Ancient pantheons of gods represented those forces that were important to the lives of their devotees but beyond their control: rain, fertility, health, love, death and so on.
Back when my better half and I lived in an apartment building, we would hope for an open washer and/or dryer when we would go down to the building laundry room to do our laundry. Eventually we would “pray to the almighty Laundra” that machines would be available and in-service. A similar dynamic happened when driving to different parts of the city — “praying” to the god Aspacia that we could find a parking spot. This got extended a bit by me cursing Dora the mischevious sprite (not a god per se), for everytime my car door would fail to stay open when I had just opened it when getting out of my car or other door locking, sticking, and closing phenomena.
It struck me that Dopers were a wonderful blend of nerdy, scholarly, humorous, and imaginative types that could really come up with a bunch of wonderful and amusing “gods.” And what is a religion anyway but the result of the contributions of people of a society adding to folk traditions.
So while the classic gods of sun, storm, war, love, harvest, etc. are reasonably relevant to todays society, what about specific uniquely modern myriad forces beyond our control? Are there a god of internet connectivity? A goddess of annoying cow-orkers?
Anybody want in on this?
Caveat: It should go without saying that I am not advocating actual devotion to yet another religion based on make-believe fantasies of people who don’t know any better.
I refer you to “Small Gods” – one of the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. In it, he alludes to the creation of gods … for example, the god ‘Bilious’ – the god of hangovers, called into being when someone suffering from an overserving of wine cried out to the gods to relieve him of his misery. The gods remain in existence so long as someone believes in them, and their power and influence is directly related to the number and faith of their believers.
Incidentally, on the Discworld demons are also gods, as a thousand believers cursing you as an evil djinn has the same effect as a thousand people singing psalms in your honor – and perhaps even more, as fear tends to be a more powerful motivator than love.
What about Elevetra? I’m really getting tired of living in a 5th floor walk-up. (Building in Beijing are not required to have elevators unless they have more than six floors.)
Goddess of all things technological, including televisions, phones, computers, info kiosks, websites, etc…
She’s who you pray to when you reboot it and hope everything’s right after the reboot. Or beforehand, if you’re powering down something with hard drives and you’re hoping you don’t lose a significant or painful number of drives.
Considering the wide variety and widespread use of technical things, I think we’ll need more than one goddess for them all. How about Laptopia for PCs and Palmtopia for smartphones as a starter set.