I have this mental fanfiction that every god has a way to be killed, and when you kill them you can get things from them.
For instance, the one that I refer to the most often is Ben Franklin using a kite and a key to slay Zeus and to steal electricity from him.
And then of course there’s Prometheus who intentionally and willfully laid down his own life so that humanity could have fire.
But there are more gods than there are words to describe them.
What other gods have we claimed existed, that we humans have likely slain, and what do you think we got from them?
Neptune: caught in a trawler net. His absence has gifted us ocean stock depletion and worldwide famine, but also an incredibly detailed understanding of ocean currents.
incredibly detailed understanding of ocean currents.
Wikipedia is no help in explaining this, could you expand on this a little?
Look, this is a tangent but who the hell would downvote a sincere question? Who believes that asking for details is neither worth doing, nor fulfilling in a community called asklemmy? Your finger had better have slipped, because you’ve made an enemy for life, anonymous stranger.
I have a downvote follower, pay no attention to that. Sometimes it gets really bad, which makes me laugh because they have to do a lot of work to do that. I’m not sure who they think they’re hurting by having to possibly log out and log in with numerous alts. It’s a slow downvoting. Occasionally people really are downvoting me, which is fine too. The points really don’t matter.
Oh thank god, it’s just singular fixation, not aspirational deadening of curiosity. I thought it might have been the mention of Wikipedia, which also tends to draw downvotes. I’m sorry you have to deal with that
I’m sorry you have to deal with that
Thanks, but it really is no big deal. I’m in a lot of the politics spaces, so it’s expected there.
I will say to anyone reading this, to upvote comments as much as you think you can. Some new people really do care about upvotes and downvotes. It’s a better vibe too if the authentic people are getting upvoted.
Considering you moderate a political community I’m shocked you only have 1 downvote follower
It ticks up depending on the timing and comment. The downvotes come in slow enough to be no more than 3ish. This place is so small that you can really tell their patterns.
Also they’re not artificially fucked with like they are on reddit specifically to prevent you from noticing patterns
Trawlers really took off like 200 years ago, contemporaneous to the Industrial Revolution which also saw human scientific advancement exploding. It’s just a coincidence that I’m joking about
Lol, I’m glad it’s not a rabbit hole I was prepared to go down. It looked like it was going to be one.
I like the Discworld approach, as people stop truly believing in a god they will weaken until they fade away.
This could be either just not believing, or believing more in the system than the God itself.
Small gods is a good read and introduces the concept well.Here’s one for ya: Hermes killed Thoth and got the knowledge of alchemy from him, resulting in the syncretic creation of Hermes Trismegistus and the hermetic tradition. Then later we killed Hermes and got the scientific method.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Damn, there is still one god active. Whatever you do, don’t
Lol! I was commenting on Hermes having multiple deaths, but wasn’t sure anybody would remember the multiple ways he died in Futurama, and was positive I was missing a few.
I missed out on the joke, but at least you’ve reminded me I need to get a copy of Futurama.
We killed Yaweh, gained a deeper understanding of the abyss, and unleashed fundamentalism.
You mean El?
El was killed by his son Yahweh, who commanded us all to honour our parents, then made us forget about El, with no god above Yahweh. According to Moses’s war on Egypt that required religious divisiveness to kill all of those who didn’t believe in “thou shalt not murder” as hardcore.
Nah, definitely jehova, which definitely isn’t a mistranslation.
Ben Franklin using a kite and a key to slay Zeus and to steal electricity from him.
Well you better hope Michael Faraday didn’t get any bonuses from St. Peter or else we’ll be guessing what super powers he’ll get from you!
On the one hand, it kind of makes me feel like Nikola Tesla was just a god in human form doing cool, fun stuff and then fucking Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park” showed up and he probably killed, you know, dozens of Native American gods that we don’t really even have the names for anymore to create the moving picture and the phonograph.
I also bet the punishment for killing a god is something so unbelievably onerous that it would shrivel your soul to know the truth of it.
Like I bet Edison right now is screaming an eternal agony, ripped away from the cycle of reincarnation, and being subjected to immortal punishment.
I have this mental fanfiction that every god has a way to be killed, and when you kill them you can get things from them.
I’ll encourage you to investigate the AD&D-D&D 5th Ed. material concerning the Forgotten Realm setting’s Gods, all the way up to Ao. Murdering them imbues their killer with their ‘portfolio’, specific deity controlled influence over Harvest, War, Music, Healing, etc. See also, the entire plot concerning ‘The Time of Troubles’ most notably seen in Baldur’s Gate (1998).
Wait, so Forgotten Realms gods work on Santa Clause rules?
Pretty much, except you’d need a really really really tall house for one of the gods to fall off of.
You’d better hope that they don’t have a Ring of Featherfall/Levitation, or have some other means of teleportation/flight too, because Gods won’t help you if you screw it up and they survive lol
Never thought about it in terms of a Tim Allen movie, but yes lol
Bast is still alive.
Artemis: Goddess of the hunt, wilderness, wild animals, the Moon, and archery. We got the ability to hunt and have had massive extinctions ever since.
Then you will like American Gods (the novel or TV shows).
Gods can be killed once their worshippers abandon them. Without anyone to worship them, they will be weakened to the point of non-existent.
Zeus has to be a toaster in the bathtub kinda death
I’m entertained by the idea of a divine plane working on Mega Man rules, where after you kill a boss you get its weapon for yourself.
deleted by creator
All religion is fan-fiction. The only problem is that once you make it, followers take it far too seriously and start killing and hurting innocent people over it.
Fictional gods don’t die. Nobody reads their book anymore. Same as any other fictional character. They’re just replaced by something new, that is just a remake of something old.
I mean, I’m glad that there are pockets in the world where people feel confident in saying that nobody studies religion anymore because representation is important, but saying “nobody reads their book anymore” casually overlooks like six plus billion people who do actually participate in a religion of some type.
Like, I get what you’re saying, but more people are religious to some degree than are not.
By a huge margin.
I checked the World Population Review website for the least religious countries, and it seems like there’s approximately 1.2 to 1.4 billion officially non-religious people in the world as of 2020, And three-quarters of a billion of them are in China.
So if we were all placed onto a massive chessboard and forced to battle it out life or death style, the atheists are gonna be out numbered approximately 6 to 1.
I said all of that not to disparage your atheism, but rather to say that it’s okay to have mental exercises in fiction about religion and religious adjacent topics like this, if for no other reason than to enjoy our imagination and to have conversations with each other.
They were killed by logic and reason. We figured out the real reason behind lightning, servere storms, drought, diseases, etc.
I think you misunderstood the point of the question, lol.
It’s fanfiction.
It’s like saying that the reason why we have not solved fusion is because we have not killed Apollo because he’s safe in the sun, and the only way to solve fusion would be to send a probe to the sun with a live chicken and some peach preserves as part of the method to kill Apollo to steal the power of fusion from his corpse.
