Fair enough, I was trying to generalize to Christians in general (which is already a hugely divergent group), not just various evangelicals, because, IMHO (!) it’s hard to characterize what evangelicals will or will not do since it covers a crazy wide group from out and out cults to more-or-less confederations of loosely affiliated churches which later fracture into schisms again!
I still stand by the statement that for the more organized sects that they’d still be arguing 5 years later!
There’s no such thing as an absolute frame of reference; if people appeared in the same place as they disappeared (and if the earth had moved), this would establish one.
In this particular case I think it’s that the stones quite literally give you a moment of true omnipotence and omniscience. Nobody phases into walls or pops into outer space unless you want them to.
Well, that was Natasha, IIRC, but the scale is wildly different.
I think most people would accept aliens after Loki/NY, Thor/London and the Sokovia accords. Captain America, Iron Man and Hulk are human, but are still steps into a larger world. But those were relatively local events, only really sucks if you were under them. I’d imagine a minority of hardcore religious types pretzeling their way out of cognitive bias and being treated like we treat flat earthers.
But half the world’s population, evenly distributed and the societal collapse that would follow (and I predict would be much worse than in the movie)? People will grasp at anything to give it meaning.
Yeah, there’s no way that the Snap could have killed anything less than about 95% of humanity.
Hmm, I’m now imagining a dark television series where each episode covers a different religious extremist. A Thanos cargo cult, a suicide-to-join-your-loved-ones cult, a genocide against the enhanced.
One thing I feel like the MCU is missing is that, aside from the occasional metahuman fight in the middle of a major city, the world still looks and feels exactly like our own. You’d think a timeline where Hitler was overthrown in 1942 by a cabal of guys with laser guns working for an evil mutant with a skull for a face and WWII was won when a popular Hollywood actor turned elite commando who wore his movie character’s costume into battle stopped him from nuking NYC would have evolved a little differently than our own.
Oh my god, WHY did I never think of that?
The biggest comic book fan I know is our minister.
He would’ve bust a gut at a scene of some uptight Fundy CHurch Lady yelling “Hey, why is that asshole being raptured and I’m still here?”
Family Guy did it years ago.
One of the general conceits of Marvel (and DC) comic books is that, even with superpowered beings, aliens, intelligent robots, mutants, gods, etc., running around, their “Earth” and its history, aren’t radically different from ours. I suspect that’s intentional, both for ease of storytelling, as well as making the stories feel more relatable to the readers.
OTOH, I think it’s not uncommon for other superhero comics and related media to lean more heavily into the “alternative history” end of things. In the original Watchmen comic series, for example, the emergence of superheroes in 1938 definitely changed history from that point forward: the U.S. won the Vietnam War in their reality, and Richard Nixon was still president in 1985 (term limits for the presidency having been repealed, and the Watergate scandal never occurring.
Yeah, I suppose that’s a conceit of a lot of sci-fi set in the present day. I’ve lost track of how many times first contact has occurred in Doctor Who - it seems like every time an alien invasion happens everyone on Earth has forgotten that they’ve already fought off the Daleks like thirty times.
AFAICT, the one major deviation from our timeline in the MCU is that covid doesn’t seem to have happened, or if it did it was a much smaller issue than it became in real life.
Maybe half the viruses got snapped and the remaining weren’t enough to cause a pandemic.