“You do, you know,” said The Lady. “Everyone has gods. You just don’t think they’re gods.”
- Terry Pratchett
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Which god do I have that I don’t think is a god?
Do you work for an employer?
Here in the States we are forced to work to eat and survive (we’re not allowed to go off into the woods and trap animals and pick vert and live as a hermit.)
You may not personally worship money, but your captives certainly do.
If I don’t worship money, how is it my god?
I asked which god I have.
Your life is dictated by the whims of money, despite your lack of belief, in much the same way that the gods of the Discworld go around beating up atheists.
My life is also dictated by the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and my telomeres.
Are oxygen and DNA also gods?
Can you find one single definition of ‘god’ anywhere that defines it as ‘what you need to live?’
I do not worship money. It is not my god. I have no gods and it is not your place to tell me what I believe. You are, whether you understand it or not, unable to read people’s minds over the internet.
Frankly I’d prefer to dispense with money altogether. It’s nothing but a human construct which has turned out to be more trouble than it’s worth. It elevates primarily those least deserving of power, while denying all needs to those most in need. The heedless societal pursuit of it is clearly the path of doom for the entire world. It can do nothing at all without us, and we would be better people without it. Money is not a god. It’s neither living nor dead. It’s a virus.
I think the real problem here is that OP doesn’t understand what a god is. They seem to think it’s “something you need to survive,” which is not true about the Christian god or the god of any other religion I can think of.
I don’t think OP understood what Terry Pratchett meant either. Or the limits that his fantasy series applied to real life.
Insistence doesn’t change reality.
Very insightful. I made vague mention of your god, and you immediately guessed correctly who I was talking about, and even offered Him a prayer. I wish I had such a keen gift for seeing to the end of allusions as you do.
Is a god a God though if we don’t think about that god as an God?
No, but most people do think of Reality as a god. But they don’t think He is a god. There’s an important distinction between thinking of one as something, and thinking one is something. One is conscious, the other is unconscious. People are perfectly capable of worshipping, praying to, and generally being religious towards someone they refuse to believe is a god.
For example, the Corpus very clearly treat Parvos Granum as a god, despite maintaining he’s only a man. It’s a very obvious contradiction. He maintains false humility.
How is reality a god? It’s not a being. It has no intelligence or agency. I can’t think of a definition of god that “reality” would fit.
Parvos Granum
My searching tells me that this is a character in a video game, which is a weird thing to reference when talking about actual beliefs.
@Darkenfolk@dormi.zone is from dormi.zone, the warframe instance. I was talking to Darkenfolk in language I knew they would understand.
Maybe broaden your references for your entire audience next time.
And a fictional character’s beliefs doesn’t support your argument regardless of who would understand it.
I thought we were talking about Discworld.
I love discworld. I don’t get the quote though. Anything you wanna add op?
It sounds like the typical “atheism is really a religion” nonsense.
More that we exhibit the same behaviors around some things that we exhibit around gods, even to the point of sacrificing life and limb to them.
Gridiron Football is quite godlike in the US. We lose only a few teen and college lives every year on the field itself (Twelve a year, according to NBC news), but the injuries and concussions are plentiful and life-defining. And it’s normal for us to erect vast stadiums for pro-ball with taxpayer dollars while children go hungry and workers are without medical care.
The immersion problem in grain silos fits right into American Gods in which small private farms don’t keep their grain silos adequately arrid (dehumidified) and so it sticks in chunks and has to be prodded down leading to twenty or so worker deaths by immersion, Sacrifices to Ceres or Demeter. The level of moisture also increases the mold growth in the grain, though I don’t know if it’s to dangerous levels.
My own favorite natural god is the sun which shines life giving energy on us every day for eons. Yet we have to avoid looking at it and without the protection of the Earth’s magnetic field would quickly be fried in its presence (at eight light seconds away). Without the sun, we’d freeze and die. And if we were to imagine the sun a human body, the rest of the solar system (mostly Jupiter) would be a blood draw, and the earth would be a drop of blood smeared on a slide.
As I said, the typical “atheism is a religion” nonsense.
I worship nothing and I never have worshiped anything. I’ve also never believed in something with supernatural powers that can control me.
I have no gods. I don’t really care what your favorite gods are, I never asked.
Wow, somebody’s crabby
