Religion in your writings

The main culture in my current series features a dead creator entity — truly dead — survived by his twelve creations, demi-god-like beings, who are the major focus of worship. Well, eleven of them are. The twelfth was who killed him — or at least, the twelfth was a suitable scapegoat. That one is missing or uncommunicative; the others do communicate, it seems.

Temples and shrines to all of them exist — even the dark deicide. The Twelve do exist in some form, and do appear to have somewhat godly powers. However, it's very likely that originally they were not examples of Deity; the cataclysm that changed everything broke the laws of reality and they resettled and healed not quite the same as before, and it's likely that they became the beings they are now from that event.

Oh, and the deicide one ends up as a character, though she doesn't believe she is that entity and the abilities are permanently renounced and gone. Still, it's a good thing she's not the viewpoint character; even a once-deity-ish-thing could be a bit Suish as the MC.

I generally avoid fantasy religion, except for occasional mention that someone is or isn't the type of person to pray. In settings similar to our world, however, I find it fun to have different sects of Christianity conflict with each other or with atheists. (One character from an incomplete project, who I still intend to use for something, was a logical-minded nerd who was also a member of a cult. She strongly believed that she'd had direct contact with a higher power—because she had.)

edited 27th Sep '11 5:23:46 PM by feotakahari

There are a lot of religions of note in the world of my main work, but few of them really take centre-stage in any significant way. Most of them are either based upon or vaguely related to now-extinct religions that once held a great deal of sway (Mithraism, etc.) as they would possibly have developed were they to have survived into the 19th century.

Also, if some of what they were preaching was provably real, but not in the way they predicted. (Take your bows, Baraqiel!)

My Wordkeepers 'verse is a Fantasy Kitchen Sink, but it's based in the "real world," more or less, and it's explicitly stated that mages span the creeds of the world. But, in the company of other mages, they tend to go for an Oh, My Gods! approach and reference archaic deities. One of my major villains was originally motivated by Christian fanaticism, but, in the rewrite, I might tone that down a bit. He'll still believe witchcraft is an affront to God because that's his character, but he'll be less explicit. I'd rather not put off such a big chunk of prospective audience.

My Suenyaverse has a fictional religion, though. The worship of Lit, the sun-goddess, who is usually just referenced (again) in an Oh, My Gods! sense. But I've come up with a real mythology attached to her, and tied it into their culture. For example, their version of Christmas, the Twelve Nights, is a mid-winter festival celebrating Lit giving humans access to ice magic, which allowed them to preserve food into the winter months. She has a few dieties beneath her, so it's technically a polytheistic religion, but she's the "primary" diety, along with her brother, Rad (who in a Hijacked by Jesus fashion would probably be considered the devil, but this is also a Dark Is Not Evil setting).

I ought to point out that this is only really going to put off anyone if you have him as the only explicitly Christian character. If you've got plenty of others who are decent people, you don't really need to worry about offending anyone except the kind of people who you probably don't want as readers anyway.

I am determined to have the religions in my setting make some kind of sense and not be mere knock-offs of existing ones, but it's hard. Of the three I have most developed, one is a polytheistic religion assembled from the ashes of a secular world, one is a monotheistic religion centred around the sun god from the aforementioned religion, and the third is an unrelated religion which I based mainly on Plato and Nietzsche.

In addition, one of my main character's friends is an antitheist, and so she needs to be able to attack the religions and other characters need to be able to defend them.

The same setting contains a parallel Earth where I've deliberately taken a completely different approach to worldbuilding. There, religion is not nearly so significant, although some characters have personal beliefs, and they're mostly in-jokes rather than fully-fleshed out ideologies. For example, Friendship venerates Skies of Stars, in his own none-too-venerative fashion, who sounds ominous but is really just a parallel world version of Princess Celestia.

The faykind also hold the belief that when they die, their souls will be violently mauled by horrifying monsters. This is canonically true.

@ Atom James, why was it failed from the start?

@Doktorvon Eurotrash,

you said "It wasn't really an analogue to Real Life religions, though, since the mind-being could be objectively proven to exist. "

Just going to say that some do believe that their religion is somewhat objective in some areas, I'm not saying it's true or not, but some religions are adaptable when it comes to new data or scientific discovery.

@ no one in particular

sometimes i do feel weird about writing Jason's secret (my main character) religion as I keep noticing some distinct undertones from my real life religion. Certain elements about man's nature and instincts in paticular. To make it weirder my religion numbers around 8,500 out of a population of 2 million, and the main character's religion numbers 2,000. He fakes being part of another fictious religon because of a genocide that almost wiped out his people, and so has a facade religion that worships Lilith, numbering about 15,000.

Actually, it might help if I just show the Census records lol.

The other is mostly the fictional occult religions, though some of them are real world occult religions. In the Pavonian district most of them are real world religions as it is a very Westernized area. Arsia is heavily into the fictional culture of the planet in contrast. Olympia is somewhere in between.

edited 27th Sep '11 8:04:36 PM by jasonwill2

@NRJ: Easier said than done. There's not really a time or place to just put in some random Christian good-guy, and I'm not the sort to convert existing characters just for the sake of plot. Even if there are a lot of them. Even if I did so, even I know it would look very blatantly like I was "apologizing" for Radston (said bad guy) rather than an attempt at creating a compelling character on their own, and I would rather not be that transparent. It's far easier for me to tone down the bad guy's fanaticism (he has other flaws and motivations I can play up instead, like his estrangement from his parents and his enjoyment of manipulating and using women) than randomly create him a foil, especially considering how densely-plotted this universe is.

I didn't necessarily mean that to be what you should do now, but more advice for the future - if you're ever worried about the Unfortunate Implications of having your one representative of Group X be a bad guy, or otherwise a negative character, just have multiple characters from Group X. If you've already plotted out your work and characters, then you're right, adding another character to offset the bad guy isn't a good idea. I just think it's useful advice in general.

@Jason: The more I wrote the more I realised that it wasn't really being ambiguous enough. As much as I tried, the Theocracy was just too, well for lack of a better term, evil. I painted one side more favourably than the other and considering what I was hoping to do, I failed. I'll probably give it another go later on, but for now it can stay on the backburner.

You can still fix it up with a second draft though.

I love the CrystalDragonJesus trope for some really odd reason, maybe I see it as slightly parodying Christianity in general, but then maybe that I used to be a Christian has something to do with that too.

I actually like when despite someone presented as a religious person they are shown more screen time for their personality then spousing their beliefs. I actually though seem to be doing that with one of my main chartacters, who just comes off as some kind of Prodastant that is ignorant of other religions and non westernized cultures.

It's really frustrating because I didn't intend this and now I'm trying to give a healthy and much less critical dynamic between him and his surroundings. I wanted to portray him as ignorant of other beliefs but at the same time a good person with good motivations and a good heart, but alas I have only made him look like a dick. which is weird because his last name is DICKENS.

lol. ill just fix it with the next draft

@jasonwill 2:

I didn't mean that Real Life religions aren't true, only that the existence of God or gods cannot be proven or disproven. In my story, the mind-being speaks directly to its followers, so the question isn't whether it exists or not, but rather whether or not it should be worshipped.

onetime i tried to make a cargo cult based on cheeze itz. only got three other followers then gave up. but i was totally serious about it, about doing it for the lols though.

not that that has any relevance really, just wanted to share that.

Well then.

Hmm?

@nrj: Oh, I know, but it wouldn't work in this series, you know?

It's an intriguingly morbid conception of the afterlife. A bit hard to teach to the young'ns, though, assuming that your conception of the Fae have young'ns.

edited 28th Sep '11 6:31:03 PM by JHM

Humans came up with afterlives such as Heaven and reincarnation and Valhalla and stuff like that because they feared The Nothing After Death.

But then, how would the faykind even know that they're going to be torn to shreds after death?

I suppose someone could have come back from the dead and told them so. (Not that I'm speaking for Bobby, he can verify/joss if he wants)

I've been thinking: how should religion be handled in an All Myths Are True Alternate History? Obviously "All Myths Are True" is kinda a misnomer, as it'd be really hard to reconcile all of them. I really hate to come out and say "only Religion X and Y are true", but it would feel like a copout to say none of them are true.

The way I handle All Myths Are True is I do jurisdictions for every pantheon that depends on how many and how avid their followers are with their worship, like the concept that Gods Need Prayer Badly draws off of. Say if you're Shinto or Buddhist or something like that; praying to the Abrahamic God won't do anything. Conversely, the Shinto pantheon is at its strongest in Japan because that's where they've resided for hundreds of years; Amaterasu won't be as strong in, say, Europe because of how rare Shintoism is outside of Japan, etc. with all of the other pantheons and religions.

Hope that wasn't too confusing.

edited 28th Sep '11 7:59:14 PM by CrystalGlacia

Religious figures are involved in one of my novels. It has a Shin Megami Tensei -esque theme.

Oh. Yeah. I forgot. I have the greek, norse, egyptian and every other type of god under the sun in my world (granted, most of them died off from a big ass war that happened way before the story).

They aren't considered part of a religion though, because many of the civilizations that will adopt them as their deities don't exist yet.

Currently, they're just mythical nameless scary mother fuckers.

No, it wasn't confusing, Glacia. I dislike using Gods Need Prayer Badly in my own stuff for some reason, though. How would cross-cultural people be affected (like a Jewish person in Japan)? What happens to atheists?

That... that is appealing for some reason.

...however, the roman gods do not exist. >:[

My rule with atheists, agnostics, and others who don't observe a specific religion or worship a specific deity is that when they die, they go wherever they think they'll go after death.

edited 28th Sep '11 8:16:45 PM by CrystalGlacia