Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-10197675-20130806142227/@comment-1255618-20190421032200

@Atvelonis Yeah, this sounds pretty much like my feelings on the matter. That being said, including Sermon 0 in the games would definitely expose the work to many more people, which I'm sure would make the discussion all the more lively since many casual and even hardcore fans get a lot of their information from the reading they do while playing the games. That being said, the "secret messages" take quite a bit of work to decode unless someone points them out.

I have to admit, as "cool" as Vivec is I feel like it's too easy to treat his views as gospel, since he's sometimes the only source that goes very in-depth into topics of the lore few other "expert" mystics touch on. There aren't too many philosophers able to take on Vivec or just write out their own take on things that may be just straight-up more compelling. Ideas like the Godhead, what the gods are, CHIM, that the Psijic Order are idiots (which I personally very strongly doubt), etc., are taken for granted. That's been alleviated somewhat by the very awesome and also very contrary writings of Sotha Sil's acolytes, which take an unapologetically Anuic or even Buddhist-ish view. But even so, it would be nice to have some high-level contrary voices in the games like Jobasha who can make convincing arguments against Vivec's ideas. Most people in the Elder Scrolls world aren't even familiar with mysticism or the ideas of mystics and so can't even speak engage with any of Vivec's ideas about "deep cosmology". Sure there are plenty of theologians in Mundus, but they're mostly representative of whatever their culture's traditional views are rather than truly individualistic free-thinkers in matters of cosmology and philosophy: always extremely cool to read about and hear from but fundamentally different from mystics. They're fulfilling two quite different niches.