A reader asks what seemed a question about Dungeons and Dragons or Traveler games, but may be more. Reworded slightly, his questions were these:
“What makes something a monster? Why are dwarves and hobbits not monsters, but orcs and hobgoblins and gnolls are? I think that the difference must lay in their inhumanity.
“What makes humans human is the Image of God. This is often said to be our ability to reason and to speak, but may be more than this. It is our capability to create, and to love the things we have created, and to love others. Monsters are beings that lack these capabilities, but have the capacity to reason. Must they also have animosity towards humans to be monstrous? What about unreasoning beasts?”
He goes on to mention a game of Traveller, where, as moderator, he places in his background robots, clones, genetically modified humans, and a few ‘uplifted’ animal races, but has no aliens. He defined modified humans as fundamentally human in mind and soul, with some added or altered body parts, such as wings or gills. He asks how to introduce beast-human hybrids as monsters into his game, while making them distinct from humans and modified humans.
My comment:
It is a fascinating question, because it is deeper than it appears on the surface. To know what is monstrous, we must first know what is Man.
This is, as all men know, a difficult thing for men to know.
We can touch on the core of the matter by saying: man is the earthly animal who reflects the heavenly likeness of God.
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