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by VanL 5395 days ago
Do I understand you correctly that you cannot even stand the idea of someone talking positively about God?

I am trying to think of another context in which your sentence (In <genre>, the sole purpose of <noun> is to mocked, criticized, or denied.) would make any kind of sense whatsoever.

Is there a particular, articulable reason that this is anything more than running away from concepts that challenge your preexisting mindset?

For example, I disagree with slavery, but I also disagree that in modern art, the sole purpose of slavery is to be mocked, criticized, or denied.

I am a fan of Python and not so much of Java. Nevertheless, I would never agree that in web development, the sole purpose of Java is to be mocked, criticized, or denied.

I tend to disagree with the Republican party on a number of issues, but I would never say that in political discourse, the sole purpose of Republicans is to be mocked, criticized, or denied.

Finally, I spend all day, every day working against patent trolls. They make me frustrated and angry, and are, in my opinion, the symptoms of a broken system. Yet I seek out people who advocate for the current system so that I can understand it. I can't afford to have the patent literature I read circumscribed so that the sole purpose of patent trolls is to mocked, criticized, or denied.

Am I missing the point?

1 comments

Just try to imagine something so awful, so harmful to <X>, and your horrible generalisation would make sense :)

In particular, what happens when the genre is sci fi and the noun is god?

Clearly, that noun is not to be adored. Religion is for that.

Should sci fi say something nice about that noun? That He really exists, after all? Science is for that, and science until now...

I really think that sci fi should take a clear stance against god.

God has yet to be disproved by science; it's unlikely that will ever happen, actually, no matter the fact of God's existence.

There's also no general framework from science that makes God incompatible with known laws.

So God, in the context of a sci fi book, belongs to the class of things that have yet to be discovered but which are still consistent as possible discoveries.

Even aside from that, you can have concessions made to the willing suspension of disbelief. There are limited concessions made in all but the strictest of science fiction for the sake of making a compelling story.

I can understand if you have such a strong distaste for those kinds of ideas that it ruins a story for you, but that's a matter of taste, not any necessary quality of the genre at large.

"God" will never be disproved by science since there's no real definition of God. Between the thousands of conceptions of God and the eternally moving goalposts (under which god will eventually be (or already is) defined as 'something impossible to test by science'), it's completely meaningless in an empirical pov.