Poll of the Day > Which religion from a work of fiction do you find most interesting?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Just curious.

Worship of the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods from the Cthulhu Mythos.

Probably the Cthulhu cult that makes bas relief of eldritch monstrosities. I always liked that and the art from Alien that H.R. Giger did. Especially the visuals in Prometheus. I'd like to hope a super advanced civilization that has basically transcended everything reverts back to pure art and biology; darkness and death.

Behold! The Horror in Clay!!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/0/1/AAfGAbAADq0J.jpg

Jenova Witnesses

greek/roman/norse are all good.

"modern" mythology all have boring stories

Not a religious belief really, but I was always impressed by how far they were willing to go indepth with the mythical figures of water ship downs

The issue with a lot of the big ones is that they often have a deity that's all-powerful... and that's just boring on its face and causes all sorts of narrative issues, such as "Why doesn't he just snap his fingers and fix all this?" and "but it's his fault, he controls everything, why is he punishing others for what he's done?" and stuff like that.

Unfortunately a lot of mythologies that I'm most interested in are the ones I haven't found very little information about (particularly indigenous American religions due to cultural erasure), so I'll just go with Egyptian mythology. Was into that a lot when I was a kid. I really liked Bastet.

Aes Sedai

Bene Geserit and the Orange Catholic Church

The whole thing going on in Terry Goodkinds sword of truth series

Anything from Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett

Eru Illuvator

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/7/1/AAQwHjAADq2z.jpg

they're all works of fiction

#edgy

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. God is powerless, the prophesied savior is an asshole (and a leper), the closest thing to angels are narcissistic shitbags, and the Devil is basically the personification of self-loathing.

And the world is saved by laughter.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheChroniclesOfThomasCovenant

Unironically I'm a huge fan of modern Christianity lore. No other religion goes that hard on the magic unrelenting torture dimension. Other stories say "there's a bad place that sucks and ye get what you deserve", but only Christianity says there's an entire dimension that has reworked the laws of physics to be as tormenting as possible.

Hellraiser is the coolest revision tbh. I want more fiction like that.

Cthulu is cool too.

Here's two more:

The Incarnations of Immortality series. All of the primal fundamental forces of the universe - Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature, Evil, Good - are actually jobs that are held by ordinary humans who are granted incredible powers (and functional immortality) to fulfill their purposes. And the universe is basically broken and unfair because the role of God is filled by a total narcissist who has spent the last 2000+ years staring at his own perfection in a mirror.

Empire of the East/The Books of Swords series. A doomday weapon designed to prevent nuclear war unravels the basic laws of physics and makes technology (including nuclear weapons) impossible, and essentially floods the world with magic. Existing nuclear bombs turn into literal demons. There are no gods, but human belief literally creates them. The new gods basically act like people expect gods to act, doing things gods should probably do, and ultimately doom themselves by creating powerful weapons that cause humans to stop caring about the gods (and making them capable of killing the gods). And then all the remaining gods die because humans stop believing in them.



Yellow posted...

Unironically I'm a huge fan of modern Christianity lore. No other religion goes that hard on the magic unrelenting torture dimension. Other stories say "there's a bad place that sucks and ye get what you deserve", but only Christianity says there's an entire dimension that has reworked the laws of physics to be as tormenting as possible.

To be fair, Christianity itself kind of doesn't do that. For most of Christianity, the only real torment of Hell was the fact that everyone there is effectively removed from God's grace, which in and of itself is the worst torment any being can ever suffer.

The idea of Hell being eternal fires and torture sort of got tacked on as various Church leaders decided the idea of God not caring about you being the ultimate doom felt too esoteric for stupid peasants to understand, so they had to come up with new ways to convey to the dumb idiots just how bad it was. And then the Hell symbolism and idea of ironic tortures took a HUGE boost from Dante's Inferno, which was really just Dante's way of writing mean fanfiction about people he didn't like (because he wrote about them all getting tortured in Hell, ha ha fuck those guys).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

To be fair, Christianity itself kind of doesn't do that. For most of Christianity, the only real torment of Hell was the fact that everyone there is effectively removed from God's grace, which in and of itself is the worst torment any being can ever suffer.

I like to think that God was interweaved in the laws of nature in Christian lore, feeding his bias in to make something so chaotic habitable, so that when you remove him what was left is reality in its natural state, which is a recursion of the worst possible state. To me it gives it a much deeper logic behind it.

But yeah even Evangelicals don't like preaching the 9 layers of hell. There's nothing that detailed about heaven, because hearing about the 9 circles of holy ecstasy doesn't sound nearly as fun.

Most of Warhammer 40k world.

Violet_Blooded posted...

Most of Warhammer 40k world.

I want to get into that lore, but most of it is board games, not my preference. Sounds really cool, though. Maybe I need to find a youtube channel that explains it.

arceus. then pokemon become real.

The Qun.

The church of Zoltan

Lokarin posted...

they're all works of fiction

#edgy

this

Yellow posted...

the 9 circles of holy ecstasy doesn't sound nearly as fun.

sounds kinky

Metalsonic66 posted...

Jenova Witnesses

Welcome to the Final Fantasy House of Worship.

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFRjrLmc_4c

George feenyism

He loves you all.
Class dismissed.

Yellow posted...

I want to get into that lore, but most of it is board games, not my preference. Sounds really cool, though. Maybe I need to find a youtube channel that explains it.

It's not lore based board games. There's literally a thousand books on warhammer.

So hypnox, you started out with "I'm curious." What do you mean by that. What are you doing with this? Are you trying to figure out what people would actually want?

Straughan posted...

So hypnox, you started out with "I'm curious." What do you mean by that. What are you doing with this? Are you trying to figure out what people would actually want?

Nothing with the information. Just wondering what religions are out there in the various forms of media.

I just thought of one. I'd start a religion that aims to discover time travel so we could go back and save the metroid from Mother Brain. Anyone wanna join?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/7/AAfGAbAADq7b.png

Christianity

Probably the Nine (sometimes Eight) Divines and the Daedric Princes in the Elder Scrolls series The lore for those games is quite fascinating.

rexcrk posted...

Christianity

It's so boring though. Don't get me wrong. I will be the first to admit that the prince of Egypt is an awesome movie and I would sit down to watch it whenever someone wants to, but the book itself is so hard to get through.