About religion in writing.

[CL]

I just woke up and had a thought: mythology. I am aware they used to be religions and that there are probably a couple hundred people out and about that say they "follow" it (I doubt they actually do sacrifice anything living to appease these neglected deities), but what is everyone's opinion about them in stories? Do you feel the same about mythological religions (aka: "dead" religions) as you would for active religions?

 

[OvidLemma]

Okay I know I said I was out but I need to go on a small off-topic rant.

There can only be an agnostic a/theist. There is no such thing as just being "agnostic" because "agnostic" is a modifier, not a noun. To be "agnostic" is to "have knowledge", to be agnostic is to "have ignorance". Conversely, to be a theist could be to believe in god and to be atheist is to disbelieve in god. You can be gnostic theist or gnostic atheist, and you can be agnostic theist or agnostic atheist, or you can be a theist or an atheist, but you cannot just be gnostic/agnostic in the discussion of beliefs.

In writing terms: "gently", for example, is a modifier. You can place a cup down. You can gently place a cup down. But you cannot adverb gently as its own existence. It is a modifier for existing verbs only.

To break down further:
A gnostic theist (Christian) is "someone who believes god is real because they have knowledge ("proof") of His existence", whereas an agnostic theist (Christian) is "someone who has faith in His existence even without evidence".
A gnostic atheist is "someone who knows that god isn't real because they have knowledge/evidence of it" and an agnostic atheist is "someone who does not believe in the existence of god because they lack the knowledge ("evidence") of His existence." And there is an important distinction between the two. One is saying "it is an absolute certainty that god does not exist" and the other is saying "I have not personally been sufficiently convinced that He exists, and so I default to disbelieving". Having conversations with Christians who do not make the distinction is a fucking headache.

A lot of the time when people describe themselves as agnostic, they usually mean spiritual, or open to spirituality. A vague "maybe, who knows" or "there could be a higher power but I don't feel comfortable prescribing to organised religion".

/grumble

OKAY THAT'S ALL I WANTED TO SAY SORRY I DIDN'T ATTEND TWELVE YEARS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION NOT TO GET THIS OFF MY CHEST FLUCKET OUT HAVE A NICE NIGHT EVERYONE.

Yes, I know an agnostic atheist is a thing because I am one. My little quip was whether you could be a dyed-in-the-wool one. And, while I accept your framing of a/gnosticism, many people don't, and it has only become a popular framing in recent years (the past 15 years or so). Before that, agnosticism almost always referred to either, specifically an ambivalence about the existence of god or an affirmation that the existence of a god is inherently unknowable. I can probably count on one hand the number of people I've met who adhere to either position, but perhaps it was more common in the past.

That said, I think the more recent framing is true to the original intent of the phrase. If memory serves, it was T.H. Huxley who coined the term agnostic sometime in the late 19th Century to encapsulate his beliefs - namely that the existence of a god had yet to be demonstrated and was, perhaps, indemonstrable, and so he could not affirm it... and that he took this exact same stance to any and all phenomena and entities under consideration.

 

[Toomanysorrows]

I just woke up and had a thought: mythology. I am aware they used to be religions and that there are probably a couple hundred people out and about that say they "follow" it (I doubt they actually do sacrifice anything living to appease these neglected deities), but what is everyone's opinion about them in stories? Do you feel the same about mythological religions (aka: "dead" religions) as you would for active religions?

The thing is, at least for the two most popular dead mythologies, it's impossible to separate the literary from the religious. With the Greek and Roman myths, many of the surviving are derived from adaptations of previous stories (or outright inventions) by writers like Ovid. The Greeks and the Romans had no inherent regard for myths in the same way that we might today have for the content of the Bible or Quran. They were already changing them and adapting them to send their own messages and to entertain. The only thing we do differently is that we usually don't believe in the figures portrayed anymore, whereas they usually believed in their gods and heroes to some extent still.

And Norse mythology is not at all a religion but entirely a literary creation. We know very little about what the Norse believed (and they probably didn't all believe the same thing!) What we have left from them in the form of the Edda's is a set of stories meant to entertain the christian elite of Iceland, somewhat based on religious traditions among the warrior elite of the Scandinavian countries, but also with christian and classical influences. Even the elements that we know are copies of older material from the 9th century were more stories to entertain the nobility than articles of faith.

So why not use them in our stories? We're just doing the same things they were.