Oh Gods!!

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We need to take the new Christianity very seriously," Philip Jenkins told me. "It is not just Christianity plus drums. If we're not careful, fifty years from now we may find a largely secular North defining itself against a largely Christian South. This will have its implications."

Though the religion in question is actually a sect of Christianity, the Church of Humanity Unchained, from Honor Harrington's adopted planet Grayson, evolved a doctrine that was in many ways a reaction to their Death World. As a result, epithets for God on Grayson include the Tester, the Comforter, and the Intercessor. The phrase "Sweet Tester" is quite common. Specifically, it's a different way of envisioning the Holy Trinity - "Tester, Intercessor, and Comforter" = "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost/Spirit." In Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series novels, characters exclaim "Great space!", "Galaxy!", or "He went space knows where." "Oh my space" is sadly absent. In Oh God! Book II, God messes with the heads of several psychologists by toying with whether it was day or night. When He finally seems to have stopped and departed, one sighs, "Thank God!" and His voice responds, "You're welcome." Vesper is brilliant at football. She’s great at helping her dad run the farm. She’s not so good at being friends with her cousin, Aster. Oh, and she hears a voice coming from the stones of Stonehenge. Meanwhile, Aster is super-bright, and he’s travelled the world with his mum, but every time he worries or panics (which is pretty often), his hands start to dissolve into stars.In the Rankin and Bass film The Flight of Dragons, Carolinus, the green wizard, utters, "By the beards of antiquity!" Recognizing that the appeal of the series was George Burns himself, the third movie, Oh, God! You Devil (1984), has him play both God and Satan. In a straightforward Deal with the Devil plot, a struggling musician named Bobby Shelton (Ted Wass) sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for fame and fortune. Trapped by Satan, he seeks help from God (who has been watching over him), and the two nemeses face off for God's list of protected souls. By Io!" rather than "By Jove!" and in one book the exclamation "Oh my god!" prompts the reply "Which one?"

Wonder Woman (1987): Diana uses Oh, Morpheus help me as an expression after waking from a bad dream. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Disa occasionally shouts "Aulë's beard!!!" when she gets frustrated.In Bizarrogirl, a Kryptonian woman exclaims: "Cythonna's teeth!", invoking an ancient Kryptonian goddess. In an issue of Supergirl, one of Darkseid's minions got out "Darkseid's testi—" before being shushed. CAO DAI. A syncretistic religion based in Vietnam, with more than three million members in fifty countries, Cao Dai combines the teachings of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, and also builds on elements of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Geniism. The movement was formally established in 1926, six years after a government functionary named Ngo Ming Chieu received a revelation from Duc Cao Dai, the Supreme Being, during a table-moving séance. The movement's institutional structure is based on that of the Catholic Church: its headquarters are called the Holy See, and its members are led by a pope, six cardinals, thirty-six archbishops, seventy-two bishops, and 3,000 priests. Cao Dai is elaborately ritualized and symbolic—a blend of incense, candles, multi-tiered altars, yin and yang, karmic cycles, séances for communication with the spirit world, and prayers to a pantheon of divine beings, including the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Quan Am, Ly Thai Bach, Quan Thanh De Quan, and Jesus Christ. Its "Three Saints" are Sun Yat-sen; a sixteenth-century Vietnamese poet named Trang Trinh; and Victor Hugo. The movement gained more adherents in its first year of existence than Catholic missionaries had attracted during the Church's previous 300 years in Vietnam. Ling uses " Tezuka" in place of "God." She also occasionally uses "velvet Hells," which is a shorter version of " by the velvet-draped halls of Shendilavri," which is a succubus curse. It's a sign she used to be a succubus herself.

I asked a lot of the scholars at the conference why they thought it was important to study new religious movements. Perhaps the most succinct answer came from Susan Palmer, a Canadian who in recent years has become an expert on the Raëlians (and whose ancestors were Mormon polygamists who fled U.S. persecution in the nineteenth century). "If you're interested in studying religion," she told me, "NRMs are a great place to start. Their history is really short, they don't have that many members, their leader is usually still alive, and you can see the evolution of their rituals and their doctrines. It's a bit like dissecting amoebas instead of zebras." In Pre-Crisis days, Krypton was monotheistic and Raoism was presented as very similar to Judaism or Christianity, though the original The Krypton Chronicles miniseries revealed that the name Rao had been used for their culture's sun god in their polytheistic past. The monotheistic prophet Jaf-Em preferred to give Rao the title "Rao, who kindled the sun" (to distinguish that Rao was not the sun, but rather its creator), a phrase which continued to appear in Kryptonian marriage ceremonies up to the present day. In The Wheel of Time series, the dominant religious belief is in the Creator and the Light, a never-seen force which is at war with the Dark One, leading to many familiar English idioms substituting "the Light" for God ("the Light bless you", "the Light preserve us", "thank the Light", "the Light willing", etc.). In the comic sci-fi novel Mallworld, people regularly swear by "the Pope's tits", evidently just so the author can toss the incongruity of a female Pope in on top of all the other weirdness.The Jamaillans, on the other hand, believe in Sa, a sort of all-encompassing, bi-gendered deity. This allows for fun expressions like "As sure as Sa's got tits and balls". The conventional wisdom is that religion is the realm of the irrational (in a good or a bad sense, depending on one's point of view), and as such, it can't be studied in the way that other aspects of human behavior are studied. But Stark argues that all of social science is based on the idea that human behavior is essentially explainable, and it therefore makes no sense to exclude a major and apparently constant behavior like religion-building from what should be studied scientifically. The sources of religious experience may well be mysterious, irrational, and highly personal, but religion itself is not. It is a social rather than a psychological phenomenon, and, absent conditions of active repression, it unfolds according to observable rules of group behavior. Fungus the Bogeyman has Fungus exclaim, "Why, for slime's sake?!" which is particularly strange because slime is what Bogeys drink. Thank the Maker!", often said by C-3PO. In his specific case, this was Darth Vader. Not that he remembers.