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?
Zeus has to be a toaster in the bathtub kinda death
Bast is still alive.
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.
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.
The Greeks were a bit behind the news, then, haha.
[off topic?]
Check out the graphic novel series “The Wicked And The Divine.”
Every year, a dozen young people reincarnate as various gods. They have incredible powers, but know that they will all soon die.
I killed the Christian god and got a quarter.
A quarter of what?
A dollar, but it was just like 1/4 of a ripped USD???
Drawn and quartered.
God is dead. Of his pity for man hath god died. So be thee warned against pity. From where thence there yet cometh unto men a heavy cloud. Verily i understand the weather signs.
But attend also to this word. All great love is above all its pity. For it seeketh to create what is loved.
Myself do I offer unto my love and my neighbor as myself. Such is the language of all creators.
All creators however are hard. Thus spoke Zarathustra.
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.
an incredibly detailed understanding of ocean currents.
So that we can watch them fall apart.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oublievish, god of the forgotten
We cast him into darkness so deep that the light could not reach him, and he ceased to be. From him, we stole the ability to forget. And then we used that ability to erase our memory of our crime. Now, no one knows he even existed.
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?
Never thought about it in terms of a Tim Allen movie, but yes lol
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
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.
The first microscope was, in fact, Asclepius’s stolen staff. That lead to germ theory.
In the early 20th century, we finally mined deep enough to collapse the underworld on Hades and found Uranium.
A DARPA radio transmitter fried Hermes in flight and brought us the internet.
One of the V2 rockets landed on Selene, who was visiting Earth, and opened up the way to travel to the moon.
Terry Pratchet wrote in Good Omens that the apocalypse horsemen Pestilence was slain by the advent of penicillin.
From my own head:
Mercury was killed to bring about the Internet.
Athena was not killed, but severely weakened to domesticate the herd animals.
We sacrificed Fenris for lap dogs.
I love this thread and will be working some of this into my next RPG storyline.
Athena was not killed, but severely weakened to domesticate the herd animals.
Wouldn’t this be more Artemis?
Likely, I get them confused.
