Religion -- the Light, Part 2

The Theme of the Church of the Blinding Light is, well, something I haven't properly defined yet. What is the role of the Light in The City of Lives? Well, let's start with what it's not:

• It's not the defining or central part of the world. While religious conflicts could support a City of Lives campaign, the setting is really about politics, class warfare, and high strangeness. The Light is not meant to act as the backdrop for heroic vanquishing of infidels.
• Similarly, the Light is not meant to be a villainous organization, waging an oppressive inquisition. A powerful, corrupt evil church carries significant narrative weight, but it's not what I need in CoL, where all morality is drawn in shades of gray. There may be believers, corrupt priests, even organizations bent on destroying the worlds -- but they are small parts of the Church, no larger or more powerful than in real-world religions.
• It's not something  to be laughed at. Many fictional churches are targets of satire, reflecting the author's dissatisfaction with real-world religion. The church worships clearly imaginary gods, or are hypocritical about their beliefs and practices, or is portrayed as blindly obedient. As tempting as it may be, City of Lives is not the place for me to preach via my own "perfect" religion, nor to mock people's beliefs and hide behind the label of fiction. The Church of the Blinding Light should reflect real-world religion, for both good and bad.

So that's what it isn't. What is the Church of the Blinding Light, thematically speaking?

• It is the dominant religion of the City, binding together some Bloodlines that otherwise have nothing in common. So it can symbolize connection across otherwise disparate cultures.
• It is a rigid faith, inflexible in the interpretation of its principles. Compared to the wild complexity of the City, and even wilder areas beyond, the Light represents both reassuring stability and stifling orthodoxy.
• The Church provides an ethical framework for the City. While not everyone follows these ethics, they provide a foundation for their laws and societal constructs. Just as the USA, while not a Christian nation, has laws that reflect the values of its Christian founders, so will the City's laws be based on the beliefs of followers of the Light (areas of the City run by ancestor-worshiping Iversdotter gangs or money-worshiping bankers. 

So now that we know what the Church is and isn't, how can we look at it with a defining central metaphor? Part of me wants to just abandon it and say "it's just as complex as a real church." However, that's not terribly useful. The real world is far too complex to fit into fiction -- it must be simplified, distilled, and spun into its most dramatic form (heck, even documentaries have thematic statements and character arcs). Okay, so let's look at the defining symbol and theme of the religions that inspired the Light. And keep in mind, folks, I'm a game designer, not a theologian, so please forgive me if I get some stuff wrong.

• Christianity's defining symbol is the cross, representing its central metaphor of Jesus's sacrifice. Its followers' goal is redemption through surrendering to God's will.
• Judaism's defining symbol is the Star of David, and its central metaphor is the Covenant with God. Its followers' goal is a good life on earth, achieved by following God's Law.
• One of Buddhism's defining symbols is the dharma wheel, representing its central conceit of the Eightfold Path to enlightenment. Its followers' goal is freedom from being through abandonment of the physical world and the self.
• Modern Western civilization's symbol is, I dunno, the dollar(?), representing the fruits of industry. Its followers' goal is physical rewards and renown, achieved through hard work and/or talent.

So, the Light's symbol is probably a stylized sun -- perhaps one that touches a ray of light out to a tiny human form? After all, the Sons of Light are considered to be their deity's Chosen People, meant to rule the City. This is certainly reminiscent of the Judaic Covenant. But the goal of the Sons of Light is not a good and simple life, but secular power. This is the covenant they made, and their goal -- to glorify the Light by ruling well. For other followers of the Light (Leovites, Kipmen, etc.), they must support and glorify the Sons of Light, and thus gain the reward due to dutiful servants.

• The Church of the Blinding Light's symbol is the sun, which represents their covenant with the Light. Their goal is to gain spiritual and material fulfillment by supporting the Sons of Light and/or ruling the City well.

So the Theme, we have discovered, is spiritual and secular power joining together. And this leads us directly to the new concept of the Twist: a religion (or monster, or district, or whatever) created with the method of (A)rchetype, (R)eal-life inspiration, (T)heme could end up as a virtual copy of an existing religion. In fact, the Church of the Blinding Light has come perilously close to being a copy of Christianity and Judaism. So we "twist" it, changing something fundamental around that makes the concept unique. For the Light, it is this:

• Ambition is a virtue -- this is a notion borrowed not from any religion, but from modern secular American culture.

and, a few more twists:

• There is no separation of church and state, but nor is worship of the Light mandatory. Church leaders are encouraged, even expected, to hold important secular positions.
• Asceticism is seen as a sin. It is denying the wonderful world that the Light has provided -- but avarice is also punishable. The middle path, as in Buddhism, is encouraged.
• The supernatural is not seen to be related to religion in any way, either positively or negatively.

So there you have it. Some more fundamentals on the Church of the Blinding Light. Of course, I could go in further -- take a look at the specific laws or beliefs the Church is founded on... but I doubt that much more than this will be useful for a prospective GM, nor is it a good use of our time when we have so much yet to cover. So next time, we'll continue on our fictional religion kick, with the beliefs of the Rurals and Religion -- The Seeding Manual.

Religion

Again, a disclaimer: none of this is meant to relate to my own religion beliefs, nor that of anyone else. I'm looking at religion purely from a fiction-writer's standpoint, not intending to reflect on anyone's real beliefs.

A few posts ago, we discussed the nature of divinity in the City of Lives universe. If you'll recall, we determined the gods are physical beings from the bizarre dimensions known as the Far Realms, capable of performing godly miracles because of the interactions between their own laws of physics and those of the Realm of Lives. They are not dependent on worship for life or power, and have as many motivations for helping their parishioners as human politicians do for taking office. However, we haven't determined the nature of religion in the City. All too often in fantasy literature (and especially fantasy gaming), who the gods are, what their abilities and motivations are, and even how to worship them, are all understood perfectly. I have a problem with this -- it doesn't in any way resemble the real world. "But Emlyn," you say, "The City of Lives is pure fantasy, it doesn't have to be realistic!" My response is that I always try to follow a simple rule: the rules of a fantasy world can be bizarre and completely unlike reality -- as long as people act like people. And people have a million different ways of interpreting religion.

Now, there is the argument that since the gods are definitively real in The City of Lives, performing miracles  and communicating with the populace, people would know how to worship them and wouldn't argue. I... think not. Pardon me for a perhaps not-terribly-apt metaphor, but observe the US government (or any government, for you readers across the world). It has the power to make laws (as gods are known to do), send rescue workers to disaster areas and help people in ways the local populace would be incapable of doing (manna from heaven, anyone?), and punish people (in the end, transforming someone into a pillar of salt is just showier than a lethal injection, not any deadlier). And there are a lot of different opinions on how the government should work: how to interpret the Constitution ("holy books"), what laws should be introduced or struck down, and how to enforce the ones we have. Democrats, Republicans, the Green Party, the Tea Party, uncle Marvin and his militia in Idaho...

If we can't agree on how to run our government, then I see no reason that all the believers in a single god should agree on how to worship him/her/it, let alone the worshipers of the various other gods that populate the multiverse of The City of Lives. In fact, religion in the City is just as complex as in our own universe, if not more so.

It doesn't help that the most powerful deity regularly worshiped by the City-dwellers -- The Light -- is notably non-interventionist and seldom communicates directly. This is, of course, a decision I made in my effort to make The Light parallel Christianity -- in this respect, similar to how God was seen in the Renaissance period, where many small pieces of science had been figured out, and it was accepted that God didn't speak to the average priest or parishioner, but sometimes Saints healed people and God smote the wicked. Essentially, I want the Light to be less interventionist than D&D gods (handing out magical power to priests willy-nilly), but more definitively powerful and real than, well, the real world. So, as @kelly suggested, one way to do that would be to have some occasional miracles -- clearly magical manifestations that don't have anything to do with the known magic system. It would be a remarkable, once-in-a-lifetime event to hear the words of the Light or see Its works, but it would happen approximately once in everyone's lifetime.

As to the true nature of deities as physical beings from the Far Realms, I think it would, and should, be up for debate -- if not quite as much as gods on Earth, then at least as much as poorly-understood laws of physics. After all, the Far Realms follow different rules from our world, strange and incomprehensible -- even with Fractal Elves and Scarcity Merchants visiting the City, people's understanding of them is probably somewhere between how well medieval Europeans understood Chinese culture and how well an ant understands humans. And that assumes that the deities even cop to their status. Whether a deliberate deception or simply not correcting a misapprehension (I haven't decided), the Light is viewed by its worshipers as I think the worshipers of the Light see It as eternal, outside reality -- all the things the Christian God is. Finding out it's a physical being would probably break all their heads.

Ultimately, like in our own world, there will be debate on the nature of the gods. Some believe that deities (well, their deity) exists outside the Realms and those who maintain that, definitionally, the Realms encompass everything. After all, nobody really knows how far the Realms go, I'm assuming. Some people might theorize that in infinite Realms, everything anyone believes in, and indeed everything anyone can imagine, exists somewhere. There are probably even some who believe that it's just another form of magic, and can be understood the same way -- that worshiping that phenomenon as a god doesn't ultimately make any more sense than worshiping Shapers, Sharers, and Shifters. And thus, even the City of Lives, where gods are a fact of life, there are atheists... just a different sort.

Join me next time as we delve into religion more completely and examine The Light.

As a side note, thanks to @kelly for brainstorming some of this out with me!

A Treatise on the Nature of Divinity

First, a note: None of this reflects on my, or anyone else's, religious beliefs. My real-life religion is, frankly, none of your business -- and how a writer models their fictional religion (should) have more to do with what's appropriate to the reality (and the metaphor) of the setting rather than their own beliefs.

Anyhoo -- divinity in The City of Lives. As I began conceiving it, I gravitated to a concept popularized (in part) by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett -- that gods are created by man, and live on humanity's belief. This has long been one of my favorite takes on divinity -- being essentially a humanist, I like the idea that it all comes down to us, and that the gods, whatever their power, depend on humans at the core.

However, this concept is fairly overused in popular fiction these days (American Gods, Small Gods, Dragonlance, Fables... etc. (as well in certain polytheistic religions)), and so there would have to really fit the setting to justify using the tired idea. Additionally, the power of belief is a major piece of the Planescape setting, and I want to ensure that CoL , while superficially similar to Planescape, is fundamentally different.

Next option: The assumption that D&D (and most real-world religions, but we won't really get into that here) use: deities are tremendously powerful on their own, and require no worship. However, they ask for it. Why? Maybe they have massive egos. Maybe they see it as a form of respect, or a type of barter: worship for miracles. Or, a slight variant, seen in HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and others, gods not require or desire worship, either helping humanity out of a sense of compassion or duty, or ignoring humanity's desires completely.

I like the idea that gods have variety in their reactions to worship: some like prayers to feed their egos, others ignore humanity's desires, and some like an use worship in a mundane context similar to a government -- an army of parishioners can fulfill a god's goals, even if they don't provide "mystical prayer energy."

The next question is: are gods fundamentally the same or different from humans and other physical beings. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic God (or at least, most modern conceptions), is considered to exist outside space and time, eternal, originating and existing outside the physical universe. The Hindu deities are similar, but sometimes take physical form as avatars. The Norse deities are made of flesh and blood, born and able to die, even their immortality dependent on a physical elixir.

In much of fiction, gods are not real gods unless they are separate from the physical universe. In the Stargate TV shows, the advanced aliens -- even those who now nigh-omnipotent energy beings -- are said to not be gods,  not  worthy of worship, because they started out right where we are, as limited physical beings. The Marvel Comics Asgardians are (usually) considered true gods, though they are, similarly, extradimensional aliens with physical form.

For the universe of The City of Lives, we have an option that is kind of in-between "physical" and "separate" -- from the Far Realms. I want the Realms to cover all of existence -- to my mind, there should not be a place apart from the Realms, non-physical in the sense of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. And if the gods' Realms can be traveled to, they can either be:

• essentially the same as our own world, just bigger and grader, like Mount Olympus; or
• mind-bendingly different, following different physics and incapable of being properly understood by humans. "Extra-dimensional beings," physical but following different physics from our own, are a fairly common sight in literature, especially Lovecraftian horror, and a valid place to start.

This second idea seems more "godly" to me, a way to make gods different from humans without making them "separate." And look -- I already have a place that fits that description! The Far Realms, those worlds so far from the Realm of Lives that their rules of reality are different. Perhaps people from the Realm of Lives (or even Earth) could hold similar power in the Far Realms -- after all, what's Near here is Far from there...

So, in conclusion -- gods in the universe (multiverse?) of CoL are no more (and no less) than beings from the Far Realms, obeying different physics than ours, and thus holding great power in realities like our own. They take their power from the interaction between their natural Far Realms abilities and the physics of the Near Realms. And they perform their deeds for a variety of reasons, but are in no way dependent on worshipers, except in the way a government is dependent on its citizens.

Anyone have any thoughts on this conception of gods? Does it work, or does it take away from "godliness" by making them physical beings? Should they be more like Gaiman or Pratchett's gods, or is their independent divinity refreshing? Let me know what you think, and next time we will finish up our walking tour of the City of Lives (and try out the ART method again) in The Lost District.