User talk:Taam

/Archive 1

SEMI-RETIRED

This user is no longer very active on Wikipedia.

The Puppet Show

"One man campaign to run down this ancient civilization"

Frankly, you have misinterpreted my entire attitude toward Egyptian religion. I want to lay out here what my attitude is and why I have done some of the things that you find so offensive.

First, my comment at Talk:Main Page was flippant, but if I was trying to mock anything, I was mocking the original comment in that section for hypersensitivity. Someone who is so cursory in examining Wikipedia's coverage of Egyptian topics might not go beyond a surface reading of the Osiris myth. Someone who is upset enough by controlled regurgitation to complain about it might well be disgusted by a surface reading of the myth's events. As for the coverage of those events in the article itself, they are not cherry picking. The "adultery" receives only half a sentence and is paired with an entirely different explanation of why Set killed Osiris. The "beheading" receives all of two sentences because the significance of that event is less self-explanatory. And the dismemberment of Osiris, the conception of Horus, and the homosexual episode are all prominent parts of the myth. If the homosexual episode receives disproportionate attention, it is only because scholarly explanations of its significance are varied and complicated. Te Velde (1967) spends pages and pages trying to grasp its meaning. Nor do I mean to imply that homosexuality or adultery were approved of in ancient Egypt. The first paragraph about the homosexual episode says that it is a product of Set's "forceful and indiscriminate sexuality". And the deeper meanings contained in the myth are far from neglected. The entire Influence section talks about them, and the sections on the birth and childhood of Horus and the resolution are mostly concerned with them. And there are many other instances throughout the article where I address them.

Regarding the "sarcastic comment about Unas" you complained of last year, I assume you mean my edit summary adding Egyptian temple to the list of featured articles at the WikiProject Ancient Egypt page. Yes, I quoted the "Cannibal Hymn" and then said "no, I'm not full of myself at all". I did not use Unas' name; I used my username. Why? Because Egyptian temple had just passed FAC and I had received a massive ego boost. So I made fun of my own pride and excitement, by suggesting that I was about to become more powerful than the gods and then pointing out how silly it was for me to suggest that. I did not mean to say anything about Unas or the hymn.

Yes, I am sometimes flippant about ancient Egyptian religion. I'm flippant about a lot of things. I don't show it much on Wikipedia, where all too often, jokes produce misunderstandings like this one. But my sense of humor does show up on subjects other than ancient Egypt—for instance, in maintaining and adding to WP:Deleted articles with freaky titles, or in joking about my own obsessive tendencies. I could just as easily joke about other religions. For example, I have a lot of sympathy with the description of Christianity given in one of those deleted titles: "The belief that a cosmic jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity". But if I did that, I would risk the ire of many, many more people. I don't want to be driven off Wikipedia by feuds, with anybody.

So here is my real attitude toward Egyptian religion. I've been familiar with and fond of it since the age of seven, starting with the video adaptation of David Macaulay's book Pyramid and learning from progressively more sophisticated modern treatments of the subject. My recent burst of interest in it started with Middle Egyptian by James P. Allen, one of the clearest, most insightful, and most sympathetic modern scholars of the subject. I am very familiar with the metaphorical nature of Egyptian mythology, which explains all the contradictions and seemingly bizarre events. I've been trying to convey that reality in the article Egyptian mythology and in a forthcoming rewrite of Ancient Egyptian deities. I frankly think Egyptian religion is mind-bogglingly, gloriously weird, and that attitude produces both serious articles and talk-page jests. (The Egyptians themselves were not above joking about their gods, if "The Contendings of Horus and Seth" is any indication. But that did not make them any less devout.) There are parts of Egyptian religion I find distasteful, like animal sacrifice and the totally authoritarian nature of kingship, but I don't joke about them, nor do I overemphasize or downplay them.

Sorry about the wall of text. But I want to convince you that I do want to convey the real nature of Egyptian religion as well as I am able. It's become my purpose on Wikipedia. I don't want there to be bad blood between us, because it would only interfere with that goal. A. Parrot (talk) 18:30, 25 October 2012 (UTC)