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.