Religion and glitter?

[tryingitall]

Balthazar has settled into the Nexus fairly quietly. It's a place more or less to his liking, he must admit. Chaotic without being violent, plenty of entertainment and liquor and people to talk to...

It's not home, and he's not going home, since this is apparently what he gets as an afterlife. That's more than a little depressing. He's already missing his siblings. Still, this might be better than oblivion. Time will tell. In the meantime, he's found or purchased assorted craft supplies, including markers and crayons, heavy paper, glitter glue and paint. And dry pasta.

"So, how do we all feel about religion?" he asks with aggressive cheer. "Do you have one? Would it bother you to discover something here that contradicts what you believe?"

Pause. He pokes at whatever he's working on with a little frown. "...and if that's too heavy a question, come look over my shoulder at this. I need critique."

He's been gluing and painting and glittering farfalle with reckless abandon. "Does this look like a bunny? I think it looks rather more like a unicorn threw up after a trip to the Olive Garden, but I'm still an amateur pasta artist."

Come to think of it, is there such a thing as a professional pasta artist? If so, he wants to meet one.

Comments

[rosco_coltrane]

"Well, we call religion Christianity, where I come from," Rosco answers, coming to stand beside him, gazing down at the artwork. "I believe in God and Jesus. I ain't a regular church-goer, so I ain't much good at the philosophical stuff. I got a pretty good idea on how to live decent."

Granted, thanks to Boss Hogg, Rosco doesn't always live up to even his own standards of living decent, but he doesn't see any way to help it. So, he doesn't bring that up, but just continues eyeballing the pasta image of a bunny.

"It ain't that bad," Rosco says. "I don't know what unicorn sick up would look like, but you ain't too far off from a bunny. They're mostly ears, belly and fluffy tails."

[ixis]

"Religion? A crutch. Even if definite proof of gods is offered, and it has been, why devote yourself to them? It's begging for scraps when you could be putting that energy towards your own ascension. Gods exist only as bar for you to surpass. Or destroy." That last opinion is added with a nasty snicker.

[synthdetective]

Nick peers over Balthazar's shoulder to look at the piece of art, and he squints his eyes to see if he can make sense of it. "It looks like a rad rabbit." Valentine leans back, and he slips his hands into his pockets. And he tries to think about the other question, long and hard.

"If there was much of an afterlife, I'm not sure that I would even be here," says Nick, and he goes to take a seat in one of the chairs along side Balthazar and he reaches out for a piece of pasta with a finger to look it over.

"But as far as religion goes, I never paid it a whole lot of attention. There are others who do, but I'm not exactly the judgmental type. Because for some it might give them a bit of hope in what might be a hopeless world," says Nick, as he rolls the piece of pasta between his fingers.

Hope you don't mind me coming late to the glitter party!

[rekindledtitan]

Both question and invitation are taken up by another machine, this one in high-tech plate armor. She stops by his array of craft supplies, head tilted at the results.

"Hm. With the caveat this stuff isn't my strong point, from my perspective you get three main kinds of religion. You've got the old Earth ones, and they seem fine. Don't cause trouble for our city and people seem to like them, and that's enough for me. You've got faith in the alien being who's protected us for centuries. I don't know if you'd call it a god, but it's the closest thing I know.

"And then you have the things our enemies worship. They come in different forms but all of them seem to come back to the same thing. Something that would turn humanity's last city into our last grave if it could. You can imagine how I feel about that." But he doesn't have to, because the grim turn of her tone there spells it out.

Her companion Ghost slips around her while she talks, a tiny machine with a many-pointed silver shell. It peeps curiously at the glittery pasta with a single blue optic, keeping a shy distance from the artist. This seems to prompt Blaze to nod at the picture herself and comment in a more good-natured tone, "Looks like you got kinda carried away with that."

[itmeanstruth]

"Something here that contradicts what we believe?" Came a voice from the tree directly above Balthazar. A middle-aged man dropped down to make his presence known, though he was still hanging from his legs. "Nothing more exciting than that."

It was topics like this, and the chance to learn from people from all kinds of worlds, that brought Minoru into the Nexus at random times. He was a wandering Snake Sage, a pupil in the sect of one of his world's sacred animals. In some worlds, he might be considered a monk or shaman. In more secular ones, a drifter. But one thing was clear - he was always curiously open-minded to learn something new about the mysteries of life, death and rebirth.

"Where I'm from, in my birth village, we follow a belief system that was once known as ninshu. But it's not as spiritual a path as it was when the Sage of Six Paths was still alive. What is religion like in your world?"