Can Your SCIENCE Explain Why It Rains?!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I mentioned before that I wanted the OGYAFE to have Untrue Religions, because as far as I'm concerned that's how religions are in our world work. What I didn't expect was how much fun I'd be having.

Here in The Real World, I have to admit that carrying on about nonsense like ghosts and spirits and psychics and astral planing and horoscoping drives me NUTS. "You know that's bullshit, right?" is the only thing I can think of to say. And I don't actually say it; it's just all I can think of to say, so instead I just stay quiet and then later go slam my head against something.

And yet here in this world I have characters who are totally, and rather hilariously casually, invested in astrology and animism and superstition,* which has about as much basis in the reality of their world as it does in ours, and I am having a BLAST. The setting is sorta-kinda mid-20th-Century in terms of technology, so you get people who are earnestly arguing about what a site's spirits will think of a new skyscraper being built on their turf, or including demon appeasement intheir car maintenance routines, or considering the most auspicious position of the stars when closing business deals, or--well, the entire tangential story I've got loudly playing in my head right now is based on a controversy about modernizing and exploiting spirits--and I love it. Here in our hospital a chapel strikes me as silly; in their world I LOVE that there's a little spirit shrine in every room.

... Then again, I do think they are being silly in the other world; I am just more tolerant of it. And I am fascinated with silly beliefs in both worlds, but around here it's more train-wreckish. Maybe I don't mind so much in OGYAFEland because they're fictional, and thus no real people get hurt when they believe in nonsense. Or maybe I should take a lesson from my own response to my characters, and try to treat real people who carry on about bullshit with more enjoyment than annoyance.

But it is still bullshit.


*But not, they will stress, in gods. That would be ridiculous.

Comments

[beccastareyes]

It seems to me that even if you had gods coming down for tea with their worshippers every Tuesday, people would still invent something to irrationally believe in. (Look at all the non-religious stories on Snopes... even setting aside the ones about how Person-or-Company X is a godless crypto-Muslim satanist, plenty of things seems to be believed in despite evidence.)

Also my acceptance for others' quirks is directly proportional to their groups' acceptance of me and my quirks. I don't mind a chapel in a hospital, but I get cross when that comes with the dominant religion being able to place limits on my health care. Fictional religions, unless they are in Really Obvious Parable books, generally don't affect my life any more than fictional characters do.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, humans would totally come upwith SOMETHING ridiculous. Brings me back to studying urban legends in folklore class.

Yeah, I don't mind the chapel itself; it just seems sort of ... odd to me. I can understand it as a place for people to try to gather their thoughts, but it seems like the wrong place to go for actual help.

Fictional religions also don't evangelize nearly so much. It's a lot nicer to look at a religion when it's not aggressively demanding you be a part of it.

[black-rider.livejournal.com]

It's fear, and displacement of responsibility. If you're in a hospital, doctors are effectively gods; remote and impossible to understand. Theres's a point where it actually seems more effective to ask a faceless sky god for help. Not that it IS more effective, of course, but it's pretty rational when you look at how humans react to death.

[shadesofmauve]

Having people in real life do variations of 'believing in gods would be ridiculous -- but let me tell you about astrology" (which happens in every possible direction, as far as I can tell) always sends me immediately to head-desk land. But like you say, one avoids actually *saying* anything.

Oddly enough, I have more tolerance for straight-up animism, mostly because I find it more interesting and charming. Little shrines in every room to local spirits are just a flavor I like better than one all-whatever. :P

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I always liked it when the Bible-thumpers argued that one of the Bad Things about reading fantasy, aside from the SATANISM (a whole other can of worms), is that it wil cause kids to have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. I got KO'd from sheer irony.

(And yet in this story I just think it's kind of funny that they're so snobby about how "we don't HAVE gods! Pshaw!"--long backstory there--and then point out that you can't go onto the tennis court without leaving a few gummy bears out for the Tennis Court Haunt or he'll steal all your balls and wrench your elbow somethin' FIERCE.)

I like animism because it adds an interesting intimacy and personability to beliefs. And it seems like it's a little less zealous about converting other people.

[cougarfang.livejournal.com]

I feel that animism keeps a sense of proportion that a lot of other religions lack. None of this prophesying-apocalypse smitey holier-than-thou stuff, just humans and rocks and plants and animals and whatnot getting by in the world together.

[shadesofmauve]

That's a lot of it! I think it's that, in it's supernatural/spiritual sense, it actually comes back around to more how I live. It's rooted and human-scale.

Also, it tends to produce really entertaining art/statuary and rituals.

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

I find religion a lot more tolerable in fiction than in my day to day life, and I think it's mostly because fictional characters have no power over me. They can't vote to elect people who will enact legislation harmful to me or someone/thing I care about. They also don't interact with me, which means they won't look at me and say that my disability is basically due to the fact that I haven't prayed hard enough. :P

It's also that you're allowed to explore the idea of a religion for fun when reading fiction, but most RL religious folks are likely to take it amiss if they find out you're only interested in their religion because it's a fun worldview to explore, but you have no intention of making a habit of it. :)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I think you might be right--at least the fictional dudes aren't trying to stop me living my life.

And yeah, Real Religion is SRS BSNS, so playing iwth it works better if it's fictional.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. My own novel-- which I will someday finish >_>-- is set in an autocratic theocracy, which is shown as clearly not ideal. But I decided to make the main character an astrologer, and it's a bit weird writing a character who implicitly expounds a system that I know to be false.

But by contrast, for example, there's the Wheel of Time series, where there's only one religion that is inexplicably exact and correct, without any sign of how anybody knows this stuff. The author claimed that it was a result of magic, but I think a system where people can invoke any God they can think of while working literal miracles would result in more religions over time.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a good exercise getting into the headspace of someone so different from yourself, isn't it?

I've always been bothered by books where Everyone Knows The Right Religion. It makes a little more sense when the gods walk among people, but even then I'd expect a whole lot of arguments about what they actually MEANT by what they said, etc. And if you've got a lot of gods (never read the Wheel of Time, so I don't know), then I'd expect different groups to focus on different ones. And after a long enough, time, they would forget about/downgrade the others...

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

The Belgariad is a good example of that. After the Gods agreed to remove themselves from the world, a group of Alorians misinterpreted Belar's last instructions and actually became a major hindrance. (And then there was the whole matter of Relg) It shows how hard it is to get things right even with gods around.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Darn that Bear Cult. If Alorns will find a way to misinterpret something, they will, especially when it means they get to try to take over the world.

To add to that excellent example, Eddings's Elenium and Tamuli series also have an entertaining take where the Elene god, whose church is definitely not a stand-in for the Catholic Church, is remote and uncommunicative and hierarchichal and only talks through his priests, causing his followers to have to interpret things themselves. I like that all the other gods frequenly gripe about what a stuffy old codger he is.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

One of the things I always liked about that Warhammer 40K background was the Tech Priesthood of The Machine God, and how omnipresent it is at even fairly basic levels of technology. No human in that Universe really understands how technology works at all, and it's all gotten mixed up with millennia of doctrine and traditions, so no one there would even dream of starting up a car without first chanting The Litany of Ignition, for fear of offending the vehicle's Machine Spirit.

It gets way into the totally counter-productive, too. I remember one bit where they were wafting sacred incense over the processor of a computer to soothe its Machine Spirit and encourage smoother operation, which was clearly implied in the narration to actually be damaging to the fine electronic components.

My favorite, tho, was when one Tech-Adept's video monitor is acting up, and he administers The Ritual Smack of Admonishment to settle it down. Hitting something when it doesn't work isn't just standard mechanic's procedure, it's actually a religious ritual.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hah! I love it! That's a pretty good outline of how superstition gets going, too.

Catherine Fisher has a book series I vaguely remember--the Relic Master series--that follows a sort of holy mage who tries to keep Relics left on the planet by the Makers working. It's never really explained outright, but it's implied that the Relics are advanced technology and the "Makers" were terraformers. Not a new thing, but I liked the addition that they do have an inner "magic" that is implied to be an advanced neural interface. It gives you both sides of Clarke's Rule!

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Reading through a supplement I just recently got, and got to a great bit, from the PoV of an Alien race who have captured a Human ship, and are trying to reverse-engineer its drive: "To their further frustration, the captured humans that had operated it seemed to possess no actual understanding of its mechanisms either, running the equipment solely through the application of superstitious rituals and chanting."