Collectible deities?

his foot got caught in the railroad tracks. Sadly dieties cannot be separated from their feets.

lol.

I try to get around it by doing a "they walk openly among us" sort of deal. Your mileage may vary, of course.

How about they _have_ been interfering in the recent past. Neptune's been busy recently. In David's neck of the woods, Vulcan has be stoking his forge a bit. Mars has been busy in the Mid-East.

They all got bought out by Amalgamated Mythology Inc., aka Monotheism. Mergers and acquisitions, mate. St. Dionysus, St. Bridget, and so on -- looks to me like old J.Hoovah's been sending round the boys with "offers you can't refuse" for the last two or three millenia, going right back to Canaanite deities such as Repiu:

"OK, Repiu, you work for us now and yer name's Raphael."

"What if I don't wanna?"

"Well, you saw what we did to Baal."

The non-intervention thing? You know that line in The Usual Suspects? "The greatest victory the devil ever had was in persuading the world he doesn't exist" (or something like that). That's what it's all about. God as Kaiser Soze. If we're dealing with the Godfather rather than God the Father, well, of course he's gonna keep in the shadows. There is no Cosa Nostra, as any good Mafia footsoldier will tell you.

"You know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk." (That'd be Tom Waits, but I suspect y'all know that.)

I have to say, what David is describing was one reason American Gods really didn't work for me. The whole Faith = Life equation (or Faith = Power, which is sometimes the explanation for why magic works) is fine for Tinkerbell, but it's played out now. Really, I think any attempt to explain the gods is doomed to fail. So why bother? Certain fantasists are too hung up on the mechanics. I don't really care how things work. Just tell me a frelling story.

The gods have been away fighting Aaggaewqlfishbull at the edge of the galaxy, but now they're back... to rid the world of Oprah!

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Gods generally bore me, and I don't think I'd ever actually write about them. If I did, though, it seems to me that the mechanism that allows gods to return is not faith, but rather fear and gullibilty. Gods are con artists, cosmic spammers, and when enough people buy into their "you are born weak and dirty and need to be saved" routine, they are allowed to gain a foothold on our relaity.

In their defense, most people are born weak and dirty. Statistically speaking. And lots of gods couldn’t care less about salvation...

^Maybe I've been around too many babies lately, but I tend to believe people are born strong and beautiful, and that things like gods and kindergarten make them weak. (And psychoanalysis, and the drug industry, and... I wonder if Menscius and Nietzsche would have been friends? It suddenly occurs to me that Menscius is the positive side, and Nietzsche the negative side of the same project.)

Also, I think it's time for Rayguns to be cool again.

Hey, I didn’t say they were born ugly. Just dirty.

But strong? Humans? Try telling that to Charlie the Karate Chimp.

Primates? No match for humans! (Unless Edgar Rice Burroughs has lied to me...?)

p.s. http://www.richardsandrak.com/3333.htm

Like I said, most people, statistically speaking...

And yeah, I hate to break it to you, but Mars doesn’t seem to be populated by oviparous red-skinned beauties, either. :)

They're just hiding to protect the real estate market.

[creationist]How do you know? Have you BEEN to Mars?[/creationist]

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I do take your point, of course, David. And Jon: wouldn't the red-skinned beauties help the market?

The rent on a decent-sized studio would soon cost a jeddak's ransom. Prices go up and honest swordsmen are forced to move away. Next thing you know, Trump's in there, bulldozing ruined cities just so he could put in casinos.

Now that is a story I want to read, Jon.

I do think the point is: born strong, beautiful, well-groomed, etc., etc. compared to *what?*

Anyone who thinks they are particularly powerful compared to, say, the universe, is delusional. Well, for a given definition of "they". And "powerful". Certainly what we think of as "us" in the west, this mortal body of ours, is easily crushed by a Mack truck (for the "I can squish you" definition of "power" that we are also so fond of).

SF has often been written in support of the religious contention that "ok, man, sure, FOR NOW, but just you wait, because PRETTY SOON I'm gonna be able to crush Mack trucks with my robot arms, and check it out, in a MILLION YEARS I'm going to be this GIANT ROBOT that can crush whole GALAXIES!! Eh? EH? But I have to freeze my head first."

Which I'm a little bored with, frankly.

Now, if you want to say "ah, but who I really am is the harmony of all things, and this body here is just a temp gig of mine in the cycle of all that", ok... but then, lots of gods are on record as fully in support of that notion.

(I think you're really saying humans are born *sufficient*, just fine thank you, don't need anybody else's help and nothin' to feel ashamed of. To which plenty of gods would say: sure. And plenty of others would scratch their heads in confusion, not sure why anyone would want to be independent like that, and what would independent like that even mean? Cut off from everybody else, in their own apartment with a microwave and a TV and no obligations incurred by or towards kinfolk? No ancestors to propitiate and no descendants to propitiate you? It's kind of a distinctly modern ambition.)

The problem of gods is really the problem of aliens rewrit. Gods who want to walk around among us, starting our wars and having sex with our beauties, are not actually gods in any interesting sense. Good stories can be done like that, but they aren't actually stories about gods; they're stories about superheroes. They're accounts of a broader human family. Ditto for faeries. Just more guys in capes.

Nothing wrong with that, mind you. I'm all for it.

Anyway, I definitely agree with our host that the "beleif=power" gambit is a bit stale, indeed was a bit stale when Marvel comics was using it in the 80s. It presents serious problems to story logic, too, like in American Gods -- okay, belief has been shifting from Odin to Money, Tech Boy, Madonna, etc. I buy that. But what possible effect on this trend can any of the characters have? Where's the story? You always have to introduce some secondary mechanism that doesn't fit so well with the first, like "okay belief=power, EXCEPT if I bop you over the head and use the Fantasmitron on you, then I can steal the power back". Just doesn't map well. Screws up the symbolic level. (Gaiman handled it far better in Sandman by having the Endless, who were indifferent to belief, at the center).

But I'm not sure what the question really is. What ideas have we got about what -- being able to include an interventionist Athena in your story? Why do we want to do that again? (I'm asking genuinely, not sneeringly -- I expect the reason for doing it probably contains the right answer about the mechanism)