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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Goblyns Hoard" data-source="post: 4508901" data-attributes="member: 19970">I'm going to nit pick here for the purpose of a (hopefully) interesting conversation.I'd say that it isn't the church's power that is near absolute in this situation - it's the god's.  The reason for this nit pick is the corruption that was rife within some churches in medieval Europe - where the church was functioning to put power in the hands of the leaders of the church, and not always acting in line with the teachings of their own faith.  In that situation discussion of the church's power is obviously appropriate, the church leaders were usurping the power of their god to enrich their own mortal lives.But if the power to accomplish things on the mortal plane comes directly from the ability of a god to impart their power on clerics, then those clerics don't have the ability to usurp that power.  If they start to use their power for their own benefit over the will of their god, they're going to find out very quickly that those powers just don't work any more.  So they have to continue to go about doing what their god actually wants them to do, which actually requires a great deal of character to do.  As a comparison consider Bartleby in Dogma - pissed off at the fact that he has to serve for eternity, has plenty of power but is very constrained in how he can utilise it, and when he steps out of the lines gets crapped upon by god...So in a world where the gods are very evident it's possible paladins & clerics will be quite rare - no one needs to be convinced by you that the gods exist and you spend your entire life serving their will without a lot of freedom to do what you want to do...</blockquote>

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