Youth and Religion

25-Aug-08 at 8:06 PM
6 comments

As I make my transition into adulthood I'm starting to forget some of the things that I considered important. It's interesting that when I started this blog I listed religion and mythology as major interests, yet I've hardly wrote about them. Part of this is because I've had a problem integrating religion and mythology into my stories and I'm still struggling with those issues. When I was young Religious discovery was such a big part of my life... lately it's been eclipsed by political discovery, which is interesting, but doesn't spark the same wide-eyed wonder that old myths do.

I've become too pragmatic as of late. Financial security has tempered my dreams and visions of miraculous change with calculated opinions and boring planning. I forget about the questions I had when I was younger like does magic exist? Or do miracles occur? As a kid these might not have been any more valid to my life then they are now, but they inspired me and made me question things.

I've forgotten how relevant those things were to me, so it was an eye opener when I find out that Churches actually consider it a massive problem that youth are making a massive exodus from the Christian faith to "new age" spiritualist faiths. My pragmatic self can't help but analyze this behavior from a larger standpoint, that young people don't want to identify with the same faiths and values that have filled the world with conflict and hate. I know I didn't. For me it was the history of the inquisitions that drove me back. Now I see much the same in the tensions surrounding the Islamic faith. There's hypocrisy in every religion, but the ones with history have more than the cool new thing does. There's also the drive for individuality that wicca or druidism accommodate better than the monolithic faiths of their parents.

Now where am I going with this? I'm working on new stories, stories about modern mythology, and in such stories I want to consider where the magic would exist in plausible ways and how it would start to change the world? I've struggled with those questions before, and now I'm back to them...

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I like to take the angle that magic, as it is in heroic fantasy, is merely science juiced up to crazy levels. There's nothing truly mystical, but just as possession of a Bic lighter would have relegated you to Godhood in the dark ages, so too would an exhaustive understanding of the true nature of energy. Wizards are notoriously intelligent dudes. In making fireballs, Merlin simply took the science of spark and tinder to the Nth degree.

Invisibility: manipulation of light waves.

Levitation: controlling wind

Geas: High-end hypnosis

And so on. Imagine the good you could do with proper use of a Cone of Silence. :-P

See, that's where my setting doesn't go. I don't deal with effects like invisibility or levitation. A lot of the effects can be scientifically justified such as aura manipulation and that sort of thing. Where I really try to integrate the magic into things is in the creatures from old mythology, Valkyries, oni, cerebus... all that great stuff, how would creatures like that exist in the modern world that still seems like our modern world?

Hmm. Perhaps the awakening of latent abilities due to excessive genetic manipulation? Like Dr. Moreau to the tenth power. Certainly Cerebus would work here, but so could harpies, griffons, mermaids, and even dragons.

I read a great sci-fi book some years ago called Quozl that suggested rabbit-like aliens have lived on Earth with us for a long time but have never been discovered because they are advanced enough to easily remain out of sight. Even when they walked among us, they did so in ways that didn't cause us a moment's pause. A lot of it, I think, was based on human psychology and how we will see what we want or expect to see.

For that matter, much of the magic your characters employ could be simply illusions, just like in real life.

Oni and other demons are problematic because you have to decide if an afterlife exists at all. If it does, then why are we concerned with justifying magic? Magic exists in a God-fearing world. Just ask Job.

But if there is no afterlife, no god, no demons, then you have to figure out: what deformed these creatures so? I like the Buffy idea of how vampires will turn people but allow them to be buried, so that when they wake up they must dig their way out, ensuring that any last speck of humanity is stripped away before they ever reach the surface. Combine that with our unexplicable ability to do things we normally couldn't when we're under duress and you have a beginning of new magics right there.

I could go on, but I'm not sure I'm headed in the right direction, so I better stop. :)

Alright dude, you asked for it so I'm gonna give it to ya.

The setting I've been working on for so long is this:

Gods as in plural exist. They always have. Some benevolent some malevolent, but all need humans to love or fear them. Gods sustained themselves on the souls of humanity. When a person died if that person was devout or fearing then their souls would go up to their god. Martyrdom or sacrifice was especially potent. In return for the souls and to continue getting more, Gods would invest some of their power in making mortals love and fear them even more. However as time went on the gods were prospering more than humans, humanity spent much of it's time warring against followers of other gods and worshipping their own, and with so many gods to appease it became impossible to manage large groups of people without offending some diety or another. So people tried to combat against the gods, however people can't hurt gods really, and killing worshippers just makes them more powerful, so a more subversive method needed to be developed. Conversion.

The problem with conversion was that Gods could undermine each other in all sorts of creative and sneaky ways which was why one god hadn't managed to rule over another. So a society was formed with a singular goal to kill all the gods so that humanity could guide it's self, and they would do this by creating a fake god, a fictional entity that all humans could worship, a personification of morality and ethics that could be a foundation of law so that even if you did not choose to worship you still followed the tenants. And they set about spreading the word of this new fake god.

That was the origin of monotheism.

Fast forward 2500 years to the modern day. The old gods have been subverted but with the advancements of modern communication and movements such as Wicca which encourage young people to choose their own gods, some deities are beginning to make a resurgence in followers, and they're not too happy.

Interested in hearing what you think. I've got the broad strokes down but the details still screw me up.

[this is good]

Upon first read, I think it's a great concept. I need some time to read it through a few more times and think on it.

At first, I thought I was going to have ask if you've ever read any Lovecraft, but then you went a different direction and it was all good. :-P

I'll get back to you.

Yes I have read some lovecraft, I did once own the Call of Cthulu role-playing game, but I seem to have misplaced it...

Youth and Religion

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