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Conlanging & religion

adapted from a 26 April post by James E. Hopkins

Tony wrote re: conlanging and fundamentalist belief.

Tony, thanks for sharing. Just a thought: all human culture and all human art is CREATION. It is not that we are playing God, it is just that we are playing a role God is pleased to have us play, the role of co-creators. God creates us and we create (if we are wise and free) a culture and civilization that reflects what is deepest and truest of our spirituality.

Every time someone ploughs a field they are altering God's work. Everytime someone paints a picture they are creating a new vision. Everytime someone tells a fantastic fairytale to a wide-eyed child they are changing the reality as created by God. But all these things have so enriched the human spirit, gave us our most brilliant music, our most soul-stirring poetry, our most breath-taking architecture, our most treasured literature.

I consider myself a religious and spiritual person but I rather go with what enriches the human spirit than with what impoverishes it.


Conlanging & religion

adapted from a 26 April post by Andrew Smith

My thanks to Tony for bringing up this. It's not a topic I normally discuss and finding out that my experience is not a 'unique' encouraged me to bring up the 'Dark Side' of Conlanging.

Basically, I felt that I tended to get too involved in the artworld part of conlanging, and that that was somehow "playing God." I guess the reasoning went something like this: By creating my own language and a cultural environment for it to live in, I was in some way saying that I could do it better, or if nothing else I was creating a world where I was in control of what happened. This, along with a sermon I remember hearing about freedom from addiction in which they listed fantasy as an addiction, motivated me to "purge the evil" out of my life. It was *very* hard for me to do, but I took notebooks with years worth of grammar, vocabulary, historical and cultural sketches, drawings, etc. and made a bonfire out of them, in accordance with Acts 19:19 where the church members burned all their evil books. There are very few things in my life that I regret as much as burning that stuff.
Yes, I got that rap too. Gradually over time conviction led me to believe that language creation, fantasy and role-playing was "playing God." The catalyst for me was a family prayer session with a conservative minister of religion. After that I went out and destroyed a lot of notes in those areas that I had made up until that time. It caused a lot of misunderstandings for friends I had at the time, some of them I now regret, but not necessarily all of them. While I was not creating during this period, I substituted this activity with reading in other fields such as history which proved very fertile and productive for later fantasy creation.

After a couple of years of this I decided that I wanted to do some more creating - not old stuff, but to create new stuff. I wrestled with it for a while and came to the conclusion that if God didn't want me to do this he would soon put the kybosh on it. He didn't - maybe he likes Brithenig and expects to hear it before his throne of grace at the end of time.

I still consider myself a member of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand and attend church, although not the same church as I have since changed cities. I hope I am not as religiously conservative as I used to be. On another note people might be interested to note my denomination name incorporates the English/European name of my country and the indigenous/Maori name. It's slightly PC, but now pretty well established.


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Copyright © 1997, Jack Durst,
Last updated: 8 October, 1997