Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6457841" data-attributes="member: 4937">I allow the debate over to what extent divine beings need and benefit from worship to be a point of religious contention on my world.  However, without spilling a lot of campaign level secrets, I'll say that the dominant paradigm finds the notion that immortals depend on belief to be real to be inconsistent with experience.   First, if that was true it would be likely that there would exist some memory of the time before belief created the deities and this memory would be difficult to erase precisely because it itself would create beliefs about reality.   Secondly, it would imply that mortals themselves are gods and collectively have even vastly greater power than the gods collectively, something that does not appear to be true (and has within the worlds history been tested).  If belief really is that powerful, it would seem like it could do much more than it does.As for alternative approaches, again, avoiding campaign level secrets, my signature contains information that suggests one that is commonly believed - that it is the memes themselves which first came into existence and give rise to minds - not the other way around.   That is, this being a world with real Platonic solids, it is the memes themselves that are the actual progenitors of both gods and men.  Since the memes are nearly indestructible, it is hardly surprising that their first order manifestations would be immortal.  A boogey man is just an incarnation of a certain sort of fear.</blockquote>

Verification