Part 4: words

Update 4:

Welcome back. Last time...let's not talk about last time. Right now we're meeting Muhammad again.


Most men are too proud to bow before ANYTHING, but that ego is what keeps them from Allah.

For those of you suicidal enough to make a The Making of a Prophet drinking game, take a shot every time Muhammad mentions the ego from this point on. You'll be dead of alcohol poisoning soon enough.



Oh dear. Before I go on my little rant, let's just get "how is that man walking around with one leg" out of the way. There.

Sit the fuck down children, cause it's time. You can skip this if you want since it's not humor, but I need to get this out of my system.

Let me say one thing: there's nothing inherently wrong with a female deity. Hell, even the Maiden/Mother/Crone triat can make sense in the right framework. However, applying it to Allah, and by extension the Judeo-Christian God, is just...no.

First off, Allah is a masculine version of "the God", "Allat" would be closer to "the Goddess." Tacking on a feminine (or even masculine!) reference is downright blasphemous, as assigning a gender at all to Allah could be considered blasphemous if you interpret Surah 112:3-4 the right way. [He begets not, nor is He begotten. And none is like Him.] Most of the words referring to Allah can easily be translated as the gender-neutral 'it'. The others are stuff like "I," "We," or "That Which" (like "That Which Created [It]").

A HUGE point of Islam is that Allah is One, a singular entity, force, CONCEPT that defies all assignment of gender, or sex, or role, or any human imagining. MDickie wasn't actually completely talking out of his ass with that wire-frame scene, in this manner. Allah is practically a cosmic constancy, a super-consciousness, not a person. While God created Man in His image (specifically HIS in this case, leading to the patriarchal depictions of the Judeo-Christian God), Allah doesn't HAVE an image that can be described as anything but Allah. Allah = Allah. Allah has no body, exists nowhere and everywhere, and is omniscient.

These aren't obscure abstractions only gotten through somewhat serious study, this stuff is fucking on Wikipedia, which is where I'm pretty sure MDickie researched his material. I'm not picking this apart because WOMEN, I'm picking this apart because I'm nearly certain MDickie did this because he's a cherry-picking neopaganist twit who blasphemes against everything he says he believes while cobbling it together in some horrible, eldritch K'Nex version of a holy book. Referring to the Judeo-Christian God and Allah as a feminine entity is done 4 times out of 5 because you just want to rebel against The Patriarchy and figure calling the Father the Mother will make you Edgy, despite the fact that if there IS some all-powerful creative force I doubt it's limited to having one gender role.

I have infinite respect for those who have done their homework and figured out that how they view life includes a feminine version of a Creator. I have none for those who loot other belief systems for shit that looks cool.

 The tragic part is this appears to be the only fucking time he calls Allah a feminine entity, making this either a typo that makes me look like a moron, or somehow even more insulting. 

Those of you waiting for the funny to start up again can start reading again. I just needed to get that off my chest because fuck MDickie.





The miracle humming noise starts again.


You just need to know what you want and where to look. I've already taught you the power of divine insight.

Uh, Muhammad, your hands are on fire.


You should pray like this several times a day to touch base with Allah and remain inspired. I've already given you a lot to think about. Let us prepare to put this knowledge to use...

Another MDickie drinking game rule is to take a shot when he finishes a conversation line with '...'. Your liver will look like a half-burnt bagpipe by the end of this game.




So, time to demonstrate pra-



Fucking hell, can I do anything without being interrupted?

The powers I've taught you can only be accessed buy [sic] building up POSITIVE spiritual energy! A healthy spirit is like the salt of the earth. What good is salt when trodden underfoot? (It keeps you from slipping on ice, that's what.) If you abuse life then life will cease to serve you! You have to rise above your temptations. That bad karma will be worked out over time, but you can speed up the process through meditation. Your sins may drown out the voice of God at first, but you'll hear it if you persevere...


Okay, okay, don't be a dick or you'll build up bad mojo, fine.



Notice our sitting animation has changed now. That darker red section of the Soul bar is our negative spiritual energy. Doing bad things, like hugging people, stealing stuff, punching people, and generally being a not very nice guy lowers your spiritual energy if you have a positive amount, and increases your bad spiritual energy after it hits zero. Having a ton of bad karma makes Muhammad yell at you and makes you unable to use Miracles until you get back into the yellow spiritual energy. Meditation and getting punched in the face are the two easiest ways to build up spiritual energy.



This is what praying looks like. Notice the lack of the miracle bar due to the bad karma.



The two or three other poor bastards who have played this game aside from me are probably twitching reflexively at the sight of this message. Whenever you're praying, assholes run to you like you're some sort of magical asshole beacon and pester you.



Saying no gets them off your back, but makes you lose all your positive spiritual energy. Saying yes preserves it, but everybody in the area starts to beat the fuck out of you. This dialogue gets unbelievably annoying very, very quickly.






To get any peace I had to go on top of the archway so people wouldn't immediately run to me and interrupt me.



Here's the miracles proper. By holding space, you stay in the Meditation orb, which ever so slowly increases your positive energy. By using the arrow keys you can move a line up and into other branches.



Like so.

The keen-eyed among you may have noticed my Health, Brain, and Soul bars changing wildly between screenshots. This is because I am unashamedly cheating my ass off behind the scenes. Alt+f1, f2, and f3 each refill a bar, and I am not going to spend five minutes of my life staring at a mullet waiting to have enough energy to turn on wireframe mode. Nor am I going to die in the middle of a playthrough and do all this again. This means that you likely will no longer see any hilarious life-endangering rampages, but I do this for my own sanity.



So yeah, the Vision miracle. It does the same thing as in the cutscene, with the added bonus of making the game shit itself and lag like crazy for some reason. You can press the S key to switch it on and off while it is active, and it slowly drains energy while it is.



It's still dumb.

And now you'll see what caused me to start cheating my first time through.



They bug you even when you aren't praying.





Yes, this is another "Lose all your magic or get the stuffing beaten out of you" choice. And they do this ALL THE FUCKING TIME. If I screenshotted all the times people run up to me to say this or interrupt me while I'm praying, they'd easily be half the update. So anybody who complains about cheating can fuck right off.



Oh yeah, Muhammad still didn't tell me where he was going, so I had to find out on my own.



I walk up to Muhammad who is ignoring the scripted event he's supposed to be in in order to lecture me about baby-making.

Wait a minute.



WHAT IS THAT MAN DOING TO JOEL!? WHY IS IT MAKING BARBRA CRY!? WHY DOES SHE HAVE A KNIFE IN HER SPINE!? LECTURE HIM, MUHAMMAD, NOT ME!





I'm going to go take a nice long hot shower and scrub Molestro's leer out my soul. I leave you with the quote MDickie tortured until it squealed so he could make this scene.