Comments on: Godless Heroes

By: Poking God With A Stick « Looking Up at the Sky

Poking God With A Stick « Looking Up at the Sky — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 06:52:53 +0000

[...] Science in My Fiction linked to this piece in Science Daily. The headline is that more than 20% of atheist scientists describe themselves as ‘spiritual’, out of a survey of 275 natural and social scientists. [...]

By: Athena Andreadis

Athena Andreadis — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 15:17:18 +0000

For women fantasy authors, another incentive is to create religions that balance the overwhelming bias in favor of men (in both real-life and fictional contexts). However, magic is always a problem — it’s almost invariably a method of shoehorning arbitrary outcomes and very rarely well-conceived or organic.

By: Paul Schroeer-Hannemann

Paul Schroeer-Hannemann — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 01:58:52 +0000

The “Eberron” campaign setting for D&D suggests that their gods might not be real. They certainly don’t appear in person anywhere near as often as the gods of other settings, and clerics and paladins (implied to get their power from faith alone) don’t need to have similar alignments to their deities.

Still, given the standard pseudo-medieval setting for most fantasy I suppose it makes sense to feature considerable religious influence. Atheists weren’t exactly well-treated back then.

By: Peter Erwin

Peter Erwin — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 21:46:42 +0000

I wonder if one could consider some of the characters in “Lord of the Rings” to be “secular”. There’s certainly little or nothing in the way of any specific, organized religion or religious behavior among, say, Hobbits. (Of course, in Tolkien’s conception, there *is* a one true creator god behind Middle Earth, but he plays no direct role, and the only really organized religion that shows up is misguided worship of Sauron…)