keep them safe.

That kind of fear is crippling for the average person.  It's easy to impose modern standards on ancient people, but I think it's the wrong way to look at things.  Instead, that should be a measure of how far we've come in our understanding of reality.  We've come a long way.  There's no reason to stop now.

[jonottawa]

Some people are STILL in "know-it-all punk atheist" mode, I see. That's fine if that's your thing. But don't pretend it's brave. It stopped being brave 20 years ago. If you want to be brave, to truly risk persecution and to speak out against people who believe things they can't substantiate, oppose globalism, oppose hedonism, oppose demographic replacement, oppose the Orwellian censorship of unpopular political beliefs, talk about African overpopulation and the existential threat it poses to our planet. Lots of opinions can risk persecution. Atheism ain't one.

[Labtop 215]

Some people are STILL in "know-it-all punk atheist" mode, I see. That's fine if that's your thing. But don't pretend it's brave. It stopped being brave 20 years ago. If you want to be brave, to truly risk persecution and to speak out against people who believe things they can't substantiate, oppose globalism, oppose hedonism, oppose demographic replacement, oppose the Orwellian censorship of unpopular political beliefs, talk about African overpopulation and the existential threat it poses to our planet. Lots of opinions can risk persecution. Atheism ain't one.

*rolls eyes*

You mean me?  Never said I was brave, but whatever.

I can't say that atheists aren't being persecuted because they are still being persecuted backwater places like Iran and Iraq.  Apostasy there is still punishable by death.  Furthermore, religion doesn't "displace" authoritarian beliefs.  It amplifies them.

[Privateer]

 There are more twists and turns in this thread then my path to find the first village.

 Simply from my experience in-game; if you ignore the 'spiritual' side of the game you will never notice.

 If you use rituals many things in the game seem related to the 'spiritual' side, both good and bad.