Combatting Heresy (Perfect World)

Abstract

Through history, religion has been as much a battleground as a paradise. Therefore, despite the high level of mutual tolerance exhibited by university scholars of religious studies, one chapter of this book needed to explore hostility. It recounts an invasion, a strategic attack against a despised alien culture, conducted as a scouting expedition into a virtual world based on it. The sattva for the avatar is an infant girl, who died in 1870 at the age of one, and was the daughter of two aggressive missionaries who wrote extensively about the world tour they took in 1879–1880. Thus, this chapter has two themes: (1) how it is possible to revive symbolically a person who died in early childhood and thus left little information about personal characteristics, and (2) how it may sometimes be necessary to embrace rather than shun religious conflict. The MMO is Perfect World, a Chinese fantasy gameworld containing much Taoist culture. The infant girl’s Baptist clergyman father despised Taoism, as her mother despised Chinese culture in its treatment of women, both of them publishing books about their experiences that were highly critical of Asian societies. Thus, her avatar is a vehicle for exploration of religious conflict.