http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoSuchThingAsSpaceJesus

The Sun God, Futurama : The Game "You found me out... I'm not really a god... I'm *cough* *cough* just an ordinary...eternal, omniscient, superintelligent being."

Advertisement:

Sufficiently Advanced Aliens are very common in sci-fi, and they will often claim to be actual deities. In some cases, they'll be actual, historically worshipped deities like Apollo or Thor.

Unless under some sort of mind control or from a "primitive" culture, the heroes will never treat a Sufficiently Advanced Alien as a deity, or even consider the possibility that they might just be right. Some Earthlings might fall for the "alien", but they will be shown to be weak-minded to be taken in by these "gods".

For something like the Puppeteer Parasite whose "miracles" are born from technological prowess, this is reasonable enough, but for beings like the Q or the Ori or various Eldritch Abominations in fiction, who have immense, unexplainable powers that genuinely seem god-like in nature, it stretches (dis)belief. The only reason they should be considered "just" powerful aliens seems to be "they came from Outer Space", which doesn't really make all that much sense if you think about it - if there is a deity who created everything, and you could physically meet them, why should a divine encounter only happen on Earth? Other views on why such entities are considered aliens instead is also due to the prevalence of Clarke's Third Law and its corollaries in science fiction and real life science, and because the words "god" and "magic" brings up connotations of worship and superstition.

Advertisement:

An interesting irony in this is that Heaven is generally regarded as being in, or above, the sky, and that most cultures tend to look upward when thinking about their deity or deities.

There is a strong degree of Arbitrary Skepticism in many examples of the trope, particularly in cases where characters automatically disbelieve the self-proclaimed deity because it runs against their view of what God is or should be. Take, for example, Star Trek V, where "God" tells our protagonists that He "needs a ship," and is met with skepticism on the grounds that God wouldn't need a starship. Sure, the Judeo-Christian God would have no need for a starship, but Helios had a chariot and Ra had a barge (and The Bible does describe God as possessing a chariot made of angels)... In short, the entity is disbelieved because it pretends to be specifically the Judeo-Christian God. Had he instead claimed to be, say, Quetzalcoatl , one suspects our heroes' reaction would have been very different.

Advertisement:

See also Sufficiently Advanced Alien, Arbitrary Skepticism, and Ancient Astronauts. Not to be confused with If Jesus, Then Aliens which in some ways is almost the reverse. No Such Thing as Wizard Jesus is how Jesus will continue to be worshiped and not suspected of being anything other than the son of God even if an alien superhero named Josys from the planet Beaven is running around doing everything he can do and more.

Has nothing to do with Space Jews.

Ironically, there technically is a "Space Jesus ", however he is a musician and not exactly the Jesus you were probably thinking of.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Comic Books

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Myth & Religion

Christianity does this to all the small g-gods. 1 Corinthians 10:19-20 King James Version (KJV) What say I then? that the idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing? But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. How does this connect to space, you ask? Well, small g-gods and devils in the Bible are angels or sons of God. And angels are called stars in the Bible in many places like Revelation. Have you ever noticed planets and constellations are named after pagan deities? A literal interpretation of this is that the stars are the angels themselves or inhabited somehow by an angel. Literal star gods that are not gods like in fiction.



Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40K: The Tau have no Warp presence, and thus are nearly immune to the risk of insanity and daemonic possession that is endemic to humanity (even their space travel doesn't use the Warp, and thus is safer but much slower). Having no frame of reference for it, they therefore believe that the human reports of daemons are just madmen's tales (to be fair, Chaos forces are usually insane), and that the daemons they have encountered are a highly unpleasant species of alien with bizarre abilities. It's hinted that the Ethereals are aware of Chaos and the Warp and deliberately hide this information from the population.

Video Games

Averted in Space Station 13, where the default religious figure for a Chaplain is Space Jesus. The administrators of the server can portray themselves in-character as said deity when the Chaplain prays to them.

In StarCraft, the Xel'naga are an ancient alien race that created both the Protoss and the Zerg and they are shown to be very, very powerful, so much so that the Protoss worship them as gods. However, most gods aren't slaughtered by their creations, that's the Mad Scientist's job.

and they are shown to be very, very powerful, so much so that the Protoss worship them as gods. However, most gods aren't slaughtered by their creations, that's the Mad Scientist's job. There are several varied examples in World of Warcraft: The Titans are a pantheon of extremely powerful cosmic beings that were formed at the dawn of the universe. While they're not responsible for all life in the universe, they've created or guided their fair share, including ultimately being responsible for most of the playable races. However, they're generally depicted as metallic giants and they create mechanical servants and futuristic tech. They're referred to with god-like titles, such as creators or makers, on top of the term titan, but rarely the actual word god. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the Old Gods. Regularly referred to with the word god, they are Eldritch Abominations that are bound to a single planet. Eventually, it was revealed that they're essentially giant-sized parasites working for an even greater evil beyond the physical realm. While actual worship of them is generally consigned to the insane or extremely evil, they're one of the few beings to actually be referred to as gods. Elune, the moon goddess of the night elves, has been referred to as the only true goddess in the Warcraft universe. The tauren worship her as one of the eyes of their deity, the Earthmother, but don't consider Elune a distinct entity. However, despite elaborations on the cosmology of the Warcraft universe, Elune's true nature has not been revealed. She was responsible for creating the night elves from dark trolls, has performed the occasional miracle, and has an artifact related to the titans, but she has never been seen in person and her relation to the other cosmic beings is unknown. This is very awkwardly averted by the Naaru. They don't particularly say they are deities (or say anything since they speak through wind chimes in your brain), just extremely holy. There isn't a single NPC that speaks ill of them, even though part of their life cycle is a black hole that devours souls. Epileptic Trees surround them to the effect of this trope, but the issue is brushed under the rug as they were barely featured in the following expansion. One Naaru, however, did go mad and turn into a Raid Boss . If you know the way the Light works, however, this makes a bit more sense. The Light (that the Naaru serve and most of the Alliance worship) is not a deity, so much as the collective good will of the universe—karma that you can get divine spells from. The Naaru are the physical form of that; much closer to angels than gods.

Toyed with in Shadow Hearts where an Eldritch Abomination is shown to be designated the role of God. Roger Bacon states that God, is not God as we think of Him but a Sufficiently Advanced Alien yet Roger is still a pious monk; Either the real God is immaterial and thus Roger prays to the real thing and God was given credit for the alien's action creating the planet or Roger has knowingly been praying to the giant space monster, neither is too hard to believe considering who Roger is. The heroes on the other-hand don't seem to care and just aim to beat the snot out of the primordial space titan that has come down to bring about the Apocalypses.

Web Original

The Jenkinsverse plays with the idea that the intellectual underpinnings of religion - imagination, inventiveness, a tendency to see conscious agency behind apparently random events, a profound sense of spiritual connection to the universe and the desire to makes sense of it - have been essential to the survival and success of the human race, given that Earth is a Death World. Most aliens, hailing as they do from softer and easier planets, never needed nor invented religion. When the interstellar community is first introduced to the concept of theism via the unfiltered perspective of a depressed, misanthropic antitheist, they not unreasonably conclude that Humanity Is Insane.

Western Animation

Futurama: Bender almost at once calls the sentient nebula he encounters God. He comes close to this trope when he says that God wouldn't use binary code, but he realizes that a space probe which "collided with God" would. It is not exactly confirmed, but it is heavily implied that the nebula is indeed Him. This is probably a mixture of Star Trek V (as above) and The Changeling, an Original Series episode in which a robot probe collides with something and becomes sentient (although in The Changeling, the probe decides Kirk is God). And to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which an alien-altered probe becomes a god by the end of the film. And Kirk claims to be its "God". It should be said that while there is no mention of Space Jesus, there is a Space Pope. ◊ There is mention of robot Jesus though. The robot Jews believe that He was built, and that He was a well-programmed robot, but they don't believe He was the robot Messiah. And a zombie Jesus, possibly connected to His second coming "in 2148". It may or may not have erased most of the VHS tapes.

Star Trek: The Animated Series rehashes this trope in episode 22, "How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth", in which a winged alien, Kukulkan, which had served as a patron to humans millennia earlier (causing the Mayans to worship it), returns to trade anvilicious rhetoric with Kirk. At the episode's end, Spock mentions that the alien had visited Vulcan, too, and "left much wiser".

Averted in the Transformers franchise. Despite the technology, there's much of the divine and mystical in Cybertronian culture, and most of it proves to be genuine. Unicron is a good example, as he's rarely treated as anything other than an evil supernatural force, and is generally dealt with by use of a sacred relic (the Autobot Matrix of Leadership.) A good part of the second season of Transformers: Prime, in particular, revolves around several mystical artifacts, the most important being the Omega Keys (though the Forge of Solus Prime played a big part, too).



Real Life