Modern "re-imaginings" of myths and the like that your really dislike?

[Megaolix]

Can we stay away from the racism parts and stick to discussing mythology? Or will I need to hit more people and lock this thread?

 

[Konradleijon]

No. Thing so yeah
Legend of Korras take on Taoism,

from season 2 . Where the Yin demon must be defeated which is like the exact opposite of Taoism.

Good and Evil are not equal but opposite forces of the universe But Evil is good imbalanced

 

[Prince Charon]

EDIT: Saw the Mod post after I posted. I can delete this if you want?

Okay, but the Parthenon is even older, as are several other famous ancient buildings. I've never heard anyone suggest those were built by aliens. Now compare that to, say, Machu Picchu.

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The Parthenon isn't as big, and is mostly known as a ruin. There's also the Nazca Lines, which are often not said to have been built by aliens, but built by Native Americans to get the attention of aliens.

As for Stonehenge, it's a relic of Paleolithic peoples who were largely displaced by the Britons. It's the same mentality, the idea that people who aren't our ancestors can't build these kinds of architectural wonders.

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I'm not sure how many British people think of the largely Neolithic and later builders of Stonehenge as 'not British,' and I doubt that many of the people who think Stonehenge was built by aliens do. The idea of 'something beyond men built this' regarding Stonehenge dates from at least the medieval Welsh and Cornish (yes, I know Stonehenge isn't in either location, but there are similar monuments all across the British Isles), who certainly didn't think of the ancient peoples of Britain as 'not our ancestors.'

 

[magic9mushroom]

speaking of that I hate it when The forces of hell and Satan stand a chance against G-D. Satan is like a whiny teenager, bitching about not being G-Ds favorite, and thinks he has a chance against G-D, which is less likely then one guy with a shotgun taking out the entirety of the worlds military combined.

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And in how many of those stories does the devil (Satan isn't the devil) make any significant headway by the end of the story?

People thinking the devil has a chance has plenty of Biblical support.

I also hate whoever ancient legends get turned into aliens seemingly oyt of fucking nowhere, "Oh the gods were aliens, they were alien machines" fucking damn it, they were an entity of godlike power and were fucking Gods, not everything needs to be Clarkes law, you can have magic in your story.

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Gods and (realistic) aliens are just different ways of looking at the same thing. Revelations involves a city comparable to Coruscant being constructed in space. The construction of a Dyson Sphere is on par with the feats of most gods and is literally tearing the world down to make a new and better one; it also permits the wielder to wipe worlds clean in a literal day with the light of a billion suns. And with neural interfaces the distinction of "under own power" versus "with tools" becomes nearly meaningless.

There's also the whole simulation idea, which permits straight-up "physics is my bitch".

I feel DS9 really fucked up its look at the Prophets by presenting a dichotomy between the Prophets as Bajoran gods and the Prophets as wormhole aliens and people going "if you really are Prophets". There's no debate on the matter - they're aliens acting as gods to a civilisation, and doing it about as effectively as most IRL-myth polytheist pantheons. Saying they're "not really gods" is idiocy; anyone from the ancient world would consider that a perfectly legitimate pantheon (the whole idea of "deserving" power really wasn't as well developed back then).

 

[Lord Invictus]

The whole premise of the AA theory is really quite sensible in that it makes a point I have not seen refuted. Which is,

Ancient man would not be able to tell the difference between gods and aliens. At least the polytheistic variety. If aliens come down to Bronze Age earth-humans will see them as deities. Even if they are in fact flesh and blood(or their equivalents of) biological entities.

How do you define a god? How do you define an alien? Is a god supernatural and an alien natural? Okay, how do we define these terms? The Christian God is extra universal, as well as pan universal(omnipresent and pre existing). The gods of Sumer and Greece were not.

The whole premise of the AA theory is basically the second paragraph. While the merits of the evidence of the ancient astronaut theory in terms of evidence are a different matter-has anyone ever disproven this foundational assumption?

As for Satan having a chance, in the Bible he's powerful and wages war against God and his Church. He's the "god of this world" and is successful in some ways. At the same time-when he's unlocked from his thousand year jail sentence in Revelation 20 and leads one final attack against the saints, his armies are destroyed without a sweat and he is cast into Hell. Same happens before with Armageddon. The Beast and the False Prophet are captured with their armies destroyed in the blink of an eye.

So the conclusion is you don't fight Jesus and win. You lose and either become bird food and go to Hell, or your captured and go to Hell.

 

[Konradleijon]

Yeah, it sucks,

I dislike when faerie are pure evil murdrious balls of chaos. The real Fae weren't nice. Per say, but they where much more complix then just evil killers, certain Fae even helped with chores in the house.

like Jinn in Islam can actually go to heaven as they have free will, You don't want to mess with them, but theirs a different between them and demons.

 

[Lord Invictus]

Yeah, it sucks.

I'm not sure what your referring to.

I dislike when faerie are pure evil murdrious balls of chaos. The real Fae weren't nice. Per say, but they where much more complix then just evil killers, certain Fae even helped with chores in the house.

like Jinn in Islam can actually go to heaven as they have free will, You don't want to mess with them, but theirs a different between them and demons.

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Fa are capricious and untrustworthy. They aren't demons, but they definitely were to be avoided and not contacted. If you did contact them, you were supposed to be cautious and respectful.

CS Lewis called them Longaevi.

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[Konradleijon]

My point exactly , their not strictly good or bad.

 

[magic9mushroom]

The whole premise of the AA theory is really quite sensible in that it makes a point I have not seen refuted. Which is,

Ancient man would not be able to tell the difference between gods and aliens. At least the polytheistic variety. If aliens come down to Bronze Age earth-humans will see them as deities. Even if they are in fact flesh and blood(or their equivalents of) biological entities.

How do you define a god? How do you define an alien? Is a god supernatural and an alien natural? Okay, how do we define these terms? The Christian God is extra universal, as well as pan universal(omnipresent and pre existing). The gods of Sumer and Greece were not.

The whole premise of the AA theory is basically the second paragraph. While the merits of the evidence of the ancient astronaut theory in terms of evidence are a different matter-has anyone ever disproven this foundational assumption?

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The Jaynesian theory of the ancient pantheons is quite compelling IMO.

The problem with ancient-aliens theories in terms of RL is "okay, so where the hell did they go?". Historically, people don't generally just pack up and leave a place where they were living like gods - not all of them, at any rate - and life in general does tend to be expansionist (simple thought experiment: if 1% of a civilisation is expansionist and 99% is static in an environment that allows at least 10,000x expansion, soon 99% will be descended from the expansionist bit and 1% the static bit; natural selection is a harsh mistress). But we can't see Dyson Swarms everywhere. There's the "ascend to a higher plane of existence" idea, but even then you've got to assume not everyone would be interested and those that weren't would end up building Dyson Swarms just the same - not to mention that we've no obvious idea of what such a higher plane would even be.

 

[Lord Invictus]

The Jaynesian theory of the ancient pantheons is quite compelling IMO.

The problem with ancient-aliens theories in terms of RL is "okay, so where the hell did they go?". Historically, people don't generally just pack up and leave a place where they were living like gods - not all of them, at any rate - and life in general does tend to be expansionist (simple thought experiment: if 1% of a civilisation is expansionist and 99% is static in an environment that allows at least 10,000x expansion, soon 99% will be descended from the expansionist bit and 1% the static bit; natural selection is a harsh mistress). But we can't see Dyson Swarms everywhere. There's the "ascend to a higher plane of existence" idea, but even then you've got to assume not everyone would be interested and those that weren't would end up building Dyson Swarms just the same - not to mention that we've no obvious idea of what such a higher plane would even be.

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I'm familiar with Jaynes. It's an interesting idea.

Anyways, the point AA makes is ancient man couldn't tell the difference between the "natural" and "supernatural".

As for why the aliens left, that's the question AA never answers on the history channel despite building it up to it every episode.

 

[magic9mushroom]

Anyways, the point AA makes is ancient man couldn't tell the difference between the "natural" and "supernatural".

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Not a huge fan of that phrasing, because it implicitly assumes there's a non-delusional difference to tell and I don't think that's obvious.

 

[Lord Invictus]

Not a huge fan of that phrasing, because it implicitly assumes there's a non-delusional difference to tell and I don't think that's obvious.

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Supernatural would mean genuinely beyond or above nature. Able to perform miracles or break physical laws. Natural would be little green men.

Ancient man would in his limited frame of reference been unable to discern if the beings he saw descending from the sky were genuinely gods or merely more sophisticated creatures than himself.

 

[magic9mushroom]

Supernatural would mean genuinely beyond or above nature. Able to perform miracles or break physical laws. Natural would be little green men.

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What is a miracle?

And, well, any scientist will tell you that physical laws are descriptive, not prescriptive; if a law can be "broken", it actually had exceptions all along.

(Is the weak nuclear force a god? It breaks conservation of quark flavour and CP symmetry, which are otherwise apparently ironclad.)

 

[Lord Invictus]

What is a miracle?

And, well, any scientist will tell you that physical laws are descriptive, not prescriptive; if a law can be "broken", it actually had exceptions all along.

(Is the weak nuclear force a god? It breaks conservation of quark flavour and CP symmetry, which are otherwise apparently ironclad.)

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Creation ex nihilo. Walking on water. Turning water to wine. Raising the dead on command. Feeding five thousand people with 12 loaves of bread. Parting a sea to walk on land. Speaking in tongues without learning them. Healing a man who could not walk. Calming a storm on command. Surviving in a burning menace. Healing a child from a distance the moment the word was said. And many many more .

 

[magic9mushroom]

Creation ex nihilo. Walking on water. Turning water to wine. Raising the dead on command. Feeding five thousand people with 12 loaves of bread. Parting a sea to walk on land. Speaking in tongues without learning them. Healing a man who could not walk. Calming a storm on command. Surviving in a burning menace. Healing a child from a distance the moment the word was said. And many many more .

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Most of those are quite doable for an alien with nanotech, and some we can do today.

The only ones that actually sound impossible are "speaking in tongues without learning them" (logically forbidden) and "creation ex nihilo" (depends on your definition of "ex nihilo"; if pair production doesn't count then that would appear forbidden).

 

[daimahou]

The Jaynesian theory of the ancient pantheons is quite compelling IMO.

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Can I get a link to that theory?

 

[Konradleijon]

I'm familiar with Jaynes. It's an interesting idea.

Anyways, the point AA makes is ancient man couldn't tell the difference between the "natural" and "supernatural".

As for why the aliens left, that's the question AA never answers on the history channel despite building it up to it every episode.

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Actually in a lot of animist cultures their is no clear distinction between the nature and the so called supernatural.

 

[magic9mushroom]

Can I get a link to that theory?

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Basically, it boils down to: "up until the Late Bronze Age collapse (about 1100-800 BC), people (at least in the Ecumene) understood the higher mental functions not as internal processes of their minds but as gods literally telling them what to do".

It sounds crazy, of course, but psychologically all the nuts and bolts check out - theory of mind is learned, not innate, telling people that multiple personalities are a thing that is reasonable to have makes them more likely to develop, and as children we're quite capable of straight-up hallucinating stuff to fit our imaginations. And it makes a lot of sense of some of the strange shit in the Bronze Age, like all the idols everywhere (props for the hallucinations) and the literature treating talking to gods as an ordinary, everyday occurrence (because, says Jaynes, it was). It's also pretty noteworthy that basically every polytheistic religion predates that period.

If Jaynes is on the money, then those pantheons could be said to really exist, insofar as they were those cultures' conceptualisations of various perfectly-real parts of the human psyche.

 

[Amazon Climber]

The whole premise of the AA theory is really quite sensible in that it makes a point I have not seen refuted. Which is,

Ancient man would not be able to tell the difference between gods and aliens. At least the polytheistic variety. If aliens come down to Bronze Age earth-humans will see them as deities. Even if they are in fact flesh and blood(or their equivalents of) biological entities.

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I think it's possible that you and I have very different definitions of sensible. I mean yes, okay, if ancient aliens existed people probably couldn't tell they weren't Gods. Although they do seem to be able to conceptualize the difference between Gods, monsters, and other species of sapient. Regardless, I wouldn't really call that thought experiment the premise behind a theory, any more than I'd call the fact that none of us can prove we're not just the vivid imaginations of the person we're conversing with a premise.

Also, I don't think that's limited to ancient man either. If Q and God teamed up and asked us to play Divine or Alien, how many people would get it right without just guessing and getting lucky?

The only ones that actually sound impossible are "speaking in tongues without learning them" (logically forbidden) and "creation ex nihilo" (depends on your definition of "ex nihilo"; if pair production doesn't count then that would appear forbidden).

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Speaking in tongues without learning them is just a universal translator, and creation ex nihilo and teleportation of existing objects are functionally indistinguishable.

 

[Lord Invictus]

Most of those are quite doable for an alien with nanotech, and some we can do today.

The only ones that actually sound impossible are "speaking in tongues without learning them" (logically forbidden) and "creation ex nihilo" (depends on your definition of "ex nihilo"; if pair production doesn't count then that would appear forbidden).

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Eh some of them are? Nanotechnology requires the environment be influenced, most of the miracles I describe relate to merely a word spoken which had a demonstrable effect(even one time at considerable distance). Ex nihilo means from nothing.

My point is that a miracle is something which can not be achieved through natural means.

 

[magic9mushroom]

Speaking in tongues without learning them is just a universal translator, and creation ex nihilo and teleportation of existing objects are functionally indistinguishable.

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The former I'd go system-reply to the literal Chinese Room and say the system of the person with the translator has learned all tongues and the person without the translator isn't speaking them.

In the latter, we were discussing the difference between simulation and actuality (of being a god) so the difference between simulation and actuality (of a miracle) is relevant. Also, teleportation of matter is not known to be possible (quantum teleportation moves information about objects, not the objects themselves).

My point is that a miracle is something which can not be achieved through natural means.

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Supernatural would mean genuinely beyond or above nature. Able to perform miracles or break physical laws.

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If supernatural things are defined as those that can perform miracles and miracles are defined as those things that can only be performed by supernatural means, we have a circularity problem.

Assume I don't know what you mean by "miracle" or "supernatural", and have no concept of the difference between "natural" and "supernatural" (these are actually mostly true assumptions). Please explain these to me with definitions in terms of things whose meanings I know.

(Note that when I said the weak nuclear force is an example of something that breaks rules, I was legitimately not kidding; a view of miracles as being the stuff only the weak interaction can do and supernatural as being the weak interaction would be self-consistent and tethered to things I know about.)

 

[Ragnarok]

My point is that a miracle is something which can not be achieved through natural means.

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The very first episode of Star Trek Voyager had the titular ship magic up replicate a giant vat of water on the surface of a planet.

Fuck, most Star Trek tech is basically magic. Universal translators, replicators, teleporters, the holodeck...

 

[Tsee]

Assume I don't know what you mean by "miracle" or "supernatural", and have no concept of the difference between "natural" and "supernatural" (these are actually mostly true assumptions). Please explain these to me with definitions in terms of things whose meanings I know.

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Sure, in the "natural" world, physical forces happen. We observe them. And then we create mental categories and beliefs. The universe doesn't care about those beliefs, except where they change a person's actions.

With the "supernatural" world, human beliefs, thoughts, and mental taxonomies have direct consequences on the physical world, outside of stuff that's mediated by a person's actions.

(If that's hard-to-parse, "I was angry - so his nose broke" is magic, but stops being magic when you add a middle step of "I was angry - so I punched him - so his nose broke". That 'so I punched him' bit is what I mean by 'mediated by')

So, if Hermione Granger appeared in my bedroom, the second thing I'd like to do would be discussing magic. I'd think that magic could be studied by science. But I'd also call it "supernatural" because intention matters; a P-Zombie could copy Hermione's movements exactly, and be atom-for-atom identical to Hermione, but because the P-Zombie lacks inner experience, it wouldn't have the "determination" needed to cast Lumos.

Obviously, everyone's free to define words how they like. But this is how I think of magic, and it allows for a supernatural world.

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The other solution is to just do what the Randi Challenge folks said, and define "super-natural" with respect to our current understanding.

So, if you show them a perpetual motion machine, they don't care if it works on techno-babble or the light of someone's soul, it's so far outside of their conception off the "natural" that it's magic to them.

 

[Tsee]

Related to my definition of "supernatural," I really dislike the way D&D made people think of wizards as people who have a "spell book" with a bunch of discrete, purpose-designed spells.

If you go into the old stories, "Wizards" are wise ones, who understand reality and can basically trick it into doing things. But it's not prepared spells, it's just an innate consequence. I also dislike how "Wizards" made is so everyone else lost the ability to do "one weird trick" style magic. Like Sigurd got the ability to understand the language of birds by drinking dragon's blood. That's not a spell, that's just a thing that happens.

 

[Lord Invictus]

To give a bit of theology, I would say God, angels, Heaven, Hell, and so on are inherently supernatural. Or perhaps the better term would be extra natural or Supra natural.

Existing outside of and above nature.

If we assume nature is one-composed of matter, and two is (for the most part) a closed system.

Water, stars, quarks, and rocks are all "natural" in the sense they are composed of matter, and exist within the world of natural laws and processes.

God on the other hand existed before and outside of nature, that is the physical universe.

So my definition of "natural" is that which lies within and is bound to the physical universe. The supernatural is that which is outside of the physical universe and not composed by its parts.

 

[Konradleijon]

Related to my definition of "supernatural," I really dislike the way D&D made people think of wizards as people who have a "spell book" with a bunch of discrete, purpose-designed spells.

If you go into the old stories, "Wizards" are wise ones, who understand reality and can basically trick it into doing things. But it's not prepared spells, it's just an innate consequence. I also dislike how "Wizards" made is so everyone else lost the ability to do "one weird trick" style magic. Like Sigurd got the ability to understand the language of birds by drinking dragon's blood. That's not a spell, that's just a thing that happens.

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yeah, or the fairy tale where you help a snake and then they let you learn the Language of animals. And then you find out from your old and crippled dog, that your wives a traitor so you beat their. So you, know,

also their are like spell books from ancient Egypt

edit: a More Topical example is Mulan 2020. Where Mulan has to hide the fact she can use Chi/Ki in Chinese culture Chi is your life force. And everyone living thing has it. Not just men.

 

[Idkusername]

I really don't like how Tiamat was portrayed in FGO Babylonia. Her whole backstory is that she is ded after waging war on her children and the gods by birthing monsters, and getting killed in return. Somehow, this translates to being unkillable.

 

[Konradleijon]

I really don't like how Tiamat was portrayed in FGO Babylonia. Her whole backstory is that she is ded after waging war on her children and the gods by birthing monsters, and getting killed in return. Somehow, this translates to being unkillable.

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It's hardly the worse Fate "reinterpretation"

 

[S.I.N]

So while I'm thinking on It i want to say this because it gets on my nerves Vlad tepes is incorrect, tepes is not his last name. Tepes is basically a nickname which means impaler, his name is Vlad drakulya of house draculesta founded by his father a bastard Of the house of basarab,. Vlad the dragon/Dracul named after the organization the order of the dragon. So media please stop using tepes as his last name that is extremely incorrect.

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[me-meboi]

Sinnerlust Not sure if the actual Helsing manga/anime ever mentioend Alucard's full name but TeamFourStar wrote voicelines of God calling Alucard 'Vlad Dracul, son of the Dragon' in the Helsing abridged parody series.

They also mention about Alucard being in the care of ottomans/turks as 'the ten years of r*pe'. Not sure if what exactly happened to him in Ottoman care as a political hostage was accurate or not...

Edit: Not that this is supposed to help or hinder anything. Just an intersting piece of trivia

edit 2: nah, just checked. TFS also called him Tepes. But thwy did call him Son of the Dragon. So conscious decision on their parts!