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.
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edited 9th Feb '14 1:01:31 PM by Madrugada
I'd imagine it's down to Devil, but No God. People tend to make stories involving demons because they're edgy and work well as antagonists, so angels tend to be left unmentioned in pop culture, etc.
the other big reason is that much of the pop culture focus goes up to around seven to nine at most. Even SMT doesn't have much beyond representatives of the ranks and the aforementioned.
And that is on top of Sailor Earth cases where writers just make up members to the heavenly hosts, making it more confusing when the figure use is an actual but obscure one.
Watching Horror of Dracula made me think of this one. What’s the story behind the classic idea that driving a wooden stake through the heart is the best way to get rid of a vampire once and for all?
Come on! Let's bless them all until we get fershnickered!there is a trope about it, that might answer that question.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 16th 2025 at 6:51:55 AM
Funnily enough, wooden stakes didn't kill vampires in the original Dracula book. It only immobilized them long enough to cut off their heads, and Dracula himself isn't even staked. He's stabbed in the heart with a regular knife before being decapitated.
"Oh my God!
There's so much blood! D:"
As I recall, isn’t staking a vampire something that originated in an occult belief, as a means of binding the undead spirit to its own body, and decapitation is actually what kills it?
Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.Vampire: The Masquerade and later Vampire: Requiem are more faithful to the old folklore. A wooden stake in the heart doesn't kill a Cainite but it does paralyze them and eventually forces them into Torpor (a state of dreamless hibernation).
Edited by M84 on Aug 20th 2025 at 3:10:47 AM
Disgusted, but not surprisedUnrelated, but is it specified that, if you died in battle, you had to do with your own weapon in hand to get into to Valhall, or any other Warrior Heaven for that matter? Or could you get in with any weapon, so long as it was a weapon?
Like, say you lay dying on the battlefield but your sword or axe got knocked away, so you manage to grab a spear, or a different axe or sword, or even a bow with an arrow right on top of it just before passing on, would that still count?
Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.I just finished watching the first season of Blood of Zeus. Good show, by the way. ![]()
Watching a show about Greek mythology made me remember this part. Yeah, what's the deal with that? On both sides of the Mediterranean, the gods were siblings and spouses at the same time. :S I still remember the joke my friend Max made about it. He said the Greek gods were "the original hillbillies."
the general reason might be the result of the purported origin from a single point. which isn't exclusive to divinity
With the Greeks specially there was once a single entity (Kaos) who created several deities (the Protogenoi), who by virtue of being the only sapient and/or living beings around messed around with each other and siring various progeny (the Titan), who in turn sired their own progeny (the Olympeans. Though Kronos did near his damnest to prevent that from happening) with each other despite humanity being created around that point.
It's possible Mycenean royalty followed a similar pattern to Egyptian royalty with incest, which transferred to the gods. Cause the pharaohs sure had a stereotype going. I wanna say the Greeks were more icky about the subject (e.g Oedipus) but, well, the Ptolemaic dynasty sure followed Pharaohnic traditions to the letter?
Edited by alekos23 on Aug 22nd 2025 at 5:00:57 PM
Couldn't it just be ancient Greeks holding gods and humans to different standards rather than Mycenean royalty being incestuous? After all in Greek mythology, the gods are sunless no matter what things they do, and can only be humbled by god's greater than them. A lot of things done by God's would be considered evil if done by Greek royalty even back then I believe. So them being incestuous doesn't have to translate to their initial followers being incestuous or such.
Edited by xyzt on Aug 22nd 2025 at 8:21:04 PM
Throwing this out there myself (with no research to back it up), it’s possible that in the mythologies of the oldest tribal peoples (meaning, the point in time just before the Mesopotamians arose as the first empire/kingdom, but after we as a species largely transitioned out of being Hunter-gatherers) only considered their gods as siblings in the metaphysical sense and thus the inherent incestuous nature of their relationships wasn’t something they thought all that much about.
Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.
Or it could also be possible that the oldest tribal people may not have seen incest as all that bad either. That is a possibility too. For instance, Buddha used his tribe's incestuous origins as a point of pride to show why his tribe and kshatriyas in general were superior to Brahmins of his time and place in terms of lineage (against a backdrop of some Brahmin trying to put his tribe down on the issue of purity).
Edited by xyzt on Aug 22nd 2025 at 10:41:31 PM

^^ I’m gonna have to bookmark that page for later research, that’s actually pretty crazy there’s that many.
And, yeah, like, how have almost all of them been forgotten?
Chain an angry nature god at your own peril.