Thursday, September 3, 2009

Possible faith insults

It occurred to me that in some of my discussions of divine intervention (mainly in books and articles, not necessarily in this blog), I have said things along the lines of “it is easier to have faith in a god that takes an active role in your life”. Wow - That’s really insensitive, and I’m not a politically correct sort of a person. What I meant to say was, “It is easy to have faith in a god where his/her priests can produce miraculous effects on demand.” Depending on your faith you could easily see the hand of the divine in a sunrise. I see it in the miracle of an egg and a sperm forming a baby, and that happens every day. So if I’ve insulted anyone I’m sorry. I do truly mean to put emphasis on the fact that fantasy worlds allow some people to control the gods in physically visible ways.
On the other side of the coin, don’t forget that many of the people of a fantasy world would see their gods in the rain, the sun, the fact that fires burn, etc. Call them superstitious if you want to or decide exactly what type of force is needed to cause the rain. (elementals? divine servants? two pressure systems interacting? a mix of all three?) With Book of Wishes, we introduced regional elementals. Under that style of system, every river, every breeze, every mountain has a regional elemental controlling it. Earthquakes are caused by massively powerful earth elementals shifting position (the regional elementals that have some control over the plate tectonics). Think about it, the Greeks had a god for every wind and all manner of nymphs and nereids.
So if you see the divine in every tree and flower, you are not alone, and I never meant to question you!

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