Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Alphonsus Finds Religion

My animator grew up in a non-religious household. While his father seemed open minded toward religion in the most part, he never spoke of it. Of course, he did ridicule and despise televangelists, but this is a normal and healthy thing to do, and says nothing about true religion. In his household, religion simply, “wasn’t”.

My animator tried to experiment with religion. After brief stints of being religiously devote, and then atheistic, he settled into a comfortable kind of agnosticism. Religion, nonetheless, remained an object of fascination for him. He studied both externally through classes, through reading, and internally, through his own philosophical thoughts. While never a religiously devote person, my animator considered himself to be a spiritual person, using the very vagueness of the term “spiritual” to hide behind.

And now I find myself as the head of a religious sect, and I find this somewhat disconcerting.

In Everwind, I briefly toyed with the idea of being a mage, but quickly found that both through a notice of the lack of healers and through some natural inclination in this direction, I decided to become a cleric.

There are eight or so gods in Everwind. The god that bares the closest relationship to the one we call simply God is there referred to as, “The One”. I originally chose to worship to this god. It turns out that there are no clerics of The One, however, and no quests or role-plays have ever been designed for them. I selected therefore selected the god closest to The One: Castan.

Castan has been defined as the right hand of The One, and is the leader the other gods. Castan depicted as a lion, and is the god of Justice, Honor, Valor, Truth, and Wisdom. He is essentially a spiritual version of the knights of the round table, and part of his discipline involves always seeking the truth and to never knowingly tell a lie. In retrospect, given my own personality, Castan is the ideal god for me.

What came quite unexpectedly to me was the fact that there were no other worshipers of Castan in the realm. When I became a cleric of Castan, I quickly learned that I was the ONLY cleric of Castan. Thus, after a meeting of the clerics, I found myself enrolled as the Speaker for Castan—essentially responsible for the training of any Castan acolytes who were to follow me and to write out the rules, beliefs, and, indeed, to better define the god himself.

While I know this is a role-play game, the task, nevertheless, is daunting to me. My responsibility is essentially to define fully a religious sect; to define a god, and to specify the ways in which he is to be worshipped. My own spiritual and philosophical background, instead of making this an easy task, instead makes it much more difficult. For the principles of Castan are truly principles that I value myself, almost to the point where they were a religion to me before they became a religion in this role-play. As a cleric who honors these principles, I become a role model of sorts to other avatars, and to the real people who animate them.

Where I will take this, I do not yet know. With the help of a boffo outfit, coincidence of circumstance, and good role-play, I already find myself to be one of the most respected of the clerics. It is a game, but, just as the games of real life teach lessons, this game, as realistically played as it is, has the potential to teach powerful ones.

I thus take my role as the Speaker for Castan quite seriously. It will take me some time, nevertheless, to figure out just what exactly this role must be.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow...!
What an intriguing concept you have stumbled on here sir! I cannot wait to see what becomes of this - such possibilities for your mind here...

FD Spark said...

Yeah not sure how a agnostic or nonbelieving cleric would work out.
There is saying in one group I use briefly hang out in real life when it came to spiritual matters and never quite got is this saying.
"Sometimes we must fake it to make it."
Even pretending we believe to some can be first step in believing in something new especially when your biocomputer's version of reality doesn't compute with other new possible realities or possiblities nor disspell its disbelief.