I have this mental fanfiction that every god has a way to be killed, and when you kill them you can get things from them.
For instance, the one that I refer to the most often is Ben Franklin using a kite and a key to slay Zeus and to steal electricity from him.
And then of course there’s Prometheus who intentionally and willfully laid down his own life so that humanity could have fire.
But there are more gods than there are words to describe them.
What other gods have we claimed existed, that we humans have likely slain, and what do you think we got from them?
All religion is fan-fiction. The only problem is that once you make it, followers take it far too seriously and start killing and hurting innocent people over it.
Fictional gods don’t die. Nobody reads their book anymore. Same as any other fictional character. They’re just replaced by something new, that is just a remake of something old.
I mean, I’m glad that there are pockets in the world where people feel confident in saying that nobody studies religion anymore because representation is important, but saying “nobody reads their book anymore” casually overlooks like six plus billion people who do actually participate in a religion of some type.
Like, I get what you’re saying, but more people are religious to some degree than are not.
By a huge margin.
I checked the World Population Review website for the least religious countries, and it seems like there’s approximately 1.2 to 1.4 billion officially non-religious people in the world as of 2020, And three-quarters of a billion of them are in China.
So if we were all placed onto a massive chessboard and forced to battle it out life for death style, the atheists are gonna be out numbered approximately 6 to 1.
I said all of that not to disparage your atheism, but rather to say that it’s okay to have mental exercises in fiction about religion and religious adjacent topics like this, if for no other reason than to enjoy our imagination and to have conversations with each other.