this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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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?

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[–] Chainweasel@lemmy.world 24 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

I like the Discworld approach, as people stop truly believing in a god they will weaken until they fade away.
This could be either just not believing, or believing more in the system than the God itself.
Small gods is a good read and introduces the concept well.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 6 points 12 hours ago

Douglas Adams takes this in a different direction in one of the Dirk Gently books, namely, all gods continue to exist in a dimension beyond ours and live according to how many people currently remember them.

Over there, gods are basically just people. Forgotten gods live in shacks and hovels in out of the way places. The Abrahamic god isn't actually mentioned much that I remember. Probably because he's off living in a palace somewhere, and his former pantheon mates, along with his wife, are doubtless relegated to squalid conditions nearby.

Ironically, it's been a while since I read that book so I may have misremembered some of the details, but there's a weird mind-bending concept that if we think of misremembered details as a god then my recollection is at least partially, and paradoxically accurate.

[–] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 1 points 56 minutes ago

Believing in other gods is an abomination unto Nuggan.