Quote Originally Posted by dalor
So you really don`t think that if the Pope could literally cause Angels to come to earth and invoke the will of an All-Mighty God...and not only the Pope but Cardinals, Arch-Bishops, Bishobs and even the lowly Friar...
If the Pope can summon angels, and he declares the Emperor Louis the Bavarian to be excommunicated, but the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, who can also summon angels, argue that the Emperor is unjustly excommunicated, and in the right, why should I believe the Pope over the Archbishops? What if the Pope has also fought with the Franciscan order, bans the Franciscans, and all of them, lowly friars, continue to benefit from the grace of God and cast spells and sumon angels, and the Franciscans support the Emperor. Further, the Pope seems to be taking directions on at least some matters from the King of France, and learned people, such as Petrarch decry the Papacy and speak of an Avignon Papacy?

There is nothing in the D&D rules for declaring that one orthodoxy is correct, and the other is false. There are rules that say that defying your god will cost you spells. But let's be eccumenical and assume that Protestants please god as much as Catholics, and in such case both have spells, both summon angels, both have all the powers one would expect of functioning clerics in good standing.

Priests of Haelyn can be LE or CG. Both get spells, not only do they have different alignments, they can be expected to differ on the authority of priests over the faithful, the hierarchy of the church, responce to orthodoxy, literal interpretations of texts. We know that Fitzalan produced a significant theologiocal break with the Orthodox Imperial Temple, and both of them can cast Haelyn's spells and win his favor.

I think ConjurerDragon did a great job describing why things we consider natural the medieval mind would consider miraculous and direct evidence of divine action manifest. So I'll just add that the medieval experience with religion was not about faith. Faith is a modern invention to answer people's need for a diety now that we can explain the natural world without recourse to divinities. The medieval world needed to explain storms and natural disasters, and the death of children, plagues, indeed anything out of the ordinary and many ordinary things, like death, that were important. These were explained by recourse to the divine.

One's crops grow because God wills the crops to grow and feed us (there are Biblical texts which make this argument). Moderns believe that crops grow because water activates seeds which absorb nutrients and water then use sunlight to convert these into food, and grow according to natural laws. Its science. To the medieval the harvest was a miracle, and more so, the success of the harvest was a description of God's favor. A poor harvest showed disfavor, a good harvest strong favor. Then recall we must work in natural disasters and disease.

As an aside, the landmark event that caused moderns to consider this issue in a serious way was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, on All Saints Day while everyone was in church. To see a country's capital slain in church no less, to see the earthquake tumble the city, fires consume the city, and then a tsunami overwhelm the city, is a grave crisis. The old world view attributed this to the wrath of God, but moderns argued other causes, from the congestion of cities (Rousseau) to the arbitrary fragility of life and death (Voltaire), to more naturalistic explanations that volcanos and earthquakes are controlled by as yet undiscovered natural processes (techtonics and vulcanology are still way off).

Using spells and class powers to heal people, summon angels (to keep with this example), and perform miracles is just a game mechanical way of recreating the ideas that the medieval era had of itself (directly, indirectly through its own fantastic literature, and more indirectly through our fantasy literature which is just an evolution of earlier fantasies). If people never thought that gods were real and made work in the affairs of men, we not play games that pretended that there were such gods.