One of many reasons I appreciate Brandon Sanderson is that he clearly loves religion and theology in all its forms, and one consequence of this is that he keeps writing "But the things this person integral to your religion did are explicable by the natural laws of the universe!" "*blinks* Yes, and?"
There's also a bit in Warbreaker where Lightsong expresses general skepticism about the religion he's a god of, and his high priest calmly replies that the theology is very robust and offers to explain it to him. :::PPP
I've had that gripe with some 2edgy horror where a demon announces that they are in fact God. And the protagonist believes a being commonly known as the Father of Lies, because...? Or another one where there was some magical means to see God and everyone was seeing what they thought God was like, and the atheist had a Total Perspective Vortex experience - that one's your own damn fault, protagonist, you already KNEW people were seeing what they expected to see! And are we supposed to think yours is more correct? Why?
I would like to quote this and this regarding my gripes with fandom's takes on monster species and fantasy racism: (Potterverse lycanthrophy, for example, is not homosexuality, it's HIV; genuinely dangerous and potentially catching, but under control with medicine.)
i mean, a lot of these, it's not villains, it's angels. although in spn and good omens some of the angels are villains. so when they're telling people "god is missing and your religion is totally made up" they're telling the truth. but the really appalling oversight is that in none of these does anyone go "ok but like... you've confirmed that angels and souls and a reality other than this one all exist. you've confirmed that i have an immortal soul, that i am more than meat. this is a triumph for materialism how exactly?" nope, everyone who believed in a god before -- and in this-world fiction like spn they're always bible-belt american christian -- falls the fuck apart because there isn't a human male god deliberately meddling, and the souls they now know for sure exist aren't going to get special treatment when they die. the america-centrism alone is jaw-dropping. where are the shinto or confucian folks being smug because they knew all along there were lots of small and medium gods instead of one big one? where are the buddhists? where are the animists? they're usually even too scared/ignorant to touch judaism with a ten foot pole, so the only non christian characters are middle eastern muslims, and ugh i could go on and on but i've already ranted enough. teal deer: ficcers who don't know anything about religion or understand people who believe things should maybe stop rehashing that trope. :(
The Buddhists are too busy being not understood to be a real religion with religious shit by Americans is where.
ok i'm gonna come clean here, the reason i brought it up is because of a bit in a night vale fic where, after talking to the angels at josie's, one of the scientists drops his crucifix necklace in the trash on the way out, and it's written like a triumphant casting off of burdens. i mean, maybe the guy was looking for any excuse to ditch his religion, sure. but when you don't give us any other information about him, and the fic is already rife with the trope i'm complaining about, what it looks like is this guy just yeeted something that was probably a gift from his mama, and isn't thinking at all about whether the teachings of jesus as a philosopher and spiritual leader were valid aside from the church's take on them, and basically a huge aspect of his life is just... gone. and he doesn't care. which in night vale means he's being mind controlled, or has been replaced by a strexcorp clone or something. but nope. it's not a plot point. it's just the author failing to see people of faith as fully realized human beings.
NIGHT VALE? Wow, they would have had a great deal of difficulty picking a worse fandom to do that stupid trope in if they were actually trying to.
I have always tried to be careful about writing religious characters because of that exact trope. (and having used that trope because it seems to be a Very Common Trope in SF.) Even when I am writing negative or unpleasant characters who happen to be religious, I try to make them well rounded. This is sometimes hard as I have met very unreasonable people of certain flavors of Christianity and it would therefore be easy to stereotype them. :\ (I am using Christian as a specific example because the US is at least culturally Christian, even if there are other religions present.) The Common Trope Of The Future Will Be Areligious has not really seemed like a likely thing to me, and also a somewhat annoying thing. The Fantasy Trope of What You Know Is Wrong Because God is Dead Or Never Existed And You Are Being Informed By A Supernatural Creature Who May Be Lying is also pretty annoying.
THANK YOU. it’s something i see a ton outside of fic too, and i’d been hoping it had died down a bit, but i guess not :’) and the tendency to say “religion” when people VERY blatantly mean “evangelical fundamentalist christian” just pisses me off so bad. (not to mention the tendency for people to assume Literally All Christians are Bad (TM), but that’s a rant for another day.) sucks that this garbage seeped its way into fic. like...next time you write a thing, author, please get richard dawkins’ proverbial dick out of your mouth first.
I think a lot of people just take theories about the utility of religion in society as gospel, so to speak, and combine it with the notion that historical people were less smart than modern people. They really truly have no idea that any religion has any more to it, let alone long and vibrant histories of smart and scholarly people who dedicated lifetimes to exploring pretty much any question you could possibly think of and more that you probably never would. It’s like misunderstanding one formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative and discarding philosophy entirely as a bunch of simple nonsense for people who can’t think good and want to learn to do other things good too. I suppose it’s possible that everyone who has ever been invested in this is deeply unreflective and hasn’t ever seriously considered not going to Camelot because it’s a silly place or whatever, an idea that these types of critics themselves believe to be blindingly obvious. But it’s vanishingly unlikely. We’d need Occam to keep his razor outside a 50 yard radius of any places of worship, and Hanlon to go strategically apeshit within. Are these people incompetent in their own spirituality but universally too afraid to admit it for Reasons, or are they maliciously preying on each other, or are they all simply that stupid? Or maybe human experience doesn’t have to be universal to be real and worthy. Maybe nobody loses if some people are religious and others don’t get anything from spiritual endeavors. There’s room in the human experience for so many ways of being and ideas of what a good life is like. There are areas that are just not gonna overlap for everyone. Hopeless romantics and aromantics. Dog people and people who dislike dogs. People with various opinions on cilantro. Deeply religious people and people for whom religion is useless at best. Some people may eventually see things differently, but many never will and that’s got to be okay or we’re all fucked in some way. Even when it’s a comparatively insignificant matter, it feels sour when fiction depicts people like you as either missing something truly meaningful in life or having a foolish cardboard dimension to your life.
Old Jewish joke: Two rabbis are sitting around discussing things, as you do, and they get onto the topic of whether or not God exists, and by the end of the evening they're both pretty thoroughly convinced that he doesn't. Next morning, one of the rabbis is at the synagogue, getting ready for services, and the other rabbi sees him. "Hey, didn't we agree last night there is no God?" he asks. First rabbi just kinda looks at him. "So what does that have to do with anything?"
That problem is pretty similar to this guy's objection was to His Dark Materials. Pullman apparently hadn't heard the tale of Sun Wukong's bet.
This is probably my biggest turn off with things that do that, really. I don't feel respected or treated like a person with agency. Just a tool to make a point and the point is 'You're dumb'. It sucks when it's done to anyone, atheist or theist. Like fuck.
i never finished the dark materials trilogy for precisely that reason. like, if you've studied christianity and then you decide to bash it, ok, that's your onion and i respect it. but pullman just built this awkward strawman and danced it around going "hurr durr i'm christianity and i suck" and that's not only insulting to christians and thoughtful atheists, it's just plain embarrassing to watch.
