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

[star_dancer54]

I think that another author that uses this, at least to a small extent, is Piers Anthony in his On a Pale Horse. In the story, Death goes to take the soul of an atheist. They wind up having a conversation while the atheist is bleeding out - he's a suicide - and when Death tried to take his soul, it fragmented and faded away as if the atheist had never existed. I can't remember if it was involved in any of the others in the series, though. There was also a little girl in another one of his books that had the ability where if she believed that something was true, it was true. An example of this is her belief that a dragon she ran into was a kind thing that could become her pet, whereas before it was a feared creature. Am I making much in the way of sense here?

[ciaan]

Yeah, that scene from On A Pale Horse kinda freaked me out when I read it way back when.

[tassosss]

Hi. Here from friends friends browsing. Another modern work that goes this route is Enchantment by Orson Scott Card.

I can't think of older sources. In myth stories, non belief by humans usually results in punishment by the gods. In at least the Greek and Roman traditions, the stories tend to be about the gods and their antics and the stories featuring humans are heroes who need the help of the gods to complete their tasks. Both of these need the gods present because they are stories that explain things or relationships.

I think you're right about it being postmodern because it feels like a more existential idea (I could be using this term incorrectly). It looks at people and our relationship to the past and our cultural history and looking at what's changed, especially in Gaiman. It's not the kind of theme you see in older myth stories.

[ciaan]

I'm not sure what to say now, expect that I agree with your agreement. And yes, the idea of history is an interesting point too, because other cultures had very different ideas of the past, and of how/whether human life and beliefs had changed through time.

[ilna]

Jean Ray - Malpertuis

..and there should be some of it in Dunsany, as well.

[ciaan]

Thanks!

[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

[slinkling]

Interesting stuff. I feel certain I've read these sorts of scenarios (lack of belief --> the death of the the god) elsewhere, though off the top of my head I can't remember where. I'll keep thinking about it. But Gaiman's done the most with it, that I know of