Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
Except, you are reaching consensus when everyone at the table agrees to play the game you're playing. Or when you agree to game time. Sure, one person can propose the game or time or location, but everyone that shows up to it is in consensus about it or it doesn't happens.On the consensus piece, it's because I've seen it used so many times out-of-game as a bad-faith delaying tactic - usually by the losing side in an argument or debate - that when I see it now I just assume this to be the case, and in response I push for a binding resolution now by vote or other lock-it-in means so as to cut off the backroom lobbying crap before it starts.
The minute I hear someone say "Can we just come to a consensus?", up go the red flags.
At least, I hope this is true, and you aren't running a kidnapping ring and running for hostages!

Ok. Yeah, the suggestion was an alternative where you let the player decide, and your only response was about players doing nonsensical things for no reason you could articulate and then saying that this is way it can't work that way. You made up a strange corner case of crazy to leverage the precautionary principle in favor of not letting players have any input because they might, I dunno, hurt themselves or the game? You weren't very clear on what you thought the end outcomes were here.On the in-game religion piece, to me pantheons and deities etc. are part of the background setting* and thus fully under the DM's purview. Sure the DM could open this up so players could in effect build their own deities, but in my settings at least this would risk running aground in two ways:
--- all deities in all my settings work on an underlying universal chassis that players might never see or know about; a player-designed deity might run afoul of this without realizing it, meaning I'd have to keep a hard veto power
--- my pantheons are already designed intentionally so as to allow a wide variance of Cleric types and alignments to be chosen for play; and some of the "holes" left in those lineups are intentional. For example, one can play a Dwarven Nature Cleric (a.k.a. Druid) in my game but to do so said Dwarf has to go out of culture to find a deity as no Dwarven deities support that type of Cleric - what self-respecting Dwarf wants to spend time frolicking about in forests when there's good mining to be done?. A player inventing a Dwarven nature deity to fill this hole would violate this intentional design and in so doing probably force me to come up with a completely bespoke spell list just for it; and that's a crap-ton of work I ain't about to do just for one character, thank you very much.
* - the exception of course being if the PCs are deities, but I've never tried that type of game.