in reply to More monk-ish terminology

I think that would be alright if it was an option to turn that on or off in our settings.
I can only imagine someone coming and looking for answers and not being sure
where to go. Personally I think it would be a cool idea though. Of course, thinking about this now, I wonder, do you want to follow the Christian model
of religion, or would you want to look towards Buddhism, etc.
Each would lend their own language to the site.

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RE: RE: More monk-ish terminology
by Adam (Vicar) on Jun 09, 2000 at 23:53 UTC
    Thats a good point. Is this a Christian monastery or a buddhist monastery? Or maybe its just a perl monastery, where maybe we should make up some of our own lingo. But I do agree that we should make the site more monastical.
[reply]
      How would you make it more Perl-ical? I suppose we could call the FAQs "The Sacred Camel Droppings" or something, but somehow I just don't see it getting a properly respectful response. On the other hand, Saint Larry of Perl himself says Perl stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. So, if it's Eclectic, we can use items from Buddhism and Christianity; if we do it to a fault, that's Pathologically. For Rubbish, there's Maleteen2000's JavaScript and Font Tag posts <SEG> (I kid because I care, you know) and for Lister, we'll just write "Smeg!" a lot and dress our cats in 70's liesure suits.

      It'd be going too far to make vroom wear an H on his forehead, though.

      Hey - it's Friday. Whadda ya want, serious answers? Pfui...

      - Ozymandias

[reply]
      This is more of a Christian monastery since in the Buddhist culture there are no saints, bishops, or friars. At least as far as I know. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

      -- zdog (Zenon Zabinski)
         Go Bells!! '¿'

[reply]
        I think, in the interest of being open-minded, we should not necessarily restrict ourselves to Christian or Buddhist thought. I see several reasons for this.

        I think we all understand that religion is being used as a somewhat humorous metaphor for what we enjoy. For example, we can have a node entitled "Seekers of Perl Wisdom" and envision the humble supplicants coming to the monastery for advice. Personally, I smile every time I see that. But keep in mind that the religious theme is a metaphor, not a dogma laid down for us. If we accept that, why not mix and match religious themes as we feel comfortable with them? It's our playground and we get to choose the toys.

        Karma is a Hindu and Buddhist concept, but I think we can all grasp it, even if we do not agree with it. Even if we have the non-buddhist term of "Saint", many could grasp and not be offended by the use of the word "Karma" (assuming it were being used).

        By the same token, many might feel more at home with terms like Initiate and Abbot than Lama (that's a buddhist monk, not the animal with two l's) or Panchen Lama. Nothing wrong with that, either.

        My ultimate bias, though, is that I think this could be a richer, more interesting site if we adopted the religious terms for our use, rather than agreeing to stick with terms from only one religion. Let's make our own monastery, not adopt someone else's.

        Cheers!

[reply]

        Well, this was a duplicate of the post above. I was stuck using IE today, so I got bitten by the "double-post" bug that seems to be going around. Better reading this than another copy of the above post, right? Back to Netscape for me...

[reply]

        Well, I would not call it very Christian either, as we don't seem to have a "pope" category, but go straight from "bishop" to "pontiff" to "saint". Yes, you could say that pontiff is a pope, but in theory multiple pontiffs could exist on the site (btrott is approaching it fast!) Wonder how much research vroom did while coming up with the monk titles? (See Voting/Experience System for a list of all titles)

[reply]

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