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The Dresden Files => DF Spoilers => Topic started by: Con on February 15, 2021, 03:03:54 PM
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So beyond the usual reasons of Old Gods needing worship for power or longevity. WOJ is one Archangels across the Multiverse and one God with capitol G.
So The White God needs prayer for the same reason Mab needs deals to act and intervene. Mortals have to ask (pray) for the White God to interfere with Free Will.
According to Uriel Free Will is about choice, and he nudges things for more options and Free Will.
White God is bound by the rules he created. He can only intervene with Free Will if a person asks for it of their own volition. The same way a Denarian can only act through a mortals Free Will.
Even Agnostics like Sanya.
So that's the theory. God needs Worship to intervene in Free Will. "Ask and ye shall recieve."
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White God is bound by the rules he created. He can only intervene with Free Will if a person asks for it of their own volition. The same way a Denarian can only act through a mortals Free Will.
Or He can say, "no."
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just my opinion but I don't believe TWG is bound in any way. The rules of free will were put in place because TWG Believes in them. It's not a nilly willy belief but an absolute belief.
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just my opinion but I don't believe TWG is bound in any way. The rules of free will were put in place because TWG Believes in them. It's not a nilly willy belief but an absolute belief.
That just means he's bound by his morality and honour, which arguably would be stronger than any magical metaphysical binding.
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That just means he's bound by his morality and honour, which arguably would be stronger than any magical metaphysical binding.
Perhaps
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That just means he's bound by his morality and honour, which arguably would be stronger than any magical metaphysical binding.
The weight of responsibility can be more binding than chains. Wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't some great magical limit as much as a philosophical one...although at that kind of cosmic level I suspect the difference is purely academic.
So beyond the usual reasons of Old Gods needing worship for power or longevity. WOJ is one Archangels across the Multiverse and one God with capitol G.
So The White God needs prayer for the same reason Mab needs deals to act and intervene. Mortals have to ask (pray) for the White God to interfere with Free Will.
According to Uriel Free Will is about choice, and he nudges things for more options and Free Will.
White God is bound by the rules he created. He can only intervene with Free Will if a person asks for it of their own volition. The same way a Denarian can only act through a mortals Free Will.
Even Agnostics like Sanya.
So that's the theory. God needs Worship to intervene in Free Will. "Ask and ye shall recieve."
It's an interesting idea. But really, can TWG even act? And even if He could, would He?
I have always thought, at least in the Dresden Files, the reason that TWG is so strong is that He is literally everywhere. He has more than simple intellectus...he is it's source. Reality is constantly totally available. As we know in the series, the more knowledge the more power so the formula is as follows: By being everywhere, He knows everything, and therefore can do anything which allows him to be everywhere (amongst other things) - it's an infinite loop formula. However, contrary to this, we also know that the stronger a being is the less able it is to act.
It's the White God's house, his Creation, his multiverse, his rules. I suspect then (like all leaders) he has to lead by example and is as bound as anyone. If he broke his own rules logically that would make God fallible...and the universe might end. By definition he can't break his own rules. But he could change them.
We know reality can break. We know this doesn't actually take all that much. Ethniu throwing around a lot of magic started to do it, and all she was doing was blowing up buildings. Imagine if she was messing around with continents and oceans, much larger amounts of energy. We know that the truly big beings cannot show up in their "true" form otherwise reality will crack (Ferrovax for a start). The truly massive beings like Archangels and the Mothers don't even visit Earth much and only with the tinniest fraction of their being so as to not "mess up the sandbox" as Jim put it.
So if TWG is the ranking supreme being, I imagine that he is of a scale above even that. So he can't show up at all. Can only act in a very set number of ways. That's why he has Angels. They are his messengers, his voice, his hands. TWG isn't some magician going around waving his wand at problems. I can't say for sure what he would be doing in the Dresdenverse but I imagine he is busy just keeping Creation maintained or some other ineffable thing. Maybe he just watches, or experiences the whole opera of it all. I suspect it's beyond human understanding. The Angels are the ones going around fixing problems and delivering edicts. And then there is us, the humans. We know human Choice spins off branches of reality, creates parallel universes and is the whole point of everything. Perhaps it's humans doing the most important job: creating more reality. Growth, life. For whatever reason Lucifer and his team want to taint these realities, and the Outsiders want to shut the whole show down (according to Jim, it's too noisy and bright).
You discuss big questions man.
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I just keep laughing at this post. If in fact you're talking about God capital G.... you keep saying need or can't in correlation with what he can and can't do really... got nowhere else to go with this post except for LOL PS maybe you should say god with a little g
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I just keep laughing at this post. If in fact you're talking about God capital G.... you keep saying need or can't in correlation with what he can and can't do really... got nowhere else to go with this post except for LOL PS maybe you should say god with a little g
With respect to whatever beliefs you may have, I hope you understand that we are talking about a character in a book series and not something from the real world (i.e. not the god of the Abrahamic religions). Therefore it doesn't really matter how I or anyone else capitalise any letter in relation to the character...which is in a fictional book series. I don't confuse the two. Jim isn't writing historical accounts.
Also, as you are being more than a little antagonistic I think if you have nothing useful or constructive to contribute you should probably just keep it to yourself.
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You're missing the point when you say guy with a capital G you're talking about the one above all. The beginning and the end the Alpha and Omega no limitations. Fiction or nonfiction. Not being antagonistic. Stating the obvious
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You're missing the point when you say guy with a capital G you're talking about the one above all. The beginning and the end the Alpha and Omega no limitations. Fiction or nonfiction. Not being antagonistic. Stating the obvious
Not really different from all the other ones. He needs the stories to express himself here and he acts through less powerful beings because he would damage reality too much otherwise. Or he might express himself in totally other ways outside the Christian world, like how he expresses himself to butters. We see the dresdenfiles in the US through Harry’s eyes. The whole thing would look quite different in other parts of the world and they won’t be wrong.
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You're missing the point when you say guy with a capital G you're talking about the one above all. The beginning and the end the Alpha and Omega no limitations. Fiction or nonfiction. Not being antagonistic. Stating the obvious
For clarification, when we are referring to the being Harry calls the Almighty, Michael calls the Lord and Uriel might call the boss (tbh, we haven't heard what Uriel calls him) - on the forums we refer to that being as The White God (TWG as an abbreviation). This stems from beings like the Leansidhe calling that being The White God. We also do this because we don't want to confuse the other members of the forum with who we are talking about. TWG is the fictional being, calling him anything else (like capital G "God") could/would confuse this. It's just a formality but it helps keep the discussion on point. It also allows us to respect other members of the forum who do not believe in a god, God or have their own God like Allah or Yahweh that they worship. This forum is broad and has people from many backgrounds, cultures and faiths. Many also do not believe at all in the supernatural, and some I imagine are agnostic. If you read the section in the forum rules about Touchy Topics, this is skirting it. So if you want to refer to the character in the Dresden Files, please use TWG or The White God. When referring to the being that is the object of real world people's faith, by all means say God or Allah or whatever seems best.
Your point, as I understand it, is that because The White God has been inspired strongly by the Christian faith and the Christian literature they therefore must be the same. It's an easy and understandable mistake. Jim has clarified this as far as he is willing to. That is, TWG looks like what people in the Dresdenverse expect him to. To Muslim's he is Allah, to Jewish people he is Yahweh, and to Christians he is the Almighty. But he is far beyond this. Jim used the lesson about how three blind men find an elephant and one grabs the tail, one grabs the leg, and one grabs the trunk. To the first blind man the creature is thin and ropey like a tail, to the second the creature is thick and powerful like a leg, and to the third one he is sinewy and strong like a trunk. They are all right, yet all wrong. They have an incomplete picture of the creature. So using that metaphor we can understand that each faith in the Dresden Files gets only a partial amount right about the universe but gets other bits very wrong as they each don't have all the information.
How Jim refers to this being has no bearing on the real world, and nor does how I do. I'm not sure why you are so bothered about this but I hope you understand what I am saying here. Christians and other monotheistic religions believe that there is only one god, their god. They also then denounce any other being from another faith that is worshipped as a god as a false being or even a demon. However Christianity is far from the oldest religions, and polytheism is far older, and I doubt that people who for example worshipped the Egyptian pantheon of gods were less sure of their faith, and believed their gods to be just as powerful and unknowable as anyone else. So referring to those beings as Gods with a capital makes no difference at all, no matter how much any monotheist may wish it to be, especially as we are talking about the Dresdenverse and not our world. It might be appropriate when looking at it from Michael, Charity or Father Forthill's perspective. But not from Butters or Sanya (Butter's being Jewish and Sanya being agnostic). They serve the same being as Michael. There is no indication of which of the three is more right as it's very much about perspective.
Also, we actually don't yet know the hierarchy of the beings of the series, we have limited information from both the books and Jim's interviews. There could well be beings above TWG. TWG could be an Old One. We just don't have enough information. So just because Christians in the Dresden Files believe their god to be above all others, doesn't necessarily make it so. As for general usage, I think we're now in Touchy Topics area fully and I am going to leave it at that.
This whole section of the forum is dedicated to discussing the big reveals in the books, and inevitably involves a lot of discussion and theorizing around topics like this one - where there isn't enough information and we have to fill in the blanks. Sometimes it gets wild but its a place to have fun and people here by and large seem to. I invite you to try not and be so worried about this stuff - get in and enjoy it. If you disagree with someone try and lay out your argument as logically and fairly as you can.
You might not have felt you were being antagonistic, but saying you're laughing at someone else's post is baiting - especially if you're not laughing with them. As is being passive aggressive. I will say god, or God, as I see fit and seems appropriate to the context. I won't change it to appease someone who won't engage respectfully, or because you're merely upset. If you are genuinely offended by this, you are welcome to ignore my posts or you can ask politely for me or others to change something. But asking in such a hostile fashion will not get you what you want and will alienate most people.
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Not really different from all the other ones. He needs the stories to express himself here and he acts through less powerful beings because he would damage reality too much otherwise. Or he might express himself in totally other ways outside the Christian world, like how he expresses himself to butters. We see the dresdenfiles in the US through Harry’s eyes. The whole thing would look quite different in other parts of the world and they won’t be wrong.
Indeed, I quite agree.
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WoJ is that TWG put up the barrier to block out the Outsiders and only allowed mortals to summon them..
I think that Jim has been deliberately vague about TWG, and for good reason. Anyone who watched Supernatural should realize how introducing God creates a rabbit hole you don't want to go down. At most TWG should maybe have a single conversation with Harry. Other than that I hope TWG is left vague, and mysterious.
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WoJ is that TWG put up the barrier to block out the Outsiders and only allowed mortals to summon them..
I think that Jim has been deliberately vague about TWG, and for good reason. Anyone who watched Supernatural should realize how introducing God creates a rabbit hole you don't want to go down. At most TWG should maybe have a single conversation with Harry. Other than that I hope TWG is left vague, and mysterious.
Well, I think it was that he told the Outsiders to stay out and they did but allowed mortals the choice to invite them in...like vampires. Curiously, not sure he did create the Outer Gates and Walls. I mean it's certainly possible but that actually hasn't been expressed from what I know.
Yeah I agree. There can be too much explaining. Some things are better left unknowable - for story purposes. No one cares about the trick a magician performs once they know the secret.
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I can't say for sure what he would be doing in the Dresdenverse but I imagine he is busy just keeping Creation maintained or some other ineffable thing.
FYI, that's what some theologians interpret the "and on the seventh day He rested" thing as. An explanation that God is constantly "holding" creation in existence.
Therefore it doesn't really matter how I or anyone else capitalise any letter in relation to the character...which is in a fictional book series.
The grammar nazi in me begs to disagree.
You're missing the point when you say guy with a capital G you're talking about the one above all. The beginning and the end the Alpha and Omega no limitations. Fiction or nonfiction. Not being antagonistic. Stating the obvious
I think it's only obvious that a fictional god or top god would be, literally, almighty if you're coming from a Christian point of view. This view always annoys me in fiction when dealing with a god or gods that are clearly not Christian.
The gods, top or otherwise, of most mythologies aren't almighty. The answer to "what kind of god would allow this" in that sort of system is very easily answered. The kind that doesn't have to power to stop it.
I think that Jim has been deliberately vague about TWG, and for good reason. Anyone who watched Supernatural should realize how introducing God creates a rabbit hole you don't want to go down. At most TWG should maybe have a single conversation with Harry. Other than that I hope TWG is left vague, and mysterious.
I agree. The more definitive an author gets about this sort of thing, the more turned off most of the audience gets. It ends up being offensive or disagreeable to a large part of the audience or it's just done poorly. (Like when writers have characters that are "smarter" than the reader, but the reader is always a few steps ahead of the character). The only thing worse than a preachy author is one who's preaching the "wrong" message.
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FYI, that's what some theologians interpret the "and on the seventh day He rested" thing as. An explanation that God is constantly "holding" creation in existence.
It's as good an answer as anything else. It all depends on how powerful you rate the Almighty. I was watching some Supernatural clips (as you inspired me to) and I came across something about how God (Chuck) going off and creating more universes like an author with multiple novels, and just moving on once he has done enough in one. Obviously an analogy, but it makes about as much sense to me as anything else. Personally, the less human or personal God is to me the more it makes sense to me. It's just my perspective but I feel human conversation is incredibly inefficient and primitive in terms of an exchange of information, so I feel I could no more have a human-like conversation with anything that could create a universe than I could converse with gravity or electromagnetism. At least, not in any way that would be all that understandable on a conscious level. Now perhaps I might understand a "response" on a subconscious level but that's harder to work out. All this isn't to say I couldn't attempt to communicate using words, but it seems bizarre that the response would be on the same level. In saying that, that might just be how my brain works. It could be very different for others - I couldn't say for certain without being in their heads.
The grammar nazi in me begs to disagree.
Language is a strange thing. Constantly trying to be constrained yet never submitting. Language inevitably goes the way of the masses no matter how much it is attempted to be restrained. I mean, if the primary goal is communication then the majority will inevitably and naturally decide (without anything like a formal consensus) what works for them and what doesn't. Whatever becomes popular becomes the rule, as it has always been. When Christianity was a stronger force the capitalization of God when referring to the God of Abraham was not merely a rule, but sacred. The "gods" of other religions were deemed to be false, to be demons. This however created a language problem when actually discussing them for academic purposes, as those beings had previously filled the same position in society as the God of the Christians. The Christian monks and members of the church were generally the only ones apart from members of nobility who could read and write, and not only in whatever was the main language of their country but often older languages and languages of other important places (and probably some of the less important places too). These members of the Church often recorded history and translated old texts, and simply always referring to a being as a demon was not always practical. So the distinction was that their God was to be signified as the only God via capitalization (this ensured that it was both clear and made the distinction) and that other beings were false idols, and the lower case denoted that status as pretenders. The Almighty was named God as he was the only God there could be, and all others that claimed that title were false. The Christians were also not the first or the only religion to do it. In fact, similar things happened both in other concurrent religions at the time but also well before the rise of Christendom.
A famous example was the Aten in Ancient Egypt. A Pharaoh in 1300BC called Amenhotep IV decided after a while to not worship the sun god Ra (or any of the other gods), but worship the actual sun itself. He called it Aten and eventually renamed himself Akenaten (Effective Spirit of the Aten) and said it was the only god, and he was of course the living embodiment. There were several reasons for this - not the least of which it depowered the powerful priests of Egypt. Part of his strategy was to attempt to remove the names and images of the previous gods (and he was hardly the only one - just about every story of younger gods overcoming older gods is a reflection of a stronger cult defeating a lesser one, and so the god of the cult that lost was demonised - the god Set is an example of this). After Akenaten's death the priests returned the worship back to the old gods and attempted to remove the images and incorporate the story of the Aten into their own stories.
But to your point - it is only necessary to capitalize when naming a being, and as I pointed out above, when discussing the character The White God (TWG) we don't call him God or god or anything else, in order to keep the distinction between a fantasy series character and the object of religions belief in Christianity (despite however close the similarities are). I believe the Almighty is acceptable terminology as well. As for whether other deities can be capitalized or not it's really a personal choice more than a rule here or otherwise. Not every variant of the English language requires it, not even most. As you pointed out so well, it's all about point of view.
I think it's only obvious that a fictional god or top god would be, literally, almighty if you're coming from a Christian point of view. This view always annoys me in fiction when dealing with a god or gods that are clearly not Christian.
Exactly, unless you bother to explain just why one god from one religion is stronger than another. And often that ends up insulting readers or not making much sense, especially if it's buried in thinly-veiled preachings. Most author's these days are not foolish enough to make much of a definitive statement, unless they are deliberately trying to get a particular message out there. Jim's done alright I think by and large. Some of it does seem a bit skewed, but it's the story he wants to tell. Beyond that, I think he's building an argument (and he has discussed this was his intention) that the beings themselves get interpreted differently depending on who is looking. It doesn't totally work right now as we have only seen Harry's perspective but it's possible by the end things will be much more open to interpretation.
The gods, top or otherwise, of most mythologies aren't almighty. The answer to "what kind of god would allow this" in that sort of system is very easily answered. The kind that doesn't have to power to stop it.
Indeed, even in early Abrahamic writings God wasn't always all-powerful. And if you go by the Problem of Evil argument, you could still make that case.
I agree. The more definitive an author gets about this sort of thing, the more turned off most of the audience gets. It ends up being offensive or disagreeable to a large part of the audience or it's just done poorly. (Like when writers have characters that are "smarter" than the reader, but the reader is always a few steps ahead of the character). The only thing worse than a preachy author is one who's preaching the "wrong" message.
Pretty much. Hopefully Jim will strike a good balance. He mostly does, at least for me. For it to be perfect I would probably have to write it - and that's kinda the point too. Not that I could write anything as good as the Dresden Files.
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As for whether other deities can be capitalized or not it's really a personal choice more than a rule here or otherwise.
If it's a proper noun, capitalize it. If not, don't. (Excepting rules about capitalizing other than proper nouns, or, as my brother calls them, improper nouns). So it has been written, so it shall be done.
Exactly, unless you bother to explain just why one god from one religion is stronger than another. And often that ends up insulting readers or not making much sense, especially if it's buried in thinly-veiled preachings. Most author's ...
I was mostly talking about stories like Stargate: SG-1 where, in universe, the characters have no reason for claiming to be all knowing and all powerful except for the writers coming from a Christian world view that they've never given any thought to. Why would the Goa'uld claim to be all knowing or all powerful when both claims are obviously and easily falsified?