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Since we've gotten told to stop talking generally about religion twice in the Homosexuality and Religion thread and were told that, if we want to talk generally about religion, we need to make a new thread, I have made a new thread.

Full disclosure: I am an agnostic atheist and anti-theist, but I'm very interested in theology and religion.

Mod Edit: All right, there are a couple of ground rules here:

  • This is not a thread for mindless bashing of religion or of atheism/agnosticism etc. All view points are welcome here. Let's have a civil debate.
  • Religion is a volatile subject. Please don't post here if you can't manage a civil discussion with viewpoints you disagree with. There will be no tolerance for people who can't keep the tone light hearted.
  • There is no one true answer for this thread. Don't try to force out opposing voices.

edited 9th Feb '14 1:01:31 PM by Madrugada

alekos23 Since: Mar, 2013
#21576: Apr 27th 2023 at 10:42:20 PM

Probably helps that he kinda feels like a later addition doesn't it. Here's all those gods but suddenly here pops up this rando that asks for the top job then proceeds not to do much after (that we know of.) tongue

Angelspawndragon King of the Seven Rhinos from That haunted house in your neighborhood Since: Nov, 2018 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
King of the Seven Rhinos
#21577: Apr 28th 2023 at 3:24:26 AM

It also doesn’t help that many of the mythological stories the Egyptians and Babylonians told simply didn’t survive the sands of time, as it were, ([lol]), and it’s kind of a miracle that we know anything about their mythologies.

And, in fairness, Greek mythology (as we currently know it at least, since it’s always possible that there was some intermediary form that came about after the theorized Proto-Indo-European mythology that predates all of them) is comparatively younger, so when it did get all written down, it probably had much better odds of surviving into the future.

Or, well, the future for the ancient Greeks, and the modern day for us.

Edited by Angelspawndragon on Apr 28th 2023 at 3:25:05 AM

Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.
jawal Since: Sep, 2018
#21578: Apr 28th 2023 at 3:45:29 AM

I think it is simply due to western civilization useing Latin as intellectuals language during the Middle Ages, so people kept reading the Ancient Greek works, including their legends. Which leads to books, theater, movies and comics starring these characters, and with the west dominating the world culture for the last 300 years, they get better known everywhere.

 By comparison, the Ancient Egyptians language was lost for like 1800 years, even to Egyptians themselves, and their legends were forgotten until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone during Napoleon campaign in Egypt (1799).

So of course Amon and  Marduk are not as popular as Zeus and Odin.

To change this, is honestly the responsibility of the Egyptians,Iraqis and Arab people in general, not Hollywood. By producing good art works, they will promote their mythology more.

Similar to how Anime promote Japanese deities and myths in the World right now.

Edited by jawal on Apr 28th 2023 at 10:51:41 AM

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
Angelspawndragon King of the Seven Rhinos from That haunted house in your neighborhood Since: Nov, 2018 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
King of the Seven Rhinos
#21579: Apr 28th 2023 at 4:04:51 AM

^ Well, the issue there is that a lot of the Middle-East, and Egypt as well, don’t exactly have the same resources as Hollywood does to be able to produce various retellings of their stories.

And, for any artists who do want to adapt stories from Egyptian or Babylonian mythology and actually try it, navigating the quagmire that is the entertainment industry without any connections is almost impossible, especially given how brand/IP dominated it’s been for over 30 years.

It’s also made worse by films like Gods of Egypt and The Mummy remake (with Tom Cruise, not Brendan Fraser), which were clearly made by people who didn’t really care, which led to box office failure, which only enforces film studios’ views on Egyptian mythology (read: doesn’t make a profit, so it’s not worth adapting).

Moon Knight is probably the only decent and profitable portrayal of Egyptian gods, but that’s because Moon Knight is an MCU show, but it’s unlikely any studio is going to look at Moon Knight and think, “Hey, maybe there’s something to this Egyptian mythology stuff that’s worth making a film of.”

Edited by Angelspawndragon on Apr 28th 2023 at 4:14:08 AM

Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.
alekos23 Since: Mar, 2013
#21580: Apr 28th 2023 at 4:13:24 AM

also way more wars happened over there, and thus way more changing of leadership and thus more history rewriting or erasing. Greece's kind of a crap place to take over by comparison really, maybe one or two key port areas but that's about it.

Edited by alekos23 on Apr 28th 2023 at 2:13:45 PM

jawal Since: Sep, 2018
#21581: Apr 28th 2023 at 4:20:24 AM

[up][up]

Well, the issue there is that a lot of the Middle-East, and Egypt as well, don’t exactly have the same resources as Hollywood does to be able to produce various retellings of their stories
.

Certainly, so they must try to improve their art industry, so they can compete better.

And again, as anime taught us, you don't need the same resources of Hollywood to produce an interesting work.

You don't even need visual media, how about a book series like A Song Of Ice And Fire happening during Ancient Egypt? Or a The Lord of the Rings in Mesopotamia?

All you need is the talent so that the work can be good and gets translated in various languages, and adapted in successful movies.

Adapting a country history is IMHO said country responsibility first and foremost. And it will assure that the works reflect their views accurately.

Leave it to Hollywood, and you may get something as Gods of Egypt if you are lucky.

Edit: Just to say that I mentioned Gods of Egypt before seeing your edit.

Edited by jawal on Apr 28th 2023 at 11:38:49 AM

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
Noaqiyeum we must dissent (it/they) from across the gulf of space (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
we must dissent (it/they)
#21582: Apr 28th 2023 at 5:28:21 AM

I don't believe there are modern countries which identify themselves with any of the civilisations of ancient Mesopotamia. (I don't think even Iran dates back quite that far.) The cultural landscape has changed a little in the past several thousand years. You can't reasonably blame Turkey for modern ignorance of the religions of the Hittite Empire simply because they have overlapping geography.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Apr 28th 2023 at 2:00:39 PM

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jawal Since: Sep, 2018
#21583: Apr 28th 2023 at 5:39:45 AM

Modern Egyptiens consider themselves the descendants of Ancient Egypt, though.

Edited by jawal on Apr 28th 2023 at 12:40:03 PM

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
Shop all day, greed is free
#21584: Apr 28th 2023 at 5:53:03 AM

Saddam was actually quite obsessed with portraying himself as a modern Nebuchadnezzar in Iran-Iraq War propaganda in the '80s . He even went as far as trying to build a reconstruction of Babylon south of Baghdad.

There's no state-sponsored cult of Sumer, Babylon or Assyria nowadays, of course — if modern Iraq identifies with one historical forebear, it's probably the Abbasids under Harun al-Rashid — but Iraqi archaeologists take their heritage very seriously, and domestic public interest is picking up as security and economic conditions slowly improve. I can't find the links at the moment, but I remember coming across photos of Iraqi university students dressing in ancient Mesopotamian costumes for their graduation celebration a few years ago, as well as a Babylonian-themed laser tag place that someone set up for some reason.

Turkey doesn't really do Hittite or Mittani cosplay because while the people there are majority descended from those peoples, the modern culture isn't: the Turkic culture was brought by Central Asian steppe nomads who became the dominant power in the area during the medieval era, and then permeated to the native peoples over the centuries. That's why modern Turks are more likely to identify with the Asena or Ergenekon myths than any number of Bronze Age pantheons native to the region. Which, come to think of it, is honestly not too different from how your average Brit is more familiar with Zeus and Athena than with Toutatis and Taranis.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Apr 28th 2023 at 6:06:15 AM

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
jawal Since: Sep, 2018
#21585: Apr 28th 2023 at 6:03:37 AM

[up]

Are those the photos you are talking about?

https://al-ain.com/article/iraq-university-students-graduation-party

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
dRoy Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar from Most likely from my study Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: I'm just high on the world
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
#21586: Apr 28th 2023 at 6:56:23 AM

[up][up] Funnily, or perhaps appropriatingly enough, that reminds me of how Mussolini was really obsessed with Rome and Hitler was with the Teutonic Knights. [lol]

Continuously reading, studying, and (hopefully) growing.
eagleoftheninth Shop all day, greed is free from a dreamed portrait, imperfect Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: With my statistically significant other
Shop all day, greed is free
#21587: Apr 28th 2023 at 7:01:51 AM

Those are the ones, thanks.

Iran is kind of in the same boat as Turkey, only their nomadic ancestors arrived on the Iranian Plateau much earlier, towards the end of the Iron Age. Up until then, the classical Bronze Age cultures of the Tigris-Euphrates delta (Babylon, Elam, Media and so on) had actually enjoyed a nice continuity... right up till the Neo-Assyrians marched in and burned down everything in sight.

The Persians rose up and became a ruling power on the ashes of those civilisations, so to speak. Eventually the Achaemenid dynasty conquered the Mesopotamian states as they rebuilt, a process that their texts like to paint with a streak of magnanimity — the Kourosh Cylinder specifically describes the founding king sponsoring the reconstruction of Babylon and the temple of Marduk.

It's also believed by some historians that Anahita, the early Zoroastrian water goddess, was a syncretic form of Innana-Ishtar that the Persians adopted into their faith; as far away and as late as 1st century BCE Afghanistan, we've found Bactrian statues marked with the name "Nana", with visual elements that suggest further syncretism with the Hindu goddess Durga.

The Persians also adopted the cuneiform script for their own language and wrote a lot of administrative texts and inscriptions in the languages of their Mesopotamian subjects, although they eventually settled on Aramaic as the main language of government. We don't know when cuneiform scripts died out, exactly; the last writings we've found date from around the 1st century CE or so. So while Zoroastrianism and the Pahlavi script survived the Muslim conquest, the cuneiform inscriptions lining the ruins of the Achaemenids and their Mesopotamian subjects would remain untranslated until European archaeologists started working on them in the 19th century. Which, of course, didn't leave Iranians with a lot of cultural memories of those days, those distant days.

Insofar as modern Iranians are concerned, the foundational text of their culture is The Shahnameh, which is a chronicle that mashes together legends, folktales and dramatised historical episodes. The Bronze Age and everything else that came before Alexander basically don't exist in the text: it was The Time of Myths filled with legendary heroes the same way that the Greeks viewed the time of Homer's stories. Then came Alexander; then Ardashir; after that we enter the Sassanid era, which follows actual historical figures like Khosrau Parviz and Bahram Chobin and narrates their lives in a more grounded fashion.

The text itself was collated by Ferdowsi and Daqiqi in the Islamic era centuries later, using a more recent form of the Persian language that pronounced a lot of things differently from their Sassanid forebears. So the cultural canon that emerged ended up a melting pot of cultural elements.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Apr 28th 2023 at 7:52:37 AM

One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.
MorningStar1337 The Encounter that ended the Dogma from 🤔 Since: Nov, 2012
The Encounter that ended the Dogma
#21588: Apr 28th 2023 at 1:26:48 PM

@angelspawndragon, Japan is also a possible route for brining Obscure myths to light, but they have their own baggage as Fate/Grand Order can attest. (Incidentally Fate prolly contributed a lot to keeping Gilgamesh in popular consciousness)

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 28th 2023 at 1:28:32 AM

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#21589: Apr 28th 2023 at 3:54:13 PM

Moon Knight is probably the only decent and profitable portrayal of Egyptian gods,

What about Age of Mythology?

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Angelspawndragon King of the Seven Rhinos from That haunted house in your neighborhood Since: Nov, 2018 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
King of the Seven Rhinos
#21590: Apr 29th 2023 at 3:12:50 AM

^^ Possibly. But yeah outside of the Fate series (and maybe Record of Ragnorok, idk I haven’t seen it so I have no idea if any other mythologies besides the Nordic deities are involved?), I don’t think they have much interest in Egyptian mythology.

^ I mean in regards to the mainstream audience. RTS’ are pretty niche games as a genre, and while Age of Empires and Mythology probably are pretty popular among RTS fans, I don’t think your average gamer even knows what an RTS is, let alone having even heard of Age of Mythology.

On the other hand, if God of War does start up a new trilogy set in Egypt though, between God of War and Moon Knight, that might be enough to start garnering more interest in Egyptian mythology from the mainstream audience, and that in turn might start giving any other projects that have something to do with Egyptian mythology some traction, perhaps enough traction for at least some of them to get fully greenlit and later released.

Edited by Angelspawndragon on Apr 29th 2023 at 3:16:32 AM

Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.
jawal Since: Sep, 2018
#21591: Apr 29th 2023 at 3:21:08 AM

Assassin's Creed Origins is a better example for a game set in Ancient Egypt, even if it is not about the gods.

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
alekos23 Since: Mar, 2013
#21592: Apr 29th 2023 at 3:32:52 AM

Eeeeh, Ptolemaic Egypt is kinda annoying cause it gets all the screentime instead of the older eras. We're talking 4000 years of history and they keep going for Cleo. Do something different sheesh. tongue

DeMarquis (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#21593: Apr 29th 2023 at 5:29:14 AM

I greatly regret the loss of whatever it was the original Druids actually believed in.

I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
Jhimmibhob Since: Dec, 2010
#21594: Apr 29th 2023 at 11:30:08 AM

The thing about Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythologies is that they have no Theogony or Eddas, surviving works that impose order, hierarchy, & relations on the profusion of gods, and that help give us an "authorized" version of Greek and Norse mythologies, respectively. In actual practice, I suspect that Greek and Norse paganism was a lot messier than Hesiod's or Snorri's post-hoc rationalizations—a bunch of local cults with wildly varying folktales involving them. Much, in fact, like the gods of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent.

Forenperser Foreign Troper from Germany Since: Mar, 2012
Foreign Troper
#21595: Apr 29th 2023 at 12:10:47 PM

Speaking of Egyptian Gods, in the Bible, during the story of Moses, are the Egyptian Gods acknowledged as inferior entities to the biblical God or are they said to not be entities at all, all just human inventions?

Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian
Logaritmus Since: Dec, 2022
#21596: Apr 29th 2023 at 12:15:21 PM

[up][up]I think, that there are a lot of versions of Greek myths on This Very Wiki or The Other Wiki. But, if my sources are correct, Theogony had effect to Greek mythology, becouse it was very popular and a lot of local cults adopted its ideas and hierarchy, and Greek mythology became more unificate. Illias and Odyssea had similar effect, but they describe just a litlle part of mythology, for this reason they were less significant.

Edited by Logaritmus on Apr 29th 2023 at 12:16:29 PM

Angelspawndragon King of the Seven Rhinos from That haunted house in your neighborhood Since: Nov, 2018 Relationship Status: YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LISA
King of the Seven Rhinos
#21597: Apr 29th 2023 at 12:33:04 PM

^^ I imagine the intention depends on when it was written/told.

The original versions of Genesis probably started off as “my god is more powerful than all of yours and here’s why,” and eventually became, “my God is the only real god and yours are all the false creations of magicians”.

And these days either one could be a valid interpretation.

Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.
jawal Since: Sep, 2018
#21598: Apr 29th 2023 at 12:58:38 PM

[up][up][up] [nja]

The Old Testament in general refers to Yahweh not as the only god, but more as the most powerful or greatest of the gods.

That imply that other gods are real, but not -According to Yahweh - as great as he is.

Edited by jawal on Apr 29th 2023 at 7:59:24 PM

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
Protagonist506 from Oregon Since: Dec, 2013 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
#21599: Apr 29th 2023 at 1:49:22 PM

In the Bible, God sometimes refers to another god as if it were a being that actually exists in some capacity, but will also sometimes declare another god to simply be wholly fictitious.

Judaism's monotheism is seemingly something that happened gradually, and indeed it likely wasn't purely monotheistic when Exodus was written.

The Book of Exodus itself doesn't seem to make a clear statement whether the Egyptian gods exist or not, but I'd say it's written with the assumption that they might.

There are several events in the book where Egyptian Priests are described preforming magic/miracles through some manner of secret art, but are incapable of competing with God's miracles.

It's not too hard to approach it from the angle that the Egyptians were using smoke-and-mirrors illusions, as The Prince of Egypt portrays. However, it's not clearly stated one way or the other, so it's also a valid reading that the Egyptians did have actual supernatural powers.

Leviticus 19:34
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#21600: Apr 29th 2023 at 2:11:54 PM

The earlier parts of the Old Testament mostly go with the idea that God doesn't actually follow the rules of the other gods. Like, under normal polytheistic vaguely syncretic approaches, the Egyptians in the story would assume their gods defeated the Hebrew God. But then it turns out that the Hebrew God was just biding his time and he was able to effectively smack down the Egyptian gods while having basically no power base. The same pattern shows up repeatedly.


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