Faith (mostly in fantasy)

It comes and goes, but recent events in online roleplaying have got me thinking about faith. Mostly, it's in a fantasy game world sense, but in general, too. I find I don't have my basis for real religious faith. My own thoughts on it vary from day to day, and very few people around me in my life show signs of strong religious beliefs. Thus, I really only get to think about it through roleplaying and then it's often in a fantasy setting of some sort.


Now, in real life, subjects of worship appear to be hazy. The percentage of people who hear their gods seems relatively small, leading other people to question their reality. My own experiences have been rather odd. I was not raised with any real religious beliefs, and I suppose I picked up traces of Christianity mostly by osmosis from the very few times I went to church and cultural bias toward "God." I have never heard Him or any other divine power. And yet I actually have had a couple prayers that I can recall answered. What's disturbing, however, is that both situations I can cite that I *prayed* for an outcome and got it were instances of selfish attempts to win something in drawings. Surely there were other times my prayers weren't granted, and I have been fortunate enough not to feel a need to pray for more serious things, but that doesn't seem the sort of prayer the Christian God would grant - or most others, for that matter - due to how it encourages further selfish actions. In fact, I think that's part of why my belief in God waned. Now, at my most faith-inspired, I believe in a greater power that may have some sort of sentience, but I don't see it as God any more than as Zeus or Buddha. And either way, my faith in organized religion (in the sense of established churched, preaching, and doctrine) is pretty much shot.

Ahem... but enough of that.

So it's a departure to me to deal with "serious" religion, even through a character. In fantasy worlds, gods are often very real and apparent. They may lend a worshipper the power to smite and enemy or cure a friend. They may even manifest directly, commanding obedience or granting blessings. As I've never seen anything like that in real life, it requires me to change my thinking. One might say "it's not more out there than magic," but somehow there's more weight to belief in a god than belief in magic. Magic generally doesn't tell you how to live your life, fantasy gods often do.

So now I have a faithful worshipper - a paladin of sorts. But what does that mean? Okay, he prays to the dawn every morning. He holds to the tenets of life and light. He tries to be just, to be worthy of his goddess' blessings. While he's far from suicidal, he has no fear of death because he believes his goddess will take care of him when his life is over. But for all that, she's not the most proactive goddess - she's not commanding crusades or even giving many orders at all. Thus he's left to act as he feels she would approve of most of the time, interpretting her wishes from what signs he does get.

Then something bad happens and people die. How is he supposed to take that? Should he accept it as a challenge laid in his path by his goddess? Overcoming adversity to prove one's worth isn't strictly in her nature, but maybe it's a general assumption of deities. If she didn't deliberately let it happen, then why didn't she intervene to stop it? Shouldn't a "good" god protect their followers from such things? In some cases, the gods are limited in how much they can directly interfere, either by nature laws, agreement, or habit.

And how does it change things if the something bad is caused by another deity? When gods start sniping at one another's mortal realms of influence, things can get pretty messed up pretty fast ("I'll see your flood and raise you a wave of locusts"). Often that seems the reason why divine intervention is limited (even if only from an author/creator point of view) in fantasy worlds - because if gods had free rein to do what they wanted, mortals usually wouldn't get to do anything that mattered.

Wouldn't seeing someone else's god manifest, create an immortal agent to use among mortals, and flout mortal law be enough to make someone look to their own god and question "Why is this allowed to happen?" Or is true faith actually an absence of that doubt? I have trouble conceptualizing the latter, but I wonder if that's because of my own beliefs (or lack thereof).

My rambling train of thought seems to be losing a little steam. There are still connected ideas that I haven't touched upon, but maybe that's for another time.