The Religious Systems and Divinity in the Displaced Universe
With two characters who have a religious background, and one who had aspirations towards a religious story line, I knew that religion was going to be exceptionally important in my campaign. Considering how touchy religious content is for a lot of people these days and can be quite the tipping point for individual choices on whether or not they consume a certain media as religion does tend to drive many other facets of their lives including politics, social systems, and morality. From these blogs, the Vampire story, and my books, it may be quite obvious where my politics and morality lay, you may have suspicions towards what my social circle looks like, and I think I’ve discussed my religious affiliations in the past as well.
I am pretty open about my atheism, but I was raised in the Episcopal Church, which the priest at my church liked to describe as Catholic Light (twice the fun with half the guilt!). When I was thirteen I was disillusioned from religion, went on a bit of a spiritual journey, and decided that logic meant more sense to me than faith. I’ve admitted in the past that I was a bad atheist at that age, though I don’t think that anyone is a good atheist at that age. As I got older and experienced what good religion looked like, or at least was willing to see it for what it was, I began to realize that faith had value outside religion. That’s a difficult concept to explain, but Father Mitchell is my attempt at explaining it better (there’s a whole blog dedicated to him, which I’ve either released or is coming soon, I can’t remember the order for release at the moment).
Catholicism (and Christianity in general) has had a historical issue with sharing space with other religions and usually “won” these encounters through zeal, superior firepower, and effective social and political control. However, as I grew as a person, I realized that most of the people that led these initiatives were not really christians, since they weren’t following the teachings of Christ. I wanted to explore this in a world where the Christian God’s influence is far more limited than it is in our real world, not because he’s weaker than the other gods, but because he stands on par with them.
While there are still more followers of Jesus in this particular world, their faith is shattered, divided, and so unclear that it is nearly impossible to present a united front of what their faith represents. Too many false christians stand as the epitome of what the religion is in the minds of too many people. The hatred, vitriol, and segregation that is preached at more pulpits across the country and world doesn’t represent the proper teachings of the faith, which was the main point I wanted to explore.
Seeing individuals who were brought up in our toxic religious world, being browbeat into believing that faith means never questioning the dogma, never straying off the path of what was expected of them from the church, and clinging to the political beliefs of men who died centuries ago because “that’s how we always did it” run into the faithful of Goibniu, Nike, and Belenus, whose faith is absolute in its flexibility and constantly rewarded, has been a wonderful and fascinating journey for me.
Most notably, this is seen through the party’s interaction with Father Mitchell, the Catholic priest who represents everything religion should be, a shepherd trying to lead a flock while he himself is lost. His openness to understanding the party is the reason that he makes the best window for the party and you my readers to experience this topic and the reason I love him so much as a character. Through him we get to see the characters, their faith, and how we can apply their own viewpoints to our world.
Luis is absolute faith.
Normally, this wouldn’t work well, as we’ve seen what absolute faith can look like in the world: rules for thee not for me, inflexible thinking, refusal to see other world views, and colonial mentalities that breed conflict for the sake of spreading “truth” when in reality all that’s spread is pain and suffering.
In the case of Luis, his faith is absolute… but he only applies that to himself. He believes that victory is inevitable because he trains himself for it, he follows Nike’s teachings, has faith in her, and knows that she will help him achieve this goal, not provide it to him without effort. Luis runs every morning because he knows that dedication and effort are needed for victory. He knows that no god can or should provide victory without effort on the part of the faithful, for those would just be a hollow victory.
He also recognizes that not everyone shares his faith, and that doesn’t matter to him. Luis knows that not everyone has the dedication or wherewithal to commit themselves to Nike, and she doesn’t have time for slackers. His faith is absolute in the realm where it is his absolute. He is devoted to his victory, and surrounds himself with people who will help him reach that, regardless of their faith, because he knows that victory sometimes requires thinking and viewpoints beyond one’s own, and an echo chamber inevitably leads to failure.
Lee questions his faith, while also helping others question themselves.
Nowadays, people see questioning faith as not having any. Unquestioning, blind faith is the only kind of faith many people accept in our world, where Lee opens the door to asking questions of the gods, trying to understand his tenants, and using questions to help others come to the proper answers within their own faith without telling them what to do or think, but rather he gains a better understanding of them while helping them understand themselves better.
One of my favorite aspects of Lee is his unwavering calm in the face of social adversity. Too often, people in our world see being questioned as being attacked rather than an opportunity to be understood. Lee takes that opportunity to understand every time, not to say he never gets mad or frustrated, but he’s very good at keeping his composure even in these moments. Even in the face of the anger and fury of his questioning, no other character has been able to rattle Lee during a debate, because he understands that their anger isn’t at him, but rather at the idea that everything they’ve built their own lives around may not be as cut and dry as they’ve always believed.
Timm is self-guided faith.
Many people today feel that faith is something you have to follow a certain doctrine for. A christian must go to church, follow the bible completely and to the letter (which is hilarious because even the most devout christian’s I know don’t follow even two-thirds of what’s in the bible), and do what the church tells them to. There’s confusion on what a “real” member of a religious organization is even within a sect of the religion itself.
Timm is unbound by these limitations, both because he has a tendency to ignore those, but also because he’s not surrounded by others who follow the faith. He has to go on a journey of self discovery to understand what he believes, how he can interpret the tenants of Belenus (who will become a more prevalent force later in the series), and he uses every resource available to him in order to do it. He seeks advice, guidance, and opportunities wherever they can be found. Timm is constantly growing because he never says no to life. While he constantly questions himself, his actions, and his place in the world, Timm never stops seeking, growing, or discovering.
Religion means many different things to many different people. The best people who have faith in a religion tend to be the ones that accept that not everyone wants religion, or wants to be part of theirs. They share their faith not through the teachings or the stories or the dogma, but through their acceptance, empathy, and desire to understand others rather than “fix” them. More importantly, they focus on what their faith can do for themselves as an individual and how the teachings can help them grow, because they know that as they grow and improve, the world around them does as well, and in the end, that’s all we really want out of the divine: a better world.
