The Rules of Religion

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The Rules of Religion

It takes a lot of research to create my worlds.

I have friends members who would roll their eyes at such a statement. When I tell them I write fantasy, they laugh and say, that must make it easier. I ask why, because I can’t resist being snarky. They respond with something along the lines of “well, you can just make up anything. You don’t have to worry about rules. It’s all make believe.”

Anyone who reads fantasy would know better. In all fiction, there must be rules. Without limits, there is no story. Without limits, magic does anything the characters need it to do, death means nothing and there are no stakes. Maybe some people would like to read stories like that, but not me. And I definitely wouldn’t want to write them.

I’ve just finished the final revision on the second novel in my self-published Threads of Magic series, Wings of the Butterfly. I love this world. I have other worlds that I play in now and then, and that I plan to write longer stories for in the future, but the world of Threads has captured me.

With Wings currently awaiting a proofread and the third novel in the series, Cry of the Hawk still in pre-writing phase, my thoughts turned to another aspect of this world. The Threads series deals with war, the nature of loyalty and family ties.

With the side story that came to me, I wanted to play with something different. Religion is one of my favorite things to create, second only to languages. Creating religion brings lifeblood to a world. So much of what a group of people believe is fed by their religion. It colors how they feel about life, and death, how they celebrate, how they grieve, how they go about their daily lives.

The physicist Steven Weinberg once said “with or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” I’ve also heard it argued that for evil people to do good things also takes religion.

Religion, faith and belief carries people away from the earth, to something beyond. To a meaning that some feel science can’t give them. It drives people not simply to do bad or good things, but things that frighten them. Things they never imagined they would do. Things that change, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Because of religion, people may discover something they never would have known. Something new about the world, about themselves, about what they believe.

All people, including the characters in my worlds, are volitional beings. Under normal circumstances (minus otherworldly mind-control), they are capable of thinking and acting. They react to what they experience, and develop beliefs. They have new experiences, and either their beliefs change or they become stronger.

That’s a rule of life. A rule that saves me from creating one-dimensional characters, like the evil priest, or the saintly nun. I used to worry about creating religion that were too similar to ones that existed on earth. I don’t anymore. It isn’t about the religion. That’s window dressing. It’s about the people. Those who believe one, those who believe something else, and how they change when confronted with new experiences.

Cheers.