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[Dirst]

Groups will find a way to have differences over region.  What constitutes a major difference is definitely relative.  The differences I meant were differences in understanding how the world works, and each can develop methods that shouldn't work by the other's worldview.

"But, but how did you..."

Note that they could be looking at the same metaphysics, but by random chance created seemingly contradictory solutions because neither understands the "real" rules.

If you ever saw Babylon 5, there were races that believed in reincarnation and races that believed in an afterlife and races that believed the soul is lost upon death.  The third group developed a tech to capture the soul of a dying person, much to the consternation of the first two groups.  Cue violence.

[cochramd]

Not familiar with Babylon 5, but that stuff sounds intriguing. If you could capture the soul of a dying person, wouldn't that really be the first step to proving once and for all what happens beyond the pale shadow of death? You could devise some sort of soul-tracker and place it on the soul of a volunteer and let it go. Worst case scenario is that passing to the afterlife is indistinguishable from just disappearing, and that still lets you ultimately prove or disprove reincarnation.

Then again, could any world really handle the consequences of certain religious beliefs being proved to be objectively wrong?

[GoblinCookie]

I agree that the Fire vs. Water, Earth vs. Air oppositions are definitely more open to interpretation & opinion than many, more absolute, oppositions like Gaiety vs. Misery, Food vs. Poison, etc. So I say [again] that the RNG should have differently-weighted odds of certain combinations; Flat-out contradictory domains like Law and Chaos should probably have a 1% chance of being given to the same deity (who assumedly would be interpreted as the god of the Chaos-Order continuum), while those with some grey area could be more in the 5-25% range.

The opposition between fire and water, until you invent the whole meta concept of elements is basically not any different from those other divisions. 

I'm not going to trouble myself with the academia nuts running rampant in the handful of recent posts above, but rather take a different tack: The Greek playwrights depicted their gods as vain, debaucherous, jealous, lazy, wrathful, and indignant, for all the same reasons that men would be expected to feel such emotions. Moreover, we find that the tradition of writing gods in this way lasted for hundreds of years, even longer if we include the Romans' wholesale co-opting of the pantheon. This is a far cry from "basically decaying and about to be overthrown". The Norse gods are a similarly flawed and rambunctious lot, and although their sagas are much more difficult to date (Viking bards hardly ever wrote anything down), they do seem to have lasted for a similarly long time.

The decay and death of a religion takes a long time.  Yes the Norse had a similar situation god-wise as the Greeks+Romans did but remember they also ended up going the same way, they fell to Christianity despite having the 'defender's advantage' of being the established religion and the traditional religion of the culture at the same time.  They also did not fall because of Christianity's militery might, they fell despite having autonomous states with their own independant armies.

What I am suggesting is that things 'went too far' along that route, the stories/myths initially exist and strengthen the religion because they allow people to relate to the gods on a non-abstract level.  As I have mentioned before, I believe the strength of a religion depends upon it's ability to balance out the abstract divine spiritual/elemental 'presence' with the quasi-humanity of a bieng with which human beings can relate.  The poets while initially useful for this purpose can end up developing into their own thing independant of their religious function and the gods start to lose out to actual human beings as a result of the loss of the abstract presence.

The Religion arc will surely give us Priests, but it may not be until the Magic arc that those Priests can cast actual spells in relation to one or more spheres in their god's domain. One can certainly argue that these spells would not "profit" the god in terms of spiritual energy unless they were performed before a fairly large audience, but that only seems fair. The deity's physical manifestation itself could be looked on as miraculous, and seems appropriate for the anointing of a new priest. Whether or not the god possesses a human-like personality seems irrelevant.

If gods can cast fire spells by drawing upon the 'god of fire' unless we have a quasi-human intelligence to relate to then all he is doing is using the power or force of fire.  That is the other side of the coin, what you end up with if you identify the god too closely with the thing that it is god of, the god comes to mean nothing but the thing itself and is redundant. 

As if a female pregnancy goddess couldn't initiate a pregnancy every bit as easily--and making the deity male would raise the question of "if it was the god who got her pregnant, then what exactly did the husband contribute?" Personally, I prefer a goddess who visits every conception to bless the union with a tiny spark of new life broken off of her own unborn fetus. She provides neither sperm nor egg, she merely controls the merging of the two, and protects the fetus during gestation.

I said that both of them are possible.  A female pregnancy goddess however cannot initiate a pregnancy or else she is male, this is why I said she wins the symbolic game.  A male pregnancy goddess can initiate a pregnancy and hence relate directly to his followers winning the personality game, but is threatened with being replaced by the actual personality of the husband. 

First, no one said the world is fair.

Second, even if only certain people have access to detailed scientific knowledge, nothing you said impeaches the fact that they still know more than you do and the most efficient way to advance knowledge is to "stand on the shoulders of giants."  This is an inescapable consequence of limited human capacity and the gains of specialization, and as such it is not restricted to science.  Artists today benefit from the knowledge of artists before them, farmers today benefit from the knowledge of farmers before them, etc.

Third, there is pedagogical value in letting a student "reinvent the wheel" but there isn't any value to be gained from being intentionally ignorant of what has gone before you.  Even if you think the current framework is wrong, it's still much easier to build a better one if you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current one.

Ultimately every human brain is inherantly basically the same as every other human brain.  The situation is rather like the relationship between the muscles of the athlete and the couch potato.  The athlete does not have strong muscles because his muscles were born made of steel while the couch potato's muscles were not, they are strong because the athlete trained when the couch potato reclined in front of the TV.  While it is of course alright to learn from other people, 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is dangerous to the intellect for the exact same reason as lounging in front of the TV is dangerous to the athlete. 

It is functional as long as the giants live because it allows a division of labour but that is what makes the situation so deadly.  Since there is no inherant difference in ability but simply a social heirachy that defines intelligent and ability, the time inevitably comes when the giants die off and have to be replaced.  Except that the dwarves are so ingrained in the habit of standing on giants shoulders that they end up being unable to replace them and we end up with a situation where we end up being bound by the dead hand of yesterday's 'great men'. 

This is a rule that applies to everything intellectual; over time the intellectual quality gradually decays because the students replace the masters but remain dependant upon those masters even though they are dead.  This continues until the situation becomes so decayed that it becomes possible for a new force to arise and sweep aside the whole intellectual establishment, at which point the cycle simply begins all over again. 

This is a much better argument that simply asserting that human-like gods make a religion weak.  And a similar view had been popular in anthropology, that there was some natural life cycle to a civilization's spirituality from shamanism to polytheism to monotheism to rationality.  It made sense on the surface, but later scholars showed that the dominance of religions has a lot more to do with political power than the inherent rightness of one set of beliefs.  In particular, Christianity is chuck full of co-opted pagan symbols and festivals to transition the masses into believing a system that did a better job of justifying the king's power.  Note that demonstrating the causality of power -> religion instead of the reverse required knowing the prior framework very very well.

History is hard for precisely the reasons you cited, namely that history is written by the victors.  Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists need to sift through a lot of noise to try to get to the "ground truth."  It's also a human endeavor, which means it is subject to errors, prejudices, fads, politics, etc. but it does advance.  This is relevant for game design because a really awesome world generator would be one that keeps the metaphysics distinct from the explanations of those metaphysics, allowing evolution over time.  The apparent metaphysics in a region could be subject to local influences, leading to incompatible beliefs in different parts of the world... which is much more interesting than people simply following different gods that happen to be rivals.

Political power is a red herring, a powerful religion that is on the ascendant ends up with political power since it can command the political allegiances of a large number of people and this stands to rise over time.  Established but decaying religions use political power that they earned in the past to prop themselves up but it does not avail them in the end.  That is what happened with the Roman and Norse religions in the end, they were decaying and weak but they were able to buy themselves a few centuries of extra time by leaning on their states. 

All (theistic) religions are the same in my system, there is no distinction between polytheism and monotheism at all here.  The exact same problems that afflicted the pagan religions also afflicted the monotheistic religions that came after them.  Yes having human gods is a deadly problem, the main reason is that it causes the gods which are absent to be replaced by human disciples.  The problem is that these human disciples do not excersise dynamic leadership or intelligence because the actual gods suck up the real leadership/intelligence and are not physically there (similar to the dead giants problem of the above passage).

Why did the Catholic Church have such a problem with Galileo and Copernicus?  The reason is that the Pope is effectively a Protestant, he has no higher authority to go on but he is only Pope because he was such a great beacon of orthodoxy, this means that he needs an authority to cite but no authority exists except scripture.  This means that they become extremely brittle, unable to adapt to new developments since the religion is left dependant upon a human-god that is absent, which by neccesity is replaced by a regent that cannot really rule because his authority is siphoned away by the god-man who is not there. 

[Dirst]

Ultimately every human brain is inherantly basically the same as every other human brain.  The situation is rather like the relationship between the muscles of the athlete and the couch potato.  The athlete does not have strong muscles because his muscles were born made of steel while the couch potato's muscles were not, they are strong because the athlete trained when the couch potato reclined in front of the TV.  While it is of course alright to learn from other people, 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is dangerous to the intellect for the exact same reason as lounging in front of the TV is dangerous to the athlete. 

It is functional as long as the giants live because it allows a division of labour but that is what makes the situation so deadly.  Since there is no inherant difference in ability but simply a social heirachy that defines intelligent and ability, the time inevitably comes when the giants die off and have to be replaced.  Except that the dwarves are so ingrained in the habit of standing on giants shoulders that they end up being unable to replace them and we end up with a situation where we end up being bound by the dead hand of yesterday's 'great men'. 

This is a rule that applies to everything intellectual; over time the intellectual quality gradually decays because the students replace the masters but remain dependant upon those masters even though they are dead.  This continues until the situation becomes so decayed that it becomes possible for a new force to arise and sweep aside the whole intellectual establishment, at which point the cycle simply begins all over again.

I think you seriously misunderstood the meaning of that quote.  The "giant" here is not a single prior scholar, but the combined knowledge of all that went before you in the field.  There would be a very real threat of hollowed-out expertise if things weren't written down in a way that the latter scholars could comprehend, and this does happen on a small scale when The One Guy Who Knows How The Machine Works retires from his workplace... but it is not a problem that afflicts the arts or sciences generally.  The makers of powerdrills are perfectly capable of designing and building handdrills, and so on.  Instances of "How the fuck did the ancients do that?" are pretty rare.

One quibble I do have with the current publication system is that reviewers tend to rely a bit too much on authors to double-check the assumptions of their citations.  It's all well and good to use prior results as a starting point for your own innovation, but it's possible to use a prior result outside its proper scope.  If you're building something it might fail spectacularly under conditions you thought it could handle (Tacoma Narrows bridge), and if there is no physical item a hidden assumption can lurk under the surface for a long time before someone checks if it's actually appropriate in its newer applications (examples of that are highly technical and way way way outside the scope of this thread).  This is close to the hollowed-out expertise problem, but one of the advantages of published scientific results is that it is virtually certain that some student somewhere will come up with an application that exposes the hidden assumption.

My research involves a lot of econometrics, which at its core is linear algebra.  I have preformed multiple regression using pencil and paper to ensure that I understood what was going on, but I did not feel it necessary to re-invent the pencil or the paper.

Political power is a red herring, a powerful religion that is on the ascendant ends up with political power since it can command the political allegiances of a large number of people and this stands to rise over time.  Established but decaying religions use political power that they earned in the past to prop themselves up but it does not avail them in the end.  That is what happened with the Roman and Norse religions in the end, they were decaying and weak but they were able to buy themselves a few centuries of extra time by leaning on their states.

This is a perfectly reasonable take on history, but as I said historians (who apparently had nothing better to do) disentangled the politics and the religion and came to the conclusion that political power tends to precede religious power.  The Church of England did not spring unbidden from the minds of the British peasantry, or even the British priests.  The implication of this direction of causality is that your missionary should concentrate on converting the elites.  Worked for Catholicism (which targeted nobles), but not for Scientology (which targeted celebrities).  An important constraint is that the religion needs can't be so repugnant to the masses that they overcome their political loyalties and burn the converted elites as heretics.

All (theistic) religions are the same in my system, there is no distinction between polytheism and monotheism at all here.  The exact same problems that afflicted the pagan religions also afflicted the monotheistic religions that came after them.  Yes having human gods is a deadly problem, the main reason is that it causes the gods which are absent to be replaced by human disciples.  The problem is that these human disciples do not excersise dynamic leadership or intelligence because the actual gods suck up the real leadership/intelligence and are not physically there (similar to the dead giants problem of the above passage).

Why did the Catholic Church have such a problem with Galileo and Copernicus?  The reason is that the Pope is effectively a Protestant, he has no higher authority to go on but he is only Pope because he was such a great beacon of orthodoxy, this means that he needs an authority to cite but no authority exists except scripture.  This means that they become extremely brittle, unable to adapt to new developments since the religion is left dependant upon a human-god that is absent, which by neccesity is replaced by a regent that cannot really rule because his authority is siphoned away by the god-man who is not there.

We're not discussing your system.  We're discussing suggestions that Toady might make to his system, and real-world anthropology can be a good guide if not taken too far.

My personal take on the Papacy is that it's an adjustment mechanism built into the Catholic orthodoxy.  No one gets elected Pope until they're near the end of their life expectancy... they've spent their whole lives inside the system and have two or three really great ideas on how to change things, honed by years and years of working out all the details in their spare time.  The new Pope is invested with lots of executive authority thus getting to implement his ideas, and is gone in relatively short order so someone else can implement his great ideas.  This sets up a system where things adapt, but slowly.  This system can get gummed up if a single Pope lives too long, which happened with John Paul II.

As for a general system, my understanding as a non-specialist in this area is that rulers need some justification for their authority.  Some do this by force of arms, others by an appeal to a higher authority, and many by a combination of the two.  This works fine until you get to the head of state... who is his/her higher authority?  Historically it would be the Higher Authority.  As I mentioned above, the elite's religion needs to be at least acceptable to the masses, so the masses ultimately hold (very loose) authority over the ruler which is articulated through priests.  Lots of moving parts in that system, and plenty of failure points.  You can cut out the middle-god and just appeal directly to democracy or republicanism, where in the latter case the judiciary takes on the additional role previously held by the priesthood.

In a game context, religion can influence ethics and values, with the nobles' beliefs having an outsized effect, but a faith that is too far outside the mainstream will be limited to lurking in the shadows.  Over time, a civ's climate may shift enough that a mainstream religion falls out of favor (e.g., paganism) or that a marginalized faith comes out into the open (e.g., modern Wicca).  There is no evidence that modern Wicca is a direct continuation of the older pagan religion, but for the purposes of a game mechanic it'd be close enough to call a revival of the old faith.

[Blightedmarsh]

Political power is at the very heart of a powerful organized religion. Examples:

The Doctrine of Christianity was devised by the council of Nicea at the behest of Constantine. It was built from the ground up out of bits an pieces of christian thought and pre-existing dogma to A) get converts so it can B) Solidify the empire.

Look at the Neo-confusian compromise, how it took elements of the three great teachings of china with the expressed purpose of facilitating a well ordered, stable conservative state.

Look how the Egyptions treated the Pharoes as the living embodiment of god or how the kings of Mesopotamia where supposed to act as the avatars and agents of the gods in this world.

Look how the druids monopolized political power in the Celtic world. A king could not punish anyone under the protection of a druid nor even meet with an ambassador until after the druids had met with them and gave permission.

Look at Assur; the Assyrians who bear his name believed that they would have to keep fighting and keep wining or the world would end. They built one of the first and one of the most bloodthirsty empires in human history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert,_Duke_of_Prussia

Look how the grand master of the monastic order of the Teutonic knights converted to Protestantism so he could marry, found a dynasty and ensure the lands he held remained in his own family. This gave birth to the Dutchy of Prussia and eventually Germany itself. Something that as a catholic in his position he could not otherwise do.

A religion on the make will reach out to those with power and offer them something they want; mostly legitimacy. Religions that do this well rise and hold onto power, religions that fail to do this fall under the harsh cut and thrust of real politique.

[cochramd]

(removed)

[SixOfSpades]

Yes the Norse had a similar situation god-wise as the Greeks+Romans did but remember they also ended up going the same way, they fell to Christianity despite having the 'defender's advantage' of being the established religion and the traditional religion of the culture at the same time.  They also did not fall because of Christianity's militery might, they fell despite having autonomous states with their own independant armies.

What I am suggesting is that things 'went too far' along that route, the stories/myths initially exist and strengthen the religion because they allow people to relate to the gods on a non-abstract level.  As I have mentioned before, I believe the strength of a religion depends upon it's ability to balance out the abstract divine spiritual/elemental 'presence' with the quasi-humanity of a bieng with which human beings can relate.

And, tell me, would this "balance" that you've been talking about, this ideal of a perfect mixture of both Human and Divine aspects in a civilization's god(s), have anything at all to do with your own Christianity? It sounds awfully like you're reaching for arguments that try to spin all of history and anthropology into saying that your personal faith is somehow objectively superior, and/or essential to the long-term survival of a culture.

You imply that there is only ONE really successful way to run a religion . . . and yet you say that *I* am closed-minded and hidebound because I keep insisting that fire & water don't get along?

The Religion arc will surely give us Priests, but it may not be until the Magic arc that those Priests can cast actual spells in relation to one or more spheres in their god's domain. One can certainly argue that these spells would not "profit" the god in terms of spiritual energy unless they were performed before a fairly large audience, but that only seems fair. The deity's physical manifestation itself could be looked on as miraculous, and seems appropriate for the anointing of a new priest. Whether or not the god possesses a human-like personality seems irrelevant.

If gods can cast fire spells by drawing upon the 'god of fire' unless we have a quasi-human intelligence to relate to then all he is doing is using the power or force of fire.  That is the other side of the coin, what you end up with if you identify the god too closely with the thing that it is god of, the god comes to mean nothing but the thing itself and is redundant.

Oh, I was drawing a distinction between "an intelligence" and "a human-like personality." All gods must have the former--at the bare minimum, a deity must appear as a voice in at least one priest's mind, state his name & the major spheres of his dominion, and inform the priest of what pleases & displeases him. In contrast, whether or not a god has what we would consider to be a believable "human" disposition seems entirely optional. Deities such as Mars, Juno, and Loki were rich with personality, and usually easy to relate to. Contrarily, others like Hades & Thoth were distant & aloof, simply performing their functions and with very little in the way of recorded personality traits.

If the god of Fire is of the former group, with a set of personality traits that at least some of his followers can match closely enough to get chummy with their deity, then he might even make a personal appearance when invoked by a favored priest, ensuring a strong worship base from any witnesses. But even if he's extremely reticent, he would still answer priests' calls to make fire behave in unexpected ways, simply because it would strengthen faith in him to do so. Being confused with his own domain is avoided because it will be observed that only his priests can direct fire in that way, and the priests cannot claim that they alone are controlling the fire, because they know that to steal their god's credit is to risk being turned into a wereguppy or whatever.

A female pregnancy goddess however cannot initiate a pregnancy or else she is male . . . A male pregnancy goddess can initiate a pregnancy

You didn't get me there. What I was proposing was that the conception resulted as the combination of three partners: The husband, the wife, and the deity. In this regard, a god of either gender would be equally effective in promoting fertilization, but only a female one could ever stand for the stress, nourishing, protection, and pain of carrying a fetus to term.

[cochramd]

Oh, I was drawing a distinction between "an intelligence" and "a human-like personality." All gods must have the former--at the bare minimum, a deity must appear as a voice in at least one priest's mind, state his name & the major spheres of his dominion, and inform the priest of what pleases & displeases him. In contrast, whether or not a god has what we would consider to be a believable "human" disposition seems entirely optional. Deities such as Mars, Juno, and Loki were rich with personality, and usually easy to relate to. Contrarily, others like Hades & Thoth were distant & aloof, simply performing their functions and with very little in the way of recorded personality traits.

You say that as if preferring to keep one's nose to the grindstone/in a book to the point of not really interacting with the rest of the world outside of work were not a perfectly human trait that we've all seen in someone we've met. I think that, much like those people, such gods could be quite conversationalists if you got them talking about their line of work (and with Thoth, god of knowledge and wisdom, that could be anything really). Such conversations would not make for myths but rather for the basis of holy texts.

As for the whole water/fire debate, you're too stuck on the preconceptions of Western classical elements. When viewed through the lens of Chinese classical elements (wood, water, fire, metal and earth), water and fire are no more or less sensible than any other elemental combination.

[GoblinCookie]

I think you seriously misunderstood the meaning of that quote.  The "giant" here is not a single prior scholar, but the combined knowledge of all that went before you in the field.  There would be a very real threat of hollowed-out expertise if things weren't written down in a way that the latter scholars could comprehend, and this does happen on a small scale when The One Guy Who Knows How The Machine Works retires from his workplace... but it is not a problem that afflicts the arts or sciences generally.  The makers of powerdrills are perfectly capable of designing and building handdrills, and so on.  Instances of "How the fuck did the ancients do that?" are pretty rare.

One quibble I do have with the current publication system is that reviewers tend to rely a bit too much on authors to double-check the assumptions of their citations.  It's all well and good to use prior results as a starting point for your own innovation, but it's possible to use a prior result outside its proper scope.  If you're building something it might fail spectacularly under conditions you thought it could handle (Tacoma Narrows bridge), and if there is no physical item a hidden assumption can lurk under the surface for a long time before someone checks if it's actually appropriate in its newer applications (examples of that are highly technical and way way way outside the scope of this thread).  This is close to the hollowed-out expertise problem, but one of the advantages of published scientific results is that it is virtually certain that some student somewhere will come up with an application that exposes the hidden assumption.

My research involves a lot of econometrics, which at its core is linear algebra.  I have preformed multiple regression using pencil and paper to ensure that I understood what was going on, but I did not feel it necessary to re-invent the pencil or the paper.

Yes the giants are usually a group not an individual, that does not change the situation one bit.

The process is not something that happens instantly in it's full extent the moment that the original group of 'giants' dies off.  The reason is that as the students take over their role, they 'grow into' the role and their abilities increase accordingly.  But their brains are not completely flexible and hence have developed a dependancy that hampers their ability to replace them by a certain degree.  Say they end up being 99% as intelligent as their teachers but over time their own students are 99% as intelligent as they are so over the centuries it all adds up.  This checks the exponential advantage that they should obtain as a result of the ever increasing body of knowledge they have. 

The process can be slowed down or sped up, the more authoritarian your group is, the quicker the process happens since the intellectual distance between the masters and students is greater within an authoritarian group than in a less authoritarian group.  Think of it like old age, it can be slowed down or speed up but it happens to everyone in the end. 

This is a perfectly reasonable take on history, but as I said historians (who apparently had nothing better to do) disentangled the politics and the religion and came to the conclusion that political power tends to precede religious power.  The Church of England did not spring unbidden from the minds of the British peasantry, or even the British priests.  The implication of this direction of causality is that your missionary should concentrate on converting the elites.  Worked for Catholicism (which targeted nobles), but not for Scientology (which targeted celebrities).  An important constraint is that the religion needs can't be so repugnant to the masses that they overcome their political loyalties and burn the converted elites as heretics.

I am pretty sure the 'historians' are just Nietzsche fans applying his statement about religion being about power rather than truth to history.  It has the universal Nietsche problem, placing a great onus on power and the will to power but not defining what constitutes power or how it comes about.  The problem is that a successful religion is a political asset to the elites, one that that they want to butter up. 

Political power is useful mainly for buttressing up weak religions against rivals and for administering the coup-de-grace to defeated religions that would otherwise eventually reform and regroup.  In cases where two rival religions power is in balance they can tip the scales in the favour of one religion of the other as well, such as in the Church of England situation. 

We're not discussing your system.  We're discussing suggestions that Toady might make to his system, and real-world anthropology can be a good guide if not taken too far.

My personal take on the Papacy is that it's an adjustment mechanism built into the Catholic orthodoxy.  No one gets elected Pope until they're near the end of their life expectancy... they've spent their whole lives inside the system and have two or three really great ideas on how to change things, honed by years and years of working out all the details in their spare time.  The new Pope is invested with lots of executive authority thus getting to implement his ideas, and is gone in relatively short order so someone else can implement his great ideas.  This sets up a system where things adapt, but slowly.  This system can get gummed up if a single Pope lives too long, which happened with John Paul II.

As for a general system, my understanding as a non-specialist in this area is that rulers need some justification for their authority.  Some do this by force of arms, others by an appeal to a higher authority, and many by a combination of the two.  This works fine until you get to the head of state... who is his/her higher authority?  Historically it would be the Higher Authority.  As I mentioned above, the elite's religion needs to be at least acceptable to the masses, so the masses ultimately hold (very loose) authority over the ruler which is articulated through priests.  Lots of moving parts in that system, and plenty of failure points.  You can cut out the middle-god and just appeal directly to democracy or republicanism, where in the latter case the judiciary takes on the additional role previously held by the priesthood.

In a game context, religion can influence ethics and values, with the nobles' beliefs having an outsized effect, but a faith that is too far outside the mainstream will be limited to lurking in the shadows.  Over time, a civ's climate may shift enough that a mainstream religion falls out of favor (e.g., paganism) or that a marginalized faith comes out into the open (e.g., modern Wicca).  There is no evidence that modern Wicca is a direct continuation of the older pagan religion, but for the purposes of a game mechanic it'd be close enough to call a revival of the old faith.

Rulers cannot inherantly need a justification for their authority at all.  The reason is that anything that might be used as a justification for the rulers authority itself is another ruler whose authority must itself be justified and so it goes on in infinite regress.  The whole concept of authority needing a justification is actually an idea intended to puppet one set of authorities to another set of authorities.  In the religious context the idea of the king's authority coming from God is either designed to give the clergy political domination over the kings (the Catholic system) or to give the king political domination over the clergy (the Orthodox/Protestant system).  In either case it is designed to force somebody else to have to defer to you in order to hold power in their own field. 

(removed)

And, tell me, would this "balance" that you've been talking about, this ideal of a perfect mixture of both Human and Divine aspects in a civilization's god(s), have anything at all to do with your own Christianity? It sounds awfully like you're reaching for arguments that try to spin all of history and anthropology into saying that your personal faith is somehow objectively superior, and/or essential to the long-term survival of a culture.

You imply that there is only ONE really successful way to run a religion . . . and yet you say that *I* am closed-minded and hidebound because I keep insisting that fire & water don't get along?

The ideal religion in these terms would be Hindiusm.  Because it was able to achieve (or mantain) that balance it was able to survive while the other pagan religions did not.  Christianity actually leans too much towards the human side of things and this is it's weakness, why it lost out to Islam and to unbelievers. 

Oh, I was drawing a distinction between "an intelligence" and "a human-like personality." All gods must have the former--at the bare minimum, a deity must appear as a voice in at least one priest's mind, state his name & the major spheres of his dominion, and inform the priest of what pleases & displeases him. In contrast, whether or not a god has what we would consider to be a believable "human" disposition seems entirely optional. Deities such as Mars, Juno, and Loki were rich with personality, and usually easy to relate to. Contrarily, others like Hades & Thoth were distant & aloof, simply performing their functions and with very little in the way of recorded personality traits.

If the god of Fire is of the former group, with a set of personality traits that at least some of his followers can match closely enough to get chummy with their deity, then he might even make a personal appearance when invoked by a favored priest, ensuring a strong worship base from any witnesses. But even if he's extremely reticent, he would still answer priests' calls to make fire behave in unexpected ways, simply because it would strengthen faith in him to do so. Being confused with his own domain is avoided because it will be observed that only his priests can direct fire in that way, and the priests cannot claim that they alone are controlling the fire, because they know that to steal their god's credit is to risk being turned into a wereguppy or whatever.

If the fire god becomes overly inhuman then there is a danger that it will simply become the same thing as fire and will become redundant.  If the fire god becomes overly human then there is a danger that the clergy will simply become regents of the fire-god, authorities in a sense but also lacking in authority at the same time; a deadly mixture.  The personal nature of the religion requires a personality to head it, but the fact that the fire-god is not physically present undermines the effective authority of it's own priests; an authority it vitally needs. 

You didn't get me there. What I was proposing was that the conception resulted as the combination of three partners: The husband, the wife, and the deity. In this regard, a god of either gender would be equally effective in promoting fertilization, but only a female one could ever stand for the stress, nourishing, protection, and pain of carrying a fetus to term.

Yes, the female deity could stand for those things but cannot actually create a pregnancy. 

[cochramd]

(removed)

[Bumber]

Yes, the female deity could stand for those things but cannot actually create a pregnancy.

It's perfectly reasonable to believe a female deity to be responsible for the spark of life required, regardless of their human form. Maybe she tends a heavenly peach tree and comes down and shoves them into peoples' fertile wombs.

Don't get caught up on how pregnancy literally works. This is mythology.

[Dirst]

Yes the giants are usually a group not an individual, that does not change the situation one bit.

The process is not something that happens instantly in it's full extent the moment that the original group of 'giants' dies off.  The reason is that as the students take over their role, they 'grow into' the role and their abilities increase accordingly.

What the hell are you talking about?  It's like you're running a D&D game a little too literally.  "Yes, but when you killed off the Cult Leader, this Cult Member became the new Cult Leader.  Since a Cult Leader has two more hit dice, he's conscious again."

But their brains are not completely flexible and hence have developed a dependancy that hampers their ability to replace them by a certain degree.  Say they end up being 99% as intelligent as their teachers but over time their own students are 99% as intelligent as they are so over the centuries it all adds up.  This checks the exponential advantage that they should obtain as a result of the ever increasing body of knowledge they have. 

A single mind hasn't been able to hold the whole of human knowledge since Ancient Greece.  We are objectively not worse off than the Ancient Greeks.  Writing stuff down is a good idea, which is why it's been popular for millennia.

The process can be slowed down or sped up, the more authoritarian your group is, the quicker the process happens since the intellectual distance between the masters and students is greater within an authoritarian group than in a less authoritarian group.  Think of it like old age, it can be slowed down or speed up but it happens to everyone in the end.

The bigger the overlap of in-brain knowledge across "generations," the slower knowledge advances.  The bigger the overlap of in-brain knowledge across professions, the less efficient the economy.  Most programmers have no earthly clue how to design and build a microprocessor, but the good ones know what it does and how to use it.

If you are so worried about using things you can't create yourself (the very possibility of which turns out to be a thorn in the side of scholars who believe all of perception is socially constructed), it's best to stop using a computer.  And English.

Rulers cannot inherantly need a justification for their authority at all.  The reason is that anything that might be used as a justification for the rulers authority itself is another ruler whose authority must itself be justified and so it goes on in infinite regress.

It's almost like you didn't read a word I wrote.  Power can be exerted without any outside authority (e.g., holding a gun to your head), but it's typically easier to run an society bigger than a single room where authority is respected.  This way the health inspector can shut down an unsafe restaurant without the need to bring a SWAT team with him everywhere he goes.  But at some point transitive authority ends up at the top of the org chart and maintaining order requires some justification for why this particular person is allowed to give orders and delegate authority to the rest of the organization.  The justification may or may not involve a written constitution/covenant/charter, but at some point there will appeals to some nebulous but powerfule force.  It is helpful but not required that the nebulous force have traditional acceptance among the rank and file.

In a despotism, the appeal is to the loyalty of functionaries with an incentive to keep this particular despot in power.  In other words he personally keeps the gravy train rolling for those with the weapons.  One vulnerability in this system is to a significant fraction of the second-rung leaders banding together, so it's important to sow distrust through a police state.  In a run-of-the-mill monarchy, the appeal is to God (which has the side effect of empowering priests a bit).  God's authority ultimately derives from His foretold victory at Armageddon, and with eternal afterlife on the line you better be on the right side (i.e., Pascal's Wager).

The whole concept of authority needing a justification is actually an idea intended to puppet one set of authorities to another set of authorities.  In the religious context the idea of the king's authority coming from God is either designed to give the clergy political domination over the kings (the Catholic system) or to give the king political domination over the clergy (the Orthodox/Protestant system).  In either case it is designed to force somebody else to have to defer to you in order to hold power in their own field. 

You know that making someone do something they otherwise wouldn't do is the definition of power, right?  People using power when it's "the right tool for the job" isn't exactly surprising.  Things get interesting when a justification for power, made entirely for the ruler's expediency, has unforeseen ramifications.  The Russian Orthodox Church's stance on earthly authority came back to bite them when the Soviets came to power.

Critical thinking is very much an inherant ability.  A person cannot simply learn critical thinking as critical thinking consists of a person's ability *not* to be educated by others as opposed to their ability to be educated.  It is their ability to selectively not learn things that other people are trying to teach them and it is undermined by educational relationships for that reason.

Mark Twain famously said, "Never let schooling interfere with your education."  A desire to avoid indoctrination doesn't justify being willfully ignorant.

Who taught you this definition of critical thinking?  You should have selectively not learned that.

If the fire god becomes overly inhuman then there is a danger that it will simply become the same thing as fire and will become redundant.  If the fire god becomes overly human then there is a danger that the clergy will simply become regents of the fire-god, authorities in a sense but also lacking in authority at the same time; a deadly mixture.  The personal nature of the religion requires a personality to head it, but the fact that the fire-god is not physically present undermines the effective authority of it's own priests; an authority it vitally needs. 

There haven't been many burning bushes etc. recently, but plenty of people are off killing in the name of their god because a cleric told them to do so.  Seems that physical presence isn't necessary for effective appeals to authority.

One can also appeal to impersonal forces to get people to do things.  No one thinks that some climate god is going throw a tantrum if we don't cut CO₂ emissions, but appeals to climate change happen fairly routinely.  You can actually treat "rationality" (in that life-cycle-of-civilization sense) as a religion to a perfectly impersonal god.

That said, the game is more interesting if the gods have at least some personality to them.  And different pantheons can have different styles of depiction ranging from existing creatures to chimerical mixes to batshit random bodies, but in a way that aligns the depiction with the god's personality and Spheres.  Goddess of Motherhood as a bear guarding her cubs, fine.  Goddess of Motherhood as a bronze colossus, a bit harder to sell.

[cochramd]

That said, the game is more interesting if the gods have at least some personality to them.  And different pantheons can have different styles of depiction ranging from existing creatures to chimerical mixes to batshit random bodies, but in a way that aligns the depiction with the god's personality and Spheres.  Goddess of Motherhood as a bear guarding her cubs, fine.  Goddess of Motherhood as a bronze colossus, a bit harder to sell.

And getting back to the original argument, hard sells like that are still capable of working when you apply some creativity. Perhaps there's a world out there were bronze colossi have genders and reproduce (I know they don't by raws, but just play along with me on this) and female bronze colossi have strong maternal instincts similar to those found in bears. In that world, a mother bronze colossus would make just as good a form for a motherhood goddess as a mother bear would. In fact, they wouldn't even need to be able to reproduce for this to work; if female bronze colossi possessed maternal instincts and fulfilled them by adopting orphans, they'd still work as a motherhood goddess, though not as well as a mother bear would unless it was a goddess specifically of adoptive mothers. Hell, bronze colossi as they are would work perfectly fine for a motherhood goddess that focused entirely on the fury and ferocity of a mother protecting her child and none of the nurturing aspects of motherhood.

[SixOfSpades]

As for the whole water/fire debate, you're too stuck on the preconceptions of Western classical elements. When viewed through the lens of Chinese classical elements (wood, water, fire, metal and earth), water and fire are no more or less sensible than any other elemental combination.

Wood + Water = boats. Earth + Metal = mining. Earth + Fire = smelting, and magma. Fire + Metal = smithing. Earth + Water = farming. Some combinations make perfect sense, at least from the POV of their applications.
Wood + Fire? Fire consumes wood. Wood + Metal? Metal kills wood. Metal + Water? Water rusts & corrodes some metals. Some combinations make very little sense, as one of the partners is destroyed in the process.
Fire + Water? If the two are very precisely balanced, you get either a still for creating (some types of) booze, or obsidian. If the two are unbalanced, however, either the water extinguishes the fire or the magma instantly vaporizes the rain. So the combination both does and doesn't make sense.

Yes, I've been influenced by the Greek classical elements, but they also had Air & Earth in direct opposition, too, and you don't see me arguing for that rivalry--because it doesn't really apply to the real world. In addition, Toady seems to agree: As the game stands, the spheres of Fire and Water block each other, but Earth and Weather do not appear on the preclude list at all.

. . . Contrarily, others like Hades & Thoth were distant & aloof, simply performing their functions and with very little in the way of recorded personality traits.

You say that as if preferring to keep one's nose to the grindstone/in a book to the point of not really interacting with the rest of the world outside of work were not a perfectly human trait that we've all seen in someone we've met. I think that, much like those people, such gods could be quite conversationalists if you got them talking about their line of work.

I specified that those gods had a lack of recorded personality traits, so we don't know much about them. Sure, they could love conversation, they could have any number of quirks & eccentricities, but we just don't know. And if WE don't know, their worshipers arguably wouldn't either, making those deities more difficult to personally relate to . . . but, and this was my point, that doesn't seem to have made them any less effective as gods.

And, tell me, would this "balance" that you've been talking about, this ideal of a perfect mixture of both Human and Divine aspects in a civilization's god(s), have anything at all to do with your own Christianity? It sounds awfully like you're reaching for arguments that try to spin all of history and anthropology into saying that your personal faith is somehow objectively superior, and/or essential to the long-term survival of a culture. You imply that there is only ONE really successful way to run a religion . . .

The ideal religion in these terms would be Hindiusm.  Because it was able to achieve (or mantain) that balance it was able to survive while the other pagan religions did not.  Christianity actually leans too much towards the human side of things and this is it's weakness, why it lost out to Islam and to unbelievers.

Another common logical fallacy is to believe that correlation implies causation. Simply because Hinduism is one of the oldest extant religions on the planet is no reason to think that it's the Colonel's secret blend of humanity & divinity that has made it so. It's far more likely that it survived because its major worship centers happened to be located in an area with a historically low sociopolitical metabolism.

If the fire god becomes overly inhuman then there is a danger that it will simply become the same thing as fire and will become redundant.

Let's discuss the most impersonal example of this that I can think of: The Force. There most likely *is* an intelligence behind it, as users can be guided by its influence. But if so, it is an intelligence that apparently lacks a bodily avatar, and even a name; the god has merged with what it controls. But that hardly means that it's ceased to be a functioning religion, what with its thousands of clergy and at least one major schism (were the Jedi and Sith ever a single body?) to its name. But there is no actual worship, per se, and its rituals seem to be purely functional--you don't meditate to be closer to your god, you meditate to clear your mind of clutter that might make you lose a fight. Does this make the Force (or its sects) a less effective religion, at least in terms of the spiritual energy paid to its god(s)? Perhaps.

If the fire god becomes overly human then there is a danger that the clergy will simply become regents of the fire-god, authorities in a sense but also lacking in authority at the same time; a deadly mixture.  The personal nature of the religion requires a personality to head it, but the fact that the fire-god is not physically present undermines the effective authority of it's own priests; an authority it vitally needs.

The most humanlike god that comes to mind is Bacchus / Dionysus. Dude was throwing outdoor orgies everywhere he went, and people were freely doing likewise on his behalf when he wasn't around. Did the lack of his direct presence somehow weaken him, or his worship? Somehow, I doubt it.

[cochramd]

Wood + Water = boats. Earth + Metal = mining. Earth + Fire = smelting, and magma. Fire + Metal = smithing. Earth + Water = farming. Some combinations make perfect sense, at least from the POV of their applications.
Wood + Fire? Fire consumes wood. Wood + Metal? Metal kills wood. Metal + Water? Water rusts & corrodes some metals. Some combinations make very little sense, as one of the partners is destroyed in the process.
Fire + Water? If the two are very precisely balanced, you get either a still for creating (some types of) booze, or obsidian. If the two are unbalanced, however, either the water extinguishes the fire or the magma instantly vaporizes the rain. So the combination both does and doesn't make sense.

Let me elaborate a bit: each of the elements feeds another element (Wood feeds Fire, Fire creates Earth (ash), Earth bears Metal, Metal enriches Water (as in water with minerals is more beneficial to the body than pure water), Water nourishes Wood) and controls another element (Wood parts Earth with its roots, Earth dams (or muddles or absorbs) Water, Water extinguishes Fire, Fire melts Metal, Metal shapes Wood both by axe and by nail). So a god with domain over both water and fire could be a water god who holds his power over fire like Damocles' sword, or a fire god who acquired control over water as a means of self-control. If we throw wood into the mix, the water god is able to conjure wood with the promise of nurturing water, while the fire god learned to control it to ensure that he is constantly fed. You could also have a wood god who has learned to conjure water to keep himself nourished and beckons fire with the promise of fuel.

Now, maybe those gods wouldn't work in DF because gods in DF don't like to share domains, but my point is that maybe you need to look at this from a different perspective. If fire and water produce wonderful things when balanced but destroy each other when unbalanced, then perhaps a god of fire and water is also the god of balance, or a helpful and demonstrative ally of the god of balance.

I specified that those gods had a lack of recorded personality traits, so we don't know much about them. Sure, they could love conversation, they could have any number of quirks & eccentricities, but we just don't know. And if WE don't know, their worshipers arguably wouldn't either, making those deities more difficult to personally relate to . . . but, and this was my point, that doesn't seem to have made them any less effective as gods.

Seeing as the other gods of their pantheons definitely had personalities, I naturally assumed that Hades and Thoth would as well. A tendency to keep their noses to the grindstone/in books explains their lack of observed personality traits, just like it does for people. Though now that I've reread his mythology a bit, Hades doesn't seem like a conversationalist; his apparent personality traits are a preference for passivity and maintaining the status quo, great anger when someone tries to reclaim his dead subjects or cheat death and being cold-hearted except for his wife Persephone. And that's not even getting into how a storyteller or actor might choose to portray a deity.

I'll agree that being difficult to relate to does not decrease the effectiveness of a deity, but perhaps there are some better examples you could've given.