That bugs me too. There's an occasional explanation I've seen pop up now and again -- the wielder might not have faith in God, but if the monster believes in God then the symbols hurt them. The Night's Dawn trilogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night's_Dawn_Trilogy) did that at one point, where a far-future priest performs an exorcism on a child 'possessed' by the disembodied intelligence of a human who died millennia ago. As billions of people are being 'possessed' at that point, there's a lot of speculation in-story about if it could work on a mass scale, but it's finally determined that the disembodied intelligence only released the child because it had been an ardent Catholic when it had been alive.
Harry Turtledove had an interesting spin on the issue in "The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump (http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Toxic-Spell-Dump/dp/0671721968)." Briefly, it's set in a modern day (well, for 1993) analogue where magic takes the place of technology, and all religions are real. His protagonist, a Jewish police detective in LA, almost gets mugged by a starving vampire at one point. He talks about how a Christian would have been killed in his place, because the vampire had built up a resistance to Christian faith by living so long in a Christian-dominated area, and then manages to get the drop of the vamp mugger by pulling out... I forget what exactly, as it's been a decade or so since I read it... but it's some sort of Jewish icon. Unused to the potency of the Jewish faith, the vamp runs screaming.
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branchandroot
1/?
Date: 2012-09-08 05:13 pm (UTC)That bugs me too. There's an occasional explanation I've seen pop up now and again -- the wielder might not have faith in God, but if the monster believes in God then the symbols hurt them. The Night's Dawn trilogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night's_Dawn_Trilogy) did that at one point, where a far-future priest performs an exorcism on a child 'possessed' by the disembodied intelligence of a human who died millennia ago. As billions of people are being 'possessed' at that point, there's a lot of speculation in-story about if it could work on a mass scale, but it's finally determined that the disembodied intelligence only released the child because it had been an ardent Catholic when it had been alive.
Harry Turtledove had an interesting spin on the issue in "The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump (http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Toxic-Spell-Dump/dp/0671721968)." Briefly, it's set in a modern day (well, for 1993) analogue where magic takes the place of technology, and all religions are real. His protagonist, a Jewish police detective in LA, almost gets mugged by a starving vampire at one point. He talks about how a Christian would have been killed in his place, because the vampire had built up a resistance to Christian faith by living so long in a Christian-dominated area, and then manages to get the drop of the vamp mugger by pulling out... I forget what exactly, as it's been a decade or so since I read it... but it's some sort of Jewish icon. Unused to the potency of the Jewish faith, the vamp runs screaming.
This is getting long. New post...