Good questions both, Sensei-sama.
Yes, I think being an architect is being creative, just like story-making, composing, painting or any other art, and I think that is the level on which an Age Writer creates. I define "God" as "the one who created the materials, the architects, the brains that could conceive the notion of "architecture" and the multiverse in which all this could take place." Which puts him (or her) far enough ahead of you or me with our kindergarten universes as to be unthreatened, I think. Of course, you might believe in a number of gods, but then polytheistic systems usually allow for some degree of mobility between mortality and godhood anyway. It's the monotheists who have the jealous gods.
All human creation is secondary--that is, it uses pre-existing materials such as wood, stone, paper, ink, paint, plastic, or in the case of an Age Writer, the raw stuff of the cosmos. To that extent it could be said that what we're doing here is quibbling over words, but I don't think it is. I believe (and the proponents of the linking theory do not believe) that the words of the Writer do actually shape a universe, blow a bubble in space-time and arrange the mass and energy in it into a life-bearing world, just as a composer's marks on paper become a storm or a love song or the story of Christ in music. Our brains were made with this capability, to form ideas, pictures, music, words, about things that have never existed in our reality, and bring them--to some extent--into that reality. The Art is just the next step.
Assuming the Art exists, there are just the two options: that Yahvo created all possible realities, or that Yahvo created all possibility and left us to make our realities. I find the second option preferable, for many reasons. (I can't remember if I've mentioned the sand castle analogy yet. Which sounds more like a loving parent: "Let's go to the beach and you can make a sand castle" or "Let's go to the beach and--as long as you don't damage them--you can look at the sand castles I made last night"?)
If someone honestly prefers the idea that they are not now and never will be allowed to make their own sand castles, then I have no logical argument that will sway them. Likewise they have none that can sway me. I'm not daunted by the idea of the power involved, or by the mistakes that people have made in the past; they're how we learn not to do what doesn't work. Not believing the creative theory does not lessen the exploitation or the suffering caused by hegemonic thinking, because that happens anyway as we've seen. Whether you create the Age, or simply discover it, the lesson that has to be taught is that it doesn't belong to you, any more than a child does. Less than a child does, in fact. You're just looking after it for the moment, helping it where needed and otherwise letting it develop in its own way. You're responsible for it, but you don't have any rights to it.
Does that make my position clearer?
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