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    • CommentAuthorMorvius
    • CommentTimeSep 13th 2009
     
    Recently, I have been trying to work out the religions in my book (I am starting with the world building first). After all, religions do play a major role in the peoples' lives unless they are all atheist for some reason. Actually, i am trying to come up with a polytheistic religion since I am always fascinated by all the various mythologies. I am still unsure if I should allow them to play any role in my book though.

    I was wondering, in your books, do gods/deities actually exist? Like A Song of Ice and Fire for example. Though there are numerous religions/beliefs (The Seven, The Old Gods, Rhllor), only Rhllor has shown any influence over the land (Considering Melisandre's abilities and Thoros of Myr). Because even if gods/deities do not exist in your books, I feel that it is still important to touch on religion for world building.

    So let this topic deal with religion building and the supernatural in fiction!
  1.  

    This is actually a very important question, and one that I myself haven’t looked at in-depth enough. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

  2.  
    In my main novel series gods/deities do exist. The main characters meet them at some point. The way I'm going to do this might be a little lame, I dunno. I want to have lots of different religions that know nothing of how the world was really created, and some some religions that do know and therefore are the correct ones, or at least partially correct. Which means I might include in my story someone who knows the true religion telling people all the others are wrong, which causes a huge uproar. But I think readers might believe I'm like telling them there's only one correct religion in the real world or something...

    Early in my story I had the idea for a certain event to spark arguments about which religion is right, but would a group of townspeople really have that kind of a conversation? Especially since this town is pretty small which asks the question why there's like at least 3 different religions all in this one little kind of secluded town, but I thought to fix that up I'd reveal that the town was founded by people of different countries and religion for some reason.

    As for the supernatural, yeah I guess my story has that as some creatures are technically the living dead. No ghosts or spirits or whatever though. Souls also play a role later on if that counts as supernatural.
  3.  

    Would a small town be religiously diverse? It seems doubtful to me.

    Yeah, I’m not even going to get into the whole ‘which religion is right’ debacle. People who believe in one thing always think that they’re in the right, or else why would they follow what they do?

  4.  
    Hmm I could change it from a small town in the middle of nowhere to a huge central city I guess and it would still work out pretty much the same way but be more believable, but I still don't really think I should include a debate about which religion is right. I'm not looking for a debate in real life, by the way.
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      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeSep 13th 2009 edited
     

    In my world gods don’t exist, but the characters think they do. Because I want to be a good author and not a smug little soapbox-talker-from-onner, I don’t give away details either way, except that my world’s gods don’t make an actual appearance anywhere.

    Actually, most of my religions don’t have gods in the anthropomorphic sense. Only one of them does, but I’m a bit shady about the alleged physical presence of them, anyway. One of my religions is about the inherent ‘split’ in life between the spirit world (as a physical place) and the physical world, one is purely animistic in a pseudo-taoist sense but emerging as a reaction to the first, one is a more territorial/tribe-centric variation of the first, another is a reaction to the hostility to stranbgers inherent in the tribe-centric one, another is a reaction against the latter and involved personal desire and fulfillment, the second-youngest is an eternal battle between the ground-people and the sky-people, and involves lots of hunting and eating of birds, and the last has a more traditional system of Greek-like anthropomorphic gods and godesses.

    As you can imagine, at least one of the books in my planned, loosely-linked series with no particular number and no one central character, is about religious intolerance and the struggle for domination.

    • CommentAuthorMorvius
    • CommentTimeSep 15th 2009 edited
     
    Speaking of the supernatural, how fantasy-like is your world? Is your world like ASoIaF which is not that fantastical? Or is it like Harry Potter/Wheel of Time? Where there are mythical creatures roaming the land with your typical goblins and stuff? I am currently leaning towards a more fantastical world.
  5.  

    My most detailed world is an alternate history Earth, and I am working under the assumption that there is no God. Or at least no God who involves himself with mundane affairs. There are some fantastic elements, such as alchemy, extra-dimensional entities, astral projection, and a sort of limited magic, but they are all “explained” with science.

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeSep 15th 2009
     

    @ Morvis: My world is definitely non-fantastical. I call it an alternative-earth-pseudo-Bronze-Age-political-adventure-thriller more than I call it fantasy; I just lump it in with fantasy because others seem to want to.

  6.  

    There are witches in my ‘world’, but they’re more of a mutation of humans rather than an actual species (except for the deep-sea ones, which obviously have been isolated, and therefore have evolved further away from humans). I don’t really have any other obviously ‘magical’ creatures, like unicorns, dragons and such. I think I’m just going to stick with a New England type of climate, and whatever comes with that in terms of flora and fauna.

    I’m thinking about including another non-human, sentient race (well, not race, because there’s only going to be a few left) and a Creator (not a God, which is a completely different thing). We’ll see how things turn out with witches first.

  7.  

    There are gods in my world, but they don’t make an appearance. There are two main factions of one religion, and the male lead follows a pantheon of several gods while the female lead follows four. I’m not planning on soapboxing (which I why I specifically left out a monotheistic religion), and so they argue and are curious about each other’s religions, but neither of them are portrayed as better. Also, other countries have different religions, and since it takes place in the capital city, which has a port, there’s a lot of mixing.

    There are mages in my world, and they have rivalries. One group is stronger, but the other can use magic longer. I want to vary my climates, and so I’ll do something like, the first book will be like New England, and the second will be like Florida, and so on and so forth. I don’t want anything like magical creatures or whatever – I want it to be both Earth-like and yet very clear that this isn’t our universe.

    •  
      CommentAuthorPuppet
    • CommentTimeSep 15th 2009
     

    I just have a creepy puppet maker in my story.. He makes puppets and as he makes them he “transfers” part of himself into each of those puppets and bringing them to life.

    <<

    >>

  8.  

    What does “>>” mean?

  9.  

    He makes puppets and as he makes them he “transfers” part of himself into each of those puppets and bringing them to life.

    That is so weird! I thought of something very similar for my ‘creator’.

  10.  

    I was wondering, in your books, do gods/deities actually exist? Like A Song of Ice and Fire for example. Though there are numerous religions/beliefs (The Seven, The Old Gods, Rhllor), only Rhllor has shown any influence over the land (Considering Melisandre’s abilities and Thoros of Myr). Because even if gods/deities do not exist in your books, I feel that it is still important to touch on religion for world building.

    All I’m going to say is that in my work, there are almost no religions. However there is a [in story] reason for that…

    In my main novel series gods/deities do exist. The main characters meet them at some point. The way I’m going to do this might be a little lame, I dunno. I want to have lots of different religions that know nothing of how the world was really created, and some some religions that do know and therefore are the correct ones, or at least partially correct. Which means I might include in my story someone who knows the true religion telling people all the others are wrong, which causes a huge uproar. But I think readers might believe I’m like telling them there’s only one correct religion in the real world or something…

    Reminds me of one of my recent blog posts. About the only way for you to be able to pull this off without offending too many (because there’s always going to be some people offended, no matter what you write) is to make the world, religions, etc so fantastical, that almost no one could see it as saying anything particular about our world, etc etc.

    of course as Jonah Goldberg pointed out once some people will see parallels and/or get offended no matter what you do or intend.

    Also, there’s this essay discussing Lewis, Tolkien and the matter in general.