The main character of any fiction you are writing now

My main character, Libby represents me spiritually five years ago. An Evangelical Christian who truly believes everything she has been taught by her parents, church and bible belt culture until she meets three characters that challenge her beliefs using history as evidence that the relgion was man made.

Buffy, inspired by a comment in a viral video titled "If atheists ruled the world," kills many, many times, all the victims coincidentally being characters in all the "Twilight" books and movies.

My WIP is mainly about religion and belief systems. I have many main characters, one of them being atheist and perhaps the mainest (is that a word?) character. Actually, it's told by several character in their viewpoints. I created new religions (and cults) since it's an alternate universe. My atheist character is mainly atheist because her mother is and she wants to stay as far away from any religion as possible. My other character is the complete opposite. Then there are three others: one created a cult, one isn't really religious, and the other (a child) doesn't know what religion is.

veinglory said:

I thought it might be interesting to discuss the beliefs or the protagonist of your current work in progress and see what range we have.

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My current project, Starbreaker, has an atheist as its protagonist. The supporting cast includes agnostics, a Discordian, and a deist.

My main character is an atheist and serial killer, and she's about to meet a god. The experience itself doesn't humble her -- in fact it barely even fazes her, but when her self-delusions come crashing down she eventually becomes a meek and submissive theist.

Is that a good thing? I dunno. It's a dark fantasy, and she doesn't give up her serial killing. Religion just makes her happier about it.

*cough* is this considered necromancy? Well, I'll jump on the bandwagon anyway.

I suppose my characters are the religion. In the world they live in they're considered gods of a sort. Kaleb, however, doesn't think he's a god... merely above humans in general. He's a sociopath and stays arrogant throughout his capture and torture whereupon he escapes and... suffers nothing psychologically. I don't think he believes in himself nor the other 'gods' (especially after eating one) so he's atheist?

Zik isn't much better, really. She lives in a hive-mind society so I suppose she used to believe in the Queen before becoming disillusioned. So maybe she's atheist too? Later on she is sort of 'martyred' but that's only because Tanak wants to use her memory for his own hive-mind society without the need of a Queen.

And Posco's society has no gods nor religion (or at least that he follows) so he doesn't count.

:\ my characters aren't the best religious examples apparently.

Ruv Draba said:

My main character is an atheist and serial killer, and she's about to meet a god. The experience itself doesn't humble her -- in fact it barely even fazes her, but when her self-delusions come crashing down she eventually becomes a meek and submissive theist.

Is that a good thing? I dunno. It's a dark fantasy, and she doesn't give up her serial killing. Religion just makes her happier about it.

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I'm thinking about writing a story about an idealistic young Shinto Agronomist who trains as a pilot and gets an Imperial Rescript from a Divine Emperor commanding him to get in a plane loaded with bombs and crash into a particular warship that the Emperor says needs to be blown up because it is carrying an atomic bomb that will be dropped on the Emperor. But the real meat of the story involves the spectacular flying Ace whose sight returns after a primitive silcon chip is embedded in his brain: can he fight his way through hundreds of radar-guided planes and antiaircraft guns to protect the young Shinto agronomist on his Divine Mission? Or will analog fire control prevail against the primordial digital man?

Higgins said:

...can he fight his way through hundreds of radar-guided planes and antiaircraft guns to protect the young Shinto agronomist on his Divine Mission? Or will analog fire control prevail against the primordial digital man?

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Will it come out on PC or just Xbox? And dammit when will there be a Nobel Prize for Literary Gaming? Or hell, Interstitial Air Combat at least.

Ruv Draba said:

Will it come out on PC or just Xbox? And dammit when will there be a Nobel Prize for Literary Gaming? Or hell, Interstitial Air Combat at least.

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Sounds like Pure Anime Xbox to me. Here's a "little diety" Shinto Anime plot summary (from http://www.anime.com/KamiChu/):

Yurie Hitotsubashi was just an average middle school student living in the city of Onomichi on Japan's inland sea. She spent her days worrying about exams and trying to get Kenji, the clueless boy she likes, to notice her. Then during lunch one day she suddenly announces to her friend Mitsue that the night before she had become a goddess.

Their classmate Matsuri quickly latches on to Yurie's newfound divinity as a way to promote her familyís bankrupt Shinto shrine. She hopes that replacing their hapless local god, Yashima-sama, with Yurie will make the shrine more popular (and profitable). Now, with Matsuri as her manager, Yurie has to grant wishes, cure curses, meet aliens, and attend god conventions (and even join the "Union"). All the while attending school and working-up the courage to confess her love to Kenji.


http://www.anime.com/KamiChu/

http://www.abcb.com/parents/index.htm

http://www.theofantastique.com/2007/06/07/shinto-and-liminality-in-anime/

http://school.phippy.com/shinto/world.html

GLAZE_by_KyrstinMc said:

My main character is an angel from Heaven, so I suppose she passes for Christianity.

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I think all angels are Jewish. They don't need to be justified by the blood of Christ and they do Jehovah's work directly and freely pass in and out of the Divine Presence.

Higgins said:

I think all angels are Jewish. They don't need to be justified by the blood of Christ and they do Jehovah's work directly and freely pass in and out of the Divine Presence.

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Don't they date back to the Mesopotamian Ur-Nammu? Or was that just Judaic-influenced archaeologists seeing things in mythopoeic representations of rain-clouds?

Ruv Draba said:

Don't they date back to the Mesopotamian Ur-Nammu? Or was that just Judaic-influenced archaeologists seeing things in mythopoeic representations of rain-clouds?

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I would assume angels have a relation via traditions about winged beings going about various kinds of cosmic business to all kinds of winged beings going about various kinds of cosmic business.

We can skip the 'Irad, the rather ambiguous "Watchers" of the Books of Enoch and go straight to:

http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/gods/explore/exp_set.html

under ApKullu Griffins and ApKullu People and Anzu and Gula and so on. No lack of winged beings going about various kinds of cosmic business over Mesopotamia and the Levant. Even the Greeks had plenty of winged beings such as Eros and Iris and some Victories (Nikes).

Somebody needs to write about an atheist god.

Dawnstorm said:

Somebody needs to write about an atheist god.

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I think somebody in Japan already did. Does the name "Haruhi Suzumiya" ring any bells?

MGraybosch said:

I think somebody in Japan already did. Does the name "Haruhi Suzumiya" ring any bells?

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Hehe. True, I forgot.

My main character is a strong believer in a monotheistic religion. I have two other P.O.V. characters who are non believers (one because she thinks the world is too cruel to have a compassionate god watching over it, and the other does not believe because he has uncovered information which contradicts the church teachings).

Most of the other characters in the plot believe in a pantheon of gods, and one atheist character is someone who could be percieved as a villain or hero depending on your point of view. She wants to overpower a church she sees as corrupt and dangerous, but she uses corrupt and dangerous methods in her attempt to discredit them.

Religion is important in my WiP.

There are three gods, called the Alfa. They came from space one thousand years ago, and brought magic. The Alfa mated with the humans of this planet, and their descendants carried the gift of magic, becoming the Divira race. The ones without magic are the Efira. The Alfa foresaw a terrible future, and went into sleep to wake up when they were needed.

The series revolves around preventing the extinction of magic, since no Divira have been born for twenty years. To do this, the last descendants of the Alfa seek to awaken the sleeping gods.

Near the end of the book, it's revealed that the Alfa strengthened their magic with time, with every generation giving power to them. This allows them to trascend physical death.

Recent main characters:

• A disgruntled social-worker who burns her case-load to death. She starts off non-theistic but ends up vaguely pagan.
• A British aristocrat who loses his reputation and his face in a battle. He's High Anglican and retains his faith throughout, but not his confidence in the aristocracy.
• An elven nature-worshipper whom I think becomes some sort of socialist. I wrote her as an exercise. Her story is outlined here.
• A sentient newt who's a member of an outcast tribe losing their traditional lands. He's an ancestor-worshipper.

I tend to write atheist MC's. My current project has an atheist MC with a questioning religious supporting character. Since zombies have overrun the world, there are some questions of where God is in all of it, how he could let this stuff happen, and if there is really an afterlife and souls. My MC is very atheist, especially after what has happened, and I am finding it very interesting to see the two conflicting differences between how the character's are handling the propective of life after zombies.

veinglory said:

I thought it might be interesting to discuss the beliefs or the protagonist of your current work in progress and see what range we have.

My current WIP is a fantasy with an elven protagonist. He uses magic as a spiritual force that is generated by the land. Thus he is a person that deals with magical energy and see people as having innate abilities to store and use this energy, which comes in two forms. However none of the characters in this book refer to God or Gods at any point. This is simply how it is designed and I dare say the average reader would not notice it. There are a number of powerful but non-god entities in the story including dragons and a kind of vampire.

The main thing I found interesting is that it took some effort to remove colloquial use of 'god', 'soul' and similar terms from the dialogue even thought they really don;t fit the cosmology at all.

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My experience was very like this, especially with how the elves view the energy that connects all things. The men, including all three main POV characters, have no inkling of what a religion is and thus no notion of 'gods'. Ironically, the only person in the story who has any religious belief is the scientist who arrived from earth. He was agnostic, until he found this planet with so much of the same flora and fauna as earth. Since evolution wouldn't work that way naturally, he had to come to grips with the idea that there is some sort of interconnection between everything in the universe.

knight_tour said:

My experience was very like this, especially with how the elves view the energy that connects all things. The men, including all three main POV characters, have no inkling of what a religion is and thus no notion of 'gods'. Ironically, the only person in the story who has any religious belief is the scientist who arrived from earth. He was agnostic, until he found this planet with so much of the same flora and fauna as earth. Since evolution wouldn't work that way naturally, he had to come to grips with the idea that there is some sort of interconnection between everything in the universe.

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Your basic premise is called "convergent evolution." That describes how organisms with very different lineages can develop similar characteristics. Mammals, for example, have developed wings just as birds have, although the evolutionary split occurred long before birds evolved from dinosaurs and mammals evolved from small reptiles and before either had wings. So theoretically your world could occur within the evolutionary process. If carbon-based life is the norm that would occur across the Cosmos, it's not unreasonable to think that forms like fish, mammals, reptiles, birds, cephalopods, etc. would evolve.

Anyway...there's at least one other possible explanation for your fictional world. Species from Earth could have been transported to another planet and left to evolve. Or maybe species from that world were transported to Earth in the distant past. On Earth, there was an explosion of new species in a very short (relatively speaking) period of about 10 million years in the Cambrian epoch.

fullbookjacket said:

Your basic premise is called "convergent evolution." That describes how organisms with very different lineages can develop similar characteristics. Mammals, for example, have developed wings just as birds have, although the evolutionary split occurred long before birds evolved from dinosaurs and mammals evolved from small reptiles and before either had wings. So theoretically your world could occur within the evolutionary process. If carbon-based life is the norm that would occur across the Cosmos, it's not unreasonable to think that forms like fish, mammals, reptiles, birds, cephalopods, etc. would evolve.

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I agree that evolution on other planets can of course produce similarities to things on earth, the issue here is that there are exact species, such as wolves, rabbits, oaks, etc. As the scientist from earth was on the very first ship developed to go to another galaxy, he doesn't see any means by which these species were transported from one to the other. And on this planet, advanced technologies don't work properly. Physics and time all are muddled in certain ways. When he tries to reproduce electricity or gunpowder, they work in only the weakest sense, i.e. the gunpowder just fizzles. He has spent over 6000 years living on this planet at the time of my story, while he has aged only about 25 years. He doesn't look on the coincidences as being 'god' in the sense that, say, Catholics mean, but he does view the energy that he can see flowing through all things as being in some way responsible.

Sounds like an interesting premise, Knight Tour. Is the quandary solved and the truth revealed in the novel?

fullbookjacket said:

Sounds like an interesting premise, Knight Tour. Is the quandary solved and the truth revealed in the novel?

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Not in this novel, because I couldn't do it the way I wanted. In order for a first time writer to get published, from everything I have read, I need to both keep the novel self-contained and within a rather small word-count. Even with cutting things way back I am at 130,000 words.