Unbeatable
Senior Member
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2005
- Messages
- 691
- Location
- PA
- Basic Beliefs
- moral and existential nihilism, igtheism, dysteleology, pragmatic methodological naturalism
What does the same one mean? If in one version of the story, Batman lives in Gotham city and drives a black bat mobile, but another version he lives in New York City, wears a business suit while fighting crime and drives a gold Porsche, are they both the same Batman? Or to put it another way, if you change your broom head several times and your broom handle a few times, is it the same broom?
Batman is still batman, even if you make big changes to him. Again; two different interpretations of batman (or god) may not be "identical", but they *are* the same character.
Interesting comparison. For a long time, I too have drawn an analogy between deities and the stars of long-running superhero franchises, but I've always had the opposite view to yours-- Christian Bale's Batman is not the same character as Adam West's Batman. For that matter, Grant Morrison's Batman is not the same character as Scott Snyder's Batman. There's no continuity between them. They exist in separate fictional universes. Mutually exclusive ones. They have similarities because they draw various elements from the same source material, but they are distinct from the source material and from one another. With gods, the fictional universe in question is inside of the mind of the believer, rather than in a book. The "god", i.e. the thing that a believer worships is a thing in that fictional universe, a thing whose attributes may render it mutually exclusive with a thing worshipped by a different believer. Granted, the believer confuses their fiction with reality whereas the fanboy knows that "canon" doesn't mean "literally true", but otherwise it's the same.