Personally, I always liked Cayden Cailean from Pathfinder, simply because it was the most absurd origin for a deity I'd seen outside of actual mythology. "Common sellsword gets completely shitfaced, wanders into magic MacGuffin that either turns you into a god or turns you into dust, and succeeds at it, staggering out three days later"?

Come on, I laughed for five minutes straight when I first read it in the sourcebook

Quote from: Arnwolf666;1129507Where is this type of thinking acceptable outside of religion. What field of study?

  History comes to mind.

Quote from: Ghostmaker;1129556Personally, I always liked Cayden Cailean from Pathfinder, simply because it was the most absurd origin for a deity I'd seen outside of actual mythology. "Common sellsword gets completely shitfaced, wanders into magic MacGuffin that either turns you into a god or turns you into dust, and succeeds at it, staggering out three days later"?

Come on, I laughed for five minutes straight when I first read it in the sourcebook

Agreed!

A God's origin like that needs to be kept.

Besides, what would a paladin of Cayden Cailean do? Get non-believers randomly drunk and then fight them?

Quote from: jeff37923;1129573Agreed!

A God's origin like that needs to be kept.

Besides, what would a paladin of Cayden Cailean do? Get non-believers randomly drunk and then fight them?

Nitpick: Cayden Cailean doesn't have paladins, being chaotic good (you have to be within one step of your god's alignment). There's a variant class which is kinda like a half assed paladin in one of the peripheral PF Golarion sourcebooks, but I think it's kinda crap myself.

But yeah, Cayden Cailean's faithful do a lot of drinking (though they abhor full on alcoholism and will happily get someone suffering from such into the medieval equivalent of AA if needed).

Quote from: Ghostmaker;1129660Nitpick: Cayden Cailean doesn't have paladins, being chaotic good (you have to be within one step of your god's alignment). There's a variant class which is kinda like a half assed paladin in one of the peripheral PF Golarion sourcebooks, but I think it's kinda crap myself.

But yeah, Cayden Cailean's faithful do a lot of drinking (though they abhor full on alcoholism and will happily get someone suffering from such into the medieval equivalent of AA if needed).

I'm joking.

Then again, I have to admit that I only owned the first edition of Pathfinder that came out and not later editions or Pathfinder 2.

Quote from: jhkim;1129407A number of games have a divide between spirit magic and hermetic magic -- like RuneQuest and Shadowrun as well as many others. Spirit magic isn't divine, but it is distinct from the hermetic book-learning magic that wizards use. Both can be distinct from divine magic, but sometimes there's a blending between spirit magic and divine magic.

I could easily picture a setting where non-priest shamans use the same kind of magic as priests.

Along related lines, in the real world, there is often a grey area between a priest and a non-religious scholar or functionary. There are shamans, monks/nuns, witch doctors, kabbalists, and others who blur the lines between religious priests and secular sorcerers.

Why would you make a distinction between Shamans and Clerics? A rose by any other name...

QuoteYou can't be agnostic about beings you KNOW exist, because the agnostic says : "I don't KNOW if god/gods exist" It's a claim about knowledge not faith.

But how can you know? All aspects of divine magic and intervence are merely clues, not really hard proof.
And even assuming that there is no reason to treat beings granting such power as gods.

TBH considering classic philosophical division between theism and atheism - neither of D&D gods is really The God - theism is all about.

QuoteIMHO the only reason churches would exist in such a universe is because the deities need the worshiping, it's their food, without it they grow weak and eventually die. Granted this is nowhere to be found (to my knowledge) in the official lore.

It's straight up in for instance Forgotten Realms lore.
But even without it demands - beings we call gods in fantasy can organize cults to promote their agenda among mortals, even without need for a good meal.

QuoteI think the idea here, and I've seen it creep into D&D as well, is that the Paladin is somehow self-powered and that his power comes from belief in a cause. 5e specifies that it is a "paladin's quest" and his "oath" that makes him a paladin. There is a very fast and loose use of religious terminology ("holy", "evil", "divine" etc) but also examples given of paladins who are not at all tied to anything like a monotheistic faith, or in fact ANY faith. IMO, this is a product of trying to retain all the "cool classes" while also turning them into general categories. You end up with obvious nonsense like "atheist paladins".

AFAIK this is basically classical D&D paladin. He is not empowered by gods, but by combination of pantheistic cosmic powers of Law and Good which are ABOVE beings we call gods in D&D.
Absolute adherence to cosmic principles empowers paladin, and in this case truly he does not need to be cultist of any specific deity.

QuoteI find that D&D 5E paladin concept disturbing because if you buy into that, you could pretty successfully argue that the 9/11 terrorist hijackers were paladins.

Well - yes. They were 5e paladins of vengeance bound by holy oaths to punish enemies of their faith and land.

QuoteImagine if you will Richard Dawkins walking and Jesus comes down from the heavens, performs all sorts of miracles in such a way as to leaving no doubt it's not a trick. Would you expect Dawkins to still not believing Jesus exists? He might have a bad opinion of him sure, but his existence? That would have been proven without a doubt.

And Dawkins would need exactly zero faith to think Jesus is real.

Putting aside question about personal experience being serious source of any knowledge (hint: it is not) - just because Dawkins see bearded man breaking known laws of physics does not mean this being is The God in classic theistic perspective.
Q from Star Trek are basically omnipotent in our dimension and they can easily play all sort of Gods here... so what then?

Quoteaccording to the mechanics of the game there are churches to worship the gods, why?

And clerics and paladins need to follow a code or loose their divine powers.

Because powerful ancient wizards pretending to be gods are sociopathic megalomaniacs who likes to force mortals to do their biddings of course.

QuoteHow can you doubt what you see with your own eyes?

That's basically me any time I watch news in TV. It's very easy. Own eyes means nothing. Senses are not reliable.