Friday, April 13, 2012

A Story Idea That Has Likely Already Been Done, and May Not be That Interesting

So there's this fellow named Jack. Young and curious, and the son of a very open-minded and permissive Christian/Jewish couple, Jack finds himself very interested in the nature of faith, of god(s) and of religion in general. He begins to study as many of them as he can, and each one he encounters lets him gaze upon whole vistas of truth and enlightenment that he never knew were there. He comes to a conclusion that few others do, that there is more than just a shred of truth to every faith, but that all of them are completely true. He throws himself into book after book, to learn as much as he can and be as faithful as possible.
But, as Jack does so, he begins to notice some things. The first is that he's not a genius with an eidetic memory, and he tends to forget much of what he learned as he moves on to new areas. The second is that many, many contradictions appear when trying to believe in everything. Contradictions both on the surface, and hidden deep within, but not just inter-faith contradictions, but intra-faith ones as well.
So, Jack disregarded all the contradictions, as pitfalls on the way to being truly enlightened, and that only through true study and understanding would those dark spots be properly illuminated to him. The "true study" was of course the bigger problem; Jack just couldn't keep all of it in one head. And so he had an idea. He typed up a table on his computer, listing every known god or other worshiped entity/concept, and assigned a number to each one. Some numbers had subcategories, denoting different sects. He then planned to take a random number generator, find a random god, serve it and study its teachings as best as he can, and do it all again the next day. Over and over again until he reached this "true enlightenment".
And so our tale begins. Fate was kind to Jack today, now not so young. He eased himself up off the floor, scattering empty bottles of wine to and fro. Jack had served Bacchus the day before, and was lucky to have the relatively vague faith of Technopaganism to serve today. He remembered, a few months back, trying to meditate and focus on the Tao the day after the worship of a particularly demanding Shinto goddess of mirth and revelry. It had not gone well.

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