How does oblivion equal torment? You sort of have to exist in order to experience anything, torment included.
When you get technical yes. But the concept itself can be fear inspiring, which could lead to describing it as a form of 'eternal torment'. IE someone who considers the word torment to indicate 'something very bad', then oblivion would fall into that category.
I'm basically saying that there's nothing stopping someone that believes in hell/eternal damnation/eternal torment from believing that it's anything other than oblivion. It's "something to hate/fear", which is the main purpose of the idea.
TVtropes uses the term 'pain of nonexistence' even, as one common perception of hell, in its
article on hell in fiction.
Well yes, that's what I said, in a different manner of speaking. That mission that "everyone likes to use" was actually quite well developed for a mission bit and hinted at a serious PF hint. It made sense to me because there is also absolutely ZERO mention of Hell in every bit of scripture that we have, while there are legion for Heavens.
And yet it got used all the time by dev actors, in particular ones who were theoretically supposed to be the absolute religious extremists.
As usual, CCP are very contradictory.
Even then, its lack of mention in the woefully small selection of Scripture we have doesn't really say much. Even the Bible almost never mentions the concept, and never by the word 'hell'. I'd consider the Death article a more appropriate source in this case due to being written from an omniscient world-building perspective.
Also, that article was written in late 2011 btw, according to its history page.
Sorry but Eterne "said" things doesn't mean much to me. I will need written traces to actually take that into account. Not that I don't like Eterne or anything (quite the contrary), but i'm not going to take for truth the ramblings of a single dev actor with his own views on PF.
*shrugs*
I'm just telling what he said. Of which the actual post is
here, by the way.
I don't think I agree with it entirely, but he was a dev and so that does have weight. But like I said above, I prefer going by the Death article since that was actually published on EVElopedia rather than being just an off-hand post on a forum. Buuuut...
Oblivion is not Hell to me anyway. It's just void. Hell =/= void. Of course it's also written that they will suffer torment until the end of times. Okay. I find it really trite but whatever. The one thing I like with Amarr scriptures is that they tried to get away from IRL tropes, and this one is definitely not going into that direction. I quite liked the idea that it was kindof different, that's also why I found that mission PF piece intriguing, but apparently, it's not...
Until the devs actually decide to
stick with something, we don't know
what direction they want it to go in.
Personally, however, I'm not sure there even
should be a direction. It's religion. There should be a million and one different interpretations and denominations. Some might believe in hell, some might not. Of the ones that do, there might be hundreds of different beliefs of what it might be, even within a single orthodoxy. Just like in RL. If an Amarr player wants their character to believe in hell and pits of fire, then they have as much right to believe that IC as someone who believes that there is no hell and that people simply cease to exist when they die.
And personally I'd consider oblivion to be hell. But then, in my opinion, cessation of existence is by far the worst possible torment that could happen to you (see, Mizhara? I can't think of a better word choice to use here). And as hell is supposed to be the worst possible thing, even RL I can't imagine it being anything else.
Also, the Scriptures don't at all get away from RL tropes. When you have imagery in the Scriptures like the trumpets of Heaven, "God saw that it was (not) good," "In the beginning," angels, apocalypse, the ark, and the sefrim (based obviously on seraphim, complete with fire imagery), along with pseudo biblical language and book/verse notations, I can't say I find it being all that distant. Even hell gets a mention, in-game if not in the Scriptures. Abaddon is, afterall, another word for hell.