The Fifth Elephant

Love the intro 😂

Ok I know I am commenting a lot, I saw some parallels with gnosticism in his dark materials so perhaps the god they killed was the demiurge aka the fallen one

I think you can have faith even if you've met the gods bc I know ppl who let's say see an angel or are saved, but they block it out and forget bc they dont have faith....

Thanks for making me think 😅 I guess I’m generally not that into philosophy. I enjoy fantasy where the religion is a part of the story.

Hmmmm makes me wonder why Pratchett had the Creator and the Gods as very different sorts of satirical characters.

Redwall, thank the seasons, works. Trees as epithets NO

One of my favorite religious/spiritual systems in books is actually in a fantastic series called He Who Fights With Monsters by Travis Deverell! In that series the gods are effectively the personages of aspects of the world like Knowledge is the god of all the knowledge in that world, Healer is the god of healing, etc and each of those gods have their own realm but cannot affect the realms of other gods too much so while they may know a lot, they're not actually omniscient with things not in their realm. It adds a great depth to the story, I liked it a lot.

@23:30 - "hu-why does the spirit of the wood live in the ooocean" cracked me up lmao

Who decided that a god must be all knowing, all powerful, and immortal? Was that some man?

Was he talking about fiction? He must have been since science disproved any actual God, certainly there are none that fit those descriptions.

Our sensation of God comes from dopamine and other brain chemicals that are absent in a lot of people.

But that definition erases the Hebrew God of the Bible that so many are stuck to because he didn't know what the two were up to in Eden. But we already know he wasn't all knowing in many other ways, like biology... we was wrong about that, and astronomy...I digress.

Since God is an illusion, or archetype,  they know everything YOU know because that's YOUR unconscious mind.

Anyone defining what a God should be is already infected by Biblical ideas that are wrong.

No one knows what a god would be like because no one has seen it and studied it long enough to understand it's nature.

Philosophy is best left to life rather than religion if it's going to talk about qualities of God because not even the best philosophers could ever prove there was one, or that they weren't just projecting their own ideals for it.

We value Plato but he took his ideas from Orpheus, who was highly mythologized. But Plato's ideas were nice because he described our minds, not the actual God in the Pleroma.

We choose our gods, and they can be anything we want. I chose the sexy one😂.  And he is amazing. But he's in my head primarily, then in the books.

I write fantasy. You'll be reading about my God soon. And it's his human qualities you will fall in love with first, not his omniscience, etc.

Peace❤