In India Adi Shankara (8th century CE Hindu philosopher/teacher) had a condition you had to agree to if you wanted to debate him.  If he won the debate you had to renounce your religion/school of thought and become his disciple.  Or kill yourself.

Adi Shankara also died at the age of 32 so perhaps his own debate skills were overrated.

Then again, historians can't even entirely agree what century he lived in (8th Century AD is common, but others put it as early as the 4th Century BC based on the founding of temples he is said to have founded) or if he was one guy or a composite of several historical figures (which might explain the discrepancy in dating) so it's all rather debatable how good a debater he really was in the first place.

Of course there's got to be tons of legend around him.  I just think he's an excellent inspiration for RPGs and despite his early death and legendary accretions, he's definitely an example of a massively influential polytheist who was not all sugar and spice.  Even if he never existed, his idealization in the thinking of the centuries that follow certainly shows a hard edge to the polytheism of the time.  When your legendary hero is someone who demanded the suicide of debate opponents, things are not all open and accepting of everyone like 2019 takes of polytheism.  Medieval India was not at all an example of "Happy Rainbow Barney Land" from the thread title.

Quote from: Chris24601;1074975To be fair, it also wouldn't have been Christianity if it had accepted Emperor-worship and Polytheism. The entire point of it was there was only one God and no matter what you suffered in this life he'd reward you for being faithful forever in Heaven.

I'm not sure about that:
Considering Jesus' advice of "Give Ceasar what belongs to Ceasar, and give God what belongs to God", it is fully possible that we would simply have had a different kind of "christianity" during the middle ages, while we today might have had virtually the same "modern" and tolerant christianity as we actually do in several places today, just with less of its moral baggage of wars and intolerance.

Quote from: Chris24601;1074975And it worked too... today Roman Polytheism is seen in the same light as fairy tales while Christianity took over the entire Roman Empire and spread across Europe, Asia and eventually to Australia and the Americas.

This is what makes me think that "christianity" was the actual first horseman, and not plague ...

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;1074865Wow I have not seen that but I am getting it. I've always felt that a bit familiarity helps you relate and have a bit more empathy for the inhabitants.

My campaign is low magic so there are no schools of magic/ bard colleges and most of the warlocks that can cast magic are in the thrall of devils. The elves in my world used to enslave the humans. The elves are grey and alien, and have mostly been driven back to the Fey Realm where the leach power off the slumbering Grey Elf King.

Millennia ago a "chosen" race called the Tall Kings (civilized Goliaths) defeated the elves and drove them back. After years of peace a group of  humans betray the Tall Kings and use magic to kill them all. Humanity falls and there is a split between the northern (Christian analog) and southern (Muslim analog) tribes.

The druids left in the world were handed down their powers from slaves of the Elves. But they are slowly being hunted down by the Northern Duchies. So here is the rub... Magic (aka miracles) work for all three: northern clerics, Fey worshipping druids, and the southern Warlocks. But I don't want to use a moral equivalency cop out so I have a bit more brain storming on that point.

Sorry, written on the phone, excuse any crap grammar.

Oh yeah... you're gonna love Bakker. You'll feel dirty when it's over. so dirty...


"There's faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there's faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they're not entirely certain they're in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God's mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence."
- R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

Quote from: RandyB;1074793Chocolate or vanilla?

The one that's non-heretical.

Quote from: Chris24601;1074975To be fair, it also wouldn't have been Christianity if it had accepted Emperor-worship and Polytheism. The entire point of it was there was only one God and no matter what you suffered in this life he'd reward you for being faithful forever in Heaven.

Of course. My point was that the Romans didn't persecute Christianity because it was a new religion, as there were lots of new religions in the Roman Empire. It persecuted them because they actively rejected the Divinity of Emperors and Roman Polytheism. Had Christianity found a way to have, for example, the Roman Emperor as higher than the Pope, for example, then it might have survived without persecution, but would have been very different to what it is today. The Byzantines did something similar, when the Emperors became Christian. As for rejecting Polytheism, simply accepting that Roman Deities were the equivalent of Saints would have allowed Christianity to thrive, but, again, it would have been very different.

Quote from: soltakss;1075247simply accepting that Roman Deities were the equivalent of Saints would have allowed Christianity to thrive

That did happen in some places - St Apollo in Greece, St Brigit (my own namesake) in Ireland, are two I can recall. Often they later get retconned as mortal saints of the same name.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1075215The one that's non-heretical.

Nice catch.

Quote from: jhkim;1074403The case in China and India are very different than Rome - where you see a new religion like Buddhism spreading, and there is very little conflict between it and existing faiths. They fight over plenty of other stuff, but fighting over religion is rare. Also, polytheistic religions are much more prone to compromise and syncretism - mixing and matching between different sources.

Historical China is far from happy-go-lucky - but it doesn't feature much religious intolerance.

This isn't really true, for either country, but especially India. There were huge persecutions of Buddhists done by Brahminists and later by Hindus, until the religion was pretty much extinguished.

In China, there were several periods where a certain religion (Confucianism, Taoism or Buddhism) was favored by the ruling Emperor or Dynasty and the others were suppressed or persecuted to varying degrees.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1076422This isn't really true, for either country, but especially India. There were huge persecutions of Buddhists done by Brahminists and later by Hindus, until the religion was pretty much extinguished.

In China, there were several periods where a certain religion (Confucianism, Taoism or Buddhism) was favored by the ruling Emperor or Dynasty and the others were suppressed or persecuted to varying degrees.

Greetings!

Excellent points, Pundit. In my earlier posts in the thread, I mentioned that governments and societies in both ancient China and ancient India were not always tolerant, and had different periods where they, too, would persecute other religions that were for whatever reasons out of favour.

Then came the cascade of how sweet and tolerant everyone in China and India were.

As you explain, that Rainbow Barney view of the east is bullshit. I'm glad that I am not the only person to actually read deeply into the historical sources.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Earlier in the thread someone mentioned that in D&D the fact religions and gods are real (or, if you're a theist, are a lot more obviously real than their IRL counterparts), and I thought it was worth exploring the implications of that a little more...

Specifically, if people knew with almost total certainty that their Gods were real, I think there might be a lot more religious fanaticism and religious conflict. After all, if the priests of Pelor can *literally bring the dead back to life* or *smite their enemies with holy fire* you can't dismiss their teaching as divorced from the real world, or as irrational superstition. Then if they tell you "worshippers of x religion are sinners", or preach the virtues of a crusade, or advocate social norms of a particular kind, you'd be massively more inclined to believe them.

I don't know about devotion and fanaticism in the face of real gods would be an absolute.

If humanity has proven anything it's that familiarity breeds boredom and contempt rather than zeal. Think of how we regard politicians, professional athletes and movie stars... that's the god down the street.

There's not much call for actual faith if there's no doubt about it existing. When's the last time someone went to war over whether or not there's a moon?

By the same token, while strict atheism wouldn't exist (i.e. claiming the guy who strangled an invincible lion with his bare hands doesn't exist is silly if you can just go to the temple where he's hanging out and wearing said lion's hide as a cape) there would certainly be plenty of skepticism about whether he's really a God or just a really powerful mortal (like an epic level wizard).

Heck, in a setting where you can go and visit Mount Olympus with the right spell you might even see competing schools of philosophy over the nature of the gods... are they composed of normal matter or some sort of "hypermatter"? Are they actually divine or just aliens with powers beyond normal men, users of superscience in the vein of Clarke's law, or visitors from another dimension/time?

If you're going to have fanatical positions you'll find them there... Philosophical holy wars over whether Zeus is a true god and therefore entitled to screw around with his property however he sees fit -or- a space alien who really needs to stop with the abductions, anal probes and experiments that result in alien/human hybrids already.

Quote from: SHARK;1073682The Roman Empire, for example, was an empire that embraced a polytheistic, Pagan religion. While the Romans are often celebrated and admired for their religious tolerance--the truth is distinctly, and in my view, harshly different.

Its kinda hard to make sweeping generalisations about a civilisation that lasted for over a thousand years.  I mean they went from persecuting Christians to being the hub of Christianity.

The DnD version of Polytheism is kinda strange when you think about it.  I have seen interviews with Ed Greenwood who says that in his games the average NPC will worship at all of the temples and especially at the ones that they need the most, so if they are going on a sea voyage then they will make sacrifices to Umerlee for example.  It is unusual for someone to just worship one of the Gods.

Quote from: Shasarak;1078914The DnD version of Polytheism is kinda strange when you think about it.  

It's because players GMs & writers are coming from a Christian monotheist mindset. In my FR game I have had players whose PCs worship Mielikki the Forest Goddess unsure if it was ok to pray to Kelemvor the nice-guy God of the Dead in order to get their friend Raised! I had to assure them Mielikki wouldn't mind.