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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5727346" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, as far as actual RPG play, I gave an example upthread: PCs who repduiate the celestial agreements that the heavens and hells have entered into, in order to take action here and now that will make things better both for mortals generally, and for particular individuals who are the wronged victims of those celestial agreements.The issue is complicated by questions about the rationale for worship. If worship is understood on a more-or-less contractual rationale (and this is one way of making sense of the classical pagan religions) then heroic atheists might debunk or overturn the contracts - for example, by showing that there are ways to make the crops flourish without paying 10% of your income to Pelor and his church.Once worship takes on a more strongly emotional dimension (eg via ideas of a loving and nurturing creator) then heroic debunking becomes trickier, perhaps. Maybe, as in your 4e example upthread, the heroic atheist reveals that the gods are not really loving creators at all. Or, less drastically, reveals that creation is not all its cracked up to be, and thus that the gods, although sincere, are nevertheless not worthy of worship.This "creation scepticism" model of heroic atheism can also be pushed in a Conan-esque direction - whether or not the gods are genuinely there, and genuinely creators, they do nothing but meddle needlessly in the affairs of humanity, and we're better off without them! This has a somewhat Neitzschean flavour, and fits well with a more generally nihilistic or at least modernist conception. (The campaign I actually played probably counts as a variant on this model.)Historically, one reason for hostility to atheists (eg why Locke didn't extend his account of toleration to them, and why critics of Hobbes thought that his work pushed in an atheist direction, although it is at least notionally theistic) is that they have no sense of duty. This lack of a sense of duty manifests in a few ways - first, they repudiate tradition and the calls that it makes upon us (because they do not follow the received patterns of worship); second, they repudiate the duties that they owe to god as their father/creator (and this implies a more general hostiilty to authority, which is what critics of Hobbes as an atheist find in his work); third, being unable to sincerely swear oaths, they are incapable of binding themselves in their social dealings.I think a campaign that explores the modernist/Neitzschean/Conan-esque approach to atheism is fertile ground for bringing up this broader question about duty. Certainly, it was something in the forefront of the "against the will of the heavens" campaign that I ran (and some of my ideas for that campaign were derived from Wagner's treatment of some of these issues in the Ring Cycle).</blockquote>

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