This idea is based on TV shows that stage virtual fights between living or extinct animals. For example, the show "Jurassic Fight Club" has paleontologists expounding at length on the various combat characteristics of two different animals. Finally a lovely computer generated brawl will be shown, usually resulting in one dinosaur killing the other.
The new TV series "Virtual God Battle" will be similar. Each episode will start with theologists talking about the characteristics of a god or deity, their strengths and weaknesses, etc. Finally, a CG battle will be presented, and, based on a scientific appraisal of facts, one deity will be the winner.
This series could be organized like a sports season, so at the end, one diety will be shown to be superior to all the rest. You might start out with Jehovah vs Allah in episode 1, then Buddha vs Shiva in the next episode etc. Then in the final episode you'd have the battle between the two finalists, which would determine the most powerful deity of them all.
For the sake of inclusiveness, you'd need the "null deity," a.k.a. "science" in the mix too. Not sure what the symbolic representation of science would be... a black hole maybe.-- AntiQuark, Dec 21 2010 Deities etc. in Dungeons & Dragons http://en.wikipedia...%26_Dragons_deities [Jinbish, Dec 21 2010] Odds-on Favorite http://www.venganza...0/12/fsmcloseup.jpg [swimswim, Dec 22 2010] //Not sure what the symbolic representation of science would be...//
Caduceus vs. Quetzalcoatl?-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 21 2010 [AntiQuark] I think it's only a matter of time - I watched one of those Greatest Warriors programmes where they pitted a Ninja against a Pirate (I think the Pirate won, narrowly, by the usage of firearms) but could not believe what I was watching was a real serious programme.
Maybe they wont go immediately to the monolithic gods, but start with selected pantheonic deities and demigods - after-all that's been done since the beginning of time, e.g. when Zeus overthrew Chronos, and then later, in the film adaptation "Clash of The Titans" of the same thing. There's a lot of material out there providing god-on-god statistics, The Monkey God, Sun Wukon, Great Sage Equal to Heaven, fought and defeated all manner of minor deities before being promoted to heaven as a means of keeping the peace, wherin he ate all the Celestial Peaches of Immortality. In response, Heaven sent an army of 100,000 celestial warriors, each of whom Sun Wukon defeated, but was finally bested by betting agaisnt the Buddah himself in a competition of power, wherupon he submitted to his punishment of being buried under a mountain for 500 years.
Actually, there are a number of Gods where wits win the fight, despite having much reduced powers; Loki, Hermes, Odysseus (ok, not a god, but he got the better of many), Set, all manner of fox/rabbit spirits and quite possibly Man might all occupy some kind of "Trickster" position wherein the rules are subverted to some extent.-- zen_tom, Dec 21 2010 Religious Deity Top Trumps, anyone?-- lostdog, Dec 21 2010 Do it as more of an obstacle course/challenge type of thing with multiple tasks, so some of the more specialized deities (and science) have a chance to win in their specific fields.-- MechE, Dec 21 2010 Rather than a contest, you could run it as a Big Brother-style phone-in, where viewers are encouraged to vote for their least favourite deity, and the loser gets booted from the next week's show.-- Wrongfellow, Dec 21 2010 You could tap current religions for lesser entities. For example, what sort of whupass would a Seraph bring? Alternatively, just digitize the battle scene from Paradise Lost - people can't get too upset about that, can they? Plus there are all sorts of godmonster battles those Vedic heroes did which would be good cartoons.
In fact, I wonder if those exist. There are lots of Indians. I would think that epic battle anime based on Hindu stories would have a built in market of millions.-- bungston, Dec 21 2010 bung, Bollywood probably churns out Hindu epics by the bucketload. I've seen bits of a few films but never really got into them. Sadly, IMDB is fairly hopeless as a resource in this particular instance unless you happen to know the names of the films already! I can't imagine any TV studio wanting to make this program in the current political climate. There are just too many people who are happy to be offended at the moment.-- DrBob, Dec 22 2010 Great shout, [swimswim].-- Jinbish, Dec 22 2010 Sounds like a variant of Yu-Gi-Oh style card game.-- RayfordSteele, Dec 27 2010 random, halfbakery