Image transcription: a section of a Wikipedia article titled “Relationship with Reality”. It reads “From a scientific viewpoint, elves are not considered objectively real. [3] However,” End transcription.
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Discworld’s Small Gods work like this.
They only gain power if you believe in them. So they stand around like a used car salesman trying to convert you
That kind of system seems ripe for a pyramid scheme.
Are you Djelibeybi?
Same for ff14 eikons. And I think the goauld in stargate?
The Ori were the bad guy that gained power from followers, the Goa’uld were just brain snakes with advanced tech.
That was it, ty
Discworld’s
elvesfair folk, however, do not work like this and remain wildly powerful even as human belief in them withers and dissipates. The belief in elves at the beginning of Lords and Ladies is much akin to the belief in Om at the beginning of Small Gods. From memory, “like worshipping the shell left behind by a crustacean that has long since died”. But for some reason elves maintain power in the human world whereas Om is reduced to hoping the melons in the church gardens aren’t too thick-skinned.
Link in case anyone’s curious:
Wow, they really dance around that. The belief in elves is real, champ, not the elves themselves due to that belief. This isn’t a Terry Pratchett novel.
It’s written that way to be as neutral as possible.
Replace “Elf” with “God” and you’ll see how important it is to “dance”
There’s the same amount of evidence for gods as there is for elves and orbiting teapots.
Yet gods and elves change the world and teapots are content to remain unobserved
There is absolutely zero necessity to dance around the non existance of god. There is objectively no god.
What a thing to say. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that there’s insufficient evidence to believe in any gods, but to state that there is no god as a matter of fact is as presumptive as saying that there objectively is.
God doesn’t exist. The tooth fairy doesn’t exist. Elvis Presley is dead. If you want to believe there is a possibility for any of these statements to be false, you have a questionable relationship with reality.
There is evidence to suggest that the tooth fairy isn’t real–when tested, magic has consistently been shown to not exist. The only intangible forces that have been shown to act on things are gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces, none of which allows for teeth to turn into quarters. On top of that, most parents will admit that they made the tooth fairy up. It’s reasonable to say that there is objectively no tooth fairy because there’s evidence to suggest it can’t exist.
There is evidence to suggest that Elvis Presley is dead. Here’s a transcript of the medical examiner’s report listing the likely cause of death as H.C.V.D. associated with ASHD. He would be 88 today, which, considering his lifestyle, would be an impressive age to reach without dying. It’s reasonable to say that Elvis is definitely dead, because there’s evidence to suggest he can’t be alive.
There is no such evidence to suggest that there can’t be a creator deity. I don’t believe that there is, but I won’t make a truth claim without evidence. If you wanna say that the Christian god isn’t real, that’s fine. There are contradictions in their holy text that show that the god in their book cannot exist. But to say that no god can exist is a truth statement that lacks evidence. Saying it just makes you look like an edgy teenager who just figured out that they’re atheist. Makes you look like a fan of thunderf00t or Carl of Akkad.
when tested, magic has consistently been shown to not exist.
Followed by:
There is no such evidence to suggest that there can’t be a creator deity.
Uh, OK.
You can yell at an idiot on the internet, but they’ll just say tldr.
Just be glad no one’s talking about moon spirits in this post.
What evidence do you have to back up that claim?
I love how nobody is responding to you, because the truth is: we can’t know, but most of us are very sure whether there is a god either way. It’s nonsense to call what an atheist believes absolutely “true,” because we can’t know. I’m an atheist, but it’s just pseudoscience to suggest that we can scientifically prove that there’s no god.
Agreed and well-put. Lack of evidence cannot give creedence to a claim. It’s all well and good to believe in (the absence of, or possibility of) supernatural being(s), but to state such beliefs as objective is not follow the scientific method.
Would you say that feelings, thoughts and numbers do “exist”?
Would you say that God has the same power as the number four?
Where enough people have believed in the reality of elves that those beliefs then had real effects in the world, they can be understood as part of people’s worldview, and as a social reality: a thing which, like the exchange value of a dollar bill or the sense of pride stirred up by a national flag, is real because of people’s beliefs rather than as an objective reality. Accordingly, beliefs about elves and their social functions have varied over time and space.
There are a few crusades and jihads that point towards gods being just as meaningfully real to us as dollar values and national pride
Again, that’s actions taken by people based on beliefs, not actions taken by that in which they believe.
duendes
