|
|
Post by friartook on Jun 6, 2016 14:44:55 GMT
For a farmer to say, "I have faith Pelor will protect my village from the marauding undead," is functionally equivalent to me saying, "I have faith my parents will love me even if I muck things up a bit." While I hate to belabor this point and argue, I have to say that I think this is a false equivalency. Most likely, you've "mucked things up a bit" in the past, and your parents have shown you they still love you. I believe wholeheartedly that the sun will rise tomorrow. I believe this because the sun has risen every day of my life for the past 36 years. I have a strong pattern of evidence over many years to back up this belief. I also believe that occasionally I can feel a pattern larger than myself, and sometimes I feel that I can glimpse a bit of that pattern, and use it to guide my actions. I have no empirical evidence that such a pattern exists (beyond the rules of physics) and even less evidence that it actively guides my actions. But I still believe such a pattern exists, and I still use my brief and imperfect glimpses of it to guide my actions. To me, that is faith. |
|
|
|
Post by robosnake on Jun 6, 2016 17:33:52 GMT
Sounds like a reasonable example of faith to me - but I don't think it is materially different from your faith in the sun rising, it's just a difference of degree of certainty. I think there is an unbroken sliding scale between your belief about the sun rising and your belief about the larger pattern guiding your actions, but neither one of those faiths is blind. They have different degree of certainty, different kinds of evidence, and different amounts of evidence, but they're the same kind of thing. Blind faith would be, to me, something more like you believing that tomorrow the sun will not rise, adamantly, despite evidence to the contrary.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2016 23:18:05 GMT
You're still applying a narrow definition of faith to all usages of the term. That was my whole point.
Whether faith in behavior (trust) is more or less meaningful/powerful than faith in existence (without evidence) is an entirely different argument. They're both forms of faith, and how that faith translates into power in any given world, whichever form it takes, is totally up to the world builder.
|
|
|
|
Post by robosnake on Jun 7, 2016 16:17:21 GMT
Interesting. I took the definition of faith as blind faith to be too narrow and was trying to broaden it. Or, were you responding to me?
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jun 7, 2016 17:50:42 GMT
That last message was directed at friartook. Debating semantics doesn't usually go anywhere productive, so I was trying to be brief. Addressee got lost in the paring.
|
|
|
|
Post by friartook on Jun 7, 2016 18:18:25 GMT
That last message was directed at friartook. Debating semantics doesn't usually go anywhere productive, so I was trying to be brief. Addressee got lost in the paring. Agreed. When I realized that was the discussion we were having, I stepped back to assess. In the end, I was looking to explore the differences between religions in our world and those in a fantasy world containing divine magic. How does the presence of divine magic change our assumptions about religion, faith, and divinity? |
|
|
|
Post by robosnake on Jun 7, 2016 21:19:45 GMT
That last message was directed at friartook. Debating semantics doesn't usually go anywhere productive, so I was trying to be brief. Addressee got lost in the paring. Agreed. When I realized that was the discussion we were having, I stepped back to assess. In the end, I was looking to explore the differences between religions in our world and those in a fantasy world containing divine magic. How does the presence of divine magic change our assumptions about religion, faith, and divinity? Word. It's a tough comparison, since there has obviously been so much change between today and the historically comparable time periods when we're looking at fantasy (i.e. dark ages/medieval Europe). One important difference I can see is the difference between believing in gods, or maybe understanding there to be gods in a world with regular divine magic, on the one hand and personally trusting those gods on the other hand. I.e., I know Pelor is real, and that Pelor intervenes in the world, but do I think Pelor will intervene in my own life in any given situation? In this way, the difference between a divine caster and a regular person is vast. A regular person might acknowledge the gods' existence, take it as a given, give them their due and so on, but never really see them as intervening in their lives beyond maintaining the natural forces and processes. This means that your average commoner in a D&D world could be a deist for all intents and purposes. So one key question is: Do the gods intervene in the world on a regular basis, or do they only (or primarily) intervene through divine casters? There's a big difference, world-building-wise, between just those two options. In a more animistic or polytheistic world, people might assume the gods intervene on a daily basis. It's just part of every day life. In a world that might have lots of gods but which is more influenced by monotheistic religions (I see D&D as more like this in most cases) then access to the divine is more exclusively the purview of the chosen few. |
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jun 8, 2016 19:34:46 GMT
I want to clarify first that my world is, technically, a world with unconfirmed gods. There's a lot of evidence suggesting they exist, so it doesn't take a great leap of faith to buy into the idea.
Accordingly, most inhabitants of my world operate under the assumption the gods are real. Yet the nature of the gods is more contested, and the "key question" you pose is at the center of the debate. There are two spectrums, Interventionist-Passive and Intelligent-Conceptual, which have produced four major modalities of religion on Sheth.
I describe the competing theories in my setting documents, but I avoid saying which one is correct. This is an intentional design goal, as I want players to engage with divine magic in a way that matches their character concept. In the previous iteration of my setting, my gods were highly meddlesome and 100% confirmed. I moved away from this because I didn't like the idea of treating gods like NPCs. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, it's just not what I wanted to do.
|
|
