D&D Polytheism: Reply to Comments

Quite a few comments on the post this morning about polytheism in D&D, so I am going to reply to them all as a single post. I believe the root of the disagreement between myself and a lot of the commenters is this:

My point is that the idea that this fiction does not jive with what we know about real world religion. Before you say, "but this is a fantasy world", let me agree with you. It is a fantasy world. But even taking into account the things that are fundamentally different from our world (gods are real and have real world effects), the logic of the universe is still flawed. I am willing to concede that gods are real, gods are provable, gods have taken a direct role in human affairs at moments in time. That does not automatically make certain elements of the fiction logical.

Yes, there were cults in polytheistic societies that elevated worship of a particular deity. That is true. But that is not the way that such things are presented in the D&D fiction. People are described as very strongly favoring one god. That kind of worship undercuts the very reason for having polytheism; which is the distribute the responsibilities to a number of agents. It is a way of explaining why the crops failed (you didn't please the earth god) or why your ship crashed (you didnt please the sea god) or why you lost the war (you didn't please the war god). In that framework, we get real world polytheism. Forcing people to choose one god above all undercuts those rational underpinnings of the religious framework.

Furthermore, cults are typically secretive (see Mithras) because people are looking for a way to seperate themselves from the culture and form a secret society. They are also (again, see Mithras) often related to foreign deities that are gaining acceptance into a society and then fade as those deities become accepted or fade because they are not being accepted.

Secondly, the fact that gods intervene on earth and are provable is irrelevant. Real world religions believed that their gods intervened on earth and were provable too. The only consequence is that everyone would then be forced to grapple with the same gods being proven to be true. However, unlike in real Christendom or even the modern Muslim world, this does not encourage cultural cohesion much at all. The regions of Faerun differ by enormous degrees, far more that we have seen in real life when there is a common religion. This is out of sync with what we would expect based on real world experience.

The larger point of my post is that what we know about real religion does not match what we see happening in D&D campaign settings. There are conditions that do not trigger realistic responses from society, given what we know about real religion.

Of course, I doubt I have any chance of changing any minds on this. Religion tends to be that way. ;)