Post #2382037

2026-05-10 12:52 UTC

@thatfrisiangirlish@blahaj.zone @Tattie@eldritch.cafe Terry Pratchett is my go-to on this. In a conversation about the equivalent of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, etc., the personification of Death says: As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies. The human (for these purposes) who he's talking to says: So we can believe the big ones? Death says: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.

Replies (1)

@thatfrisiangirlish@blahaj.zone 2026-05-10 13:03

@bright_helpings@mspsocial.net I was a huge Pratchett fan at the time already, but only got to Hogfather where Death has those lines to Susan (She is definitely my favourite character!) much later. What actually convinced me that I should actually find a spiritual framework for myself was my physics lecturer. During a long and grueling excercise (concerning nuclear fusion in the Sun, not that it matters), one fellow student groaned about one that just went on and with circumstances and given measurements, that this was complicated. That lecturer replied, in earnest, that no, the more we are given to work with, the easier it gets. The shorter the question in physics, the more difficult, and they only do ever 'how', not 'why', because the scientific method doesn't cover why well. I was delighted to find later that the views I developed seem to be somewhat convergent on Pratchett's point. @Tattie@eldritch.cafe

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