Why Worship Gods?

Nyeshet

First Post
My favorate reason comes from a book I read a while back. I used it in my signature for a while, actually, so I still have it somewhere. Let me see . . . Here it is:

"If you aren't [omnipotent], why should we bring sacrifices, why should we praise and pray?" [Ariadne asked him.]

Dionysus raised his brows. "Why do the people of Crete bring your father tithes and taxes? Because he protects them from others, because he sometimes grants them what they petition for, because he is more powerful than they and would punish them if they didn't obey his laws. That's why you pray and sacrifice to the gods of Olympus. I said we weren't [omnipotent]. I didn't say we weren't any different from the native people in this part of the world."

Bull God (p 260) by Roberta Gellis

- - - - -

I also use another reason in my homebrew world, a bit more insidious, actually. There are many demi-worlds, planes, demi-planes, quasi-planes, etc, but there is a single transitive plane arranged in a layered pattern between them. Only through divine aid does one move up in this pattern. Each world, plane, etc is bordered by two transitive planes, one "above" and one "below". Upon death one falls to the lower one unless they have received a final blessing within the last 24 hours.

Celestials serving each of the various deities wander within the lower plane (which is not the lowest, and therefore not fiend infested), but the strength of one's belief determines how fast they are likely to find you. If your belief is strong you stand out like a bonfire to servitors of your deity, and you will be found within a few hours - or, at worst, days - and taken to your final rest. If your belief is weak it may take months to be found. If you do not believe in any, then you are doomed to wander that plane indefinately. And celestials are not the only beings upon this mid-level transitive plane.

Fiends wander the non-highest planes, as do the ghosts of those that have died before and not yet been found, not yet been caught, and not yet faded from existence. It is a dangerous place - especially for those lacking in power. Even if one manages to evade the deity-loathing fiends, the fact remains that being so far from Truest Creation - the central most seed of reality that exists above the planes of the deities - one is not immortal, nor even immutable. Given enough time, the soul will alter, will fade. Even the most powerful spirit will fade with the passing years and centuries. Eventually the spirit will cease to exist.

All that awaits those not aligned with any deity is a nerve-wracking dangerous afterlife followed by oblivion - for the lucky. Those that are caught by fiends will experience horrors undreamt by those upon the prime. And even those that remain overlong upon the plane may find their minds slowly slipping towards madness, such that oblivion might be their surest yet least saught reprieve from an ever less sane existance. Insane ghosts can be nearly as dangerous as fiends to those newly arrived into the afterlife.

Those that find a place in the afterlives arranged by their deities find instead a more pleasant setting. For them the afterlife is a place of rest, a place of enjoyment. Furthermore, by being in the divine realms, they are assured near immortality and near immutability. They cannot go insane, and their views, etc will not alter with time. Their personality, values, and degree of devotion will remain more or less the same as upon at the instant of death - regardless of how many centuries pass, and they will continue to exist as long as their deity does. And if their deity is part of a pantheon, then they might possibly exist as long as the pantheon exists - even if their deity does not.

So those that worship deities gain a surety of true immortality, a surety of an afterlife of ease, sanity, and assurance that their Self will not be altered or 'adjusted' with the passing of time. While those that do not can never be sure whether they will simply fade after a few months, years, or even centuries - or if they will experience the worst horrors of hell for as long as their fiendish captor decides to allow them to exist in torment.

And so most in my campaign world worship at least one deity - or at least the pantheon as a whole - in both the hope of eternal rest and the hope of a little something while still alive (see the quote). They understand that the deities are empowered a little by worship, but they also understand that the least powerful deities do not always have the means or the time to grant their wishes, and the most powerful deities have little need of their (individual) worship to retain their strength - and are quite formidable even without worship from any due to the devotion of the many souls they have gained throughout the prior millinia.

So the NPCs tend to be happy as long as the deities are not unhappy with them (or their community), even if prayers go unanswered, and they will continue to worship (at least to the degree of lip service to the entire pantheon) in the hopes of evading a truly horrific fate. Most make a point of staying near a priest or temple if they believe their death is imminant. If a war breaks out it is a given that celestials from many of the deities will be present in the lower transitive plane to gather the souls of the dead as they die. Adventurers are looked upon oddly at times, as they risk the chance of dying so far from a holy site or holy person of their faith as to risk meeting a fiend before meeting a celestial servant of their deity (well, this is true at least for the non-priests).


As for priests, their power comes from themselves (as is true with all casters), but it is devoted to the service of their deity, and thus they gain a few boons (domains specials, spontaneous casting, turning, etc). If they turn from their deity they do not lose their casting, but their ability to turn, use domain specials, and spontaneous cast is lost upon the instant - at least until they atone or find another deity.
 

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Elder-Basilisk

First Post
This is probably the most significant point to be made when discussing D&D religions. It's worth quoting to highlight it.

fusangite said:
One of the mistakes people make by seeing pre-Christian polytheistic divinities through the lens of modern Christian belief is assuming that worshipping a god is the same as loving the god or believing him to be perfect.
 

MonsterMash

First Post
fusangite said:
I live in a country with socialized medicine, as I believe the original poster does. Even those states with purely private healthcare have things like the Center for Disease Control to deal with epidemics and other major matters of public health. Viruses, like gods, are invisible, hard to understand, seemingly fickle and arbitrary and potentially lethal. .
Does this mean US posters should pray to Diaglo for protection from disease - I can just imagine the liturgy "OD&D(1974) is the only true game..."

fusangite said:
One of the mistakes people make by seeing pre-Christian polytheistic divinities through the lens of modern Christian belief is assuming that worshipping a god is the same as loving the god or believing him to be perfect.
Probably the most important point that's been made so far.

In the campaign world where the Gawds can literally be real with physical manifestation being potentially common the reaction to them will be very different from RL where few of us would claim to have seen a diety and this will affect how people worship.
 


fusangite

First Post
Voadam said:
From you saying "Gods, demons and angels cause droughts, . . . etc." instead of "Gods, demons and angels can cause." I took your meaning to be that polytheists believe everything has direct interaction cause from the gods etc.,
No problem. I was just following other posters and describing my own campaign.
not simply that gods can interact with the material world if they happen to be there and exert themselves to do so.
Most gods don't just "happen to" interact with the physical world. They often deliberately choose to affect mortals.
Let me expand the groups to weather, hard work, good luck, bad luck, sabotage, monsters, fate, magic, and superior military.
That's a fine list. Although it's important to note that gods are often responsible for weather, luck, monsters and fate. But, I think your statement illustrates my views pretty well. People don't just lean on the quality of their military equipment in battle; they also try to sabhotage the other guy's equipment, inspire their troops, etc. When there are lots of contributory factors, people usually try to cover all their bases.
 

Voadam

Legend
Arkhandus said:
But how are these commonfolk learning about an afterlife that isn't provided by gods? When someone returns to life they don't remember the time inbetween. Are they just going to believe any yahoo who says he's been to Heaven/Nirvana/whatever and returned? He's probably some rich adventurer that has to be a little crazy to be going places like that without permission, and to be fighting all those monsters and doing other crazy stuff. To the eyes of a commoner. But all those priests in that temple over there, they say they know what/where the afterlife is, and there are temples like that all over. Surely they're more likely to be right than that one crazy adventurer who thinks he's been to another world? If he has been there, he's probably some villain trying to subvert the faith or taint the promised land. Lynch him! ........that's what a commoner would more likely think.

After all, you need to be high level to acquire spells that will take you to outer planes. And sorcerers and cultists can perform all kinds of mind tricks, so transporting someone there isn't necessarily going to convince. You could just be messing with their mind, and making them disappear to the eyes of observers, but never actually going anywhere. Etc.

Hrum. Maybe now I'm just reaching, but whatever. Still, it is unlikely that folks would find out about and believe some crazy philosopher as opposed to the church that has been around, like, forever.


Couple points.

Religions don't require deities to have fleshed out concepts of what happens when you die. Certain strains of Taoism and buddhism don't have gods in their cosmologies and they have a full set of religious beliefs including afterlife answers. In D&D many campaigns don't have druids worshipping gods, but having a full religion with reincarnation, etc.

Established, dominant churches don't require gods. Take Fred Sabrehagen's sword books for an example, there are gods but the major churches have nothing to do with them.

Third, you can have belief in gods without having worship affect your afterlife. In Norse mythology where you go depends on whether you die bravely in battle or not, nothing else is relevant. Worshipping Zeus or not you still end up in Hades in Greek Mythology, although the gods there punish those who egregiously tick them off with torments in Tarterus, but that is for cannibalism, etc. not failure to worship.
 

Henry

Autoexreginated
Raven Crowking said:
Why does anyone in your world worship gods? 3.X establishes pretty well that clerics (etc.) gain their divine spells and powers whether or not they worship anyone. What is the purpose behind gods in your world? Does anyone get any direct benefits from worshiping them? Indirect benefits?

In my homebrew campaign world, Deities controlled ALL magical effects from the birth of the world; They harnessed magic, and you had to worship them if you wanted supernatural power of any kind. By extension, you had to follow their tenets, pray for their desired goals, and fight their battles to gain temporal power. Spiritual salvation came later.

About 900+ years before the first campaign started in this universe, beings from another plane who had mastered mechanical means to tap into magic (think of them as Epic Artificers) appeared in a remote forest, traveled and desired to spread their knowledge and wisdom. The followers of the gods, and the temporal rulers desired these beings' power, and marched to war on them. The beings were disgusted, and horrified, and sought to leave, but damage to their craft/domicile/fortress caused a magical explosion that ripped across the world, causing massive devastation, and worse, magical mutations. Governments fell, barbarism escalated, and robber kingdoms rose and fell like crazy.

However, one effect came unexpectedly; great experimenters found that arcane power could be had for the taking, and gods were no longer needed for power. The gods still have millenia of tradition and networking built up on their side, but they now fight a war for belief; they are no longer the monopolists, and must pay more attention to their followers, playing up the ideas of justness of their cause, spiritual comfort and rest, and maintenance of tradition.

No one is alive who remembers the events of those times (Elves in my world are also not as long-lived as the traditional kinds, max age is only 750 years or so) so past events started to become legend around 400 years ago or so.

---------------


Don't place too little importance on tradition, spritual comfort, belief in a cause, and sentient guidance. All of these offer strong competition to just having a non-anthropomorphic ethos to go by.
 

WayneLigon

Adventurer
fusangite said:
...
One of the mistakes people make by seeing pre-Christian polytheistic divinities through the lens of modern Christian belief is assuming that worshipping a god is the same as loving the god or believing him to be perfect.

Usually people in my campaigns fall in a few broad categories:

1. Those who worship something like the Patroness of Healing or some gentle diety like that. They generally do love their diety and feel that she or he loves them and wants to protect them.
2. People who worship a god for what he gives them (or is perceived to give them). A god of wealth and trade might fit into this.
3. People who worship a god so that he won't do bad things to them. The God That Lives In The Smoking Mountain, which great-grandfather says once spat fire. We throw a goat or occassional virgin into the crevasse up there because it seems to keep him quiet.
 


barsoomcore

Unattainable Ideal
Barsoom has gods, but they only rarely and sporadically receive worship. The Demon Goddess demanded worship for a while, and her subconscious desires for that wormed their way out of her pretty head and made folks around start thinking that building temples and organizing whole villages and towns into displays of devotion and obedience would be cool. So they did.

But Barsoom has an agency that actively seeks out and destroys "gods" whenever they emerge and tries to prevent religious organizations from flourishing.

Augustine's City Of God sheds some pretty interesting light on what pre-Christian worship must have been like, and how it contrasts to what WE in the modern world typically think of. fusangite's notions of "public duty" are very much in line with what I've read about how things worked.

If you're going into battle, you sharpen your spear, make sure your shield is well-reinforced, your armour snug and uncracked, and you stop off at the temple of Athena to offer her your genuflection. Not because you're exactly a "worshipper" of Athena, but because it's all part of making sure you're as protected as you can be.

And the kinds of public ceremonies fu describes don't even have to be restricted to big honking pantheon gods -- many communities will have their own idiosyncratic rituals that got started who knows how, but that are part of the life and identity of the community. Every neighborhood in Tokyo has a couple of shrines that every year get trotted out and paraded through the streets while the locals cheer and drink and party it up. Is this really a "religious" festival? Well, kind of, but it's not like the people spend their days "worshipping" the spirits or whatever that the shrines are dedicated to.

Anymore than people are worshipping the God of the Wood when they bring a tree into their house and decorate it as a holy site, lay offerings at its feet and then let it die and throw it away.
 

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