Every once in a while, someone will write a story wherein faith in deities 
is justified. I like those stories. I've found very few. Most are like the 
commedians who make fun of atheists, most of whom seem to just state 
"They're atheists" in some way, then laugh, as in "can you believe he said 
he didn't believe in god? WTF?"

The stories I *dis*like are where the deity is just shown to be someone 
playing at being a deity, or

I've found a few novels where the handling of deities was well done.

"Calculating God" - Robert Sawyer. (My favorite such, and best written methinks)

"Wunderland Gambit" - Jack Chaucer. (Stupid, stupid series of novels about a 
group of people who get thrown into parallel or virtual universes, one of 
which contains an actual functioning deity. Each individual world was 
interesting, but the overall premise was stupid.)

"The Prophesy" - starring C. Walkens. Lots of fun.

Some book which is vaguely cyberpunk plus greek gods which was stupid for 
anyone who knew how computers work. (Demons in place of firewalls, logging 
into Olympusnet, dumb stuff like that, but actual deities.)

There were one or two others I'd thought of that kind of fit the mold, but 
apparently not well enough to remember exactly what they were.

Any others that people can suggest? That are good? That don't treat deities 
as "sufficiently advanced technology" or "aliens that appeared long ago"? 
That contain actual deities rather than just faith therein? (Actually, just 
faith therein where the faithful are ultimately justified would do. :-)

I bring this up, because I recently read a short story wherein someone on a 
SF world participated in a ritual that reinforced his faith in the local 
deity to the point of unshakableness. It was handled wonderfully, with the 
faith bringing the kind of inner peace one would expect even in the face of 
others doubting. But then the protagonist finds his faith not to be 
justified but rather a scientific result during his further studies in 
science, and he then goes to try to convince others that they're high rather 
than enlightened, which for me spoiled the story. A world where the 
appropriate ritual reveals the actual deity is much more interesting than 
one in which the appropriate ritual reveals a biochemical high that feels 
like faith, methinks.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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