History Main / ArtisticLicenseReligion

** The worst example was probably the laughably bad portrayal of Judaism in "Kaddish", but attempts to portray AgentScully's Catholicism or any other forms of Christianity tended to run headlong into the writers' total lack of research.

** The show presents Ammit as a goddess who judges people to be good or evil based on all of their actions, past, present, and [[PrecrimeArrest future.]] While Ammit was feared as a SoulEater in the Egyptian religion, she was never a judge of anyone. She was more like an executioner, punishing those who had been judged to be evil by Anubis. Granted, Harrow does claim that Ammit got tired of having to wait for Anubis's judgment and decided to become more proactive in punishing the wicked, so if [[UnreliableExpositor his word is worth anything]], it's possible that Ammit used to be more like the myths. Avid Egyptologist Steven also notes that [[LampshadeHanging this is the first time he's heard of that interpretation.]]

* ''Film/{{Help}}'' is sometimes erroneously taken to be an example of this trope, because it features the goddess Kaili which is "obviously" a misspelling of Kali. However, according to the DVD commentary, this was done deliberately to avoid UnfortunateImplications; they wanted a goddess who ''sounded like'' Kali without actually being her.

* ''VideoGame/PonyIsland'': Asmodeus is the demon king of lust, but he doesn't seem all that interested in love or sex over [[spoiler:testing your wits in the most horrendous way possible]]. Also, Beelzebub is another name for Satan, in this game they're different demons altogether.
** Makes a bit more sense if you connect Lucifer's statement immediately before the Beelzebub encounter. [[spoiler:You get to the mostly incomplete ending of Adventure Mode, and he says that HE is the last boss. This is just MetaphoricallyTrue.]]

--> '''Willow''': Talk, all talk! [[BlahBlahBlah Blah blah, Gaia, blah blah]], moon, [[BuffySpeak menstrual life-force power thingy]]. You know, after a couple of sessions I was hoping we would get into something real, but...\\

* Modern Wiccans (or those who claim to be) are skewered in [[http://somethingpositive.net/sp04242002.shtml this]] strip from ''Webcomic/SomethingPositive'', though Davan fails to point out that no one was burned at Salem. This is a fairly accurate (if slightly exaggerated) depiction of what some UsefulNotes/{{Wicca}}ns refer to as "fluffy bunnies" -- people (usually teens) who think that all they need to be a real Wiccan is to read a few books on it and buy a few supplies. Outrageously, patently false past lives are not unheard of among fluffies, either.

** When Homer and Bart convert to Catholicism in "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS16E21TheFatherTheSonAndTheHolyGuestStar The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star]]", Marge is given a glimpse of Catholic Heaven (with Mariachi, Pinatas, spaghetti dinners, Irish pubs, Riverdance, and drunken fist fighting) and Protestant Heaven (portrayed as a boring country club with badminton and croquet, and everyone talking in vaguely East Coast accents). At one point it's revealed that Jesus himself has been hanging out in Catholic Heaven a lot, leading one of the Protestants to cluck, "He's gone native" -- which would suggest that Jesus is a Protestant, despite living 1,500 years before Protestantism existed. [[RuleOfFunny Which is the joke.]]
** In the episode "Today I Am A Clown", Krusty is under the impression that not having had a Bar Mitzvah celebration means he is not Jewish. At the age of 13, a Jewish male is expected to have been educated enough to be personally responsible for following the commandments. Whether or not the coming of age is marked by a ceremony makes no difference to the status of being a boy or man, let alone being fully Jewish or not at all.
** In "Left Behind", Flanders brings up three Bible-related topics to discuss with Homer: Jesus, Ecclesiastes, and baby Jesus. The context and wording of "Wanna talk about Ecclesiastes?" make it sound as though the writers thought this was a name of a character.

* ''Film/LordOfWar'': Yuri states that his mother is Catholic. While not impossible, it is more likely that she would have been Orthodox, which was the majority faith of Christians in the Soviet Union and Ukraine in particular (Catholics make up a small minority).

* In the ninth ''Literature/ACertainMagicalIndex'' volume, Tsuchimikado says specifically that a group of peasants' conversion to Christianity "wiped out their history, traditions and mental culture". [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_syncretism This is not]] how religion works, for many reasons -- most prominently the fact that not all parts of any given culture are religious. It's about on par with saying a Japanese Christian cannot eat ramen anymore because they believe in Jesus. The connection is simply not there.

* The games in the ''Baker Street Kids'' series for UsefulNotes/AppleII and UsefulNotes/Commodore64 have a lot of changes that differ from Literature/TheBible, sometimes getting a lot of points and facts wrong in translation for the sake of story or due to PragmaticAdaptation. Examples include:

** In "Black Eyed, Please", Flanders, a Christian, looks in his Bible and finds multiple inappropriate phrases. The only readable one is Song of Solomon 8:10, which has a specific wording only found in the Complete ''Jewish'' Bible.

* In ''Film/ItsAWonderfulLife'' Clarence the angel was once human. Humans are not angels and do not turn into them. Humans turn into saints, who are apparently conflated with angels because they both have haloes in popular art. The Mormons and Swedenborgians do believe some humans become angels, though they are the exceptions.

** The villains in the story plan to get Nightcrawler, a devil-looking mutant, installed as the pope then at a crucial time have his image inducer fail revealing him to be TheAntichrist while distributing communion wafers that when activated will cause people to dissolve, simulating the Rapture, which will cause all the Catholic Church to declare war on all the mutants, wiping out the mutants, breaking the Catholic Church, destroying Western Civilization, and causing all the former Catholics to join their church. This plan is either insanely stupid or surprisingly brilliant. It's insanely stupid because the villains were a small, breakaway faction of Catholicism with likely very little [[note]]read: absolutely zero, as they would be officially a schismatic group not in communion with the Church due to a number of delicts -- heck, ''Oral Roberts'' would have more pull in the curia than these yahoos[[/note]] actual power in the papal elections and therefore could not get Nightcrawler [[note]] Who, as a layman, would have precisely zero chance of being elected pope [[/note]] elected as pope, would require everyone in the Church to assume he is the Antichrist, and not, say, someone who replaced the pope, have these communion hosts [[note]]which are actually produced in multiples of locations, not just in some central bakery in the Vatican, as the Church of Humanity's plan would depend on[[/note]] distributed far and wide and not have anyone discover them, have Catholics spontaneously adopt the Rapture (as this is not part of Catholic Dogma, but originated in Protestantism[[note]]and not even just Protestantism at large, but a very narrow subset that emerged around 1890 or so[[/note]]), and that this will cause the collapse of Western Civilization even though large swaths of Western Civilization don't practice Catholicism, that all the Catholics will spontaneously lose their faith including the more secular and non-practicing ones, and that all these ex-Catholics will join their church, rather than the hundreds of other faiths out there. The reason why it's potentially brilliant is that it reflects how [[CrapsackWorld cynically accurate]] the reactions of the Franchise/MarvelUniverse human population would be, and that having the Rapture really ''would'' cause problems because it would overturn a lot of previous dogma. If only they mentioned the latter bit.

** The villains in the story plan to get Nightcrawler, a devil-looking mutant, installed as the pope then at a crucial time have his image inducer fail revealing him to be TheAntichrist while distributing communion wafers that when activated will cause people to dissolve, simulating the Rapture, which will cause all the Catholic Church to declare war on all the mutants, wiping out the mutants, breaking the Catholic Church, destroying Western Civilization, and causing all the former Catholics to join their church. This plan is either insanely stupid or surprisingly brilliant. It's insanely stupid because the villains were a small, breakaway faction of Catholicism with likely very little [[note]]read: absolutely zero, as they would be officially a schismatic group not in communion with the Church due to a number of delicts -- heck, ''Oral Roberts'' would have more pull in the curia than these yahoos[[/note]] actual power in the papal elections and therefore could not get Nightcrawler elected as pope, would require everyone in the Church to assume he is the Antichrist, and not, say, someone who replaced the pope, have these communion hosts [[note]]which are actually produced in multiples of locations, not just in some central bakery in the Vatican, as the Church of Humanity's plan would depend on[[/note]] distributed far and wide and not have anyone discover them, have Catholics spontaneously adopt the Rapture (as this is not part of Catholic Dogma, but originated in Protestantism[[note]]and not even just Protestantism at large, but a very narrow subset that emerged around 1890 or so[[/note]]), and that this will cause the collapse of Western Civilization even though large swaths of Western Civilization don't practice Catholicism, that all the Catholics will spontaneously lose their faith including the more secular and non-practicing ones, and that all these ex-Catholics will join their church, rather than the hundreds of other faiths out there. The reason why it's potentially brilliant is that it reflects how [[CrapsackWorld cynically accurate]] the reactions of the Franchise/MarvelUniverse human population would be, and that having the Rapture really ''would'' cause problems because it would overturn a lot of previous dogma. If only they mentioned the latter bit.

It's worth noting that one person's artistic license is another person's dogma. Even people within the same faith tradition may interpret it differently; for example, pacifist Christians may feel that the original Crusaders were in opposition to what they consider the true Christian gospel of peace, or pacifist Muslims that ISIS violates various provisions of Islam through its activities. A group or individual's take on an established faith can be smothered as heresy... or it can found its own religion. As insane as some fictional interpretations of religion are, there has probably been an even more insane version [[RealityIsUnrealistic which actually happened.]]

* ''Literature/{{Carrie}}'': Margaret's "Bible Verses" about the "Raven Of Sin" and the Original Sin being sex are a bunch of made up nonsense that doesn't appear in any translation of the Bible (in the latter case, not only the Bible explicitly says the first sin was eating the Forbidden Fruit, Margaret's rants actually contradicts the whole "be fruitful and multiply" matter). [[JustifiedTrope Justified,]] as it's mainly meant to show Margaret's rampant insanity, and even Carrie calls her out for her made up nonsenses at some point.

* ''Literature/TheManWhoWasThursday'' by Creator/GKChesterton contains an in-universe example, where an anarchist relates that he tried disguising himself as a bishop, but when he entered the drawing-room shouting "Down! Down! Presumptuous human reason!" people somehow figured out that he was an impostor since it seems real bishops don't act like that.

* The novel ''Clouds Without Water'' by Garry Harper is set in the mid-19th century. A character uses the word "fundamentalist," which was coined in 1920.

* ''Film/SalvationBoulevard'': InUniverse, Jerry tries to justify his intended murder of Carl by citing the Bible where Abraham sacrifices Isaac. Carl incredulously points out that he totally missed the point-that Abraham ''didn't'' sacrifice Isaac, since the entire thing was just a test by God. Jerry doesn't listen, naturally.

* ''Film/PainAndGain'': When an observant Jew is asked if he's Jewish, he clarifies that he is "half Jewish." While nonobservant Jews with one Jewish parent often consider themselves "half Jewish" by descent, observant Jews always consider themselves simply to be Jewish.

* ''{{Series/Cursed}}'': While this is a parallel universe, the culture does also seem intended to be based on that of early medieval Europe. Thus, some departures from real-world medieval Catholicism are noteworthy:

* ''Film/{{Religulous}}'' espouses the "Christ myth theory", claiming that UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} was not a historical figure, but was actually based on the Egyptian god Horus. This is a fringe theory that is not taken very seriously in historical or religious studies.

* ''Webcomic/LittleNuns'' Has an example of this trope. In real life, a woman must be 18 or older before she can take the vows and become a nun. While young girls living with the church (perhaps as orphans) isn't unheard of, they wouldn't wear the habits until they take those vows. Also, nuns don't show hair under their habits, but this is likely [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality to help differentiate the characters]] (only two of the nuns, the Mother Superior and Star Nun, wear their habits correctly).

** A parody of the Chick Tracts has Jack Chick dying and going to Heaven where he meets God, who is not impressed with him.
--->'''Chick:''' But God...I've spent my whole life kissing Your ass!\\
'''God:''' If I had meant for you to kiss my ass, I'd have given you lips (''spreads hands apart'') this big!

** In another episode, "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS9E8LisaTheSkeptic Lisa the Skeptic]]", somebody digs up what appears to be the skeleton of a winged human. Immediately nearly everybody in town believes that the skeleton belongs to an angel. Lisa, as the title would suggest, is the only person to suspect it's fake. All of the other people in town, including Reverend Lovejoy, criticize her for lack of faith. Except that, according to Christian tradition, angels do not have physical bodies and cannot die. Plus, their depiction as {{Winged Humanoid}}s comes from artwork, whereas the Bible describes them as having [[OurAngelsAreDifferent utterly inhuman appearances]] when it describes them at all. Therefore even those who believe in angels, ''especially'' the minister and the deeply religious Mr. Flanders, should have called it out as a fake from the beginning.

* Quite similarly, ''Nurses'' (a Canadian medical drama) also had an episode where an Orthodox Jewish man rejected a transplant due to the fact it might come from a woman or Arab. While some rabbis do object to heart transplants, due to the claim that the donor is still alive when the heart is removed and as a result it's removal would be considered murder (one case which is not overrided by the need to save a life), this would not be any worse if the donor is a woman or a non-Jsw. It was widely criticized for the same reasons, with the episode later being [[BannedEpisode entirely removed]] from streaming and reruns.