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I don't know, chilling as a brick for all eternity sounds relaxing.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:06
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I never really found it lovely because in order to be an atheist in that setting you have to ignore the many many many gods and divine poo poo and actual loving angels and demons popping out all willy nilly.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:27
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Arivia posted:The Wall of the Faithless is basically the theological (NOT thematic) equivalent to Christian Hell - believe in a God or face eternal suffering for not doing your part. If I'm not mistaken, it's actually weirder than that. The eventual fate of every dead person is eventually becoming part of the (spiritual) landscape. Being faithful to a God might mean you become a nice rock on top of some holy mountain instead of a literal brick in a literal wall, but eventually everyone turns into something.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:29
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Schwarzwald posted:If I'm not mistaken, it's actually weirder than that. The eventual fate of every dead person is eventually becoming part of the (spiritual) landscape. Being faithful to a God might mean you become a nice rock on top of some holy mountain instead of a literal brick in a literal wall, but eventually everyone turns into something.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:34
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The Western World afterlife in Wraith is run by the Hierarchy, who are capitalists from hell. Soul forging is a thing, wherein a person's eternal soul is commodified into an object. If you listen closely to the money, you can hear its moans. It's one of the most woosh things in any setting, and people generally assume the setting is racist because non-western cultures' after-lives are managed differently. But it's not "African people's souls work differently," it's "not even death is relief from Capital."
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Mar 11, 2022 22:47
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moths posted:The Western World afterlife in Wraith is run by the Hierarchy, who are capitalists from hell. Soul forging is a thing, wherein a person's eternal soul is commodified into an object. If you listen closely to the money, you can hear its moans. 90s WW shouldn't get much benefit of the doubt on whether something was racist
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Mar 11, 2022 22:52
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Telsa Cola posted:I never really found it lovely because in order to be an atheist in that setting you have to ignore the many many many gods and divine poo poo and actual loving angels and demons popping out all willy nilly. If I recall, it's not atheist of the "does not believe these things are real" kind. It's instead the idea that while they may know such things are real, the atheist does not offer proper devotion to any of them. The Toril atheist says, "None of you are worth it," and the gods in return say, "Then you're not worth a proper afterlife," and shove you in the wall.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:28
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disposablewords posted:If I recall, it's not atheist of the "does not believe these things are real" kind. It's instead the idea that while they may know such things are real, the atheist does not offer proper devotion to any of them. The Toril atheist says, "None of you are worth it," and the gods in return say, "Then you're not worth a proper afterlife," and shove you in the wall. It makes sense. In a world with real deities who have real power you can still say "gently caress Olympus, why should I give tribute to that bunch of inbred petty rapists," but whether you're punished or not that's not much at all like being a real-world atheist, it's just rejection of authority.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:37
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Arivia posted:It’s really unclear. There’s an offhand mention in the Avatar Series book 4 or 5 that the “current” system of the afterlife was created around when Myrkul (your Reaper) came to power, but specifically who did it or why isn’t stated. What is clear is that trying to undo it like Kelemvor (your overworked Death) makes everything break, really really quick. Apparently though, while he publically backed down and toed the line, he seems to have sent a letter to Ao's luminous manager who backed him up a few editions later: SCAG Errata posted:[NEW] The Afterlife (p. 20). In the second paragraph, the last sentence [describing the Wall of the Faithless] has been deleted. Of course technically they haven't actually said it's gone, but I don't see them ever referring to it as a thing that exists in future based on that. If there's no way to find out it exists without going out of your way to read previous edition content, for all practical purposes it doesn't exist any more, since any players who don't have a lore nerd proclivity or a pre-5e experience of the setting will never know it exists. I've never been much convinced by the idea that the wall is necessary somehow, since the fact it was created when Myrkul came to power cements that relatively speaking the wall is fairly new, less than two millenia old, and it was seemingly not necessary for the vast majority of all of existence. Insofar as it is necessary, it is only so because Ao has willed it so, and Ao could just, y'know, will something else. It also creates some kind of weird conflicts with the religions in Kara-Tur, Zakhara and Maztica. If my players ever do decide to go crusading, I have a few ideas lying about on how to kill Kelemvor, how to disable or bypass the fugue plane and so on, that they can pursue. Then Ao can decide if he wants to directly step in and for a change actually personally interact with some mortals who are blowing up his precious wall, or he can come up with a new system that's not so monstrously evil. But until then the Wall stays up, at least at my table. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 00:41
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Telsa Cola posted:I never really found it lovely because in order to be an atheist in that setting you have to ignore the many many many gods and divine poo poo and actual loving angels and demons popping out all willy nilly. A god in d&d can’t really do anything a guy can’t do. It feels like it’d be really hard to have real religious faith when Jesus is just some kind of high level guy just like they guy that killed the rats in your yard a few months ago. Like gods exist but who cares?
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Mar 12, 2022 00:48
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:A god in d&d can’t really do anything a guy can’t do. It feels like it’d be really hard to have real religious faith when Jesus is just some kind of high level guy just like they guy that killed the rats in your yard a few months ago. Like gods exist but who cares? Plenty of real-world religions have gods that aren't omniscient or omnipotent. Even that are very small or limited in their presence and abilities. They even have mythologies about ordinary mortals who bested gods at things. Those stories never seem to lead to a lesson of "yeah, treat the gods just like any other dude" though, and even little gods and minor spirits get their shrines and sacrifices as part of the order of things or just because of the transactional nature of magic and divinity. People raised in modern Christian-dominated cultures tend to frame pretty much any fantasy religion in light of Christian practice and mythology, especially in RPGs, but it often doesn't really line up well. Part of that is the specifically Christian definition of "faith", which also needs to be divided between how that word is used in Christian theology, and how it's used in casual speech about Christians. It doesn't really apply neatly to many real-world religions, let alone into worlds where the gods are a verifiable, daily presence.
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Mar 12, 2022 01:12
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:A god in d&d can’t really do anything a guy can’t do. It feels like it’d be really hard to have real religious faith when Jesus is just some kind of high level guy just like they guy that killed the rats in your yard a few months ago. Like gods exist but who cares? As a rule, D&D gods seem to be huge jerks. So it follows that if they're just guys, they'd be the type to come round your house every Friday night and take a drunken dump in your mailbox. Ostensibly this could be avoided by donating at your local temple a little. 'Deities are the Mob' isn't exactly the height of social commentary, but on the other hand, as capitalism keeps limping towards a fail state,  seems more and more apt, so why not!
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Mar 12, 2022 01:19
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:A god in d&d can’t really do anything a guy can’t do. It feels like it’d be really hard to have real religious faith when Jesus is just some kind of high level guy just like they guy that killed the rats in your yard a few months ago. Like gods exist but who cares? Eh, I would argue that is not the case with how the mechanics work. And since the Gods can influence poo poo in their domain you might as well leave an offering to Shroomy the mushroom god so your crops of shroom are good or whatever.
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Mar 12, 2022 01:23
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disposablewords posted:If I recall, it's not atheist of the "does not believe these things are real" kind. It's instead the idea that while they may know such things are real, the atheist does not offer proper devotion to any of them. The Toril atheist says, "None of you are worth it," and the gods in return say, "Then you're not worth a proper afterlife," and shove you in the wall. My understanding is that ancient people typically expected to get something for their offerings. As in, once people believe that harvest rituals will improve the harvest, then the logical course of action is to improve the harvest via harvest rituals. These beliefs are persistent in the real world, because it's hard to say whether or not it made any difference, but it's better to be safe than sorry, because you really wouldn't want to accidentally jeopardize the harvest and cause everyone to starve. On the other hand, in a fantasy world where acts of god are objectively quantifiable phenomena, it would make sense to me that someone would decide they're not getting their money's worth from a god and take their business elsewhere, thank you very much. In a world where gods are very real and very near, their temples should be even more businesslike and transactional than they were historically. Under this framework an atheist would seem less a secular philosopher and more a fussy shopper, and the wall of the faithless is like some kind of cartel market fixing garbage to force people to participate in the system. tl, dr: reach heaven through violence, and attack and dethrone god
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Mar 12, 2022 01:42
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Killer robot posted:Plenty of real-world religions have gods that aren't omniscient or omnipotent. Even that are very small or limited in their presence and abilities. They even have mythologies about ordinary mortals who bested gods at things. Those stories never seem to lead to a lesson of "yeah, treat the gods just like any other dude" though, and even little gods and minor spirits get their shrines and sacrifices as part of the order of things or just because of the transactional nature of magic and divinity. Eh, I'm not talking about power level specifically. I am more saying that an atheist in a fantasy world wouldn't be a guy not believing the gods literally exist. It'd be the guy watching jesus turn water to wine and saying "eh, so what?". Like the stargate thing where all the egyption gods existed and were real but were a bunch of alien worms. It wasn't the gods didn't exist, it was that the divinity didn't exist, the thing they were pretending was divinity was just a gross worm. The gods weren't different in kind than anyone else, they just happened to have a higher tech level. (yeah, I know D&D has specific rules about divinity, so it does exist in the D&D world objectively, but that is what I mean, a fantasy world atheist would see that as just one more magic thing in a world where their house pet might have a magic ability, without disbelieving that it EXISTS).
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Mar 12, 2022 01:59
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Eh, I'm not talking about power level specifically. I am more saying that an atheist in a fantasy world wouldn't be a guy not believing the gods literally exist. It'd be the guy watching jesus turn water to wine and saying "eh, so what?". But in this case, what distinguishes a fantasy atheist from a fantasy theist? Like, even if you take out some intrinsic spark of divinity, the general characteristics of what makes something a god in a polytheistic setting is that they have a domain over which they have particular and significant control; prayer to them, or lack thereof is believed to bring either blessings or curses (and in a fantasy world potentially actually does); and generally they have some degree or influence over or interaction with the afterlife or process of rebirth. If we take this as our definition of what a god is, it seems fairly clear that the entities referred to as gods in fantasy stories usually are, in fact, gods. If our fantasy atheist’s response to this is to see this as “just one more magic thing in a world where their house pet might have a magical ability”, the theist is the guy watching the atheist make that argument and saying “eh, so what?” Yeah sure Umberlee, goddess of the sea, is “just” a particularly powerful magical being. Doesn’t change the fact that if you don’t say a prayer and do a sacrifice before you get on a ship she might use that magic to drown you.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:04
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Every god in the all the pantheons lining up to pull divine pranks on the one atheist in the world's longest two boats and a helicopter joke.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:07
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Telsa Cola posted:Every god in the all the pantheons lining up to pull divine pranks on the one atheist in the world's longest two boats and a helicopter joke. I'm pretty sure this was a Fritz Leiber story.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:10
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Reveilled posted:But in this case, what distinguishes a fantasy atheist from a fantasy theist? It's the same question as what makes magic magic. Like why is real electricity not magic but a fantasy fireball spell is? They both just follow known physical rules of the world they exist in. There is plenty of fantasy wizards that decide magic is just a science and stop treating it as something other than that. like once you know gods physically exist it's a question of if they are a different and wholly apart from the world thing or if they are just a thing that exists like every other thing that exists and can be understood. A theist would believe in them the way a peasant might believe in the divine right of kings where the king is something other than a person, and an atheist would be like a modern british person who still thinks the queen exists and structurally has a bunch of royal powers, but generally thinks she's just some lady.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:45
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Feel like some of you guys should read these blog posts on how polytheism actually worked. https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
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Mar 12, 2022 05:23
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Most stories, once they establish the physical realism of gods (and often a lack of further transcendentalism), there's not a lot of mysticism you can really do after that. Some stories get around that by replacing atheists who doubt the supernatural with antitheists who actively acknowledge gods and the supernatural and instead want to physically kill and destroy them, which doesn't quite work, but it's the best you can do. I guess Glorantha is one that manages to do an interesting job of maintaining the abstractness and confusion over religion, since it's not like the gods aren't exactly physically real in like a newtonian sense, they're in an alternate plane of existence where they can't actually directly affect the world, but there are a bunch of weird roundabout ways they make their influence, and people can sort of interact with the gods through weird rituals, but then it's still weird and abstract and indirect. But then you could also try bypassing the more mystical and abstract religion bits to powergame the rituals and seek some truer level of reality and make the cosmology of the universe into your plaything, and then you'll screw up and start breaking reality in your attempts to master it, and all the forces of the world and heavens join against you to destroy you and your entire culture just to stop you.
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Mar 12, 2022 07:16
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O poo poo, you brought up Glorantha. Cue 3 pages of God LARP chat and whole paragraphs that contain "Gbadji", "Arkhat" and "superheroes". I'll get it started with the best thing in the whole setting :  Behold, the walktapus!
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Mar 12, 2022 07:28
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Whelp someone has mentioned Glorantha. Okay first thing to understand about Glorantha is that it is based in the mind set of the Bronze/Early Iron age. This means that Gods exist and can be propriated to ensure good harvests and etc, but that they can also cause everything like disease, impotence and thunder. It's just which God you blame the later for could be the patron of a nearby tribe. Alongside that and speaking of Atheists you have the "Western" civilizations. They believe that the Gods are not really self directed intelligence but made up of various different runes all slamming into each other, and because they do not possess minds they can be manipulated by people. This means that they are, in effect, Atheists. However they do believe that there is a sort of Overgod called the Invisible God who created the planet and who cannot interact with it in any real way but can be partially approached via the correct understanding of reality. They are Humanist, but in this instance this does not mean "humane" it means "Humanity can and should manipulate the world around them. What SlothfulCobra mentioned in their last paragraph is, in effect, the God Learners. A collective of Sorcerers who attempted to fully understand the Gods by fitting them into categories and saying "they are all the same" whilst trying to grab any power they could from them.
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Mar 12, 2022 10:31
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Actually thinking about it Christianity and other “monotheistic” religions are actually the best example of “no that’s just a guy” atheism. There is all kinds of angels and devils and ancestor spirits and mythical beasts and stuff that are part of real world religions that are all very strongly not gods, but just a bunch of guys that exist.
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Mar 12, 2022 12:48
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Josef bugman posted:
And apparently the Godlearner’s belief system was pretty close to totally correct, as they had a ridiculous amount of power, nearly manifested a mechanical Clanking God, and had to be destroyed by an alliance of pantheons.
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Mar 12, 2022 13:04
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Slapping a irl monotheism style unseeable unknowable absolute god who can't be interacted with and grants no powers on top of the usual RPG pantheons would be a fun world building touch. Like the normal clerics just go but you can't prove it exists, checkmate theists 
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Mar 12, 2022 13:22
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aphid_licker posted:Slapping a irl monotheism style unseeable unknowable absolute god who can't be interacted with and grants no powers on top of the usual RPG pantheons would be a fun world building touch. Like the normal clerics just go but you can't prove it exists, checkmate theists Comic books do that and both marvel and DC are on a hilarious treadmill where they want there to be some mysterious unknowable christian style god that exists beyond all the wacky on panel god stuff, but every time they introduce that idea some writer eventually has the characters either meet or fight that god which makes it just another wacky on panel super being which causes them to eventually introduce yet another level of actual for real impossibly unknowable and unreachable true god.
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Mar 12, 2022 13:50
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Christianity isn’t monotheist, it’s monolatrist. “Thou shall have no other gods before me,” not “I am the only God.” Fantasy people who reject the gods would be anti theist. “Sure, there are gods, but gently caress them.” Or Like antivaxxers, flat earthers, and such like.
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Mar 12, 2022 13:53
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Ha, I was going to say marvel has stuck for a while with ONE-ABOVE-ALL as the impossibly unknowable god that was only briefly shown and existed beyond all the comic book stuff for a while. But looks like the last 2 years of comics I haven't read have been a huge story about introducing evil ONE-BELOW-ALL which they will have to fight and the admission of ONE-ABOVE-ALL that he is not actually all powerful and might not be the actual highest power. I think it's basically impossible to keep an unknowable god in long running escalating power fiction that has other gods. Someone eventually writes "what if we fought it!" no matter how impossibly distant and powerful it was originally written.
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Mar 12, 2022 13:58
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's the same question as what makes magic magic. Like why is real electricity not magic but a fantasy fireball spell is? They both just follow known physical rules of the world they exist in. There is plenty of fantasy wizards that decide magic is just a science and stop treating it as something other than that. I think the problem with this is it relies on a very specific understanding of what it means to be a theist that I don't think is necessarily reflected in either historical polytheism or in fantasy RPGs. Like, if we look at ancient mesopotamia, you could literally kidnap another city's gods and hold them hostage by stealing their statues, which to me does not suggest that they believed their gods to be a different and wholly apart from the world thing. Polytheistic myths frequently see their gods manifest in the world, they have emotions, flaws, they can have children with mortals. The Egyptian Book of the Dead includes handy tips on how to beat the system after you die. The Buddhist concept of the Six Realms supposes that it is possible for a human to be reborn as a god. Mesoamerican religion believed that the gods literally needed blood sacrifice to keep the universe functioning. All this says to me that the default assumption we're running with here that the gods are somehow distinct from the world is drawing a hard line that I don't think actual polytheists would. In my estimation, the sort of person being described here as a fantasy atheist seems to have rather similar beliefs to a Neoplatonist, rather than a Christian. And a neoplatonist in a wholly polytheistic world isn't really analagous to an atheist, they're a theologian. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 14:16
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It’s reasonably common for Buddhists to describe themselves as atheists. Even for ones that believe in various supernatural beings.
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Mar 12, 2022 14:37
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And all the other examples?
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Mar 12, 2022 14:45
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Charlz Guybon posted:Feel like some of you guys should read these blog posts on how polytheism actually worked. This is a really good read on the different mindset. "Faith" in the modern sense was not in question really, back then. "Should we sacrifice to have a good harvest?" wasn't a question like "Should I go to Midnight Mass on Christmas?" and more like "Do I thread the plumbers tape on clockwise or counterclockwise when installing a new trap on my faucet?" or "If I don't pay my tax bill correctly, will the IRS audit me and slam me with penalties for non-payment?" quote:For players that do select a deity, that selection is usually tied to an ‘alignment’ (as with D&D 3.5 Paladins, or most deity selection in the Pathfinder system) which in turn often corresponds to a system of ethics or a way of life. Paladins in Pillars of Eternity receive bonuses to the degree to which their statements and actions match the ethics of their orders, for instance. But while there is a big emphasis on following the ethics or worldview of the god, there is functionally no emphasis on ritual, and even less on the kinds of ritualized exchanges that dominate actual ancient polytheistic practice.
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Mar 12, 2022 15:49
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Triskelli posted:And apparently the Godlearner’s belief system was pretty close to totally correct, as they had a ridiculous amount of power, nearly manifested a mechanical Clanking God, and had to be destroyed by an alliance of pantheons. Not exactly. You see the God learners represent Imperialism, so they expanded too much and collapsed and were not "correct" just because they were powerful. They tried to switch too grain goddesses who possessed the same runes to "prove" there was no difference. When they did Millet wouldn't grow for one half of the swappers, and for the other marriages would not last longer than a year. It was an understanding based on flattening all culture to serve the ends of the dominant one and, as always, it failed because it did not appreciate or understand, it assigned.
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Mar 12, 2022 15:57
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Reveilled posted:And all the other examples? Who knows, I’m saying there is examples of real people saying they are atheists that also think a bunch of entities exist. It’s not an unknown or modern only idea in the real world.
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Mar 12, 2022 16:08
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Who knows, I’m saying there is examples of real people saying they are atheists that also think a bunch of entities exist. It’s not an unknown or modern only idea in the real world. Okay, could you give a few examples of pre-modern buddhists believing in these entities and describing themselves as atheists?
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Mar 12, 2022 16:40
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Reveilled posted:Okay, could you give a few examples of pre-modern buddhists believing in these entities and describing themselves as atheists? ....... Siddhattha Gotama
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Mar 12, 2022 16:43
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:....... Siddhattha Gotama Cool, could you cite where he called himself an atheist.
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Mar 12, 2022 17:07
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Triskelli posted:And apparently the Godlearner’s belief system was pretty close to totally correct, as they had a ridiculous amount of power, nearly manifested a mechanical Clanking God, and had to be destroyed by an alliance of pantheons. The God Learners were close to correct, close enough to get a lot of stuff done, probably the most correct out of any comprehensive theory of reality in Glorantha (not a lot of competition for that), but still far enough away that some of their mucking around really damaged a lot. The Goddess switch didn't really work out, I think there were other big issues their mucking about caused, but I don't remember. I think something went wrong with Zistor, their project for creating an artificial god. They also aren't the only "atheists" (although I guess they count as deists) in Glorantha. The Mostali, Glorantha's dwarves, believe in the world machine, Mostal (that other people characterize as a god, but the dwarves would disagree). It is the Mostali's duty to spend their lives fixing the world machine, and by maintaining their faith and keeping on working, they cease to age, becoming immortal. The Mostali also consider it their duty to maintain a monopoly on technology, so they were a big part of the forces that attacked and destroyed the God Learners to take their stuff on top of stopping their messing around. I think the Lunar Empire is kind of like Glorantha's version of Christianity where they have one god above and before all other gods, and there's a whole thing about their god dying and being reborn, I don't remember the whole deal. They're associated with chaos, which is a force of evil to most of the other pantheons, especially the Orlanthi, so that adds a whole extra spiritual dimension to their imperialism, and it also means that there's a political dimension to the Orlanthi contemporary to the Lunar Empire doing their rituals celebrating (and reinforcing?) how their gods and ancestors fought the ancient enemy of chaos, which circles back to some aspects of jews and early christians under the Roman Empire, just also there's a giant bat demon in the mix. It's a whole mess of influences.
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Mar 12, 2022 18:43
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Reveilled posted:Cool, could you cite where he called himself an atheist. He was born thousands of years before that word existed. There have been literally billions of buddhists so there is no one interpretation of it any more than any other religion and there is plenty where gods exist or even ones he WAS a god, but the interpretation that all the supernatural crap existed but was just other types of guys stuck playing the same game we are that were not there for the creation of the game and won't last forever is a pretty early interpretation, all the "no but my god is actually a big deal" was stuff that came later. Like it's a big reason it spread so easily, it doesn't make you deny your former religion, it tells you that it doesn't ultimately matter. Your local god still exists whatever you heard about him is still mostly right, but that guy is just as much as a deluded fool as you trapped in the same cycle you are and when you are ready he won't even matter even a little bit. (making it a good religion for any group who had gods forced on them)
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Mar 12, 2022 19:01
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