Andor
First Post
The clerics of a slew of competing gods assert that their deities are actually gods and provide repeatable supernatural phenomena. Visit any trade city in on Oerth or the Realms and this is painfully obvious.
That's kind of a weakening of the divine arguement, don't you think? A village headsman goes to the Godstown section of Waterdeep to find someone to protect his villages crops the from the hail storms that have been wiping them out and hears: "Absolutely friend Thor will protect your village, he is the Lord of Storms and Thunder!" "Don't listen to that Charlatan! Zeus is the Lord of Lightning as all men know! Make obesience to him and you will be saved." "Liar! Talos is the god of Storms! He doesn't give a crap about you though, but I am his priest and can interceed for you if you can convince me of the worth of your cause. Tell me, how hot are your daughters?" "Swine! Unhand this rustic simpleton! The honorable and shiny Baphumet has power over all manner of atmospheric phenomenon within his blinged out talons!"
Does the villager have his faith in the gods reinforced by the scrum, do you think? Especially when a Druid or Wizard can also exert control over the weather and tried to underbid the clerics?
More to the point it illustrates what complete bollocks D&D theology is, having been written to be competatively polytheistic by people raised as monotheists.
Mlund said:It's not "trust in intellectual authority," it's trust in repeatable phenomena - historical evidence.
Let me flip this one for you. How hard would it be for a group of non-divine magic users to pretend to be Clerics and falsely replicate all your "proof"? How many people can tell the difference between "Speak with Dead" and "Minor Illusion"? Can you tell the difference between divine healing and psionic?
It has been raised many times throughout this thread that this is a stance that falls under the umbrella of atheism, although agnosticism may be closer. Although I feel I should point out that the idea that a being is not divine if it is flawed or limited is a very monotheistic one. In polytheistic religeons all the gods have flaws or limits. In many myths the gods can be tricked or deceived by canny mortals.mlund said:Hence my original point: It is far more rational to posit a moral or philosophical stance that the "gods" are real entities that pretend at Divinity - limited / flawed / transient beings that don't deserve the title though they need / crave worship.