unforum

[Leeravitz]

Speaking overall, I don't feel that we can easily make too many generalisations about what Cubist religion 'is'. It's reminsicent of lots of different aspects of Earth religion: people have validly pointed out (it seems to me) analogies not only with Scientology, Waco style Davidiansim and the like, but also with Freemasonry, traditional Catholicism, Taoism, ancient Paganism and so on. For a start, we still remain uncertain as to precisely what it is that Cubists believe *in* (although the Brothehood website has gone some way towards rectifying this).

Then, we must remember that the Brotherhood is not quite the same as the Reconstruction 'Church', and that, according again to the Brotherhood website, there are infinitely many splinter groups that have taken Cubism (in some form) as a central religious tenet. The only real - world comparison I can think of to that amount of religious differentiation on the basis of essentially the same core beliefs is the multiple distinctions of Protestantism (when Lutheranism, Calvinism, Methodism, Quakerism, Anglicanism, the Baptist Church, Episcopalianism, Unitarianism etc. are all variations of one another, in some respect).

The Salk Logs are informative in telling us that, in Pietro's opinion, Reconstructionism itself is a perfectly viable, legally sanctioned belief system. This rather contradicts certain earlier assumptions made to the effect that the Recons were simply cultists, who were held to be persona non grata within polite Perplexian society. And, in comparison, the brotherhood are well - respected: the Sentinel is happy to ask members to give them soundbites, for instance.

We may be being wrongfooted by the fact that a localised website (advertising the equivalent of the parish church/local branch of the Brotherhood) gives off the impression of being cheap and a little tacky. This doesn't immediately shout 'cultist' to me; it has something of the quality of the local congregation of a fairly staid religious institution trying to 'get with the kids'.

I would assume that the reason there are lots of 'sisters' is probably because there are equally lots of 'brothers' and all of them are deemed to share in the fraternity/sorority of the Cube's love/goodness/whatever. As a designation, it was common, of course, in Christian monasticism - for instance; monks (even today) are 'brother' and 'father'; nuns are 'sister' and 'mother'. The only (slight) mystery is whether multiple Flynnts indicate:

1. That a whole family is devoted to the Brotherhood.
2. That Flynnt is a name adopted by all female converts to the Brotherhood's tenets (not impossible - aren't all male Sikhs called Singh, for instance?)
3. That someone forget what a previous character was actually called (OOG, naturally)!

Yes, that Pietro had a eulogy at his funeral suggests some degree of religiosity *amongst the family* - in itself, that could mean that his mother was very religious, or his father or whatever. It's only like saying they were members of the local Church congregation in Pietro's youth, and had paid fees to ensure he'd get a decent burial at the end of his life.

Alternatively, given that Pietro was a bit of a name, maybe someone laid on the eulogy specifically for him.

But, given that the Brothehood are actually the respectable face of Cubist religion, this hardly seems remarkable to me - no more so than a priest intoning some final words over the coffin of a lapsed Catholic, say, who hasn't attended a service in 15 years.

[mupdan]

Sorry to drag up old posts, but I've just got card 217 and found this website (didn't see this post originally, for some reason). One thing I've noticed that I haven't seen discussed is on the "Way of life" page, where it says

[neophoenix]

[BrianEnigma]

[SheRa]

Hi there, I'm new to this Perplex City thing so bear with me.

I experienced something weird when I first visited the Brotherhood of the Six site. I haven't seen it mentioned yet, and honestly I don't know if it's intentional or just some kind of weird browser error. I run Firefox on a Mac, btw.

Anywho, when I visited the site, I visited the subpages in order. When I got to the "What we Beleive(sic)" page, under "The sixfold beliefs of the Brotherhood are as follows:" there were *8* beliefs listed. Numbers 7 and 8 were just beliefs #3 and 4 repeated. I thought it was weird, so I checked the page source, and there were only six items. Then when I went back to the normal browser view, there were just the six.

Now I can't seem to reproduce this behavior -- have tried in Safari, tried Firefox on my boyfriend's Mac. So I dunno if this is relevant or just random browser weirdness. Has anybody else seen this?

I did search, so trout gently if already discussed --

EDIT: I misspoke, it's actually beliefs 2 and 3 that are repeated as 7 and 8.

EDIT: I *have* gotten this behavior to repeat -- after I pressed refresh a bunch of times, I got the 8 instead of six beliefs.

[JamesDart]

Uhhh... sounds like just an error in the page. Don't desregard it though, even something like that can end up being important.

[iwozframed]

[Seej]

This is unusual, but I think it's just a bug in Firefox clashing with a slight coding accident on the site. It's good coding practice to indent your lists in HTML (makes your code easier to read if you're debugging). #2 and #3 have been offset by one more space than the rest of the list. This shouldn't cause any weird behaviour because your browser should just interpret the list and ignore the whitespace you've typed in the code. Internet Explorer doesn't have any problem with it, but Firefox (on a PC, v1.04) is reproducing the behaviour you describe.

Basically, whoever coded the page typed an extra space a couple of times, and Firefox is being very weird about it with no good reason. Best place to report this would be to the Firefox developers.

Well spotted though.

[RobDixon]

This is probably not important, but the last name in the list of ancient organizations on the History page struck me as odd: The Kababah Clan.

At first I thought there might be a connection to the Kabalah (Jewish Mysticism), maybe leading to some ancient link between that group and Earth mystics or something.

Then I found this link: http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/CRE_DAH/CUBEBS_Arab_kababah_.htm

It turns out that kababah is a type of pepper, called cubebs in English. It's used in food, and it also used to be distilled into a drug.

Maybe this is just a funny cube-word connection, but I thought I'd mention it anyway!

[dawh25]

I went through the pages one by one and listed the typos I found in order. Taking the words that are involved, it almost seems like a message.

Intro:
Its our first web venture...
Grammatical: its should be it's

...and about how we life that faith today...
Life should be live

Sister April Flyntt
Should be Flynnt

Answers:
none

History:
...One True Cube, whiich is One...
which

Scriptures:
none

Way of Life:
...celebrate our four festivals int he year...
in the

...come from the Brotherhoods festival...
Brotherhood's (possesive)

...summer Solstice, a cheerful celbration with...
celebration

What we Believe:
...gone beyond earthly desieres...
desires

...all that is real or true int eh universe.
in the

Join Us!(schedule of events)
...some of our upcomming events...
upcoming

Those are all of the typos I found and stringing the words together I got:

"It's live Flynnt which in the Brotherhood's celebration desires in the upcoming..."

The scary thing is it almost makes sense, though it would be incomplete.

Does this mean anything? Or is it just an over-excited sister trying to hard to make the site "attractive" and skipping letters and stuff? Most of the mistakes are simple ones to make and go unnoticed if you're not used to typing.

[vortex-5]

[spec]

"It's live Flynnt which in the Brotherhood's celebration desires in the upcoming..."

By it's live, maybe they mean the site's live? or there maybe some hidden parts of the site?

Maybe their desires are in a directory called upcoming?

[sledgecallier]

There is also a misspelling on the front page of

[neuromancer]

There is a misspelling on the answers page, though some people may not see it as one.

[dawh25]

I missed those.

If you added them into the spaces where they belong, the phrase becomes:

"It's programmes live/life Flynnt forever which in the Brotherhood's celebration desires in the upcoming..."

Neither live nor life really seem to make sense in that fragment.

Out of curiosity, has anyone looked for reasoning behind the apparently random color scheme?

[Kalt]

The color scheme is the progression of the rainbow, or the optical spectrum. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Of course there are some medium colors popped in there depending on whom you consult, but those are the bare basics.

What might be interesting are places where the color scheme doesn't follow the direct progression (which might be what dawh25 was mentioning). In certain places the color schemes reverse for either the part or the whole of the progression (yellow, orange, red, green, or violet blue green yellow orange red). Perhaps certain words mark those changes, or certain letters... or maybe not!