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10 most Popular Fantasy Religious Philosophies
#1: As long as you have that potato on a string about your neck, and are repentant about your misdeeds after death, you can come back from the dead. You have never run across it outside your village, but they have been doing it for hundreds of years, and they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work. More importantly, you could afford to buy a sack of Potatoes. – ‘The Truth’, Terry Pratchett
#2: You pray to your God thus imparting to them power and immortality. You wouldn’t consider worshiping yourself and being your own God. More importantly, those who join the inner circle of Worshipers get a share of the power and they are all quite certain that self worship is bad for you. – ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’, Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson
#3: You are met by DEATH himself and he is certain that the Potato on the string around your neck is purely just to keep you calm while your entire life passes before your eyes. Then you die. – ‘The Truth’, Terry Pratchett
#4: You slaughter your way through countless thousands, take their stuff, and eventually gather a cult of personality who worship your acts of genocide as the deeds of a Hero until you gather such a deluded following that you become a God. –‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’, Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson
#5: Self Worship without killing thousands and taking their stuff didn’t make you go blind; it got you a little bit of Power. Not a lot but it was just enough to get you a village of Followers looking for answers that only you could give them, although the non-believers are certain you will go to hell for leading them a-stray; kind of Ironic really. – ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ According to Sissyl.
#6: According to the fishlike leech you stuck into your ear truth comes from total awareness of what is being said by all parties; even the ones who didn’t like you in a previously incomprehensible language. With that kind of equality, Gods became irrelevant. – 'Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ according to Dogbert
#7: The potato worked; and it didn’t matter if it was someone else’s potato. Just as long as the potato around your neck was in good nick, you might live forever. – ‘The Truth’, Terry Pratchett
I am quite sure I don't recognize that second quote there. On the contrary, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was quite clear on the fact that if you were to worship yourself, you could still get first and second level spells. Only for third and higher spell levels did your god (or servants of said god) need to become involved in the process.
#5:
The babel fish is small, yellow, leeechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain. The practical upshot is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech you hear decodes the brainwave matrix.
It is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind bogglingly useuful could evolve purely by chance, that many thinkerers have chosen to see it as a final, clinching proof of the non existence of God. The argument runs something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist" Says God "for proof denies faith and without fait I am nothing".
"But" Man says "The babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear" says God "I hadn't thought of that" and promptly vanishes into a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy" says Man, and for an encore he goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme for his best selling book: "Well, that about wraps it up for God". Meanwhile, the poor babelfish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
--Douglas Addams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
"Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky. But Crom is your god, Crom and he lives in the earth. Once, giants lived in the Earth, Conan. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and they took from him the enigma of steel. Crom was angered. And the Earth shook. Fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters, but in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield. We who found it are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men. The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one - no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts."
[Points to sword]
"This you can trust."
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#8: You can have faith in the steel of a Sword because men made it. Sure the old guy says it is the secret of Gods but you know they only made Iron. Steel is something stronger than Gods; like the three hundred pound of Muscle it takes to wield that sword, it’s self-worship, and you can’t go wrong with that. Just dont hold it aloft during a storm or you will feel the wrath of the Sky gods. – The Eighth Dwarf on ‘Conan the Barbarian’
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#9: You worship a rock. There was a time when that rock was supposed to mean something realy important, but your people dont remember that far back. All you know is that you pay hommage to that rock everytime you enter the chief's hut. Even the chief worships that rock. It may have once looked like someone, but centuries of physical contact, candle wax, and blood from when the new chief used it to kill the old chief have vanished what was there.
#10: You worship the Sky god. Sure you dont get to speak his name or make smart comments about how he has twin goddesses of fertility as wives/daughters, but hey you dont have the authority to question the ways of the sky god. You just be thankful that those goddesses keep the food growing and the water flowing and that the Sky god also doubles as god of War in the bad times. Still that doesnt explain why the village priest gets more of the food and water, or the pick of any twins you happen across while looting other villages.
In one of Jack Vance's space operas, the protagonists land on a planet on which people walk on stilts, because the dead decompose and become dust, and it's disrespectful to walk on the dead.
And of course, there's the classic scene from Vance's Cugel's Saga, in which the hero is arrested at the inn -- "this young lady tells us that at no point in your congress did you call out the Seven Divine Psalms, or even anoint yourself with holy water!" or something like that (I'll look up the exact quote later on, if I remember).
In one of Jack Vance's space operas, the protagonists land on a planet on which people walk on stilts, because the dead decompose and become dust, and it's disrespectful to walk on the dead.
I'm pretty sure that's Cugel's Saga as well.
