Welcome to a short overview of one of the biggest magic portals in the world – a book of Bible. The current user base is approximately around 30% of the global population. One may also note that the Bible as a literary work is an iteration of the Judaism stories thus making the Bible partly a recycled magic circle.
So, how is a Bible a magic circle?
Bible is a collection of narratives which makes the book itself into a magic circle, like any other story. But it’s MDA is too separated between different planes of existence that the perception of the real value of the text becomes too diffused or distorted. The problem lies in the fact that one might suggest that a book of Bible actually consists of 2 separate magic circles: one magic circle dealing with the Mechanical part (the Ritual) and another magic circle dealing with the Dynamics and the Aesthetics (the Story).
To understand what is the Church one must understand what a Ritual is. A Ritual is a routinely performed action by a human where they connect some personal meaning to the performed actions thus giving them more purpose from the individual perspective. It is how a user can incorporate the stories of the Bible into their daily life. The Ritual is the more familiar magic circle to our physical plane of existence. It manifests itself in the form of the Church and the weekly visit to the temples (check-in, submission).
The Church is the one who has the most control over influencing its user’s behaviour and can basically be viewed as a giant corporation whose sole interest is to attract more users to their game (acquisition). But like so many other entities that reach the level of a corporation, the Church is losing sight of what allowed it to become what it is. In today’s realias we witness the Church slowly killing their own product by their own actions.
The Church takes upon itself a role of an interpreter of how the Ritual is to be performed and the actions to be understood. The problem is that people are bad at drawing a line between the Ritual and the Story. By spreading their influence over the Ritual, the church basically can interfere with the user’s experience (the Story) of the Bible reader on all possible levels (Protestantism is a reaction to limit the Churches influence into the interpretation of the Story). And while the initial version of the Bible magic circle under the Church’s administration might have been very successful in its initial stages, in today’s rapid society the Bible becomes an artefact of the past exactly because of the archaic structure of its magic circles.
The submission (busy work) approach to the Ritual as a type of Fun scares away new converts from Christianity as an active practice. This, combined with some other questionable practised by the Church back in the days (examples: crusades (murder), catholic indulges (transactions), Spanish Inquisitions, etc.) creates more and more agnostics in the Christianity dominated regions of the planet. One must mention that the church has been facilitating its user base through many different practises, like increasing the quality of life of its user’s for example and it retains a strong presence in the poorer places of the planet (which would be logical as such would have been its function in its original form). But Europe, as the heart of Christianity, is losing its interest fast (retention). And the reason for that could be the punishing levels of submission that seem like an unproportionate investment of time against a possible payout. People simply vote with their time. They choose to perform other things besides participating in the Ritual. And this has a consequence in the real world.
European society has been fostered by the Church for a long period of time. And the Church has contributed in various ways to the well-being of its customers (LTV). The Church remains one of the bigger charity engines in the world. One of the things the Church did try to teach people was the understanding of co-operation. This meant that by losing younger generations the Church essentially caused an emotional ice age in Europe with the last century being filled with a sense of anxiety and depression in the young people.
How can one claim that? Because it is easy to oversee the fact that a good game creates a good community. Now imagine a tradition of millennia being interrupted? One might suggest that today’s agnostics in Europe are simply people who got severed from the major cultural stream. And this might explain a strange sense of homelessness that a lot of youth feel in these last years. It might be the slow crippling realisation of the fact that we appear to be missing a crucial part of our life – the community. The sense of community that used to be fostered by the Church for the last dozen centuries.
Now, to the more interesting speculative part: the OTHER side of the Bible (secret). The side that has brought Christianity its influence, stature and popularity in the Mediterranean and helped the Faith to foster the community (dynamic). If one is to look past the noise of the façade created by the Church, the book contains a much more intricate magic circle on the inside (alternate reality). And this information is obstructed by the language and the interpretation. So, a new user would only be able to perceive the Ritual part of the Bible but not the Story. And it is, in fact, the Story that helps to understand the Ritualistic submissive side of the Bible. But with the Story being too out of focus because of the latest Church trends (and by late we mean, the past several centuries), the submission seems like a waste of time.
Time is the central reason why today most of the Abrahamic religions are starting to slowly lose their ground. These games are designed for a different time. And different time perception. The Bible is a game designed by the ancient writers to allow the exploration of time as well as space. People are generally curious about their surroundings. But, we are talking about a world where information is travelling at the pace of a turtle. We are talking about a world where you might never leave your home village or town and be surrounded by the same people your entire life. We are talking about a world where you do the same tasks (a.k.a the daily grind) for your community every day of your life. But the religion allows for a temporary escape from that (fantasy). And a story about a distant city (open world) for an ancient kid is probably like a story about a different planet for a modern kid. Almost beyond our imagination. And it allows conveying stories from different periods of time (playing with time). This is our oral history. This way information travels at what now seems like an excruciatingly slow pace. And one has to fill up a lot of time between people coming and going (arrivals and departures) who are carrying the information from other places in the world (location-based, spatial expansion).
However, the Bible teaches not only to understand the physical world beyond the borders of the mundane but also teaches to understand other people. This is something that comes together with any creative work (creative work). And since Bible is basically a catalogue of stories, its artistic value is immense. Artistic expression is something that can exist only in the head of the readers without affecting the world around them instantaneously. So, every reader creates their own content that is unique to them (personalised, sensations, fantasy) that can never directly be experienced by other people. And these are the emotions (empathy). Outside of the emotions, the Bible delivers a bulk of information on such concepts as the benefit of teamwork (teamwork), overcoming the challenges alone or with someone together (challenge), and the unending human search for something that is hidden or unknown (treasure hunt). And while the content of the Story text-wise is a magic circle that all can enter and share, the emotional magic circle is much more intricate.
Here comes the tricky part. One can assume that our emotions are uniquely generated content, thus we assume we are all special. But in truth, there are only a limited amount of emotions which we humans can observe and sense. We are limited by our sensory organs. So it’s possible to assume that if one person experiences something, then another person, in fact, can experience the same if the conditions are right. And through experiencing the spectrum of emotions a person can recognize these emotions in other people (social expansion). And this can be called empathy (love, sadness). A language of emotions that is woven into the underlines of the Bible. With the biggest twist of the Bible being the resurrection (surprise) of Christ, a person who is fluent in the language of emotions would probably experience a very enlightening moment.
And today there seems to be a general lack of exactly that – empathy.
So perhaps, it is reasonable to assume that if the Bible was to be revised to today’s understanding of how fast the time and information exchanges are, this magic circle can still be resurrected.
This text was created to fit the terms in (cursive) as a part of a university course. Any correlations with the real world are not accidental at all, but a lot of this could be complete nonsense. Thanks for reading!
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