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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6859750" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a classic example of a proxy argument.  What's really being argued isn't wisdom vs. charisma, but what religion actually is.  It's the person's definition of religion that is informing their view of what people should accept as the one true answer here.  There is no possible way in which this argument is going to achieve any good results.   The actual thesis statement of the original poster is: "Wisdom is fundamentally about emotional maturity and the application of reason, which has little to do with piety..."  The whole argument is a proxy attack on religion and on practicing religion, because the poster wants to divorce "emotional maturity" and "reason" from piety.  As such, it really has nothing at all to do with arguing about fantasy role-playing game, where in theory whatever opinions you might have on real world religion shouldn't necessarily inform how the fantasy world behaves because no one has to accept that any particular cosmology of a D&D universe has any bearing on the cosmology of the real universe.   There is no way we can even debate this question in the context it has been presented without debating real world religion.  So there is no way I can even answer the original poster without violating board rules.  The question really has in a fantasy context no right answer, but fundamentally depends on how you define religion and piety in fantasy setting.  If you define the pious as those who are loved by the gods, a definition that was apparently common in ancient Greece but rejected by Socrates, then sure Charisma makes sense as the stat that gains you power over the Gods by making them love you more (probably regardless of your behavior).  If on the other hand you define the pious as those that love the gods, then Wisdom makes sense as the stat that gains you power because you are better able to discern the will of the deity and thus are entrusted with greater power because you more often do the deities will and are trustworthy.   Why Wisdom was associated with clerics and not charisma has to do with the archetypal ideas of a priest that informed the original class, which must have in Gygax's mind seemed more like the later idea of piety as those that love the gods rather than the ones that gods love.  Certainly the 1e cleric spell-list has a certain biblical bent to the sort of things a cleric can do, as about half the spells we could point to a biblical verse that serves as the obvious inspiration and point of separation between what was considered 'divine' and 'arcane' when spell powers were being initially doled out.  But if you don't think this is the 'right answer', because it offends you, then certainly you can invoke different definitions that make 600% more sense to you and arrange your cosmology accordingly.Any more said on the subject would violate the board rules more than this thread already is doing.  There might be a non-provocative thread you could have about the virtues of charisma versus wisdom for clerics in the context of D&D, but it certainly wouldn't be a thread that started as a proxy argument about real world religion.</blockquote>

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