Malazan book of the Fallen is done precisely on this kind of idea and it does it so much better it isnt even funny. Its just fucking sad.
That's really interesting, thanks. I might look into this.
Checks Wikipedia page.
Holy shit, 10 volumes. That's intense.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but there's something very compelling to me about an ancient civilization tunneling into the secrets of the divine only to uncover ....a void. A great, meaningless black void. A great hole in the heart of things. No gods, no purpose. Just silence.
What the fuck, fuckety fucking meaning can be "discovered" in something meaningless?
Except that its all meaningless?
Well, that's sort of begging the question, though, isn't it? You're assuming that the universe is inherently absurd, inherently meaningless, which is not with that Engwethians were hoping to find. They were hoping to find gods, presumably gods which had created the universe for a reason, and had imbued sentient life with a purpose. Them finding out that there's no gods triggers the same existential crisis that might grip a contemporary believer - well, if there's no God, if all of this just sort of happened on its own, then what's the point?
They weren't looking for meaning in the universe, they were looking for meaning by discovering what purpose the gods had in mind when they made the universe. No gods, no purpose, right?
Of course, I'm not saying that I really agree with that reasoning, I think that meaning can be found in the absence of divine creation, but I see the logic. Again, this is precisely the same question that troubled a few centuries of philosophers, it's not exactly unheard of.
Instead of sharing that discovery and confronting the world with the great, yawning abyss of meaninglessness that lurks just beyond the horizon, they decide instead to sacrifice themselves in order to create deities, thereby imposing an order, a sense of meaning and purpose, that the universe lacks.
How does that achieve anything but exactly the opposite? Since everyone would know those are not gods but just some stupid people playing pretend on a bigger scale.
And as DeepOcean says it doesnt make any fucking sense in a setting where reincarnation is everyday ordinary fact of life.
Unless you know, neither souls or reincarnation mean anything like they do in our world - which makes those ideas vacuous and non applicable to any kind of philosophy we developed about our versions of it all. Which i tried to explain to a fucking imbecile few posts ago but it did not work. Amazingly.
I'm not really sure I followed this point. My understanding is that souls and reincarnation are just part of the natural order in the PoE universe, and so would run into the same void of meaning one confronts upon the realization that none of the natural order was created with a divine purpose in mind.
This is precisely the same concern which has animated significant thinkers throughout the last several hundred years, as society grapples with an age of religious decay. It's what prompted Voltaire to write "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." It's the same concern that runs through the famous passage of the Grand Inquisitor (I can't imagine the name is a coincidence) in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, when the Grand Inquisitor imprisons Christ, insisting that mankind must be subdued by religious dogma in order to be happy. It's the same concern that Nietzsche puts into the mouth of the satyr Silenus in the Birth of Tragedy, that the best thing for man was never to be born at all, and thus never confront the grotesque absurdity of his existence. A lot of Nietzsche's work and most of existentialism grapples with precisely the question posed in this scene - can we truly live with the meaninglessness of a godless world? The Birth of Tragedy argues that we must invent myths in order to shield ourselves from the primal horror of existence. Perhaps we must invent gods as well? Or create them?
A load of bullshit. Huge enormous stupid shit.
And all of it based on a single fucking strawman argument, - putting "meaningless" into the words of the universe.
How do fuck any of those knew that the lack of Gods (as humans invented them) means everything is meaningless?
How does that fucking idiot logic work?
I understand why those people were inclined to think as they did, as products of their times. But to impose those "ideas" are actual TRUTH? Without a micron of any kind of evidence or proof? And then base further assumptions based upon that idiocy?
Inventing one silly distorted limited fantasy, and then whaling that everything is meaningless when first proofs that the fantasies are not really real? Just because your first idiotic idea you pulled out of your scrawny humanoid ass turned out not to be true?
humans... ffs!
Yeah, I think this is a great point, which sort of gets back to my frustrations with PoE. You're arguing that there is no reason to conclude that, just because there are no gods, then there is no meaning and that people must therefore be lied to in order to protect them from the truth. There's an equally good counterargument that this is an incredibly condescending conclusion, one that mistakes the weakness of the arguer for the weakness of mankind.
This is, to me, a really interesting and meaty issue and I think the game deserves credit for even raising it. At the same time, though, they don't spend any time really delving into it and exploring it. You're never really forced to wrestle with it, and it comes in such a flood at the end that it tends to get lost in all the rest of the clutter. PoE has a lot of good ideas but is struggles to make them matter.
Another poster a few pages had, I think, a really interesting proposal which would have been to make the player character the reincarnation of Eothas. Therefore, you'd be personally forced to face down the question posed herein - do you ascend to the pantheon, knowing that it's all a lie, or do you reveal the Engwethain fabrication to the world? Suddenly the question isn't dry and abstract, but presented directly before you with a sense of personal stakes involved. PoE could have been a fascinating meditation on the nature of faith and meaning - imagine if, at the very end, you'd listen to Eder, Durance and the Grieving Mother debate the proper course of action, having grappled with the revelation that their faith was a lie. You'd have both a thematic and a personal climax, all the threads of the story finally tying together.
But they didn't. PoE remains a game with a tremendous amount of ambition, ambition for which I think it deserves a fair amount of credit, but also one which doesn't quite tie all of its pieces together. It reminds me a lot of Alpha Protocol, a game which was brilliant when it succeeded, but when it didn't it was, well ....Alpha Protocol.
old Order, Hierarchy and Justice and patron of my paladin's country... But Yes I got the impression too that you are supposed to agree with Iovara, while I didn't even felt guilty turning her on to Inqusition nor for outlawing Animancy; It was all done to save the Eora future from being overun by liberals and :incloosive: in 400 years or so. Still Thaos came to far killing entire city quarters to make Animancy look worse than it was when all it took to make Duc agree that is too dangerous was a few [Honest] and [Resolve] checks. Not to mention murdering him after he agreed to our position was dick and 
