My head is spinning trying to follow everything on this thread, but I'm wondering if 'religion' is different from 'superstition' or 'spiritual thought,' as referred to in the OP's original post. I initially took the post literally to be about 'religion'—an established belief system that usually creates some form of 'temple' and perhaps a written canon that the 'believers' accept. Religion often resorts to coercion or enforcement to ensure there is widespread lip service paid to the system. Is it possible to write a story that doesn't contain any reference to it? I think that entirely depends on whether the story is set in a society where religion is important. However, what about superstition? Is that 'religion?' I would define superstition as personal belief in supernatural occurrences or beings—but belief which is NOT formalised. Superstition often involves people cultivating their own rituals that they believe help to ensure 'luck' or a lack of bad luck. I would classify 'spiritualism' in this category. There may be quite a number of people who share the superstition, but there is usually no enforcement applied to non-believers. I can imagine a character being superstitious without being 'religious.' I can also imagine a religious person being superstitious. And I can imagine characters who are neither. Spiritual thought concerns itself with what might be 'out there.' It ponders concepts that we don't know about, or can't see, but may be there. It deals with these issues but doesn't worship anything or follow any particular rituals. It's more akin to philosophy than religion, and its adherents often fall foul of organised religion religion or local superstition. I think it's possible to write a story using any one of these supernaturally-related topics. And it's certainly possible to write a story that deals with none of them.
I'm not sure WHAT I personally believe. I'd like for it all to have a meaning beyond eat, poop, and reproduce, until you can't do any of them with any reliability. But I just don't know. When I do world building though, I do try to build at least one religion for it to support the 'common knowledge' that most members of a given society have. Humans are spiritual, and it seems to go back as far as we have evidence. I suspect it will continue indefinitely. Who knows, maybe the human race needs it, in some form at least.
Yep, a small but probably increasing role as I get further into it. My sci-fi setting has a few religions in the background, which are currently seen through names that characters take in vein mostly, with the occasional idle reference. I haven’t introduced any strong believers yet.
Spirituality is sometimes included in my writing, but not organized, institutional religion. This is because I was raised in a family that avoided church and religious rituals of any kind, so I don't feel like I understand the major religions well enough to include them in my stories. Perhaps this will change in the future.
Here's my theory: When looking at older religions (mostly polytheistic ones), it becomes apparent that so many of them focused on the 'here and now' rather than the afterlife. In other words, they were trying to make sense of the world they lived in, rather than worrying about the next one, which many assumed would simply be an extension of the real world. (Burying tons of stuff with the deceased is an indication that older religions expected life to go on, rather literally, after death.) Older societies were concerned with channeling their collective luck, in order to appease deities who appeared to control the environment and what happened on a day to day basis. The modern world seems to have shifted away from that in the past couple of centuries (maybe because science has made sense of so much of what seemed supernatural to earlier people.) Now most religions seem more focused on afterlife, and overall 'purpose' of life itself. Modern religion is more concerned about Right and Wrong in a moral sense, rather than a practical one. In earlier societies, when something bad happened, people assumed they'd done something stupid that had angered (or merely annoyed) the spirits. It became important to figure out what that something stupid was, and take steps to correct it, or see that it never happened again. Since societies tended to be small units, it became important that each person contribute to the common good by NOT doing 'the wrong thing,' that would cause the gods to be angry and destroy the harvest, or drive the game away, or create disease or horrendous weather. Maybe that's where the notion of religious compulsion got started.
I write about religions, as it plays a big role in my characters lifes, but its not the main topic of any of my "books".
One of my characters is Wiccan. I like weird and wonderful and religion is pretty weird and wonderful, so I expect elements of it will crop up in future scribblings.
I posted on this thread some time ago about my fictional alien community and their polytheistic religion being prominent to their culture. (EDIT: i guess it was a different thread talking about religion? but i definitely remember talking about the religion/mythology in my sci-fi world....) Upon editing another piece for submission, I realized religion played another huge role in it as well. As someone who ironically shunned religion growing up (always went to church with my family, went to a catholic high school and a catholic university, but with the exception of college, I hated every part of it and even claimed atheism in high school....), religion seems to be seeping out in my writing. In the piece I submitted, it even begins with a verse from Ecclesiastics and the main character's name is "Grace." She's "othered" in her small southern town because she was born out of wedlock, and because her mother had a mental breakdown. The towns people say her mom's mental breakdown is the devil's work and that her kid will take after her and be possessed by the devil to do bad things (Its hard having a mental illness in the African American community... mental illness is attributed to lack of faith and the devil. My sister attempted suicide and my grandmother said she needed to pray, and that she didnt need therapy, she needed to go to church. Good thing my mom doesnt have that mindset). There's also a pastor who turns a blind eye to his adult son's abuse of young girls and women, and a girl that Grace befriends who is from a non-traditional family. So religion takes on a big role in this piece. I'm actually excited to pick it up again. I think I started it during the end of my time in college, but recently after finding it again, have been working on it off and on when I can
Same with me J.T. Woody, in the way that I always had a monk in my story but I never planned for religion to play a big part(A made up religion.)But somehow as I was writing it seeped in more and more but I feel like it added so much to the monk himself as well as the world I was creating.
Yes. It doesn't matter if an author is a 'believer' or not. But when world building, it would be short-sighted to assume there is no such thing as religion and well-meaning people who not only find comfort in their religion but who try to live up to its ideals. Even if it plays no part in your story, it adds depth to that world.
For me it depends on the setting. Most of my characters are just kind of meh on religion, but then i have one character who is essentially a priest, so the topic of religion is kind of unavoidable. i don't usually use real life religions but ill draw inspiration from some. the priest character is a priest of a deity known as "The mother" (Super original i know) who is heavily inspired by Ishtar.
Religion plays a part in my WIP as my MMC is preparing to become a priest. I made it up, but it’s monotheistic. Eventually I will have other religions in the series if this WIP works out.
Religion features very heavily in my books, not because I have particularly strong views either way but for 2 different reasons - 1. The arguments surrounding religion fascinate me - the reasons why one person has an unshakeable belief in the divine and another person despises it are a lot deeper than many people give credit to. 2. Love it or loathe it, religion is a big part of the human experience. If one is writing about people in any time or setting, they will have their beliefs, their superstitions and even those things they deem holy. They differ for every person (or can be absent) and exploring that aspect of humanity can be very interesting.
Yes, definitely. Religion consists of the entire human species, in the entirety of history, trying to explain how the world works without having access to any real answers. It's an exercise in raw creativity. A treasure trove of historical moods and mindsets. It's been a key influencer or artistic and cultural progress. It has also been a key censor of artistic and cultural progress. It's rife with ironies, hypocrisies, and extremely odd quirks. It's something that's been threaded, for better and for worse, into the fabric of politics, science, philosophy, music, drama, etc. It's hard to get around it. Then again, there's no point in getting around something which is so ubiquitous and stirring. I don't mean to get political, but to draw an example we can look at a primary candidate for the last election cycle, Mr. Ted Cruz. The man who was vying for a role of authority which, technologically speaking, could give him the ability to bring on the human apocalypse. Paired with the fact he believes, as many of the more fanatical religious folks do, that the apocalypse is a kind of necessary spiritual cleanser that will inevitably be brought on for the betterment of all thinga. On the final chapter of his campaign his supporters, possibly out of desperation, were speaking of him being 'hand picked' by God and that they've literally seen in his face 'the face of God'. Not as if he was simply a worshiper himself but some kind of future messiah. Which, in retrospect, might come off as a tad comical seeing as he lost. However, there's scarcely any idea so deeply threaded into the human discourse that matches that kind of mortal anxiety. I'd feel I'd be suckering myself if I just excluded it from my creative process.
People who believe that all modern governance should conform to biblical law rather than people who simply see religion as a personal spiritual outlet.
"Religion" is so many things in fiction. It's an unimportant detail of regular life, an explanation for a character's motivation, a type of fantasy magic system, a basis of culture, the basis of fish out of water tale, etc. What I think is missed is the function of faith in stories when that faith doesn't smell like religion. So many fictional characters are motivated by ridiculously heavy belief in an ideology, nation state, honor, the greater good, etc. And in fiction, the functional difference between faith in a secular ideal and a godly one to character motivation is a horse a piece - especially when the "religion" is fictionalized anyway. So I think viewing religion in fiction as a special thing is somewhat misplaced. A character's dedication to being a good teacher is not really different to another's dedication to their temple. Only the descriptive words matter.
I use religion to convey differences in magnitude between creatures. I contend that an extension of Clarke's "technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic" is "a creature with sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a god." I use stories in ancient and current religions as a comparison for creatures or civilizations that are immensely powerful. I also use it to break some false anthropocentric beliefs. If I say "I predict humans will become pets to our machines." Most people would respond "humans would never want to be pets." I'd ask them that if two creatures are far apart in terms of intullectual capabilities, and the greater one cares for, guides, and keeps the lesser mind safe, sometimes even against the lesser creatures better judgement (keeping your dog out of the road, not letting it eat chocolate...) is that a pet? If we keep the animal in our home, but put it outside if it's being a pest and sneaking food you put it outside, that's a pet? Yes. Does it apply if the home is a garden an the snuck food is a magic pomegranate? Uhh... Yes? So were Adam and Eve pets?
Could you explain how you relate any of that to religion? I don't follow the connections you're implying.
There is already so much conflict in my future societies, religion would be difficult to include without making it a key issue. And I already have too many key issues. So I left it out, the same way I left racial discrimination out. I opted for class divides instead with genetic identities as the means of distinguishing which group one belongs to.
I use religion as a comparison to powerful alien beings and to remind the reader how rediulously small they are. Most people think aliens will look like little green men when even a thousand years of technology ahead of us would allow them to do things that only gods could in our mythologies. Building mountains, consuming suns, creating life... all things we traditionally associate with gods. I use religion for context and to get people thinking that my aliens have much more in common with Zeus than E.T.
