I have just had an epiphany of sorts. You ready?Judaism is a gnostic faith.Allow me to explain.
Gnosticism is essentially the belief that the universe was created by an imperfect deity, known as the Demiurge, and that a Supreme Being of pure good exists indepently of said Demiurge. The Demiurge is usually thought of to be either malevolent or simply unable to properly execute perfect good.It's easy enough to see the God of the Hebrews as a Demiurge. After all, his track record is far from perfect. In the delightfully amusing language of Richard Dawkins:
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
But this raises the question: if He's the Demiurge, who's the Supreme Being? Who's the Force of pure, omnipotent good that will save us from this world of suffering?
The answer struck me this suddenly afternoon, as I sat in bemused debate with a small troupe of Lubavitchers who were attempting to persuade me to don tefillin. It was so blindingly obvious, that I am astonished I didn't figure it out sooner. The Supreme Being is this guy:
Ha. Bet you didn't think you'd see a photo of him on my blog. Or should that be a capitalised "Him"? After all, according to Lubavitch thought, that man is the Messiah. The one who will lead us into an era of pure good, and perfect/supplant the evil-ridden universe of the Hebrew God.
Number of Chabad emissaries brutally murdered in Bombay: 2
Number of deaths on the roads of Israel this year*: 244
Number of Israeli Jews who died of lung cancer in 2005**: 1193
"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." - attributed to Joseph Stalin
* Source: Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. Motorist fatalities 1/1/08 - 31/8/08. ** Source: Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. Includes cancers of the trachea and bronchus.
It's not like Blizzard has never made me clean up their shit before (I remember one particular adventure I had in Nagrand). Yet I had hoped, with unwarranted optimism, that I could leave my dung duties behind when I arrived in Northrend. Alas, twas not to be! No sooner had I stepped off the *boat thingy* than some crazy gnome was having me feed gourmet Sephardi dishes to the local wolf population and search the, uh, products of my labour for missing microfilms.
"That's no problem," I hear you say. "When I go to Northrend, two months after everyone else, I'll just go to Howling Fjord. FIXT!" So this is where it really gets fun. A gnome in Howling Fjord gave me sticks of dynamite and directed me to throw them under nearby bats to, quite literally, scare the shit out of them. Then, big surprise, I had to collect it. Me, big, hero, saviour-of-the-Alliance me. Once again, picking up droppings.
I'm assuming Blizzard hired heaps of new people to help with the construction of Northrend.
I wonder if they hired someone solely to create feces-based quests.
