How to create a successful religion on NS; step by step

Post by **Neop** » 03 Mar 2017, 03:22

*** *** *** How to create a successful religion on NS
By: Lamoni

Hello everyone, I am (The Free Republic of) Lamoni. I have been playing NS since 2002, and have seen many fine things and nations come and go, but one of the things that has always amazed me about the very talented and creative people who play NS would be the new and different religions that various players have come up with. These range from a nation I know who worships the frost giants from real life Scandinavian myth, to a nation that worships a God that they call the Holy Marsh to the point where there are multiple different shrines to said God all over their society and the church basically runs all temporal and spiritual matters, to complex systems of worship such as Mystrian Pantheism. There are also many, many others.

It is my hope that this guide will provide you with the basics that you will need in order to help you to create your own religion on NS, as well as giving it every chance to succeed, especially if you try to spread your newly created religion outside of your own national borders.

To start, we should first define what a religion is. According to dictionary.com, a religion is defined as:

* A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

STEP 1

Most religions start with a symbolic narrative (typically called a creation story or creation myth) that explains how the religion believes that all of what we now know as reality began. These symbolic narratives often (but not always) begin with a description of the beginning of the cosmos from a state of chaos, nothingness, or amorphousness. These stories are often passed down orally, and are all stories with a plot and characters who are either deities, human-like figures, or animals, who often speak and transform easily. They are often set in a dim and nonspecific past, and address questions deeply meaningful to the society that shares them, revealing their central worldview and the framework for the self-identity of the culture and individual in a universal context. This makes the creation myth a central and important part of any religion, as well as one of the major things which anyone who wants to create a successful religion should pay attention to.

There are different types of creation myth, which we shall briefly touch upon:

* Accretion or Conjunction

These myths see creation forming as a result of "the mingling or layering of the primal elements (e.g., earth, wind, fire, and water)."

* Secretion

These myths see creation as a result of "divine emissions, such as 'vomit, sweat, urination, defecation, masturbation, web-spinning, and parthenogenesis.' Remember NS rules here!

* Sacrifice

These myths focus on creation as a consequence of the sacrifice of a god. Typically the sacrificed bodies become some part of the newly created world.

* Division or Consummation

These myths are associated with discriminating primal matter or a cosmogonic egg or with the consummated marriage of earth and sky. Usually, "the sky-father casts his seeds into the earth-mother in the form of rain." These myths focus on separating the various parts of the universe and embuing certain portions with life or the potentiality for life.

* Earth-Diver

These myths typically begin with a primordial sea into which the god descends to bring back the materials necessary for creating the world. In these myths, the amount of material retrieved by the god is small and parallels the way in which the tiny cells of procreation grow into full-sized beings.

* Emergence

In these myths, a first creature, human, or race enters our world from another world. The first world parallels the womb and is often too small for its occupants.

* Two Creators

In these myths, the world is created through the combined efforts of or the conflict between two gods. These gods may be of the same sex, opposite sex, or may be twin gods. Often one god is more ethical or compassionate than the other. These myths also sometimes establish hierarchies between created beings, that is, a society or class.

* Deus Faber

In these myths, the world is created by a Great Maker God. The emphasis is on the creator's craftsmanship and on the "intricacy and cleverness of creation."

* Ex nihilo

The Latin phrase "ex nihilo" means "'from nothingness' or 'from spirit' and is used to describe cosmogonies in which the creator brings the world into being through speech, breath, dream, thought, or laughter."

If you as the reader are still confused about how to create a creation myth for that religion which you want to start, it is okay! One of the best things that you can do is to look at real life creation myths, and see if there is one which you can sufficiently alter to fit the needs of your religion. This method can be relatively simple, compared to the kit bashing approach below.

If you really know what you are doing, you can also take parts from different creation myths, and put them together into one new, coherent creation myth of your own. This path is more difficult than merely altering an existing creation myth, and I would not recommend it to those who have a more difficult time of thinking on your feet. Good writing skills are essential for both of these approaches.

I highly advise that you create a creation myth for your religion before moving on to anything else, as the creation myth will be the foundation that your religion will be built on.

STEP 2

Hopefully, you've now come up with a creation myth for your religion. The next step for creating your religion is to determine if your religion follows Monotheism, Dualism, Polytheism, Pantheism, Animism, or others. I have provided working definitions for each type for your convenience.

* Monotheism

Monotheism has been defined as the belief in the existence of only one god that created the world, is all-powerful and interferes in the world. Another, more broad definition of monotheism, is the belief in one god. Prominent real world religions which subscribe to this belief include Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

* Dualism

Derived from the Latin word duo meaning "two," it denotes the state of two parts. The term dualism was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been more generalized in other usages to indicate a system which contains two essential parts.

Alternatively, in ontological dualism, the world is divided into two overarching categories. The opposition and combination of the universe's two basic principles of yin and yang is a large part of Chinese philosophy, and is an important feature of Taoism, both as a philosophy and as a religion (the yin/yang concept is also part of Confucianism).

In theology, dualism may refer to duotheism, bitheism, or ditheism. Although ditheism/bitheism imply moral dualism, they are not equivalent: ditheism/bitheism implies (at least) two gods, while moral dualism does not imply any -theism (theos = god) whatsoever.

Both bitheism and ditheism imply a belief in two equally powerful gods with complementary or antonymous properties; however, while bitheism implies harmony, ditheism implies rivalry and opposition, such as between good and evil, or bright and dark, or summer and winter. For example, a ditheistic system would be one in which one god is creative, the other is destructive. In the original conception of Zoroastrianism, for example, Ahura Mazda was the spirit of ultimate good, while Ahriman (Angra Mainyu) was the spirit of ultimate evil.

In a bitheistic system, by contrast, where the two deities are not in conflict or opposition, one could be male and the other female. One well-known example of a bitheistic or duotheistic theology based on gender polarity is found in the neopagan religion of Wicca. In Wicca, dualism is represented in the belief of a god and a goddess as a dual partnership in ruling the universe. This is centered on the worship of a divine couple, the Moon Goddess and the Horned God, who are regarded as lovers. However, there is also a ditheistic theme within traditional Wicca, as the Horned God has dual aspects of bright and dark relating to day/night, summer/winter expressed as the Oak King and the Holly King, who in Wiccan myth and ritual are said to engage in battle twice a year for the hand of the Goddess, resulting in the changing seasons. Within Wicca, bright and dark do not correspond to notions of "good" and "evil" but are aspects of the natural world, much like yin and yang in Taoism.

* Polytheism

Polytheism is the worship of or belief in multiple deities, which are usually assembled into a pantheon of gods and goddesses, along with their own religions and rituals. In most religions which accept polytheism, the different gods and goddesses are representations of forces of nature or ancestral principles, and can be viewed either as autonomous or as aspects or emanations of a creator God or transcendental absolute principle, and which manifests immanently in nature. It is important to remember that most Polytheistic faiths have a chief/ruling god/goddess in their pantheon!

Polytheism was the typical form of religion during the Bronze Age and Iron Age up to the Axial Age and the development of Abrahamic religions, the latter of which enforced strict monotheism. It is well documented in historical religions of Classical antiquity, especially ancient Greek religion and ancient Roman religion, and after the decline of Greco-Roman polytheism in tribal religions such as Germanic paganism or Slavic paganism.

Important polytheistic religions practiced today include Chinese traditional religion, Hinduism, Japanese Shinto, and various neopagan faiths.

* Pantheism

Pantheism is the belief that all of reality is identical with divinity, or that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent god. Pantheists thus do not believe in a distinct personal or anthropomorphic god.

As a religious position, some describe pantheism as the polar opposite of atheism. From this standpoint, pantheism is the view that everything is part of an all-encompassing, immanent God. All forms of reality may then be considered either modes of that Being, or identical with it. Some hold that pantheism is a non-religious philosophical position. To them, pantheism is the view that the Universe (in the sense of the totality of all existence) and God are identical (implying a denial of the personality and transcendence of God).

Many traditional and folk religions including African traditional religions and Native American religions can be seen as pantheistic, or a mixture of pantheism and other doctrines such as polytheism and animism. Pantheism is popular in modern spirituality and New Religious Movements, such as Neopaganism and Theosophy. Ideas resembling pantheism also existed in East/South Asian religions before the 18th century (notably Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism).

* Animism

The oldest form of religion in the world, Animism is a worldview according to which all thingsanimals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, even spoken words, buildings and other artifactsare experienced as animate and alive. It is sometimes described as a religious belief that various objects, places, and creatures possess distinctive spiritual qualities.

Animism is used in the anthropology of religion as a term for the belief system of many indigenous tribal peoples, especially in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organized religions. Although each culture has its own different mythologies and rituals, "animism" is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most animistic indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion"); the term is an anthropological construct.

Largely due to such ethnolinguistic and cultural discrepancies, opinion has differed on whether animism refers to an ancestral mode of experience common to indigenous peoples around the world, or to a full-fledged religion in its own right. The currently accepted definition of animism was only developed in the late 19th century by Sir Edward Tylor, who created it as "one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first."

Animism encompasses the beliefs that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual and physical (or material) world, and that soul or spirit or sentience exists not only in humans, but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as mountains or rivers, or other entities of the natural environment, including thunder, wind, and shadows.

Animism may further attribute souls to abstract concepts such as words, true names, or metaphors in mythology.

* Monolatrism

(Note: Different definitions of Monolatrism appear. The definition given here is not the only one, but was considered to be the most applicable to helping the reader.)

Monolatrists worship only one god, but believe other gods exist. They believe that the other gods leave non-worshippers alone. It has been suggested that early Judaism was a monolatrism based on alleged references to other gods in sacred texts.

* Polylatrism

(Note: Polylatrism is not a word in real usage. It is used here for convenience and because the word just makes sense.)

Polylatrism implies that a people worships a sub-set of gods exclusively but believes in the existence of other gods. They believe that other gods leave non-worshippers alone. Many neo-Pagans adhere to something akin to polylatrism, but the closest thing to a historical example we have might be the ancient Celts, which evidence suggests held a policy of "you worship your gods, we'll worship ours."

* Kathenotheism

Kathenotheism is a hard concept for many to understand, but might be best described as worshiping a Divine Office instead of the god holding it. Kathenotheists might believe there is a series or cycle of supreme deities, and worship each one for only as long as they hold the power of supreme god.

* Henotheism

Henotheists worship one single god while not denying the existence of others. The difference between henotheism and monolatrism is that henotheists seem believe that the non-worshiped gods have power over those who don't believe in them.

* Manism

Manism is based on the belief that the deceased, often family members, mythological ancestors or saints, have a continued existence and/or possess the ability to influence the fortune of the living. Manism is most frequent in settled cultures. Shinto is an excellent example of this.

STEP 3

After completing steps one and two (including who is god/goddess of what if going the Dualism or Polytheism routes), this is when you should start to decide upon the major principles that will define your religion. I'm not asking you to come up with the Bible, Qur'an, or Torah, but something comparable to Judaism and Christianity's Ten Commandments will help you here.

The Ten Commandments are written with room for varying interpretation, reflecting their role as a summary of fundamental principles. They are not as explicit or detailed as rules or many other biblical laws and commandments, because they provide guiding principles that apply universally, across changing circumstances. They do not specify punishments for their violation, and their precise import must be worked out in each separate situation.

Through most of Christian history the Ten Commandments were considered a summary of God's law and standard of behavior, fundamental and central to Christian life, piety, and worship. It is exactly such a summary which you would be creating for your own religion in this step.

As stated earlier in this step, you do not need to come up with your entire Holy Book(s) here. That is something that will likely take you years and a sustained level of interest in the religion itself in order to complete. A fundamental summary on par with the Ten Commandments will do just fine.

STEP 4

Assuming that you have completed the first three steps at this point, now is the time to determine how and where the followers of your religion worship the Divine. Is the Divine supposed to be publicly worshiped in a Temple, Mosque, Shrine, or other such structure in your religion? Or maybe the Divine is something to be worshiped at home, in nature, or at a small private Shrine such as can be found in Shinto?

These answers are important, as it determines what the internal administrative structure of your religion might look like. What does the Priesthood of your religion look like? How is it structured? Is there some world head honcho (the Pope is an excellent example of this) somewhere in a big Cathedral where he/she/it rules over the religion? Or maybe your religion is decentralized to the town or even house level? Something in between is also perfectly acceptable.

You need not make a large detailed post about this (especially at first), but having at least some notes on who is in what position in your religion (and what each position therein does), can be very helpful, especially when explaining your religion to others. It is also important to figure out who handles money in the religion's name, how they handle it, and how they are overseen to ensure that they do not steal from the religion. Religions are about spreading their faith to others, and money plays a large part in that, especially in the modern world, where many things have a monetary value and cost. Figuring out who handles the money should merely be part of figuring out the overall structure of your religion, however.

STEP 5

This step is where you determine how your religion would be spread to others ICly. Would your religion be more apt to:

* be spread peacefully, or also be amenable to being spread by the sword/gun/whatever?
* encourage followers to travel the world in order to spread the message, or would it be more insular?
* have a priesthood that takes vows of poverty and chastity, or allow the priesthood to marry and have outside jobs?
* have written Holy Book(s), or have a more oral tradition?
* be more welcoming of technological developments, or more technophobic and traditional?
* be welcoming of worship being conducted in multiple languages, or make use of a single, authoritative, language (examples: Latin for Catholics, or Arabic for Islam)?
* be welcoming of newcomers to the religion, or more suspicious of them?

STEP 6

Ragnarök, the End Times, Judgment Day, the Apocalypse, the ultimate fate of the universe; no matter what you call it, a good number of religions have some story or myth about the end of the world (or current age). In this step, you get to decide if your religion would have an end of the world myth, and if so, what it would be. Like with creation myths, there are any number of possibilities when it comes to an end of the world myth. Maybe the world will be eaten by a giant ice serpent, or maybe there will be some final battle between the forces of good and evil. Perhaps the current world will be destroyed by the gods, so that a new world can take our place in an endless cycle of life and death. You get to decide what your religion thinks about this!

STEP 7

Now that we've gotten through the other steps, the final step is to take all of the information that you've gathered from the other steps, and make a factbook entry or even a written paper about your religion (don't forget to give it a name!). This is another step where it helps to have good writing skills. The result from this final step should give you enough basic information about your new religion to be able to confidently explain it to others, and hopefully convince these others to adopt your religion in their own nation in some form. Over time, you may come up with new information for your religion, or you might also come up with changes to your religion which you feel may be needed. This is natural; large institutions do not remain static, and things change over time. Indeed, time for further thought and reflection on your religion would be required in order to expand it beyond the basic/intermediate level information which this guide allows the user to provide.

If it is your wish to expand your religion beyond just yourself and your own nations or organizations on NS, you will need to convince other players that your religion is something that would be fun for them to RP. While there are people on NS who like having their nation have ties to large organizations of various sorts, there are also those who will be harder to persuade. The best that you can do in these situations, is to provide others with the information on your religion, and let them make their own decisions. Do not try to force anything on others, as that simply will not work. Always be honest, polite, and responsive to the questions of others (as long as said questions are not insulting). The spread of your religion among other NS players will not be swift, but if you are willing to keep at it, and keep refining your religion, you too might eventually create a ICly powerful NS religion. If you don't really want to have your religion expand much (or at all) outside of your nation(s) or organization(s), then that is acceptable as well. Either way, you will have created a successful (by your own definition) NS religion, which is what this guide is about.

Those of you who have read this lecture to the end can now have a shiny for reading my lecture (as well as my thanks), and learning something from it:

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[img=150,150]http://bestanimations.com/Signs&Shapes/Worship/YingYang/animated-gold-ying-yang.gif[/img]

The Rejected Realms

The Rejected Realms

How to create a successful religion on NS; step by step

How to create a successful religion on NS; step by step