Where do ideas go to die?

[ciaan]

This past weekend, cos and I were talking about kinds of fiction, and then the idea of belief and gods subsisting on belief, so that they have to do/be whatever people think they do/are, and if their worshippers stop believing in them they shrivel up and die (or have to sneak off and survive in a fragment of belief somewhere). We were trying to think

Comments

[littlewings04]

The idea of belief being relevant to existence owes itself everything to the Enlightenment--cogito ergo sum, my friends. The concept of perception/thought resulting in awareness and awareness meaning existence is modern, and by modern, I appeal of course to the definition that places modernity at a point along the human time line post-Reformation. But I think it's an existential sort of concept, as most Western religions don't place the existence of the divine at the hands of the faithful, more leaving the existence of the divine as a given and it is the responsibility of the faithful to discover that truth as one of the main truths of the universe. The existence of God relying on the belief of the faithful posits a troubling corollary that the existence of God may be functionally negated through disbelief, and that runs contrary to most of the major theological traditions.

So I'm not disputing your idea, it's an interesting one, but it is inherently modern. (As for postmodern theology, it's notoriously difficult, as postmodernism denies the existence of absolutes, and God as a concept is an absolute in theology. Granted, there is some strains of postmodern theology, I'm aware of a few, but they are not at all my field of expertise.) I doubt you're going to find many ancient sources that give humanity control of that level over the divine, as well as the options for humanity to destroy the divine. Certainly not in Western thought. Possibly in some tribal folkways around the world, but none of which I'm aware. I think there may be some thought that forgotten gods fade in some folkways, but I can't say for 100% certain.