The Word Cloud

6 Comments

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  by Has'san 1 year ago

  Thanks a lot.
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  by Bren 1 year ago

  Often in American publishing the inclusion of religion is encouraged. Lots of people are believers. What does the word religion mean to you?
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  by EmmaD 1 year ago

  It's about like writing about the modern world, I'd say. You can put a church and a vicar into a novel set in 2010 London, without specially exploring the faith that underlies it. There's no society in the world, until the last couple of hundred years which doesn't have a religious aspect to how it operates, thinks, fights, loves, believes, marries, dies, hopes and fears. But how much you choose to concentrate on that aspect of your characters' lives is up to you. What is your characters' relationship with those temple and priests? Is the faith that underlies it important to them?
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  by mike 1 year ago

  it is rather difficult to write about religion. i recently read some short stories about India which came across as critical of the caste system and the author might well have offended some Hindus.
  Anthony Trollope probably achieved the right balance in his Barchester Chronicles and his comedy still lingers on in television sit-coms. Other societies might think differently but this might be unlikely too. I listened to a radio talk which considered that the population Bangladesh iwas more secular than those of Bangladesh origin living in England. I read a biography of Freud who did not believe in God but emphasized his Jewishness in the face of Nazism - a cultural identity. It does seem as though people are using religion to enforce their cultural identity and, in saying this, i will have offended some people of a religious bent.
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  by EmmaD 1 year ago

  To quote Lionel Shriver, "no one has a right to go through life without being offended."
  
  Of course religion is part of cultural identity, because religions are made by cultures: religion is what human beings do to deal with their sense of transcendance and immanence. Whether there is a God, or whether an individual believes there is a god/gods/whatever, is a completely separate issue. Then it gets complicated, because of course the society makes the religion, but the religion then proceeds to shape the society.
  
  Which is why I am wary of the idea of putting priests and temples, or whatever, in a novel, without the writer, at least, knowing what those priests and temples are all about, and what the ordinary people's relationship to them is. Not that the book has to be centrally about that, but it needs to be part of that world, just as what kind of transport, communications, relationships to nature and the animal world, needs to be. These are integral parts of the human experience. Until the last - what - 100 years? - religion was an integral a part of the structure and experience of every human society which has ever existed, although often the kind of integral which is taken for granted: Jane Austen doesn't often mention people going to Church, but that doesn't mean they didn't, like clockwork, every Sunday, unless they had a very good reason not to. I don't think I'd believe in a fictional world which didn't have, at the back of it, some common (if contested) form for its spiritual life.
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  by Has'san 1 year ago

  Thanks for sharing all of this with me, it certainly was helpful.
  The temple and priests is not the focal point of my story, the reason why I placed them was because I needed a priest in my story, not because I want to have some religion in the story but because to disguise his true identity then i thought with the presence of priest I might need to add a bit more so I added temple. However, the priest in the story is a good man and he does help people in various religious issues but many people in the story would not approve of a priest who is also a magician, therefore i did all of this.
  Hope I am able to explain myself.
  Thanks for the help Bren, EmmaD and Mike.