Zompist Bboard Again

Maybe ‘The sun is just a disk.’, if their cosmology hasn't stretched to heliocentrism¹ yet?

¹ Or today's, erm…, nullicentrism²?
² Or should that be omnicentrism? Cosmology is weird.

Interesting question. Someone once suggested that sun worship makes somewhat more sense than many other religions because the sun demonstrably exists and even plays a critical role in keeping us alive. You can point to crops growing in sunlight after all, whereas you cannot point to an otherworldly god sustaining us. Perhaps the debate would center on whether the sun is conscious and capable of volition or merely an inanimate object. Nobody would dispute that the sun exists or that it plays an important role in our survival but they could certainly dispute whether it cares about worship and sacrifices.

malloc wrote: ↑Thu Oct 22, 2026 6:32 pm Nobody would dispute that the sun exists

Except phlosophers ("does anything exist"), as well as trolls and conspiracy theorists ("it's a fake yellow disc and the warmth is coming from a giant invisible oven").

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Oct 22, 2026 4:44 pm Leilis' latest post reminded me of something I've been thinking about for a while. I might have posted it somewhere in Ephemera, but hey, why not see it as a conworlding exercise?

The idea is, suppose in a conworld, there's a movement of atheists, and it emerges in a culture, or a group of related cultures, where, for a very long time, the dominant religious belief has been a form of sun-worship. What would these atheists say?

"The Sun doesn't exist"? "The Sun is an illusion"? "The Sun has no power"? "The Sun is just a giant ball of plasma"?

That last one is, of course, what a modern Earth atheist would say in response to a sun-worshipper. But keep in mind that this response requires some fairly advanced astrophysics.

I think some form of 'the Sun is an inanimate object' or 'the Sun has no power'; it's more or less what Christians thought back when sun gods where in fashion

"The Sun doesn't exist/is an illusion" has potential as an heresy or a rival religion though -- the equivalent of Gnostics maybe?

What I really want to know is what the Sun priests have to say when it's realized there are countless suns in the universe.

Thank you, everyone!

hwhatting wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2026 3:36 am

malloc wrote: ↑Thu Oct 22, 2026 6:32 pm Nobody would dispute that the sun exists

Except phlosophers ("does anything exist"), as well as trolls and conspiracy theorists ("it's a fake yellow disc and the warmth is coming from a giant invisible oven").

Well, I'm from Northern Germany, but even here, I guess most people would hesitate to deny that the sun exists.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2026 4:07 am I think some form of 'the Sun is an inanimate object' or 'the Sun has no power'; it's more or less what Christians thought back when sun gods where in fashion

I doubt it. Christians were in power when some combination of Platonism, Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism was the prevailing philosophy. The general attitude was that every created thing reflects lessons about the world above. The sun is a reflection of God's power in the material world.

Back then, they didn't even think the earth and the heavens follow the same natural laws. Aristotle thought earthly things follow rectilinear motion while heavenly things follow perfect circular motion. That was too materialistic for Platonists, who tried to conceive of lower things as emanations of higher things. Neoplatonism turned this into systematic philosophy, like in Proclus: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Six_ ... y_of_Plato

What monotheists would have said is that despite what lessons they reflect, created things shouldn't be worshipped anyway. The king was also a reflection of God's power. What was due to him was obedience, not worship per se. Worship is only due to the ultimate source of power, not its pale reflections.