Clerics with no gods

[HellHound]

It is the flaws inherent in humanity's struggle for faith that makes for interesting stories.

Agreed 100%. And I really feel that the struggle of faith and interpretation is at it's most personal and interesting when it involves deveoping faith and learning what you really believe in and how that changes your outlook, not who you really believe in.

In such a pardigm, where story is the most important element, the role of the cleric as healer (mechanics) is secondary to the role of the cleric as spiritual figure (story). Thus, if you offered to play the cleric in my campaign but had no interest in role-playing a spiritual or religious person,

Where the impass here is that I don't understand why a godless cleric is shrugged off as a non-spiritual person.

 

[TerraDave]

Well, an act of the gods just wasted my first attempt to post on this...

so to be breif: Yes, we have clerics without specific gods. Yes, you can play this way: as has been pointed out, the cleric actually predated specific deities, which where not emphasised in the core rules until 3rd ed. (in 2nd ed for example, the priests/clerics god is really just mentioned in passing).

And yes, the issue of no specific deity is different then a player not liking his choices and making something up. He could always just make up his own god as well.

 

[ForceUser]

Agreed 100%. And I really feel that the struggle of faith and interpretation is at it's most personal and interesting when it involves deveoping faith and learning what you really believe in and how that changes your outlook, not who you really believe in.

Sure, but as you say, that's on a personal (micro) level. On a macro level, a world is alive with belief systems, ingrained from birth into the cultures and everyday lives of everyone from penniless serfs to the wealthy elite to monsters living in caves. Religion is the driving force in the real world, like it or not, and has been since whatever genesis of humanity one ascribes to. There's even evidence of burial rituals among neandertals, which suggests that the now-extinct homo sapiens neandertalus had religious beliefs.

My point is that religion permeates nearly every aspect of life in the real, modern world, and even moreso in the ancient world. Medieval European history was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. It's hard to imagine a person trying to find faith in something as nebulous as an alignment, which is simply a construct for determining one's moral and ethical predispositions, and which should be transparent with regard to the everyday world. In my campaigns, I don't even use alignments. It is worship of a higher power--revered ancestors, a pantheon of gods, Mother Nature, what have you--that brings grace, and it is from grace that divine power descends. Regardless of whether a PC in my campaigns follows a faith similar to animism, Buddhism, Islam, or paganism, that faith derives from an understanding of the world that is itself formed from a system of belief. In the real world, it is in the exploration of such belief systems that the greatest stories of human history are told. In my campaign, I seek to capture some of that through the role-play of the faith of divinely-inspired characters.

 

[ForceUser]

Where the impass here is that I don't understand why a godless cleric is shrugged off as a non-spiritual person.

I guess my point is, why bother? To me, a godless cleric is just a video-game character--there to patch people up and lay some smack down, and not good for much else. If this is how one enjoys D&D, great. Have fun. But it's not for me.

 

[JimAde]

I have to disagree. I think HellHound's point (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that just because a person doesn't worship a specific god, doesn't mean he can't be deeply spiritual. He can have beliefs that mold his behavior and attitudes even if those beliefs don't include a personal supernatural being. (That's personal as in "having a personality" not as in "mine" )

 

[fusangite]

I notice a lot of people seem to view magic here as faith-dependent. That's probably where the split in styles happens. I assume that magic is god-dependent or physics-dependent; the idea of faith generating anything itself is unpleasantly modern for my kind of D&D. I suppose that if one viewed magic/miracles as faith-dependent rather than god-dependent, godless clerics are the logical outcome; I'm reminded of the Dr. Who episode Curse of Fenric which does a great job of faith-dependent magic with a WWII Soviet army officer warding off vampires with his hammer & sickle.

 

[ForceUser]

I have to disagree. I think HellHound's point (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that just because a person doesn't worship a specific god, doesn't mean he can't be deeply spiritual. He can have beliefs that mold his behavior and attitudes even if those beliefs don't include a personal supernatural being. (That's personal as in "having a personality" not as in "mine" )

Give me an example, then, of a spiritual person who has no system of belief. What is his spirituality based upon? What are his beliefs? In what ways is he spiritual? What philosophy does his morality derive from? Because I can't see it. People acquire culture early in their lives, and with that culture comes religious beliefs. As a person grows older, he may choose to disregard those beliefs, but even so, they will color his outlook unconsciously. Show me a person completely devoid of outside influence, who has come to his spirituality only through personal reflection and not empircal observation or indoctrination (or the rejection of either).

 

[Henry]

I guess my point is, why bother? To me, a godless cleric is just a video-game character--there to patch people up and lay some smack down, and not good for much else. If this is how one enjoys D&D, great. Have fun. But it's not for me.

I think your description is selling the concept too short; godless does not have to mean "non-worshipful" or "creedless." There has to be faith in a path of some sort to follow, hence the DM's in-road to connect the PC to the campaign.

Where the impass here is that I don't understand why a godless cleric is shrugged off as a non-spiritual person.

I can understand why -- mainfly for the reasons Forceuser gives. SO many DM's are used to people who want to play godless clerics purely because they want all of the powers and none of the responsibilities of playing a cleric. The player who wants a "fighter with extra bennies" is doubtfully going to be drawing up a philosophy to replace that "god that's been kicked to the curb."

HOWEVER: To me, there's no difference really between worshipping a god, and following a faith or philosphy. If you go against the faith, you lose your powers and your way, same as if you went against the god's beliefs. Take away the avatars, the manifestations, and the "voices from on high" and you've got a philosophy with anthropomorphic features. The Volcano Priest will lose his powers if he doesn't do the will of the volcano (make the sacrifices, burn a ritual shrub every week, whatever); the Ancestor Worshipper who disgraces the memory of the ancestors loses his power. Just as the follower of Torm who acts without honor, or the Priest of Talos who uses weather control spells to stop hurricanes. It's still the exact same thing.

Therefore, a good DM who dislikes godless clerics may well require a DETAILED description of the philosphy or faith, so as to give him a good idea of how the player sees it working, and subject to any edits the DM requires before the game begins.

The purpose of a god in D&D is NOT to shoehorn a player into soemthing they don't want, it's to give both DM and player a common frame of reference of what's expected before play begins.

 

[HellHound]

I guess my point is, why bother? To me, a godless cleric is just a video-game character--there to patch people up and lay some smack down, and not good for much else. If this is how one enjoys D&D, great. Have fun. But it's not for me.

Like I said in my first response, *I* am a -very- spiritual person without an organized religion and without a deity or 'god', and the quest for personal spirituality is a huge thing that everyone reacts to differently. Having very strongly held spiritual beliefs but no religion does not make me a video-game character.

And this is where I bow out of the conversation instead of getting into a further discussion on the relative values of personal spirituality versus organized religion. I'm sorry for continuing to argue it to this point.

I'm not saying that there is no structure to my spirituality, just that spirituality does not necessarily equate with gods or superior beings besides ourselves. I'm arguing that a cleric can be godless, not that a cleric can exist with no structure to his beliefs. Spirituality is not about indoctination, it is about belief. Going on to talk about my opinions on indoctrination as part of religion will only bring me further beyond the limit of not talking about religion on these boards.

 

[ForceUser]

The Volcano Priest will lose his powers if he doesn't do the will of the volcano (make the sacrifices, burn a ritual shrub every week, whatever); the Ancestor Worshipper who disgraces the memory of the ancestors loses his power.

These are still systems of belief, Henry. Ancestor worship is a form of religion (Shinto, Chinese animism). A cleric who follows such powers is not "godless" in the sense that Hellhound means. Hellhound, correct me if I'm wrong, is asserting that one need not follow any doctrine, nor any belief system (be it gods, spirits, ancestors, appeasing volcanoes), to be a spiritual person. That is the point I am refuting. Spirituality does not occur in a vacuum; it is a process based upon an understanding of the universe, and that understanding comes from an observation of the world combined with indocrination into a system of beliefs held by others in one's culture.