Designing religions

[Karlin]

I think it has more to do with "assumptions" than "beliefs". I'll explain where I'm coming from (on a personal level). If you ask most people about "Judaism", they'll tell you that "Judaism" has a set of beliefs, and point to the 13 principles of belief that Maimonides put together. Yet historically, this was revolutionary- Jews didn't have a set dogma or even a set of what English speakers, at least Christian ones, normally mean by "beliefs". I'll illustrate with a story of a Jewish gangster, part of Murder Incorporated, who was caught and questioned by a detective. The detective asked: "when you were committing these crimes, did you believe there was a god?" The gangster answered "I knew there is a god". He didn't think in terms of "belief". I don't think Myth is a set of "Beliefs" either- it is a type of knowledge.

 

[Ban]

I think that goes for every religion pre-modernity, including Christianity. "Religion" itself is a secular Western concept I'd say. Of course not in the sense of what is preached or believed, but in the very notion that religion can be extracted from culture and philosophy and practiced as a thing of its own separate from either. To people who existed before contact with modern western standards, any set of "beliefs" held were indeed more akin to "assumptions," but to the outsider looking in, any assumption is just another belief.

 

[Karlin]

That's why I put "Judaism" in quotation marks. It's a made up term that outsiders (though it's spread to internal use) use to talk about the religion of the Jews, which is basically a tribal religion deep inside.

 

[skip.knox]

The word itself is problematic, as it has undergone many shifts in connotation over the centuries. Here's a decent summary (Wikipedia should change its name to Decent Summary)
Religio - Wikipedia hat
We moderns have a propensity, almost a compulsion it sometimes seems, to reduce concepts to a single word. Medieval people were happy with phrases or even longer forms. So, they would say things like "the body of all believers" to describe what we might call religion. Longer forms open the matter up. To stick with the example, "the body of all believers" puts the emphasis on people and on community--something shared within that body.

This matters for writers. When a person comes to design a religion for a fictional world, they sometimes have in mind creating a hierarchy with some sort of enforcement power. Sometimes this is to set up a "church" as an antagonist, sometimes it's to set up competing churches as another form of political conflict. That's fine, but that approach is mainly about politics and power structures.

A different approach designs the religion as a cultural milieu. Here the emphasis is often on rites and symbols, usually the more exotic the better. I think here of the old masters like Burroughs or Howard, who used it to frame how magic was delivered. Always obscure, dark, threatening.

Yet another approach is religion as plot device. The gods drive the story. It's funny; I just thought of this. We're usually fine with gods *starting* stories, especially epic stories. We're less fine with them ending stories. Hm.

Anyway, it's important, imo, for the writer to know why they are designing a religion. I'll add a fourth approach to close this msg: religion as ethnographic thought experiment. I think this is what I'm doing in Altearth. My humans get a religion ready-made: the ancient state religion of Rome. But I have elves and dwarves and others. I don't want them taking on the Roman religion, but I didn't want to ignore that aspect of their culture, either. So I've been trying to "grow" their religion out of their own culture. I say grow because it's been organic, just tossing seeds in the ground to see what comes up. Designing, creating, or growing a religion--it's complicated.

 

[Insolent Lad]

Whether or not the gods themselves take part in their religions would make a pretty big difference, I would think, even if those gods are not in any sense 'creator' or 'supreme being,' and their followers know this (or maybe don't). I have to admit I allow several pantheons of gods to pop in and out of my stories and that definitely has an effect on belief. Especially since I put forth the premise that whatever gods a culture might come up with already exist somewhere out there in infinity and are essentially 'discovered' by men (or elves or whomever/whatever) and a connection is created.

Outside of this, I think we can divide religions into two basic groups (with considerable overlap, to be sure): those that grew organically in a culture and those that were in some sense 'revealed' by a prophet or teacher. This would certainly have a bearing on the beliefs of their followers, and how strictly or loosely they held those beliefs. But one thing I do believe is that religion is always a reflection of culture. A religion belongs to its time and place, to the politics and economics with which it coexists.

 

[The Dark One]

From a fiction writing perspective, if you want a religion just to give the world a little more depth, don't go into too much detail. We were all foobalist and prayed to foobal during thunder storms etc

If, however, you want religion to be a part of the drama, then the key to that is a schism within the faith. True foobalists prayed during thunderstorms but the heretic foobalists only prayed on rainy days. Death shall be their reward!

Jonathan Swift did it best with the Lilliputians - Big Endians and Little Endians...