Religious issues...

[Gman]

Some of the god's may very well get on but I'm pretty sure their worshipers will fail to.

Without worrying about alignment differences (and most gods have a variety of alignments as worshipers) - consider this.

Churches are full of people with many and varied agenda's and political aims.

These may or may not coincide with the aims of the State (Lords/rulers)

Even within the church of Haelyn many different "brand names" exist

Imperial Heart/ Orthodox/ Western Imperial - Forget altruism and happy co-existance -These churchs are often run by Politicians with the aim of personal power not pious well mannered faithful worshipers.

Do god's involve themselves in the every day politics of their church - NO.
Do people in those churches choose to interpret their holy writ in some way that advantages them the most. YES.

Does the Paladin get orders not to step in to a trial by combat (lets say Peasant vs lords champion ) from a High priest (who isn't Lawful good) and has an agenda - bound to happen!

CONFLICT SCISM CHAOS !!!
Worshipers of same god both believing they have the right of it going to war! Happen/happens all the time (read Reformation histories!)

Question - why doesn't god intervene - Why not stop giving clerical spells to one of the sides???

Answer - Mabey both sides have a differing perspective of the truth and no one side is any worse than the other.
- Maybey they should challenge the authority of the High priest who ordered the first attack and stop blindly following orders.

Mabey its all a test or just mabey the gods are really just sitting around in Valhalla Partying and don't give a toss - see Thor- OOTS (Order of the Stick)!!

But the thing is in all this that there are lots of Roleplaying and Political complexities to play with as a GM ! Does the Paladin follow his heart or the Rule of Law - can he go Rogue and still be Lawful or will he have to play the system against people that really may just blacked his name frame him - excomunicate him and send the assassins round (all for the good of the church of course)

Petty Petty mortals doing petty petty mortal things - not worth the time or bother to intervene! (Remember D&D gods are also not Omniscient!!)

[Gman]

The Elfies also had to recognise that Divine magic is why the humans kept obliterating them.

So me thinks that that would have to have a more sophsticated view of the universe - something like

Just because Powerful beings can grant others power doesn't make them divine but pretty royal pains in the butt who we hate. (Hey and why would you want to worship some human who got a bunch of power at Deismar)

Stupid humans call them gods but we intend to ignore them as much as is reasonably possible.

Being a pure athiest would require them to deny Divine magic and the existence of highly powerful beings that killed a good proportion of their population at Deismar in one way or another.

Not rational and elves ain't stupid. - but they have good reason not to follow gods!!

[irdeggman]

Remember its all politics.

Temples are not run by the deities they are run by the regents.

There are large scisms inside the worship of each deity themselves.

IHH and OIT, etc.

Would the OIT merely allow a regent of the IHH to attempt to start a new temple in Diemed? I don't think so.

"Crush" can mean a lot of different things. It doesn't necessarily mean to use "force" - most of the time it has to do with using "influence" and trying to sway public opinion.

Theocracies have an entirely different set of challenges and perspectives than do standard ruler based provinces.

[Thelandrin]

Being a pure athiest would require them to deny Divine magic and the existence of highly powerful beings that killed a good proportion of their population at Deismar in one way or another.

Well, that is applying our monotheistic meaning of atheism to it. In Cerilia, atheism might well be defined as denying the value of the New Gods or simple outright refusal to treat them with anything more than common courtesy. When something is real, such as divine magic, you can't deny that and, as has been pointed out, could even be rationalised away by Elves and mortals as not even connected with the Gods.

[kgauck]

In Anuirea, unlike the real world:
1) You can cast a spell to prove your God is real.

Ryan presented his excellent counter to this argument and I will now repeat my argument.
1) People hunted witches because the believed that whatever they were doing, it was malcious magic. Do you believe in witches?
2) People were punished as witches for stealing consecrated bread because it was belived to be magical. Find any criminal charges pressed for people stealing the communion host. You can't because no one believes its magical.
3) People disinherited their children to give wealth to priests to recieve absolution for various crimes. They did not seek absolution from God, they went to the priesthood, because they believed the priests wielded this kind of power. By the end of the middle ages, the Church owned about a third of the land in Europe.
4) People believed in spells and magic of whatever nature, that when authority figures proclaimed people anathema, they died. The didn't cast a 7th, 8th or 9th level spell causing death. The victim simply believed the authority figure and gave up hope. The actual cause of death in modern cases in primitive socities where this occurs is usually from dehydration. People stop eating food and drinking when they assume they are all but dead. And this kills them. Others, believed themselves in such jepoardy that they performed tremendous pennances (see disinheriting your childen above).
5) When English and French kings would go out among the people, the people wanted to touch their garments because it was belived that touching a divine figure like the king would cure certain diseases.

People believed in religion and magic as much in the middle ages as if someone had laid down emperical date from double blind studies using the best research techniques.

[Dcolby]

I find Birthright full of the touchy-feely, and I take a bat to it all over the place. Its full of egalirarianism and suspicion of nobility, in a game where you play nobles. Its enviromentalism is all over the place, Talinie especially. There are some traditional value systems that get at the same end but don't sound like political fasions of the 1990's.

LOL My players will drive the touchy feely out of a setting so quick your head spins..

[Jaleela]

I thought I should add that not all the gods in a pantheon, of the same alignment, will necessarily get along all the time. A great example of this is to look at ancient Greek mythology, and the Trojan war. Zeus and Hera were maried, but Greek mythology basically gives us this being a difficult marriage at best.

I also would third the point so ably put out of real world rivalries between people believing in the same diety, and also, the strong belief in both the miraculous, the power of relics, and 'natural magic', as well as forbidden magic in the Middle Ages - Richard Kieckhefer wrote two excellent scholarly books on the subject - "Magic in the MIddle Ages", and "Forbidden rites", the latter beibg a 15th century German work on Necromancy (not in the D&D sense, but summoning spirits, demons, and the like, and compelling them to do your will).

People used to look in the porch of a church to see an image of St. Christopher before setting out on any journey (interrupting the mass, and annoying the priest who then turned around and wrote sermons damning the practise, which is why we know about the practise), as they believed seeing an image of St. Christopher would infalibly protect them on their journey - as sympathetic magic, rather than as a proper part of Medieval Catholicisim.

Definitely, people believed as absolutely in these things as we believe the earth revolves around the sun, or in germs and micro-organisims. I think that the religions of game worlds should have the same sort of authority in the game, and the same sort of absorbtion for NPC's attention as they did in our history, so as to give the campaigns depth. Besides, it is one more realistic source of conflict.

[AndrewTall]

I see a lot of the confrontation being between rival sects of the same god - if you win you get direct converts, etc as opposed to some surly less than half convinced peasants cowed into following a god they believe false...

I removed sapient deities from my games to clear the issue but even without doing that don't see an issue with two churches - powerful political entities struggling to dominate morality and power in a community - from having very serious disagreements. They may attack each other with persuasive argument rather than military assault (mostly) but opposition is natural for them.

As a present day example just consider how the Irish catholics and protestants have got along for the last few centuries - and they worship the same god and read from the same bibles... as I think the jews, muslims and christians are all supposed too follow the same deity as well...

If you can have conflict within the same religion, you can certainly have it between 'different but allied' religions...

[ryancaveney]

Ryan presented his excellent counter to this argument and I will now repeat my argument.

To which I have no objection. =) I say, "you can't prove it," and you say "you don't need to prove it," and both are correct.

People believed in religion and magic as much in the middle ages as if someone had laid down emperical date from double blind studies using the best research techniques.

Which is why, even though in my own personal, idiosyncratic view of Cerilian cosmology, there really are no gods at all and furthermore there never were, I still have lots of people (more, surely, in Rjurik than Brechtur, but many even so in cosmopolitan Danigau) who believe that there are. Whether someone believes in a god and whether they are factually correct to do so are entirely separate things.


Ryan

[ConjurerDragon]

prince_dios schrieb:
> This post was generated by the Birthright.net message forum.
> You can view the entire thread at:
> http://www.birthright.net/forums/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=3850
> prince_dios wrote:
> ...
> I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. I`m well aware of the benighted state of the Middle East, et cetera, et cetera.
>
> In Anuirea, unlike the real world:
> 1) You can cast a spell to prove your God is real.
> 2) The Gods have mostly friendly relationships; some are even married. I don`t see how any, say, Cleric of Haelyn could justify cracking down on the follower`s of his deity`s wife or son for any reason.
>
Marriage is not always a guarantee of a friendly relationship. Turner
and Douglas in "Der Rosenkrieg" (rose wars?) would be a nice example ;-)
Clerics of Haelyn and Cuiraceen are fundamentally different in the Law
vs. Chaos axis. The traditional lawful ruler of heaven and his young,
impulsive herald can have similar differences as Haelyn and Belinik.
And when a Cleric of Nesierie requests that the dead be mourned and all
wear black Haelyn cleric might see no reason to mourn but instead may
order a banquet and festival in honour of the soldiers sacrifice doing
their duty to their liege lord.