I was thinking about mention that, but I wasn't sure how to phrase a post. (Discworld is like. THE most formative influence on me.)
I'm finding myself low on words for a proper post about it, but let's just say I'm building a pseudoreligious practice & life philosophy around various things I learned from Discworld. GNU Terry Pratchett <3
So in terms of more positive things let's talk Thor comics. Namely the God Butcher arc of the All New Thor. So the story is that there is some dude going around killing off entire pantheons of gods. Thor had in a run in with him when he was younger and it was absolutely horrifying. Thor goes on a quest to defeat this asshole. We learn that the asshole lived on a planet that was exceptionally shitty and as a result he ended up a staunch atheist. But then he learned that gods were real! His planet's gods were just kind of huge assholes and probably not strong enough to cure the drought of their world. Out of rage he kills the wounded god and goes on a quest to create a bomb large enough to destroy the source of all gods and therefore kill all gods because his gods failed him. On his way though the misotheist gains the power to create things. Including a new puppet version of his family and he gains other followers. The butcher becomes that which he hates. A god. However he is entirely ignorant of this fact until the end when he is finally called out on it. Eventually with the power of three Thors from three time periods and the gods from all over the universe the butcher is defeated. Following this Thor goes down to a planet he had visited earlier in the story. One who lost its gods because they were killed. He finds the little girl he met earlier who had been praying for help and he comforts her. Thor becomes the god of this planet and he vows that there will not be a single world that goes godless. Gods will be a beacon of hope and actual good and everyone will have at least one to turn to. The entire story is very positive about the existence of gods and their impact on people. It also has the sort of overblown scope of an old story about gods which is lovely. It's just very refreshing to see this sort of thing. A huge polytheistic world with fallible gods who despite their flaws can mean so much and do so much. It's why I love gods. Not because they are perfect, but because they are worthy of respect for not being perfect. Because they are heroes.
I have a soft spot for the concept from Small Gods and Monstrous Regiment of a god dependent on belief dying from inside their massive edifice of religion, because despite the faith they're receiving on paper, even the truly religious come to believe in the codes and laws and prophets and trappings of the religion (or in the punishments they'll receive for misbehaving or the blessings they may receive for doing what they're told to) rather than the god itself, which they take for granted. Especially in MR, where one god failed them, so people kept to the trappings but their belief went elsewhere and created a new god in the old one's shell. I've always wondered if Om is still alive proportionate to his church's power at the time of the rest of the series, or if his understanding with Brutha was kind of, "Maybe the same thing will happen again, but this is better for all of us, and this way you're more likely to come back."
I am still annoyed about the Chantry and the fact that through all of Inquisition your Inq is either pressured to convert or assumed to already have done so and the few times you get to reject that are few and far between, and usually pretty feeble to boot (still annoyed you don't get to respond to Cassandra's 'there's not room for one more god' line, you just have to let it sit there like it makes any kind of sense. I've had to assume that Razeia just went speechless with incandescent anger at that and needed to go shoot lightning at some stuff after that.)
American Gods I feel so weird about. I really don't care for "and belief makes them real!" applied to all gods wholesale. It is just not my bag where theology is concerned. Things like Shadow's feelings towards Odin match up very closely with my own experiences with gods though. I also really love there being new gods of new things! Gods of technologies we have now and the like. It's so good at what I do like that it manages to overcome my cranky feels about theology I don't care for. Also Disneyland being magical is so right I have no words for that.
The Saga of Edda Earth has a similar belief=power thing for gods. In fact, the main difference between spirits and gods (at least early on) is belief and worship though apparently in-universe that's a university level topic. Thought by the third book the difference between gods/spirits/mortals is more It's Complicated. Some other fun religion things because religions and gods have a hand in basically everything in this series So basically all gods definitely* exist and have descendants and while encounters with either are maybe once in a lifetime, if that, for Average Joe, there's enough high profile god-born and documentation that you'd have to be pretty thick to think that a god doesn't exist. So naturally... The opening scene involves a guy in a bar loudly insisting that Aten is the One True God and being hella offensive in the process. *It's unknown if the Judeo-Christain god actually exists though there's some evidence to suggest he does. Even other gods don't actually know, but they usually act as though he does exist. One of the first characters we meet is Adam who is Jewish, works closely with a god-born who has met her gods, ends up meeting plenty of other people's gods, but still has to take the very existence of his own god on faith alone. It's an important part of his character and its great. Gods are definitely fallible and can die although very few people know how a god can be killed. At least among the followers of the Norse pantheon there is actually insurance for "acts of god" although “No one will give payment if you take out insurance against lightning and then, in the next week, call Thor a sissy and bare your arse to the sky while standing on your roof during a thunderstorm". There's apparently also a system for their worshipers to seek justice against a god, usually Loki and Thor. Also there's groups of extremists who're various shades of "FUCK ALL THE GODS" (i tried to resist the urge to write an essay about this series. i said "mala no" but i never listen to me)
Sorry to give a suggestion and then run off again, especially as I'm not sure at all that I want to open this particular can of worms, but... Xena? Anyone? (Not as any kind of [symbolically or literally] accurate representation of real-world religion or A Theology I Believe In, ftr. I just think it has interesting takes on a bunch of different religious concepts, not restricted to monotheism or polytheism, which does some very equal-opportunity bastardising of pretty much everything it touches. Religion, history, whatever. In order to enjoy Xena, you have to wrap our head around that first, which is admittedly very difficult... basically "fuck history, fuck everything, everything is Xena and most of it hurts".)
Okay so I know Warhammer 40K isn't even close to being Good Critically Worthy Science Fiction, but I just love so many things about the setting anyway, and it really does have some awesome bits of religion in the worldbuilding. Like the Emperor going around being all "I AM NOT A GOD DO NOT WORSHIP ME" and as soon as he can't do anything about it everyone's like "lol ur a god now bruh let's get started on the worshippin", the way he tried to convince everyone to be atheists specifically because he knew Gods existed and were utterly horrifying and figured people would be safer if they didn't know the Chaos Gods existed, basically an abstinence-only approach to religious education. (spoiler: it didn't really work out so well). And how the tragedy of the Word Bearers legion is that they thought humanity needed to worship something, so when the Emperor destroyed the cathedrals they'd been building for him they went looking for gods who did want to be worshipped and found the Chaos Gods and, as one of them put it much later, never stopped to ask themselves whether these gods were worthy of worship. And how the Chaos Gods, at least in some versions, aren't even so much evil as simply too intensely Their Thing for humans to handle without losing their humanity in pushing themselves to impossible extremes. And how they had a (sadly abandoned due to having lost track of who owned the copyright) Chaos God of hating chaos and its followers, as an embodiment of the self-contradiciton inherent in something that is everything, whose followers hunted down and tried to kill any other followers of chaos, including other followers of this god. :trashpanda:
Xenogears/Xenosaga tho The phrase "FMV Jesus" still sets me off. [edit: also, "Fei... I can see chur house from here..."]
