durin said:
The thing that troubles me about belief/worship=power is a paradox similar to the chicken and the egg...
I always thought that was a silly question... The egg predates the chicken by several million years (some 200 or so, IIRC).
Gods need to people to worship them in order to give them power.
People need Gods to create the world and the people themselves.
So which came first?
In so much as my opinion matters, belief/worship=power is short-sighted.
I can see that being the perception, but short of posting the
entire mythology of the campaign, it's a little hard to clarify that.
To put it into simple terms (for berevity, not because I think you or anyone else is simple), there is
God and there are Deities. Deities are beings that have ascended into appearant godhood (although they are still nothing before the power and might of
God), and did so through the means of being worshipped. Sometimes this worship is gained post-mortem (in which case the deity is born of a psychic impression made into the cosmos by the collective belief of mortals), but sometimes not (ascention in a manner similar to Upper-Krust's system, though not actually quantified... Doing so would require UK's system to be magnified a hundred-fold because of the multi-world cosmology, although it could be used if I felt like it...).
This is all part of the "psience" behind Aedon, being a cosmos in which the big bang (the "birth" of
God with the Cosmos as
God's body and each atom containing a tiny sliver of
God's conciousness) and evolution are "facts". In this Cosmos, a race believing itself to have been the spontaneous creation of a deity has simply been mislead by the deity they worship, a process taking centuries of lies and the gradual manipulation of history (in some drastic cases, evil deities have slaughtered entire adult populations and raised the infants of the race with their new "faith").
An alternate way of viewing it is in the Player's Handbook itself: That of a Cleric/Paladin gaining their power from a source of power rather than a individual being. In a system such as belief=power, the people's belief that a being has authority over an aspect of the cosmos allows that being to gradually gain that authority, eventually becoming the "face" of that power source and requiring more worship in order to retain and increase that control. If the being that is worshipped is no longer in existance (such as a deceased mortal), than this "face" grows out of the power source itself, shaped and molded by the perceptions of the worshippers.
Through out all this, however, lies the unanswered question: What does
God want? What is
God's plan?
This leads to the "god-killer" empire I described earlier in the thread; This empire's religion is known as the Four Names of God, being a belief that struggle, strife, hardship and pain are necessary requirements for the evolution of body and mind to continue forward. Without turmoil or conflict, progress halts and stagnation is the only assured result. To them, deities are "false gods", beings that mislead and corrupt the cosmos with their lies, deceit, and petty power-struggles. To them, Psionics are the ultimate expression of mortal potential, and here in lies the problem: by projecting their faith onto a deity, that deity is fed by the psionic-residue of the worshipper's mind. This makes deities leaches that must be purged from the "cosmic pool", as it were.
Granted, they are
powerful leaches, but parasites none-the-less.
On another note ... I wonder how many of our homebrew divinity and religion systems reflect our own true feelings about divinity and religion?
I'm an atheist.
