Religions in your writing?

[Rosemary Tea]

I've kind of sort of loosely created a religion in my worldbuilding. It's not well thought out at all. I've just included a feature here and there when it's relevant to the story.

Features I've included so far:

- There are gods. How many, I'm not sure. There's at least one important male deity and at least one important female deity, and at least one that's kind of non-gendered/multi-gendered.

- People keep ancestor altars in their homes, with symbols and mementos of ancestors they wish to honor. That includes both biological ancestors and what you might call spiritual ancestors, people who've had an influence on your life.

- There is a concept of afterlife, but no "if you're good you go to heaven, if you're bad you go to hell" teaching. The spirits of the departed are said to walk the path of stars (the Milky Way) into the next world. What happens then, no one claims to know. But it is considered important to live your life so that you will be remembered well when you're gone.

- There's a holy book (or books... I haven't decided which), mostly concerned with prescribing how to live. How well and how much to the letter it's followed varies greatly. How literate the people are varies, too. The religious establishment (which is not separate from the state) has been promoting literacy and establishing schools, but their efforts have reached some places better than others. If you grew up in a city or town, it's pretty well guaranteed that you got an elementary school education, though how much of one and what quality varies a lot from place to place. If you're from the country, you may or may not have; it depends on how close you were to a school and whether your family made sending you a priority. So some of the population is quite literate and some of it not so much.

- There are rites of passage for many stages of life. Some of them are religiously mandated, meaning they're mentioned in the holy book. Others are unwritten but followed just as religiously, because it's the custom.

- The seasons are celebrated, with holidays loosely based on the Wheel of the Year. Certain religious rites are observed at certain times of year. There are also a few minor holidays that aren't connected with religious rites, just folk custom.

- There is a practice of confession and penance. Sin is understood to be, basically, doing harm, and the remedy for that is to confess and do a penance, which usually involves prayer, some effort to set things right, or both. There is one period in the year when everyone who's had their coming of age rite (takes place in the early teens) is required to make confession, as a religious duty. The rest of the year, priests are available to hear confessions as needed, but people aren't obligated to make confession unless something's happened to necessitate it. Confession is also available but not obligatory to children who've reached the age of seven but not yet come of age.

- The moral teachings in the religion have plenty to say about how people should treat each other, but compared with the Abrahamic faiths they're very light on sexual morality. For a sexual act to be considered sin, it has to involve the breaking of a vow or be done to someone who cannot or does not consent. The second is an especially serious sin. But consensual acts (that don't break vows) are not considered wrong at all. No matter what kind of act it is, what combination of genders are involved, etc.

- There is a practice of tithing, to support the religious establishment and the work it does. That work includes providing a social safety net: fallback for people who fall on hard times.

- Finally, the religion is much more concerned with people's behavior than their beliefs, and it has plenty of room for fluidity. People can modify their beliefs and practices as they see fit, and the religious establishment doesn't care, as long as the tithes are paid and trouble isn't being stirred up.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

Therefore medieval and ancient religious were orthopraxical rather than orthodoxic - the rituals, music, incense burning, and observance of religious festivals was far more important than a detailed knowledge of theology. Your faith was largely based on what you did rather than what you knew.

That's still true of most non-Christian religions. Few are based heavily on belief. If we placed all world religions on a scale from practice based to belief based, Christianity would be the farthest on the belief end of the spectrum (maybe with Islam moving in for a tie).

And the difference isn't due to literacy or lack thereof. Judaism is practice based rather than belief based. A practicing Jew can be an atheist without it being a contradiction, because it's the practice that matters rather than the belief. That's so even with Judaism being a religion that relies much on literacy and study of holy books (namely Torah) and has God. But identifying as both a Christian and an atheist just doesn't happen. If you're an atheist, you're not a Christian, and vice versa. If you were raised Christian and decided you don't believe in God, then you're not Christian anymore. If you were raised Jewish and decided you don't believe in God, you're still Jewish.

However, many atheists and other non-religious people who were raised Christian continue to celebrate Christmas and Easter. So here we have the observing festivals piece.

 

[pmmg]

I think Judaism has the benefit of being an ethic group, which means inclusion cannot be removed. So by that measure, you are kind of still on the team. Which is to say, if I was not of the Jewish ethnicity, but was a believing Jew, but then stopped believing, I think they would stop considering me a Jew.

I dont know that it all matters how it is all defined. People are diverse and things are all over the place. Maybe someday it will all be revealed to us and we can know, till then... I hope I picked the right team, and Ill pray for those not on it. If it turns out I did not....well, I did the best I could. What was the topic?

Oh... religion in my writing. Well, religion is still heavily in my writing. Many characters have some religious belief, or opinions on those that do. The religions themselves are scattered. It would be hard for any to say which is true, or has actual living God's behind it. Even the MC, would only be able to say they dont know, but some Gods seem real, and some seem to have greater roles than others. Course, they would never actually say that, they are not a great thinker. The few characters that actually are in a position to know more of what is true dont seem to agree and fight about it, and its not clear who is right, or who will prevail. But my story does not shy away from religion. It is not the world of Earth religions though. All of them are fictional, barring the more prominent ones dont encompass things that would not be true. No god, for example, is confused on whether the sun is a star or not. But the characters dont know. Its just a light in the sky to them.

A typical conversation might look like the one from Conan.

Conan: What gods do you pray to?

Subotai: I pray to the four winds... and you?

Conan: To Crom... but I seldom pray to him, he doesn't listen.

Subotai: What good is he then? Ah, it's just as I've always said.

Conan: He is strong! If I die, I have to go before him, and he will ask me, "What is the riddle of steel?" If I don't know it, he will cast me out of Valhalla and laugh at me. That's Crom, strong on his mountain!

Subotai: Ah, my god is greater.

Conan: Crom laughs at your four winds. He laughs from his mountain.

Subotai: My god is stronger. He is the everlasting sky! Your god lives underneath him.

Whos god is real? Who knows? Maybe one, maybe both, maybe none.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

I think Judaism has the benefit of being an ethic group, which means inclusion cannot be removed. So by that measure, you are kind of still on the team. Which is to say, if I was not of the Jewish ethnicity, but was a believing Jew, but then stopped believing, I think they would stop considering me a Jew.

If you're not of Jewish ethnicity, you're not counted as a Jew no matter what you believe, unless you convert to Judaism. If you convert, you're a naturalized citizen, as it were. From then on, you're Jewish no matter what you believe.

There are cases of people being raised Jewish but not counted as Jewish, because their father was Jewish but not their mother (to be Jewish by birth, your mother has to be Jewish). It can get very complicated if said person lives in Israel and wants to marry an Israeli Jew, because Israeli law doesn't allow Jews to marry outside the faith (though it does recognize marriages between Jews and non-Jews that were made elsewhere). Doesn't matter if they've always practiced Judaism, if they don't meet the birth requirement, they have to undergo a conversion to be counted as Jewish.

Not a concept I've chosen to include in any of my own writing, but something along those lines might make an interesting addition to a fantasy religion. "Doesn't matter if you pray to the god of dwarfs, if your mother wasn't a dwarf, you're not a dwarf!"

 

[pmmg]

Wait? Now I cant be a dwarf??? Well, that was a lot of wasted prayers.

 

[BearBear]

Wait? Now I cant be a dwarf??? Well, that was a lot of wasted prayers.

Not without paying royalties in perpetuity

 

[Gurkhal]

Do you have any relevant religious in your writings? Is the inclusion of religion in writing sort of outdated lately? Let me know what you think, or how has your religious beliefs shaped your writings (or biased them)?

I've got a story based on the legend of the Greek hero, and founder of the city of Thebes, Kadmos in which the "Thunderer" plays a role. Not as a character that acts and talks on the scene but as a unseen character with whom the MC interacts or thinks he interacts, its purposefully a bit vague as it should be in my opinion.

In particular I've got a scene I'm looking forward to write that involves the MC at an altar on a mountain/hill where he implores the "Thunderer" and in so kind declares his intentions for the future without making it into a, in my opinion, cringy drama queen momement.