Conversion Through Fiction

[Yfelsung]

So I've begun the initial stages of a story/book I plan to write with the following premise:

What if God is real?

What if Satan was his equal, not his creation?

What if God is the bad guy?

I plan on running a very hard theme of nihilism throughout the book and the idea of humanity banding together against the divine to say "Enough is enough, you do not have the right to lord over us."

A secondary purpose of the story would be to put ideas of doubt in God's truthfulness into the mind of a reader.

Do you think fiction can be used to convey ideas properly enough to hope for a change in thought in the reader?

 

[Anachronous Rex]

Well Paradise Lost covers most of that...

 

[Yfelsung]

I plan to do it with a more contemporary feel.

I plan to begin the book with us (humans) finding Lucifer's tomb and the slow discovery that all the different gods and mythologies of the earth are based on real beings who are not immortal but just different species with far better technology than we have.

Lucifer works with us to try and take out God, but we then learn he's just manipulating us for his own reasons as well and it kind of ends up with humans vs everything else.

 

[Prolescum]

Reminds me of some characters from a book I read many years ago.

 

[lrkun]

I plan to do it with a more contemporary feel.

I plan to begin the book with us (humans) finding Lucifer's tomb and the slow discovery that all the different gods and mythologies of the earth are based on real beings who are not immortal but just different species with far better technology than we have.

Lucifer works with us to try and take out God, but we then learn he's just manipulating us for his own reasons as well and it kind of ends up with humans vs everything else.

Just write. Ignore our comments, you can always change the storyline.

 

[Yfelsung]

Well, the purpose of the thread was more the discussion of if fiction can have an affect on a person's belief structure.

Could the seed of disbelief be sown with a story?

 

[lrkun]

Well, the purpose of the thread was more the discussion of if fiction can have an affect on a person's belief structure.

Could the seed of disbelief be sown with a story?

A story can always influence a person's way of life you know. The Bible, Koran, and other Holy Books are good examples of that.

You can likewise understand a small part of a person based on his or her books.

If you can make a good enough story, it can if properly written sow the seed of disbelief. However, I doubt that's a good thing, maybe it's better to sow the seeds of critical thinking. Disbelief usually follows if one is a critical thinker. It's the logical conclusion. Again, however, it does not necessarily reflects reality.

 

[Your Funny Uncle]

Reminds me of some characters from a book I read many years ago.

I was thinking more of Bablylon 5, myself...

Edit: Sorry. To answer the OP, although it's not a new idea as evidenced here (it's pretty much impossible to come up with anything truly original anyway) I think it might help to sow seeds of doubt in people's minds. Why not? If it's a well written and gripping story then the ideas might well sink in.

 

[TheFlyingBastard]

Well, the purpose of the thread was more the discussion of if fiction can have an affect on a person's belief structure.
Could the seed of disbelief be sown with a story?

Actually, the Dune series' handling of the prophet-messiah role made me first "kinda-think" about Jesus' roll as a messiah. It was very much suppressed because I was brainwashed to hell, but still, it appealed to that little bit of reason that was trying to claw its way out.

 

[lrkun]

It will be very difficult, if not impossible to actually make an original story. However, that's just the way it is. Nevertheless, just write it.

 

[Your Funny Uncle]

On a related note, I was never religious as a child due to growing up with atheist parents, but as a teenager reading Asimov's Foundation series opened my eyes to the way that religion can be used as a political tool to subjugate the ill-educated. He showed the Foundation cloaking its superior technology in religion to dominate neighbouring more militarily powerful star systems.

 

[DeathofSpeech]

Well, the purpose of the thread was more the discussion of if fiction can have an affect on a person's belief structure.

Could the seed of disbelief be sown with a story?

One word... "Meme"

Ironically, once you let it out of the box it could inspire a christian fundy cult that believes that the important parts in the bible are the bits with all the killing and gore;
Roaming the countryside nailing people to crosses with the Holy PowerNailer and singing the praises of god's evil plan over a snack of live kittens. :lol:

Go for it!

 

[Unwardil]

If the discussion is whether fiction can have an effect on people's belief structure, just look at the holy books of any given religion for confirmation. BAZING!

Seriously though, there's plenty of cults that spring up around purely fictional things. The difficulty might lie in trying to use fiction to make someone give up a pre existing belief.

 

[Andiferous]

Pullman's His Dark Materials series is probably one of the most pedantic Atheist works of fiction I've read... Pedantry always bothers me.

 

[Fictionarious]

My answer is absolutely. The book I'm reading right now, Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card (who oddly enough is a Mormon I believe, still) is a giving great narrative arguments against belief in God through the example of a planet full of OCD super-theists who are essentially unwitting slaves of a political body. It's philosophical as much as science fiction can be, and I highly recommend the whole octrilogy (series of eight) starting with Ender's Game.

 

[DepricatedZero]

OSC is one of my favorites, even if he is Mormon. The Tales of Alvin Maker are an interesting story, but it's a spin on Joseph Smith? Whoever the Mormon Jesus is.

I just finished reading the Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, and that was pretty interesting in regards to religion - also with the implications of what makes a god and what makes it good or evil. I don't want to get in to any spoilers, but the series starts with a spin on traditional fantasy. Before the story, the plucky hero and his band of misfit adventurers went to stop the ultimate evil, and lost. The ultimate evil took over, as the Lord Ruler, destroyed the world, a whole bunch of stuff. Very good series. There's one character trying to preserve 300 religions from the time before the Lord Ruler, and everyone else disregards religion because the Dark God is sitting right over there playing yahtzee. The question of religion doesn't even come up, because their god is known and present. It's very very interesting, and saying any more could have spoilers...

Though what actually affected my loss of religious thought, if anything, was somewhere between Anthem and Atlas Shrugged.

 

[Story]

As this topic seems to be mostly about me, I have to thank you all, but I'm not sure I'm capable of all these things you speak of. I'd also appreciate if you capitalised my name.

In all seriousness, though I think fiction can certainly be used to deconvert people, but in the method you're doing it, the person has to be open minded already, there is a more subtle method where you can use similar entities, but not referencing the entities themselves to let them question similar circumstances.

 

[Yfelsung]

So you're saying that portraying God as a megalomaniac alien species may not be the best approach?

Though you must admit, making Lucifer/Satan a heroic figure would be some epic trollage if the book got big.

 

[Story]

LOL!

Admitted! Seriously that would be an awesomely interesting book, which would appeal to a lot of people, both religious and non.

But if you had a robot city that was governed by humans who gave the robots all their needs. Then gave the robots radio stations where they would communicate with the humans and tell them what they needed etc and because the humans were so technologically advanced they could simply rain metals and super conductive substances from the sky for them and they could communicate with the robots via radiowaves at any time.

Then you show how advanced human technology has come as robots can self-replicate and heal themselves and you focus on the life of one Robot, let's call him Z8 (or Zate). Zate would be born, by some explained process that humans developed so the majority of the story would just be metaphor for life with Zate as the main character, you'll show love, hate, depression and explain why the humans made those functions. Then you touch on death and how the humans collect all the data from a robot and transfer it to a virtual system after their shells cease to function and in that virtual system exists all the collected memories of all the previous robots where their cognitive functions can bring about any possibilities because the world is virtual and the humans have Yottabytes of storage waiting for them, this happens unless the humans didn't like the robot wherein they send them to the stark quarter which the robot will be made to experience all the negative memories of the robots that had experienced endless pain.

Zate, develops knowing this. You'll have an explained process of infancy for the robots. Humans wanted to examine how memetics would traverse among an AI world and study if AI could develop complicated intelligence like humans had or if they were simply bound to continue practicing the same things that they had initially installed.

As Zate encounters problems in his life, he realises that when he goes to the radiowave transmission centres to ask the humans to inspire him to do the right things or to make something good happen. It doesn't always happen. As a matter of fact, he realises that sometimes when it's most important, the human beings simply ignore him. He becomes a little annoyed by this, but has no say... robots had been a part of this human experiment for 10,000 years.

Zate later learns about robots that explain how radio-waves simply don't exist. There is no such thing as radiowaves at all. This is bizarre information to Zate, as he doesn't understand how people would be communicating with humans if radiowaves didn't exist, but these robots called "Analyzers" construct a theory explaining how the theory of radiowaves simply does not make any sense because as far as they could tell; all matter was instantaneously connected, when something happened on one side of the world, it would be connected to the other side instantaneously. Zate laughs this information off as ridiculous and continues his life, but slowly these Analyzers gain following and they suggest an even more bizarre notion; that humans, probably, do not exist.

Zate is a little annoyed by these Analyzers and works up demonstrations explaining how complicated the human experiment is and how so many radio stations have been built in which robots communicate with humans, but the Analyzers respond to this saying "The human experiment is an assumption". This infuriates many robots and as Zate debates with them, he slowly begins to question his own assumptions and considers their argument. He and others search for the place in their world where humans are supposed to be, but they do not find them.

Zate slowly begins to conclude that there are no humans. He also realises that if there were humans, then they appeared to be completely apathetic. Eventually long after Z8 expires, robots enter into their own industrial age and slowly globalise, eventually they exact experiments which conclude that radiowaves do not exist, nor does radiation, nor does light propagate as particles, these were all the assumptions of robots long ago. Everything in their universe is connected instantaneously and only in the multiverse, disconnected from their reality, does there exist humans, light and radiowaves, but they are not in the fantastical form they fashioned them in. Nor are they connected to them in anyway.

 

[Giliell]

Pullman's His Dark Materials series is probably one of the most pedantic Atheist works of fiction I've read... Pedantry always bothers me.

I respectfully disagree, sir, I found it brilliant and entertaining.

I've long come to the conclusion that the best "religious" fiction is written by atheists.
It's hard for me to say what would make me think about the whole issue if I were a theist, I never was. To me, the gods and devils in good novels always are, in harsh contrast to this world, present, miracles happen, prayers are sometimes answered in miraculous ways, the demons are there to be fought. Makes you a pretty firm believer, doesn't it?

But your novel would be more high fantasy, wouldn't it? Maybe that would make it harder for people to make the connection to the real world.
Don't say it wouldn't make a good novel, though