Date: 2019-06-05 04:25 pm (UTC)
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
From: [personal profile] brin_bellway
>>Also it probably ties to the more general insistence on using deadnames and such, "if I use your term for yourself I'm giving you a legitimacy I don't want".<<

Which reminds me of how, on a rewatch, that first-episode scene between Sisko and Picard is made especially awkward by the fact that Picard pronounces "Bajor" *with a Cardassian accent*.

(admittedly that might be the French in him coming out, French is *also* big on final-syllable stresses and pronouncing j as "zh", but like, he doesn't *usually* speak with a French accent)

Yeah, maybe it's the Jew or the liberal or both in me, but to me calling them Prophets is basically just "I acknowledge that this is what you are called, and for that matter that you have fairly clearly demonstrated the abilities for which you are named, and I might even go so far as to acknowledge that those abilities are pretty neat (though I promise not to try to exploit them because I saw what you did to the *last* guy who tried that)".

This stuff might also tie in with the way that...IIRC *nobody* on that station draws a distinction between "belief" and "worship". People ask each other "do you believe in the Prophets", and like, of *course* I believe the Prophets exist, they're right there, even if they don't directly interact with the corporeal world *much* they've done it enough to make their existence pretty clear. That doesn't mean I have to *worship* them.

(and this is all made more difficult on a Watsonian level by the ubiquitous use of translators, which the viewer is expected to ignore even when things like "translating the Cardassian word as the extremely misleading 'trial' when a closer term would be 'denouement'" happen.)

And it does kind of seem like it's *not* purely a translation issue, that they actually don't distinguish between these *concepts* and therefore people who don't want to worship the Prophets feel like they ought to downplay the Prophets' existence no matter how stupid and/or dangerous it is to do so.

(and maybe *that's* the Jew in me, too: it's been a *long* damn time since Jews were henotheists, but even "this is a thing our ancestors used to believe millennia ago" is enough to give you the *concept* of believing in gods without worshipping them)

---

If you can think of a good way to explain in more depth or coherency I'd be interested to hear it, but I think you've done pretty well so far.
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Brin

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