# Organised Religion?



## Gryphos (Apr 29, 2014)

So I'm developing a victorian steampunk/gaslamp-esque setting and I've been struggling with the idea of adding some kind of organised religion to the world.

For context, it's an age of post scientific revolution, advanced industry and enlightenment. The secrets of the world are being unlocked by intrepid scientists, discovering things such as evolution and advanced astronomy.

I do already have a kind of religion, a cult of people who worship the Occult and use it for their magics, which are real by all stretches and very powerful. People know about the Occult and hate it for its sinister nature. It's the constant threat that's always there but never makes itself clearly visible. However, the occultists' gods are real and so is their power.

If I was to add a mainstream organised religion it would be a false one, with made-up gods. So I'm torn on whether to add it. On one hand having it could be considered the more realistic option (there's a reason almost every culture throughout history has had religion) as well as that it might add some interesting lore to the world and all sorts of possible scenarios. But on the other hand I do kind of like the idea of religions having been abandoned upon the age of rapid enlightenment.

Any ideas?


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## Queshire (Apr 29, 2014)

You could not mention gods at all and instead have them worship extraordinary individuals such as Saints or something. Maybe portray it more as a philosophy aspect over a religion, to be a good worshiper you wouldn't have to do all the rituals or be able to quote all the verses, but apply the lessons of the religion to everyday life or something.

Since you specifically mention your setting as around the time of the scientific revolution and mention how the masses are opposed to the spooky mysteriousness of the Occult you could embody these ideas in an organized religion that focuses on SCIENCE!!! and discovery. Science and religion are often depicted as enemies, but the earliest pioneers of the scientific revolution saw their work in science as a way to glorify and further appreciate God's work.


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## skip.knox (Apr 29, 2014)

How about Deism?
History of Deism
Deism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and the bibliographies therein cited. Some free stuff can be found at Google Scholar and Google Books.


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## Snowpoint (Apr 29, 2014)

What if the organized religion covered all the same occult gods, by different names. The goal of their rituals is to avoid those creature's attention, creating a sort of blind-spot or "anti-magic".


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## Gryphos (Apr 29, 2014)

> What if the organized religion covered all the same occult gods, by different names. The goal of their rituals is to avoid those creature's attention, creating a sort of blind-spot or "anti-magic".



That is an interesting idea, but it would go against one thing I am certain of. No one knows anything about the Occult (except occultists). People literally have no idea what occultists believe in, so having an entire institution knowing about it kinda defeats that.

The more I think about it, the more I think it would be best to have it be an atheist society. There'll still be quaint folklore and stuff, but no Church or organised religion. Perhaps there'll be various forms of spiritual philosophy though.


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## stephenspower (Apr 29, 2014)

What purpose would the religion serve? Why do people believe? And why do they want to believe?


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## Scribble (Apr 30, 2014)

Some thoughts on the design of fictional religions:

*Social aspects:*

- An official religion would likely be part of the power structure - how does it interplay with politics?
- There would be signs, dress, ritual, habits to signify who is IN the religion and who is OUT
- Is there a hierarchy, or caste aspect of the religion? 
- How does the religion play into the cementing of social contracts: birth (declared membership), coming of age, marriage, etc...
- How does the religion play into defining the normative roles of men, women, and furry creatures? Who can/can't do what in the culture?
- Are there stigmas attached to people who do not practice? Does disbelief constitute heresy/anti-patriotism/anarchy?

*Cosmology:*

- Does the world end, is it eternal, or does it go in cycles?
- Are there souls? Is there an afterlife?
- Is it a god or gods making things go or is there some there other force or forces at work? - What about the sun(s), the stars, the planets, moon(s)? 
- What about the world itself? The ocean? Mountains? Volcanoes? The Wind? How did they come to be?

*Magic/Ritual:*

- Are there methods of employing metaphysical forces to affect the physical world: do they use prayers, jujus, fetishes, rituals, chants, amulets, star readings, etc... to try to wrestle control over the world/sickness/bad luck/victory/success/etc...?
- Purification is common to all popular modern religions in one form or another - what is the process of renewal, cleansing, or moral "reset"?
- How do highly rational people see these practices?

*Evolution of the religion:*

- Were there earlier practices that the religion grew out of that are no longer valid, but yet form a base of the religion, leaving residue - example: originally the religion was a fertility religion, but the region became industrialized, and has styled the old symbols as something very different.
- Were there two cultures blended in the area, resulting in a hybridization of belief systems that grew into one monolithic belief system? This can create some interesting contrasts and paradoxes, with gods and goddesses with multiple facets to them

*Writings:*

- Are there religious writings? 
- Who were they written by? 
- Are they held static by an authority, or do they grow with new writings?
- Do they maintain laws about society and individual comportment?
- Do they hold prophecies?
- Do they contain a set of phrases that people use commonly by people? Common quotes?
- Are there rituals for greeting?


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## Gryphos (Apr 30, 2014)

I'm not really asking for ideas for a religion, more asking whether I should have one in the first place. Once that's been decided I'll actually come up with the details.

My current idea is that there once was an organised religion, but it was abolished entirely during the Age of Minds (the general name given to the period of rapid scientific revolution), probably due to an extremely effective campaign.


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## ThinkerX (Apr 30, 2014)

Go ahead, include an official religion...with a deity as 'real' as those worshipped by the 'Occultists'.  In fact, have some of the entities worshipped by the occultists be classed as demons or angels by the official religion.  Don't forget to include schisms, splinter groups, and lost holy books.  Contradictions, major distortions, and critical omissions are the rule in real world religions, so why not follow suit?


But most of the more technically minded people of your world would tend towards atheism...until they start running into occultists, and noting similarities between the entities worshipped by them and the devils of the official faith.


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## Nagash (May 1, 2014)

Science revolution and religion don't seem incompatible... Granted, after "the Age of Minds", the very concept of religion would have been deeply thought over. I seem to recall Warhammer 40k highly advanced technology didn't get in the way of religious societies (beside the Emperor and everything), more specifically within humanity. I believe it was called Cult Mechanicus, where its adepts would worship the Machine Spirit. Seemed like a perfect combination of spiritism, metaphysical belief and surreal technological/scientific improvement.


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## WooHooMan (May 1, 2014)

The mythology I'm working on doesn't have gods.  Maybe you should try that.  Y'know, try something different.  If magic is a natural thing, maybe you can do some kind of animistic religion.  Like with totems and shamans and stuff.  You could give it an environmental twist that would cause it to come in conflict with the mainstream steampunk society.


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## Jabrosky (May 1, 2014)

Gryphos said:


> I'm not really asking for ideas for a religion, more asking whether I should have one in the first place. Once that's been decided I'll actually come up with the details.
> 
> My current idea is that there once was an organised religion, but it was abolished entirely during the Age of Minds (the general name given to the period of rapid scientific revolution), probably due to an extremely effective campaign.


As long as there are gaps in our scientific knowledge, humanity's fertile imagination will fill it in with speculation about what science can't explain yet. That's one reason religion and beliefs in the supernatural persist into our current epoch.


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## Scribble (May 1, 2014)

Jabrosky said:


> As long as there are gaps in our scientific knowledge, humanity's fertile imagination will fill it in with speculation about what science can't explain yet. That's one reason religion and beliefs in the supernatural persist into our current epoch.



There's more to it... people need an instruction manual for life: where do I fit, how do I become a good human, what is right, what is wrong, how can I be cleansed of the filth and guilt of living so I can try again tomorrow? These are the questions people try to answer through religion.


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## skip.knox (May 2, 2014)

Scribble said:


> There's more to it... people need an instruction manual for life: where do I fit, how do I become a good human, what is right, what is wrong, how can I be cleansed of the filth and guilt of living so I can try again tomorrow? These are the questions people try to answer through religion.



People do, but do elves? Dwarves? Ogres?

It's common to create separate religions for separate races, but what about creating a different sort of role for religion? Maybe its function isn't to explain the unexplained. Maybe it's to provide moral justification, for example. I'm thinking here of the Mongols, for whom their sky god told them they were to go out and conquer the entire rest of the world. If you look at them one way, they were highly tolerant of other religions. Looked at a different way, they were simply indifferent, in the same way they were indifferent to philosophy or botany. Their god did one thing, and that thing had already been done; the rest was merely execution.

I think this has been explored on another thread here. Most fantasy religions are deeply Western in how they fit sociologically. We can't really get away with varying this in regular fiction, but with fantasy there is an opportunity (if the author so desires) to go in radically new directions with religion.


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## Malik (May 2, 2014)

Also, the first part of this post about why we needed the Catholic Church back in its heyday. http://mythicscribes.com/forums/world-building/11239-divine-right-kings.html#post157064


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## Queshire (May 2, 2014)

I can't help but think this thread has gone off topic...


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## Scribble (May 2, 2014)

skip.knox said:


> People do, but do elves? Dwarves? Ogres?
> 
> It's common to create separate religions for separate races, but what about creating a different sort of role for religion? Maybe its function isn't to explain the unexplained. Maybe it's to provide moral justification, for example. I'm thinking here of the Mongols, for whom their sky god told them they were to go out and conquer the entire rest of the world. If you look at them one way, they were highly tolerant of other religions. Looked at a different way, they were simply indifferent, in the same way they were indifferent to philosophy or botany. Their god did one thing, and that thing had already been done; the rest was merely execution.
> 
> I think this has been explored on another thread here. Most fantasy religions are deeply Western in how they fit sociologically. We can't really get away with varying this in regular fiction, but with fantasy there is an opportunity (if the author so desires) to go in radically new directions with religion.



The question is... should you create a religion, and I think you can only answer the question if we consider the reasons for why religions exist in the first place. Everywhere there are people, there are religion.

And aren't dwarves and elves and ogres... people? They are fictional people with particular racial stereotypes.

Looking at history I notice kings making claims about what the gods want. Mysteriously, it always seems to back up what the king wants. The problem with looking back is that we only seem to catch the big flashy moments of religion: the Crusades, the slaughter and enslavement of neighboring states. Kings have books written, not regular people. In this way we lose what the average person like us thought about religion and the role it played in their lives. 

When kings aren't making war or using religion to sort out property ownership and taxation, regular people keep _doing religion_. 

Regular people have smaller concerns than kings. Dwarves cherish gold and metals. Ogres want to find things to eat, they want courage in battle, they want... whatever it is that ogres want, so their god or gods will fill that role. Presumably, they also want to come of age, mate, make new ogres and dwarves, and eventually die. Whatever religion they have, whatever their chief may want to claim about the desires of the gods, the dwarves, ogres, and elves still have to live their dwarvy, ogry, elvy lives.

The world is very mysterious when you don't understand biology, physics, and chemistry 101. You've got to fill in the blanks with _something_ and religion did that, and it is interesting to imagine what an ogre would come up with to explain things. But I think it is missing the point if we think that is _all_ religion does is explain things. It is a _way_ of being an ogre and being part of an ogre tribe. 

My view is that if there isn't something that more or less looks like a religion as we understand them, there must be _something_.


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## Pythagoras (May 2, 2014)

If you ask me, the fact that the occultists follow deities that actually exist means that they cannot be the only ones who believe in a supernatural power. They may be the only ones who are truly aware, but how could they be the only ones with some sort of faith? Science and religion can coexist, and I think that if the gods are real, then someone somewhere along the line would have fashioned a religion around them. To put it another way: in a world in which no gods truly exist, it is still very likely that a religion may be founded. So in a world in which gods DO truly exist, it just seems to me downright implausible that no religion would exist. 
Another point to consider: what did people believe prior to the scientific revolution? Perhaps science has replaced religion in your society, but something must have filled that void before. People don't tend to go from pure ignorance to pure enlightenment. There's got to be an intermediary stage.


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## Terry Greer (May 6, 2014)

I often have a problem with worlds that have science AND the Occult in them - if the occult isn't just a vastly expanded science that is not understood properly (Clarkes law).

Science is basically just a methodology for finding out the truth - so this basically boils down to - if the occult works - why isn't it studied using the scientific method?
(Though having the occult as a proper science would be an interesting direction to go in.)


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## Queshire (May 6, 2014)

Could be that it doesn't work when it's studied, there's a limited amount of power so that the more people use it the less power each one has, or if people start understanding too much about it the entire way it works shifts.


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## Terry Greer (May 6, 2014)

I guess what i meant - but didn't explain properly - is that if something is replicable - its science - if it isn't reliably replicable then its a belief system and therefore not true - i.e. myth, religion and the 'Occult'.  

What follows is that to have a believable occult it needs to have a set of mechanisms and laws that make it effectively a science - without that its unbelievable. 

In my view magic without a rule system, where anything can happen, is utterly boring and without suspense. The reader has to be able to forecast what can and can't happen in advance, and the writer has to provide the reader with interesting (and surprising ways) that their protaganist uses these known (and well explained and understood) rules so that the reader thinks 'of course', when the surprise hits them.


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## Terry Greer (May 6, 2014)

Queshire said:


> Could be that it doesn't work when it's studied, there's a limited amount of power so that the more people use it the less power each one has, or if people start understanding too much about it the entire way it works shifts.



Personally I find that too easy a cop out, and a lazy way of thinking. If anything goes - why should I should I care? If the protagonist can get of danger by something illogical or novel - something known as 'Deus ex machina' - then I feel as a reader insulted - and don't bother reading any more from that writer.  

Having said that - Larry Niven in his Warlock books (The Magic goes away) had a great reason for why magic isn't around any more - treating it (mana) as a resource like oil that can be used up in an area. That was well handled - but had distinct rules.
Similarly something linked perhaps to the uncertainty principle might be valid - but its an overused trope that magic can't be measured.


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## Gryphos (May 7, 2014)

> Science is basically just a methodology for finding out the truth - so this basically boils down to - if the occult works - why isn't it studied using the scientific method?



In my world the Occult does work, but it's a closely kept secret between occultists, and even then what the Occult can do has quite a few limits. The rest of the world A) can't ever find out how to harness the Occult due to the occultists' secrecy and B) wouldn't really want to be able to do what Occultists can do due to the stigma put upon their practices, vampirism, sacrifices etc.


Anyway, I've decided that there will be an organised religion in place. The exact nature of the religion I haven't decided on but I'm thinking something along the lines of spirit reverence, worshipping many natural divine beings as opposed to a set of gods. Unlike the Occult, this religion is false and was thus its doctrines were largely disproven during the Age of Minds. This caused it to lose a lot of its following and influence.


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## skip.knox (May 7, 2014)

As the hangman said, it's all in the execution.

I hesitate to rule out any approach on a theoretical level. Almost any system can be made to work, if the story itself works. I have read a great many books that had sensible magical systems but where the story did not engage me. I have yet to read a story that hooked me but I put it down because I did not find the magic system to be internally consistent.


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