Vampires: what would they actually believe?
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ArmorClassZero
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Vampires: what would they actually believe?
What would vampires actually believe in terms of a mythology? What about policy?
Last edited by ArmorClassZero on Fri Nov 01, 2019 2:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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deaddmwalking
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I think that before you get into what you believe you have to answer the question of how vampires are embraced and how independent they are at that point.
If the ancient vampires walk the earth and your sire talks to them regularly, you're probably going to hear a consistent 'true' story.
Hell, you even have to answer the question of why vampires have their own society at all. If you're a vampire and you feed on humans, there's a reason for you to participate in human society in some way, shape or form. Doing so potentially gives you access to feeding opportunities. But why do you care about what Count Vlad is doing in Romania? Is there anything he can do for you? Anything you can do for him? Is there any reason at all that pretending he doesn't exist isn't superior to any other course of action? Even if he 'reveals the masquerade', he's only a single individual and only like a half dozen people will see him die - it'd be like Osama Bin Laden's death. If Seal Team Six claimed he was really a vampire, it'd be hard to prove.
If the ancient vampires walk the earth and your sire talks to them regularly, you're probably going to hear a consistent 'true' story.
Hell, you even have to answer the question of why vampires have their own society at all. If you're a vampire and you feed on humans, there's a reason for you to participate in human society in some way, shape or form. Doing so potentially gives you access to feeding opportunities. But why do you care about what Count Vlad is doing in Romania? Is there anything he can do for you? Anything you can do for him? Is there any reason at all that pretending he doesn't exist isn't superior to any other course of action? Even if he 'reveals the masquerade', he's only a single individual and only like a half dozen people will see him die - it'd be like Osama Bin Laden's death. If Seal Team Six claimed he was really a vampire, it'd be hard to prove.
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Username17
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The past is a foreign country. Throughout most of human history the central question that theologians worried themselves about wasn't some esoteric bullshit about the nature of the substance that defined the self or any of the ephemeral wanking about the nature of righteousness that they are so preoccupied with today. It was the question "Where does the Sun go at night?" That was it. That was the big question that we were supposed to turn to priests and sages for. And the major religions universally got the answer to that question wrong. And when people called them on this, the popes and high priests of the era had a tendency to put people in fucking jail.
The rough shape of the Milky Way and the universe was discovered in 1924 when Hubble demonstrated that some nebulae were actually other galaxies. Before then it was generally assumed that our solar system was the center of the entire universe. Yes, anyone who grew up more than 100 years ago grew up believing that the center of the universe was in our sun. And that itself was a 93 million mile difference from the pre-Kopernican model which mostly had the center of the universe literally in the Earth. So just 400 years ago, thinking that the universe had a center in the Earth was totally normal.
Eighteen hundred years ago, the early Christians mostly appear to believe that Jesus Christ was crucified on the Moon. Which is to say that the reason the places and times in the New Tastament do not actually match up to historical Judea is that they weren't really supposed to. They were supposed to be events that happened in a low tier heaven, which was like a supernal world that happened to be located in the sky and shine light down on us in a roughly moon-shaped pattern. The amount of assumptions about the basic structure of the universe that have been casually tossed aside and torn asunder by Albert Einstein and Neil Armstrong is staggering.
So the question of what Vampires would believe is one that is actually quite difficult to wrap your mind around. These people are old enough that their basic assumptions about how basically everything is put together are simply incompatible with how modern people experience the world. They believe that the Sun is swallowed by an enormous Jaguar every evening after passing into a cave and then rekindled in another cave by a powerful Frog before being drawn across the sky again by a chariot pulled by colorful birds. They believe that the Earth is a flat square expanse supporting on each corner enormous stone columns that hold up the sky. They believe that psychiatric illness is caused by demonic possession. And they believe that erectile dysfunction is caused by your penis being stolen by a nearby wizard.
Remember that the Malaria-Syphilis experiment that settled the debate as to whether psychiatric illness had an organic cause turned one hundred last year. One hundred and one years ago, the demonic possession theory of mental illness was considered completely respectable. A hundred years before that it was universal, because the organic theory of mental illness is only two centuries old. The germ theory of disease wasn't even considered reasonable until Pasteur's microscope work in the 1850s! Go back a bit more than a century and a half and people believe that illness is spread by "miasmas" or demons. Not metaphorically. Literally.
Human society handles the fact that people in the quite recent past believed things that are fucking ridiculous through the simple expedient of dementia and death. People who believe the sun is the center of the universe die, and a new generation of people grow up learning about spiral galaxies in school and we move on as if the entire planet wasn't quite recently occupied exclusively by people who thought there was an Axis Mundi around which the entire universe revolved. And in the transitional period, old people kind of go crazy sometimes so when Grandpa goes off on a rant about sky pillars or heavenly spheres or whatever, people just smile and shrug because it's "just Grandpa saying crazy shit again" and not a serious attempt to relitigate the existence of "firmament."
How fucking batshit Vampire beliefs would be has a whole lot to do with how frequently vampires turn over and how many of the vampires are made in the modern era. If the ratio of vampires to humans is roughly fixed, then there are at least seven times as many vampires today as there were two hundred years ago - meaning that at least six in seven vampires knows that lightning bolts are made out of electricity and are not actual javelins of fire thrown by an angry god.
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Believing that the Earth was fixed in space and literal actual heavens existed a few dozens of kilometers over head was considered extremely normal, indeed the norm until quite recently. The archbishop who gravely intoned "We shall not know what the stars are made of" tragically died just before he would have been forced to eat crow by the discovery of Helium in 1868. The use of gas spectrometry to discover the substances that make up the stars is 150 years old today. Anyone born 200 years ago grew up in a world where being able to identify star stuff as actual physical stuff that actually exists in a materialistic sense was itself far-out science fiction.Gallileo wrote:Eppur si muove.
Eighteen hundred years ago, the early Christians mostly appear to believe that Jesus Christ was crucified on the Moon. Which is to say that the reason the places and times in the New Tastament do not actually match up to historical Judea is that they weren't really supposed to. They were supposed to be events that happened in a low tier heaven, which was like a supernal world that happened to be located in the sky and shine light down on us in a roughly moon-shaped pattern. The amount of assumptions about the basic structure of the universe that have been casually tossed aside and torn asunder by Albert Einstein and Neil Armstrong is staggering.
So the question of what Vampires would believe is one that is actually quite difficult to wrap your mind around. These people are old enough that their basic assumptions about how basically everything is put together are simply incompatible with how modern people experience the world. They believe that the Sun is swallowed by an enormous Jaguar every evening after passing into a cave and then rekindled in another cave by a powerful Frog before being drawn across the sky again by a chariot pulled by colorful birds. They believe that the Earth is a flat square expanse supporting on each corner enormous stone columns that hold up the sky. They believe that psychiatric illness is caused by demonic possession. And they believe that erectile dysfunction is caused by your penis being stolen by a nearby wizard.
Remember that the Malaria-Syphilis experiment that settled the debate as to whether psychiatric illness had an organic cause turned one hundred last year. One hundred and one years ago, the demonic possession theory of mental illness was considered completely respectable. A hundred years before that it was universal, because the organic theory of mental illness is only two centuries old. The germ theory of disease wasn't even considered reasonable until Pasteur's microscope work in the 1850s! Go back a bit more than a century and a half and people believe that illness is spread by "miasmas" or demons. Not metaphorically. Literally.
Human society handles the fact that people in the quite recent past believed things that are fucking ridiculous through the simple expedient of dementia and death. People who believe the sun is the center of the universe die, and a new generation of people grow up learning about spiral galaxies in school and we move on as if the entire planet wasn't quite recently occupied exclusively by people who thought there was an Axis Mundi around which the entire universe revolved. And in the transitional period, old people kind of go crazy sometimes so when Grandpa goes off on a rant about sky pillars or heavenly spheres or whatever, people just smile and shrug because it's "just Grandpa saying crazy shit again" and not a serious attempt to relitigate the existence of "firmament."
How fucking batshit Vampire beliefs would be has a whole lot to do with how frequently vampires turn over and how many of the vampires are made in the modern era. If the ratio of vampires to humans is roughly fixed, then there are at least seven times as many vampires today as there were two hundred years ago - meaning that at least six in seven vampires knows that lightning bolts are made out of electricity and are not actual javelins of fire thrown by an angry god.
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All religious belief is particular to a set of social circumstances in a specific time and place. The question as you posed it - "What would vampires actually believe in terms of a mythology?" - is not answerable. There are a few specific sources of inspiration from OWOD you could look to.
The Cainite Heresy from Dark Ages was a pretty cool idea. What you have here is a bunch of ex-humans who came from a medieval Christian milieu struggling to adapt their existing moral framework to their new reality, and coming up with a theology that is memorably batshit crazy. This is the kind of rationalization that produced all kinds of heresies and is definitely in the spirit of how humans actually morph their beliefs to their circumstances; the Cainite Heresy is pretty similar in its outlines to the Cathar movemement, especially in how it drew on an existing suppressed Gnostic tradition that it combined with mainstream Christianity.
The Followers of Set are also a lot of fun, in that they are presented as a totally organic religion native and exclusive to vampires that arguably spread to mortals and became integrated into their religions. Here you have a specific case of one ancient and powerful vampire specifically soliciting snake-themed worship and temple-building from his followers and a pantheon of his direct spawn building up around the founder figure. They have their own origin myth distinct from Caine and everything, and you could argue all day with a Setite as to whether the Set mythology originated with a mortal deity concept that a vampire co-opted or if the mortal deity concept comes from the vampire.
You could take an alternative approach that has been proposed here, and have the Followers of Set be a faux-Egyptian British thing that popped up in the 18th Century as contact with the Ottoman East was starting to become established in Western Europe, Egypt was in the occult imagination, and secret societies were all the rage.
The important thing, though, is that just like real-life religions, the actual content of vampire beliefs is pretty idiosyncratic. Their actual function is to give adherents a way of viewing the world that makes sense to them and in which they have a place, and also to regulate their behavior. Monotheist, polytheist - it does not actually matter, and is almost certainly the wrong place to start. If you're coming up with vampire religions of your own you should start with the specific and the local and first come up with some colorful content that will make us give a shit.
The Cainite Heresy from Dark Ages was a pretty cool idea. What you have here is a bunch of ex-humans who came from a medieval Christian milieu struggling to adapt their existing moral framework to their new reality, and coming up with a theology that is memorably batshit crazy. This is the kind of rationalization that produced all kinds of heresies and is definitely in the spirit of how humans actually morph their beliefs to their circumstances; the Cainite Heresy is pretty similar in its outlines to the Cathar movemement, especially in how it drew on an existing suppressed Gnostic tradition that it combined with mainstream Christianity.
The Followers of Set are also a lot of fun, in that they are presented as a totally organic religion native and exclusive to vampires that arguably spread to mortals and became integrated into their religions. Here you have a specific case of one ancient and powerful vampire specifically soliciting snake-themed worship and temple-building from his followers and a pantheon of his direct spawn building up around the founder figure. They have their own origin myth distinct from Caine and everything, and you could argue all day with a Setite as to whether the Set mythology originated with a mortal deity concept that a vampire co-opted or if the mortal deity concept comes from the vampire.
You could take an alternative approach that has been proposed here, and have the Followers of Set be a faux-Egyptian British thing that popped up in the 18th Century as contact with the Ottoman East was starting to become established in Western Europe, Egypt was in the occult imagination, and secret societies were all the rage.
The important thing, though, is that just like real-life religions, the actual content of vampire beliefs is pretty idiosyncratic. Their actual function is to give adherents a way of viewing the world that makes sense to them and in which they have a place, and also to regulate their behavior. Monotheist, polytheist - it does not actually matter, and is almost certainly the wrong place to start. If you're coming up with vampire religions of your own you should start with the specific and the local and first come up with some colorful content that will make us give a shit.
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Ancient History
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On the other hand, you have to imagine that the mortality rate of vampires is pretty high - it's not just the fact that pretty much every vampire is a serial killer by default, and not everyone will be into that, but there are basic rules of vampiric existence which if your sire doesn't let you in on, you're likely to only find out about the hard way - and those tend to be fatal. There's a good chance that there just aren't a lot of early vampires, because you're talking about relatively small human populations that they'd have to prey upon, while figuring out all the shit that does and does not harm them. The few that survive are the ones that are intelligent enough to adapt, bloodthirsty enough to treat human beings like cattle to be bled, and powerful enough to deal with any challengers to their territory.
So presume from the start that most of the vampires you're dealing with are at most a couple centuries old - when the extreme growth in human urban spaces permitted more vampires to be created and feed effectively, and when vampires got enough of a society together to figure out what hurt them and why and could pass that knowledge on to their childer. You get somebody that's four or five hundred years old, and he probably founded your Camarilla-equivalent or is best drinking buddies with him. Thousand-year old monsters exist, but are just that: so alien to present day human thought and contemporary vampire society that they might as well be fucking Grendel.
So too, there's a hard lesson involved in the Embrace: whatever your world view was pre-being a vampire, some part of it is going to be proven wrong. If you were a scientific materialist, well you're undead and loving it, and magic powers are a thing now. If you're a devout <insert religion here>, you're going to have to square what you thought you knew about vampires with the reality. Being able to guzzle holy water and garlic is probably going to come as a surprise to a lot of people. The idea that magic works somehow is going to be upsetting to a lot of people that thought they had one over on Grandpa Munster.
That said, you're not entirely up shit creek. The serial killer angle is balanced out by the Beast: vampires come pre-loaded with a new set of predatory instincts that normal humans don't have, and presumably that also applies as far as instinctively wanting to avoid sunlight. Going through a traumatic event like dying and re-awakening as a bloodthirsty monster is probably a good basis for indoctrination in new ways of thinking, provided you have some sort of a mentor figure or group - think of child soldiers or religious cults. No, seriously, those are your immediate models for a lot of Kindred "societies," because you need to get the rules ingrained in them fast. Religious cults especially will probably pick recruits drawn from a suitable background - being able to only abandon or twist part of your beliefs is easier than abandoning everything.
So presume from the start that most of the vampires you're dealing with are at most a couple centuries old - when the extreme growth in human urban spaces permitted more vampires to be created and feed effectively, and when vampires got enough of a society together to figure out what hurt them and why and could pass that knowledge on to their childer. You get somebody that's four or five hundred years old, and he probably founded your Camarilla-equivalent or is best drinking buddies with him. Thousand-year old monsters exist, but are just that: so alien to present day human thought and contemporary vampire society that they might as well be fucking Grendel.
So too, there's a hard lesson involved in the Embrace: whatever your world view was pre-being a vampire, some part of it is going to be proven wrong. If you were a scientific materialist, well you're undead and loving it, and magic powers are a thing now. If you're a devout <insert religion here>, you're going to have to square what you thought you knew about vampires with the reality. Being able to guzzle holy water and garlic is probably going to come as a surprise to a lot of people. The idea that magic works somehow is going to be upsetting to a lot of people that thought they had one over on Grandpa Munster.
That said, you're not entirely up shit creek. The serial killer angle is balanced out by the Beast: vampires come pre-loaded with a new set of predatory instincts that normal humans don't have, and presumably that also applies as far as instinctively wanting to avoid sunlight. Going through a traumatic event like dying and re-awakening as a bloodthirsty monster is probably a good basis for indoctrination in new ways of thinking, provided you have some sort of a mentor figure or group - think of child soldiers or religious cults. No, seriously, those are your immediate models for a lot of Kindred "societies," because you need to get the rules ingrained in them fast. Religious cults especially will probably pick recruits drawn from a suitable background - being able to only abandon or twist part of your beliefs is easier than abandoning everything.
Right but whether or not vampires know science is kind of beside the point because vampires also know there are fucking vampires, and maybe some other kinds of supernatural nonsense because even with high turnover there's not a lot scientific about how vampires themselves work.
So if there's even one super ancient vampire who is on the record as saying "Yeah there's definitely a god and this is all his fucking fault" then that probably sparks a debate in the vampire community.
Camp A) Well clearly some kind of magic is real, which does a lot to persuade people that the existence of some kind of god, or at least a source that all this comes from, is plausible. Or at least more plausible than it was before you were super strong, super fast, and stopped showing up on video. So they believe Vampire Grandpa when he says he was there when it all went down.
Camp B) The supernatural does not prove the existence of a god or gods, it just proves the existence of the supernatural. So until Zeus actually gets off his ass and shows up at the door they still think Vampire Grandpa is full of shit and trying to scare the neonates into falling in line and not causing a fuss. Or just delusional.
Camp C) There's nothing supernatural about vampirism and its existence just represents a current knowledge gap akin to not knowing how stars work. Not knowing how stars work didn't make them magic and not knowing how vampirism works doesn't make it magic. It needs to be studied and also Vampire Grandpa is definitely full of shit and probably should have been put down at the turn of the last century.
And there is probably definitely subgroups of these groups all stratified by generation and when they were personally turned but you can find just about anyone in any age range if you look hard enough. Maybe Vampire Grandpa's mind was blown so thoroughly by the discovery of helium that he turned into group C later on in life, or maybe he doubled down.
So if there's even one super ancient vampire who is on the record as saying "Yeah there's definitely a god and this is all his fucking fault" then that probably sparks a debate in the vampire community.
Camp A) Well clearly some kind of magic is real, which does a lot to persuade people that the existence of some kind of god, or at least a source that all this comes from, is plausible. Or at least more plausible than it was before you were super strong, super fast, and stopped showing up on video. So they believe Vampire Grandpa when he says he was there when it all went down.
Camp B) The supernatural does not prove the existence of a god or gods, it just proves the existence of the supernatural. So until Zeus actually gets off his ass and shows up at the door they still think Vampire Grandpa is full of shit and trying to scare the neonates into falling in line and not causing a fuss. Or just delusional.
Camp C) There's nothing supernatural about vampirism and its existence just represents a current knowledge gap akin to not knowing how stars work. Not knowing how stars work didn't make them magic and not knowing how vampirism works doesn't make it magic. It needs to be studied and also Vampire Grandpa is definitely full of shit and probably should have been put down at the turn of the last century.
And there is probably definitely subgroups of these groups all stratified by generation and when they were personally turned but you can find just about anyone in any age range if you look hard enough. Maybe Vampire Grandpa's mind was blown so thoroughly by the discovery of helium that he turned into group C later on in life, or maybe he doubled down.
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Username17
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The point is that even the idea of a supernatural that was distinct from the natural is relatively recent. Originally, the word supernatural just meant "divine." So vampires wouldn't be considered supernatural unless you thought they were a type of angel. The idea of supernatural things being separate from the course of nature goes back only to the 18th century, and the association with ghosts and vampires and shit is a 19th century idea. In 16th century Hungary, vampires aren't supernatural. There are people who don't believe in vampires, but if Elizabeth Bathory wants to murder and eat some of the local girls, people just accept that as a thing she can do because she has the power to do it - and the only reason she has to stop is because she gets accused in a church court of heresy. If she had super strength or could command nearby fires, people wouldn't even think that was weird.
The idea that we live in a materialistic world that doesn't have any monsters with magic powers in it is incredibly new and quite radical. The idea that there are dragons wouldn't blow peoples' minds five hundred or five thousand years ago, but their minds might be blown if you told them that there actually weren't any dragons anywhere.
The religious ideas of the past sound totally insane to us today. All the religions of the present have been busily pretending to have not been teaching crazy shit and letting generations of people die off while adapting their teachings to the current zeitgeist. People actually from the past who haven't adapted for shit might as well come from another planet.
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The idea that we live in a materialistic world that doesn't have any monsters with magic powers in it is incredibly new and quite radical. The idea that there are dragons wouldn't blow peoples' minds five hundred or five thousand years ago, but their minds might be blown if you told them that there actually weren't any dragons anywhere.
The religious ideas of the past sound totally insane to us today. All the religions of the present have been busily pretending to have not been teaching crazy shit and letting generations of people die off while adapting their teachings to the current zeitgeist. People actually from the past who haven't adapted for shit might as well come from another planet.
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andshinimasu wrote: Camp C) There's nothing supernatural about vampirism and its existence just represents a current knowledge gap akin to not knowing how stars work. Not knowing how stars work didn't make them magic and not knowing how vampirism works doesn't make it magic. It needs to be studied and also Vampire Grandpa is definitely full of shit and probably should have been put down at the turn of the last century.
Camp D) I say that this is how it works, and if you disagree it I'll suck the marrow from your bones. And yes there will be a test.
That's nothing news, religions adapting to the new times has been happening since forever.FrankTrollman wrote: The religious ideas of the past sound totally insane to us today. All the religions of the present have been busily pretending to have not been teaching crazy shit and letting generations of people die off while adapting their teachings to the current zeitgeist. People actually from the past who haven't adapted for shit might as well come from another planet.
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Like if you go to the earliest days of the bible there were no fancy souls or afterlife immortality, just that if you made your sacrifices you would be blessed with proper rains for your crops or if you didn't follow the book then you would be cursed with drought and your crops would dry out.
But then people started developing better irrigation systems and water reservoirs and whatnot so bad rain wasn't that much of a threat and the priests had to come up with some new excuses so they wouldn't need to pay taxes.
Even today you can see it happening in real time, like modern gatherer-collector tribes whose religion told them every animal is special and has their own spirit and must be respected start to learn how to raise pigs and chickens shift pretty fast to "yeah pigs and chickens don't have special spirit, perfectly fine to keep them caged and slaughter them when we feel like it." Not even need for the old generation to die out, people will change their beliefs pretty fast for plentyful tasty fried chicken and bacon.
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
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From a perfectly functionalist standpoint, religious declarations can mostly be considered as a means to consolidate power. Religious declarations meant for the masses are mostly various reasons you should accept the status quo and give tithes and taxes to priests and kings. Unless your vampire society is much larger than I envision it, there isn't much purpose in vampires spreading ideas to keep the masses in line. There just aren't any masses.
The model is probably small cults. Many vampires are going to recruit new vampires and then fill their brains with cultish rants designed to keep the new vampires directly subservient to the master vampire. So the vampire sovereign is probably going to be more of a David Koresh than a Thomas Aquinas.
So basically a lot of vampires are going to tell their children weird shit about how they are personally divine and allowed to keep as many sex slaves as they want. But these will be extremely idiosyncratic Manson family stories that won't easily translate to other people. Individual vampires will claim messianic status to their children, but it's not at all obvious how those teachings would incorporate other vampires, if at all.
This means that if there is a vampire society, much of its teachings would have to revolve around deprogramming brainwashed sex slaves. When the Camarilla finds a new vampire, chances are quite high that they will have been living in a compound being convinced that their sire was some sort of universe governing dark prophet or some shit. Convincing them to reject the divinity of some rando vampire Rasputin wannabe would be job one. Probably job two and three as well.
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The model is probably small cults. Many vampires are going to recruit new vampires and then fill their brains with cultish rants designed to keep the new vampires directly subservient to the master vampire. So the vampire sovereign is probably going to be more of a David Koresh than a Thomas Aquinas.
So basically a lot of vampires are going to tell their children weird shit about how they are personally divine and allowed to keep as many sex slaves as they want. But these will be extremely idiosyncratic Manson family stories that won't easily translate to other people. Individual vampires will claim messianic status to their children, but it's not at all obvious how those teachings would incorporate other vampires, if at all.
This means that if there is a vampire society, much of its teachings would have to revolve around deprogramming brainwashed sex slaves. When the Camarilla finds a new vampire, chances are quite high that they will have been living in a compound being convinced that their sire was some sort of universe governing dark prophet or some shit. Convincing them to reject the divinity of some rando vampire Rasputin wannabe would be job one. Probably job two and three as well.
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But there are masses, normal human masses. Doesn't matter if they're not vampires as long as they can be talked to and indoctrinated.FrankTrollman wrote:From a perfectly functionalist standpoint, religious declarations can mostly be considered as a means to consolidate power. Religious declarations meant for the masses are mostly various reasons you should accept the status quo and give tithes and taxes to priests and kings. Unless your vampire society is much larger than I envision it, there isn't much purpose in vampires spreading ideas to keep the masses in line. There just aren't any masses.
Ancient kings and assorted nobility considered themselves to be completely different (and superior) beings than the puny peasants masses, all the way up to god-kings and whatnot. That's why they interbred like crazy too, to try to keep the "purity" of their blood. But that mud-covered farmer would be worth less than an horse as far as the king cared.
So, vampires should totally have indoctrinated human followers and teach both them and other vampires about the "noblesse oblige" of vampires that it's only natural they rule over the human masses.
Bonus points because the vampires can actually reward their most faithful with actual immortality and special powers.
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
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Username17
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I don't know where you can get a short and punchy version on-line, Christian apologist ramblings basically overwhelm any reasonable google search you'd be inclined to make. And deep dives into early Christian beliefs are... deep. That shit is bugfuck insane.OgreBattle wrote:Where can I read about the crucifixion on the moon
The key issue for the moon part is that none of the gospels are written by people who ever met Jesus. Indeed, there are no contemporaneous accounts of any of Jesus' twelve apostles. The apostles in Acts never met anyone who ever supposedly met anyone recounted in the Testament. These later apostles got the word of God through visions, not through direct testimony. And these visions came from various heavenly sources, not from actual Palestine.
Christianity comes from Paul the Apostle, not from Jesus. And there's no particular reason to believe that the Peter who worked with Paul was the same Simon-Peter who was one of Jesus' students. Paul the Apostle got all his knowledge of Jesus from a beam of light from the sky. The early historically verifiable spreaders of the gospel never met any of the people they were preaching about - and importantly they did not claim otherwise at the time.
The idea that there was an unbroken oral tradition from Jesus through his original apostles to the early bishops and to the modern Catholic church is a later addition. Only once the early Christians had been dead and buried for a few generations did people begin to assume that there was any physical contact at all between the first Christians and Jesus Christ.
What's ironic is that just as the later stories adopted the stance that "of course these things actually happened in a real place in Roman Judea" they also got more fanciful and bizarre. Events like the Opening of the Tombs and Slaughter of the Innocents obviously did not happen. Because like, fucking obviously. And yet, those major events that are conspicuously absent from contemporaneous accounts were added precisely as the Christian religion was moving towards the claim that their gospel events were real Earthly events and not heavenly revelations.
Paul the Apostle could have pretended that he was directly taught by a Rabbi who was put to death by the Romans and then miraculously returned to life like Krishna and then ascended to heaven. But he didn't. It's only later when Christians started running into arguments like Celsus' that Jesus couldn't have been god because nothing actually happened that they started making up great events and portents that supposedly surrounded his life and death.
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OgreBattle
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There's an old copy of a story with the modifications noticeable enough and not comprehensive enough that you can tell that Jesus was actually crucified by a demon prince is space in the original, can't remember the name of it though. Think it starts with an I when transliterated.
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Yeah this. The point is that it doesn't matter to modern Christians that early Christianity is pretty much unrecognizable as being the same religion. The religious concepts embraced by modern Christians are modern concepts developed in the extremely recent past - and the religious arguments of even a few hundred years ago are incomprehensible to the modern ear. Recall that just a hundred and fifty years ago there was lively religious debate in Christian communities about whether God wanted you to own slaves or not.Kaelik wrote:There's an old copy of a story with the modifications noticeable enough and not comprehensive enough that you can tell that Jesus was actually crucified by a demon prince is space in the original, can't remember the name of it though. Think it starts with an I when transliterated.
The idea that Jesus was an actual person who lived and died and rose again on Earth wasn't anywhere in the original faith, but was tacked on just a few generations in once everyone who was old enough to remember that didn't happen had died. As the oral histories became more opaque, the claims became more fanciful, and by 100 CE you had the book of Matthew claiming that there was a giant zombie dance number in Jerusalem because everyone who had been alive back then and knew that obviously hadn't happened were now dead and you could claim any crazy thing you wanted.
Where that ties in with Vampires is that in the traditional vampire family, the independent vampire creates a new vampire and then tells them basically anything they want. Before being dominated by and turned into a vampire, the neonate knew absolutely nothing of the secret histories of vampires and their sire is now their only source of information about what vampirism means, where vampires came from, what they can do, what their place in the cosmic order is, what other supernatural creatures exist, what weaknesses they have, and so on. Presumably for most of history, a majority of vampires believed that their sires could end their unlives simply by rescinding the gift, or some similar story that compelled absolute obedience to the master vampire.
When a vampire makes another vampire the first question you have to ask is how they ever escaped the cult compound of the vampire that made them in the first place. Something like the Sabbat - an evangelical sect that aggressively preaches that the elders are lying about basically everything - seems like one of the most basic things that would occur. There is no "mainstream" for a vampire to escape their sire to. A vampire who breaks free from their sire for whatever reason (death of the sire, sent away for not being pleasing anymore, loss of faith, or whatever) would go out into the night with no reliable way to tell what things their sire ranted about were pure crazy talk, and when they made vampires of their own they'd ad hoc a bunch of theology justifying their own creation of a cadre of sex slaves and so on.
If there is anything remotely like the Camarilla, it's basically an abuse victim's recovery society. Each vampire who joins vampire society did so by being freed from or disillusioned by their cult leader and sexual abuser. Vampires being created by vampires who were already members of such a society to be inducted into that society rather than kept in the basement for fifty years as an unaging fuck doll would be an incredibly recent development. It's hard to imagine such events transpiring before railroads and steamships.
In short, the ancient vampires don't have anything remotely recognizable as a coherent theology. Even the idea of having a coherent theology was developed by humans less than two thousand years ago, and there was no pressure on vampires to develop one ever.
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OgreBattle
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This article goes into the idea of Jesus as a heavenly being crucified by demons:
https://vridar.org/2011/02/02/jesus-cru ... -in-brief/
"Earl Doherty has argued that the New Testament epistles, unlike the Gospels, portray Jesus as heavenly being who was crucified by demons in heavenly places, and that it was this event that was revealed to early Christian apostles such as Paul by visionary or mystical spiritual experiences or insights into their readings of Jewish scriptures. They described the gospel that they preached as a “mystery” that had been revealed to them by the Spirit of God in what they believed were “the last days”. The crucifixion of Jesus was not an earthly event enacted by a human agencies. The New Testament books and other extra canonical writings give ample evidence for their being a wide variety of “Christianities” in the two or three centuries, but the canonical Gospel narratives and the book of Acts have so completely dominated our understanding of Christian origins that we have failed to see just how “riotously diverse” Christianity was before and even after the Gospels were written. Our canonical gospels — the orthodox narrative of Jesus — and the book of Acts were not widely known among Christian communities until the mid to later half of the second century. We know this from the testimonies of various ancient texts.
"
"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. 3 And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— 4 was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. — 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 (is Paul describing one or two separate visions here?)
"
https://vridar.org/2011/02/02/jesus-cru ... -in-brief/
"Earl Doherty has argued that the New Testament epistles, unlike the Gospels, portray Jesus as heavenly being who was crucified by demons in heavenly places, and that it was this event that was revealed to early Christian apostles such as Paul by visionary or mystical spiritual experiences or insights into their readings of Jewish scriptures. They described the gospel that they preached as a “mystery” that had been revealed to them by the Spirit of God in what they believed were “the last days”. The crucifixion of Jesus was not an earthly event enacted by a human agencies. The New Testament books and other extra canonical writings give ample evidence for their being a wide variety of “Christianities” in the two or three centuries, but the canonical Gospel narratives and the book of Acts have so completely dominated our understanding of Christian origins that we have failed to see just how “riotously diverse” Christianity was before and even after the Gospels were written. Our canonical gospels — the orthodox narrative of Jesus — and the book of Acts were not widely known among Christian communities until the mid to later half of the second century. We know this from the testimonies of various ancient texts.
"
"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. 3 And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— 4 was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. — 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 (is Paul describing one or two separate visions here?)
"
Last edited by OgreBattle on Thu Oct 11, 2018 2:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Fairly young vampires would likely hold the same beliefs they had before they were turned. You could consider turning a traumatising event and people suffering from identity uncertainty fall back to rules, values and beliefs that are familiar, mostly from their early development stages.
You would then likely see a shift into a group mentality and a slow erosion of their previous beliefs in favor of the group identity as well as a fairly developed black sheep effect towards dissenters.
This would likely lead to a drastically different belief system for various generations of vampires with their own traditions and myths, a hodgepodge of earlier religions and personal cults.
Inter-religious conflicts don't appear unlikely between the various generations.
You would then likely see a shift into a group mentality and a slow erosion of their previous beliefs in favor of the group identity as well as a fairly developed black sheep effect towards dissenters.
This would likely lead to a drastically different belief system for various generations of vampires with their own traditions and myths, a hodgepodge of earlier religions and personal cults.
Inter-religious conflicts don't appear unlikely between the various generations.
Examples of kidnap victims who survived months or years with their abductor says that they accept their status and stop trying to escape. Some end up identifying with them, but many don't.
Of course. one reason they survived for a long time with their captors is because they stopped trying to escape or resist and hence weren't murdered.
Of course. one reason they survived for a long time with their captors is because they stopped trying to escape or resist and hence weren't murdered.