Minor Religions

I was thinking about the new favorite religion tag in XML and the corporation system when I had an idea.

Very often we hear about ancient religions or lack of religious diversity in the game. In fact, most leaders’ favorite religions in BTS are either “NONE” or “CHRISTIANITY.” How do we fix this?

I propose we add seven more religions for a total of 14. Now, I can hear people saying, “but there’s a reason there are only seven--it was done for game balance.” I agree, which is why we won’t be adding full-fledged religions--we’ll be adding minor religions.

Consider the 22 leaders who have no favorite religion:



Only Mao and Stalin are the true atheists; the rest followed ancient pagan religions. Therefore, I propose we adding something along the lines of:
Greco-Roman Mythos, Germanic/Norse Myth, Zoroastrianism, Mesopotamian Polytheism, Egyptian Polytheism, Mesoamerican Polytheism, and Animism (or an Asian religion). These would be “minor religions.” They would have neither shrines nor unique buildings; instead, we give each one a catch-all “pagan temple” like in the true religion mod.

Two things got me thinking about this: I wanted to have a more dynamic religion model whereby religions would spread and “take over” civs, instead of the static system we have now where conversions occur less often. I also wanted to represent earlier religions without crowding the map. Along the way I remembered something about corporations: you can’t have more than one in a city if those two compete. I also recalled the Omens scenario in Warlords, where if you spread Catholicism or Protestantism in a city, it would replace the other one… I think you see where I’m going here…

My idea is that we have a lot of minor religions in the start of the game which get replaced by major ones as you go along. For example, you might start out as Rome and build your pagan temples, with the Greco-Roman religion as your state religion. Then you might found Christianity once Theology comes along, and as it spreads it removes the pagan religion from the cities, replacing the temples with Christian temples just like in the true religion mod. (This would occur only for minor religions--Islam wouldn’t replace Buddhism, for example.)

You ask, what’s the point in doing this since we already have enough religions in the game? It has been my experience, especially on continents maps with 4-6 continents, that around half the continents end up with no religion. Needless to say, these guys suffer from absence of the diplomatic bonuses they’d normally get with each other, as well as the extra culture, until somebody sends in a missionary after Astronomy. This fixes that.

It also makes the game more dynamic in addition to preserving historical realism. Now you get to see your civs evolve over time, instead of having the same religion from 3800 B.C. Throw in the inquisitor unit and you’ve got lots of possibilities.

There are three issues to deal with: one, the code to make sure only a major or minor religion can be in the city at the same time, so we get the conversion scheme; two, changing the graphics on the Religious Advisor and City Screens to have two rows of religion (shouldn’t be too hard); and three, re-balancing the tech tree so major religions come later than classical ones. In fact, I was thinking that we should give each culture group a religion from the start, so Montezuma begins with Mesoamerican spiritism and Pericles gets the gods of Olympus.

Thoughts?

Well my idea is a random event where a religion is "split"

For example, when Islam is split, 1 civ could be Sunni while the other Shiite. Or When Christanity is split, Protestantism, Orthadox Church, and Roman Catholic.

These could create anger between civs that have different parts of the church, and if 1 part of a civ is Protestant for example, and the other half is Orthadox, then it may create a civil war where 2 civs are created?

Also for new religions, i think Sikhism, Shintoism, and Zoarsterism should be added.

Shintoism is good, as it's an Asian religion. The only thing that might be troublesome is it's still practiced by a large number of people today, unlike most of the other minor religions. Even Zoroastrianism is very small and getting smaller, because you can't marry into it.

But I suppose this might be counteracted by Tokugawa's no-open-borders philosophy. Shintoism would still be around late in the game.

Now that BTS takes care of most of the MAF issue....larger maps and more civs will make having extra religions a real benefit.

I like the idea and will have to bring it up in the World of Civilization group.

i'm for it.

I like the idea. BTW, how did Firaxis come to the conclusion that seven is the one to be number of religions? Six would've been better, IMO.

I like it.

Here's an idea how it could be done if you want them to appear early enough (in fact I think all should be available with Mysticism):

I am not sure if it is possible to code World Wonders that are specific only to certain civs (like UBs, but shared by a number of civs). If so, have Mysticism come with 7 World Wonders for seven religions, effectively founding them (the buildings would be cheap to allow for an early founding).

So, say, Romans and Greeks could build a wonder that founds Greco-Roman polytheism, Egyptians could build a wonder founding Egyptian polytheism etc. Dunno if it fits your original idea though.

Sounds like a really great idea, Gaius Octavius.. And I really like TheLastOne36's thoughts regarding additional religions and splits..

These splits could perhaps be accomplished through the new random events system. For instance, if Christianity is founded in the early or classical age, by the time you reach the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, your Civ might get an event, split and form a Protestant, Roman-Catholic or Orthodox church.. If possible, you might enter in XML what type of Christianity each different Civ prefers. The same could ofcourse apply to Islam, which could split in Sunni and Shi'a..

Then again, it might be too cumbersome or cluttered, but hey; just my two cents..

Swedishguy said:

I like the idea. BTW, how did Firaxis come to the conclusion that seven is the one to be number of religions? Six would've been better, IMO.

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Probably stems from seven as being a significant number in western society. Lucky number 7 and all that.

Sounds like the concept of "Ancient Religions" I came up with here while developing History in the Making.

I scraped the idea (for now) because I couldn't make the World Religions and Ancient Religions contrast as far as game terms go. Plus too many Religions will unbalance the game unless you somehow water them down, or make them unique enough that they don't follow the original Firaxis formula of "not offending anybody".

My idea was: I wanted to make the Ancient Religions basically go "extinct" once the World Religions take hold in the world. Once, say, Christianity moves into your city... after a few turns or so Norse Mythology would eventually be snuffed out and no longer present in the city. I just don't have the coding skills to do that.

I do still have all the Ancient Religions intact in my HITM mod, although they are currently "disabled".

If you can come up with a unique way to make these ancient Religions differ in terms of gameplay against the original seven Religions, I'd like to try it out.


(And I think Genghis Khan promoted Taoism during his reign... I remember reading about it once while doing research for HITM).

Well, I don't think I'm going to be able to be too specific without offending a religious person here, but I really think that saying that there are X number of religions whose role it would be to fill a niche in the early game and then be wiped out just as a matter of course takes some of the fun out of civ for me. I mean, in any given game, any religion could ascend to become the most powerful in the world if picked up by the most powerful civ.

For starters, "minor" religions would have to pretty much be assigned to different civilizations. Having the Aztecs with "Egyptian Polytheism" or something wouldn't make much sense. But to then have it so that once a major religion is discovered in the land, like Christianity, it just immediately sweeps aside the other. Why? Why would we necessarily have a world in which Christ and not Osiris is the central figure of a major world religion in the modern ages? We can have a Hindu Spain but we can't have Zoroastrianism survive into the 20th century?

We might immediately leap on the idea that these minor religions are more primitive with a much smaller worldview, that they must inherently be untrue and that history has proven them to be false... After all, Jeff the God of Biscuits seems very unlikely to us today. The gods of the old religions seem more like powerful humans than true creators of the universe which we now know to be much more vast and ancient than it looked to them. And here's the impasse... I could cite examples of just such a myopic understanding of the world and seemingly silly stories that we dismiss out of hand in the old mythologies that are right there in modern faiths. I think that with time, almost any of these religions could've developed more sophisticated theologies and expanded worldviews that would've been able to keep people's faith as society advanced because I think all of the modern religions today have done so. But I know a lot of people can't and won't believe that.

Almost none of the religions suggested are so specific to any one culture that they could not have been adopted by other peoples. However, with names like Egyptian Pantheon, Norse Mythology, etc. they are necessarily bound to one or two civilizations. But if that is the case, why should the current seven be any more of free floating religions that could be picked up by anyone? The short answer is: the suggested minor religions don't have a convenient "ism" to be attached to them. If Hinduism were called "Indian Polytheism" or if Judaism were simply "Israeli Monotheism", I can guarantee they wouldn't have made the cut. Many of these religions did not, in their infancy, have such convenient labels to be placed on them. Indeed, why would they? Why would the Greeks have given a name to reality? Why would they have created an all-encompassing term for their pantheon of gods if, to them, that were simply just the way things were? No, religions are named by people other than those who practice them unless they have some other worldview with which they have to compete.

I hear talk about historical accuracy and realism, but in the context of Civilization, these terms have very different meanings for me. It is, in large part, why I have opposed the idea of evolving civilization names and flavor units based off of historically accurate soldiers from non-European countries from the nineteenth century and onward as opposed to fictional units for these eras. Historical accuracy in the context of civ, to me, is more about sociology and psychology than history. It's about following the natural course of human interactions. The reason is because every game is different. It's a random map and a totally new world. The only constant is the human element, and so we have to be realistic according to what people collectively will do and not necessarily what they did do. In the end, the names of units, civilizations and religions... these things are just placeholders. Really we could just go with generic names and graphics. We could have totally fictional civs and leaders, but we keep them to give ourselves some element of the familiar... some connection to the world that we really do live in. But we should not make these superficial factors into a crucible into which we have to pour everything else.

I guess what I'm trying to say is... I'm not hot on the idea

Dom Pedro II said:

I guess what I'm trying to say is... I'm not hot on the idea

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That's why I axed it from HITM... I couldn't do it in such a way that it was "fair" and had balanced gameplay.

Which is why I only added two more Religions to my mod instead of several. If you have too many, then it devalues the current Religions in the game as far as gameplay goes.

See, this is one of the wonderful--and often frustrating --things about the forum: how two people can take the very same idea and argue against it from totally different perspectives. On the one hand, we have Dom Pedro II saying that making ancient religions too distinct from modern ones detracts from game value and alternative history. Conversely, we have Grave, who scrapped his idea precisely because he couldn't make them different enough! How in the world am I supposed to deal with that? Civilization means different things to different people.

When corporations were first announced for BtS, I have to say I reacted negatively. I thought it was a cheesy attempt to throw in a religion-esque mechanism for the late game instead of doing the "right" thing: fixing the current system so religions would be more relevant. They wanted something new that would "recapture the fun." While I don't hold this opinion of corporations anymore, I do want to avoid the idea of throwing in another set of religious variables just to recapture the same feeling you get when you first found and spread your faith. I try to avoid repetitive motions.

I admit this idea will never make it into the epic game because the ancient era in Civilization is very poorly done. With all the attention given to modern times in BtS, the classical world really gets the short end of the stick. I'm thinking more in terms of a mod that I've been planning for some time (with a revamped early era and expanded timeframe), which is why this idea may not make as much sense in the context of the regular game. In order to make everything coherent I'd have to give you the full details of what I'm planning, and I'm not quite prepared to do that yet.

However, I will say this: my intent in having ancient religions is not just about creating a group of "silly beliefs" that will get replaced when the more "rational" religions come into being later. No, I'm trying to model the real differences between the two. Ancient religions, like the Greek pantheon, were weighted much more toward ritual than faith. In modern religion, belief trumps ritual. Most ancient polytheisms were not "faiths" in the strictest sense precisely because they were geared so strongly toward action. The Romans didn't care what you believed so long as you sacrificed to the state gods in an elaborate ritual and paid your taxes. They didn't give a hoot if you believed Jupiter was real or just made up, if Marduk was the preeminent god, or if you were really weird and thought there was only one God. Faith didn't matter; practice did. It was all about maintaining right relations between the state and the gods.

This is not to say modern religions don't have their own element of ritual, just that belief usually plays a far more important role in the acting out of those rituals. I suppose you could argue that given enough time, the pagan beliefs might've developed a similar theology along these lines, like Dom said. (There is some evidence that they were already starting to do this in the wake of Christianity, but it never materialized.)

So to summarize, in the game I'd like to see ancient/minor religions providing more of a bonus within the civ itself, giving it extra "stability" (however you define that) and creating a sense of homogeneity through culture. The diplomatic penalties and level of missionary activity associated with later religions would all be reduced. Finally, it would "fill in the gaps" so that you couldn't just spread a later religion to one city and watch that civ convert. History seldom worked in such an easy pattern.

This is not to say you couldn't start off as a pagan Rome and maintain that status right through the modern era. My intent was to make the ancient bonuses different such that, if it happened to fit your in-game situation, you could do this. The hard part, as so many have pointed out, comes in balancing it.

An interesting idea...here's my take on how to solve it: more temples.

Basically, you would have 7 major religions, as in the game, but several different temples for each (i.e. an orthodox, catholic and proterstant temple for christianity), and other ones that get benefits (happiness) from the no religion option. This way you could build zoroastrian, roman-greco, or egyptian pagan temples before choosing a religion (indeed, having these temples might make it more worthwhile to not choose a state religion as soon as one spreads to your empire), and would also allow for more diversity within each religion. Each kind of temple would have thier own benefits and drawbacks, as well as perhaps increased happiness under certain civics. The only other modification that might have to be made would be to createa new 'religion' like 'no religion' to account for the differences between paganism early in the game and secularism later on.

on one hand the check chooser in BTS could allow for the game to have more than 7 religions but only 7 techs that enable religions. that would atleast make each game have a different set of religionss come to dominate. And your list would be great for that variety.

But I like the minor religions atleast poping up. I don't think they should have holy cities because it would be boring to see every civ have its own individual religion (that'll make the AP pointless plus alliances and diplomacy in general).

But I do like the idea of any religion coming to prominence. So I think if we/you just keep the seven founding religion techs that allow any of the 22 or so religions be the way to designate what the major religions will be then maybe through the events system you can have the other religions be flavors.

Hypothetically, the code would say if (for example) christianity wasn't founded by the time tech X was discovered, then you could have an event that says "villagers in city X claim a rabbi walked on water, but the local priests killed him anyway and now the villagers want a shrine." ANd then it enables the building of a christian shrine (that cant spread religion) etc.

That way the tech tree and the prefered religion system would determine the major religions and events can play out for the unfounded religions but add flavor.

just my two cents.

I think that creating new religions that spread would be inaccurate.

With the major world religions, ideas will gradually spread from one nation to the other. That's how religions work now. Someone brings a new idea of God to a foreign city.

With the ancient pagan or polytheist religions, it's the other way around: the foreign city brings a new idea of God to someone. When Civ A conquers Civ B, they also assimilate Civ B's gods. Now there is a god of Civ A, and a god of Civ B, maybe even other gods below them, and one god supreme above those gods. In fact, when the Romans conquered the Greeks, many of the Roman gods were thought to be the same as the Greek gods but by a different name, and religious thinkers of the time attempted to reconcile one god with another: Neptune and Poseiden are actually the same guy.

So how do the ancient polytheisms and ancient paganisms work?

They are strictly national. These ancient religions don't spread beyond their borders. In fact, as one nation conquers another and their borders expand, so too does the religion expand by assimilating new gods and cults into their broader mythos.

How would you do this in game play?

Allow pagan temples -- temples without religion -- to be built. Pagan temples would enable the bonus from the religious civics. There's a mod out there that does this now. And for civilizations that "prefer" paganism, they'd just be harder to convert to one of the world religions. You would need to have more than one Christian city in Greece to convince them to stop worshipping Zeus.

dh_epic said:

With the major world religions, ideas will gradually spread from one nation to the other. That's how religions work now. Someone brings a new idea of God to a foreign city.

With the ancient pagan or polytheist religions, it's the other way around: the foreign city brings a new idea of God to someone. When Civ A conquers Civ B, they also assimilate Civ B's gods. Now there is a god of Civ A, and a god of Civ B, maybe even other gods below them, and one god supreme above those gods. In fact, when the Romans conquered the Greeks, many of the Roman gods were thought to be the same as the Greek gods but by a different name, and religious thinkers of the time attempted to reconcile one god with another: Neptune and Poseiden are actually the same guy.

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Gaius Octavius said:

However, I will say this: my intent in having ancient religions is not just about creating a group of "silly beliefs" that will get replaced when the more "rational" religions come into being later. No, I'm trying to model the real differences between the two. Ancient religions, like the Greek pantheon, were weighted much more toward ritual than faith. In modern religion, belief trumps ritual. Most ancient polytheisms were not "faiths" in the strictest sense precisely because they were geared so strongly toward action. The Romans didn't care what you believed so long as you sacrificed to the state gods in an elaborate ritual and paid your taxes. They didn't give a hoot if you believed Jupiter was real or just made up, if Marduk was the preeminent god, or if you were really weird and thought there was only one God. Faith didn't matter; practice did. It was all about maintaining right relations between the state and the gods.

This is not to say modern religions don't have their own element of ritual, just that belief usually plays a far more important role in the acting out of those rituals. I suppose you could argue that given enough time, the pagan beliefs might've developed a similar theology along these lines, like Dom said. (There is some evidence that they were already starting to do this in the wake of Christianity, but it never materialized.)

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I think the both of you have made much the same error that I was explaining that people make before. You're taking modern Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc. and placing that over the ancient versions of these religions to make them distinct from those religions that failed to make the cut.

Ritual was an absolutely fundamental aspect of these modern religions, and it was indeed through reformation centuries after their founding that belief eventually came to trump ritual. But even then, ritual is still of fundamental importance in a number of these religions.

What, in any way, differentiates ancient Judaism from one of these other religions? That it was monotheistic? Ancient Judaism, first of all, was more henotheistic than monotheistic and it was not the first of its kind. In fact, there is from about 600 BC to the ascension of Christianity, a general trend towards henotheism and eventually monotheism.

To suggest that somehow now extinct religions didn't spread "naturally" by means other than conquest is just plain wrong. You cite the example of the Romans and the Greeks... how do you think the Romans came to have gods so similar to the Greeks? They adopted them as a result of Greek influence in the area from earlier times. There is substantial evidence that the Catholic church borrowed heavily from pagan peoples that fell within its realm, and there's yet more (albeit more controversial evidence) that some of the core mythology and beliefs of Christianity are also borrowed from Middle Eastern and Mediterranean pagan religions.

Christianity and Islam are also both two religions that spread through military conquest in different areas. Without that impact, they likely would not have taken hold there. And once spread there, the peoples there adopted them largely because the god of the invaders seemed to be more potent than their own... and yet, they still often merged their religions. South American Christianity has many many elements taken from the old Indian religions. Saints took the place of old Gods. Mary took the place of the Mother Goddess figure.

My point is that the arguments you make about the ancient religions are often things that were equally true with the seven religions in the game, and also that these religions.. many of them at least... were in the process of moving towards the complicated theologies that define the seven at the time of their destructions. A lot of the points that Christians were railing on about during the 1st century AD about God were laughed at by pagans not because they thought they were wrong, but because the early Christians had the audacity to act as though they'd thought it up!

Dom Pedro II said:

I think the both of you have made much the same error that I was explaining that people make before. You're taking modern Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc. and placing that over the ancient versions of these religions to make them distinct from those religions that failed to make the cut.

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Well, I admit to this to a degree, but in my defense I have to say it’s hard not to. Christianity is the yardstick by which the Western world measures religion. Mind you, I’m not trying to say the earlier religions are somehow worse by calling them minor, nor am I trying to give the impression their fall was inevitable. It’s precisely because they were so different that we sometimes have trouble understanding them.

Dom Pedro II said:

Ritual was an absolutely fundamental aspect of these modern religions, and it was indeed through reformation centuries after their founding that belief eventually came to trump ritual. But even then, ritual is still of fundamental importance in a number of these religions.

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Er… well, not quite… I agree with you at the outset (as I tried to make clear earlier) that ritual is an important part of any religion. There’s no exception here. Again, we face the problem of looking through the lens of Christianity, but one thing is for certain: compared to their Jewish and Christian counterparts, followers of ancient pagan cults did not place the same emphasis on internal belief. This, as we all know, was one of the major causes of Christian/Roman conflicts, when Christians would refuse to pay even the slightest nod toward native Roman customs because they felt it would be blasphemous. It is interesting that the Jews had the same difficulties, yet the Romans made an agreement with them whereby they would say prayers for the emperor in lieu of making sacrifices to the gods. Why that couldn’t be done with the Christians as well, I don’t know.

Dom Pedro II said:

What, in any way, differentiates ancient Judaism from one of these other religions? That it was monotheistic? Ancient Judaism, first of all, was more henotheistic than monotheistic and it was not the first of its kind. In fact, there is from about 600 BC to the ascension of Christianity, a general trend towards henotheism and eventually monotheism.

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I had a feeling someone was going to raise this issue sooner or later. As I was thinking about it, it occurred to me how Judaism is in many ways right on the line.

Dom Pedro II said:

To suggest that somehow now extinct religions didn't spread "naturally" by means other than conquest is just plain wrong. You cite the example of the Romans and the Greeks... how do you think the Romans came to have gods so similar to the Greeks? They adopted them as a result of Greek influence in the area from earlier times.

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I never disagreed with this.

Dom Pedro II said:

Christianity and Islam are also both two religions that spread through military conquest in different areas. Without that impact, they likely would not have taken hold there. And once spread there, the peoples there adopted them largely because the god of the invaders seemed to be more potent than their own... and yet, they still often merged their religions. South American Christianity has many many elements taken from the old Indian religions. Saints took the place of old Gods. Mary took the place of the Mother Goddess figure.

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I don’t really understand your point here, except that you’re trying to say “old religions die hard.” That’s certainly true, which is exactly why I proposed minor religions--because it’s absurd to have one missionary spread one religion in one city, and suddenly a whole nation of pagans “sees the light”! It’s absurd to think that missionary work in these places had no chance of failure, which is basically how it works right now should you come upon a civ running paganism.

I have to ask: why do you accuse dh_epic of being fallacious in his assertion that little religious spread occurred outside of conquest, yet you then make the claim that Christianity and Islam would not have gained much ground were it not for conquest?

Dom Pedro II said:

My point is that the arguments you make about the ancient religions are often things that were equally true with the seven religions in the game, and also that these religions.. many of them at least... were in the process of moving towards the complicated theologies that define the seven at the time of their destructions. A lot of the points that Christians were railing on about during the 1st century AD about God were laughed at by pagans not because they thought they were wrong, but because the early Christians had the audacity to act as though they'd thought it up!

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Well, it wasn’t really an issue of them believing the Christians had the audacity to think they invented it, but that they had the audacity to say that the polytheists were wrong. Religious syncretism, as you pointed out, was a hallmark of these faiths. Your Jupiter might be my Zeus, but it’s really the same guy, right? Well, the Jews, Christians and Muslims would say no. There is an interesting article on this called Moses the Egyptian by Jan Assmann, in which the author looks at monotheism as a kind of reactionary religion, an anti-religion, if you will, for its day. To say that there is only one God would’ve been tough to swallow; to add that ‘your Jupiter Optimus Maximus is not my Yahweh’ would’ve sounded unbelievable.


This is the source of the controversy as I see it: by allowing “major” religions to usurp the earlier polytheistic pantheons, we are effectively throwing alternative history right out the window. Had circumstances been different, is it possible that the Greco-Roman pantheon would’ve morphed and survived until the present day as a major world religion? I can’t say; but I gather that your main argument is this: to deny that possibility in the game would be a little one-sided.

So I’ll say it again: my intent all along was to make it possible for the player to keep a native religion right up through the modern era if he so desired. I have to think a bit more about balancing issues, but I believe this can be done. The question, however, is whether it would be profitable to do that.

One of the flaws in the current system is the interchangeability of the religions. Sure, you might be a Hindu and your neighbor a Taoist, but if you switched these out with, say, Christianity and Islam, there’d be no effect on gameplay. The diplomatic modifiers are the same; the culture boost is the same; the building effects are the same. What we need to consider are real differences in the religions themselves. Ancient Greek polytheism (if we’re going to lump all Greek beliefs into one category like that) did not have the same structure, the same methodology, and the same characteristics as the “big three.” Similarly, Christianity is much more geared for missionary activity than, say, Buddhism. Why should we therefore expect the Christian or Islamic spread rate to be the same as the cult of Ra’s?

My point in this long rant is that, yes, we are effectively classifying minor religions as different from the get-go, but that objection only applies if we’re going to maintain the one-size-fits-all approach to the major religions as well.

Perhaps the simplest solution, if we do want to maintain that generality, is something along the lines of dh_epic’s ideas: dispense with a new set of religions and use a different type of temple that provides bonuses geared more toward benefiting your own culture than to actively spreading a faith, or to diplomatic bonuses with other civs. This would be very similar to the True Prophets mod, so we’d have to think of more that needs to be changed to justify the creation of an entirely new system. One thing I can think of is to implement a chance of failure every time a religion tries to spread in a city with a pagan temple, to represent the resistance of the local population. I suppose you could create a new kind of blanket religion, Paganism, which would be superseded by all other religions. Since every civ would start with it (there would be no holy city) all the bonuses would even out.

Hmm, that may be what I end up doing.

Gaius Octavius said:

Well, I admit to this to a degree, but in my defense I have to say it’s hard not to. Christianity is the yardstick by which the Western world measures religion. Mind you, I’m not trying to say the earlier religions are somehow worse by calling them minor, nor am I trying to give the impression their fall was inevitable. It’s precisely because they were so different that we sometimes have trouble understanding them.

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Well, I'm not necessarily even saying that the bias comes from looking at it from the Judeo-Christian perspective. I'm saying that the very perception of Christianity (and Judaism, Islam, etc.) is shaped by these religions as they are today and not as they were thousands of years ago. My point was that these religions looked much more like the religions that are to be classified as "minor" when they first emerged. My point is that only through thousands of years of refinement have they taken the form they are in today, but that we have to be careful not to measure them as they are now against what the others were thousands of years ago.

Er… well, not quite… I agree with you at the outset (as I tried to make clear earlier) that ritual is an important part of any religion. There’s no exception here. Again, we face the problem of looking through the lens of Christianity, but one thing is for certain: compared to their Jewish and Christian counterparts, followers of ancient pagan cults did not place the same emphasis on internal belief. This, as we all know, was one of the major causes of Christian/Roman conflicts, when Christians would refuse to pay even the slightest nod toward native Roman customs because they felt it would be blasphemous. It is interesting that the Jews had the same difficulties, yet the Romans made an agreement with them whereby they would say prayers for the emperor in lieu of making sacrifices to the gods. Why that couldn’t be done with the Christians as well, I don’t know.

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It was done for Christians as well. The notion of the great Roman persecutions of Christians is largely more myth than reality. The Christians were, to be sure, at times persecuted, but to read the stories, you would think it was just a non-stop slaughter of Christians. But anyway, the Romans were concerned with money and power. Religion mattered very little to them. The rituals to the emperor was much more about showing fealty than any real religious meaning.

I had a feeling someone was going to raise this issue sooner or later. As I was thinking about it, it occurred to me how Judaism is in many ways right on the line.

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Certainly early Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism is much more clearly defined and falls farther away from the henotheistic side of the line.

I never disagreed with this.

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Was more directed at dh_epic. Sorry.

I don’t really understand your point here, except that you’re trying to say “old religions die hard.” That’s certainly true, which is exactly why I proposed minor religions--because it’s absurd to have one missionary spread one religion in one city, and suddenly a whole nation of pagans “sees the light”! It’s absurd to think that missionary work in these places had no chance of failure, which is basically how it works right now should you come upon a civ running paganism.

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I have to ask: why do you accuse dh_epic of being fallacious in his assertion that little religious spread occurred outside of conquest, yet you then make the claim that Christianity and Islam would not have gained much ground were it not for conquest?

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My problem was not that he was supposing that religion spread through conquest. My problem was that it seemed like he was saying that religious spread through conquest was something peculiar to the polytheistic religions mentioned.

Well, it wasn’t really an issue of them believing the Christians had the audacity to think they invented it, but that they had the audacity to say that the polytheists were wrong. Religious syncretism, as you pointed out, was a hallmark of these faiths. Your Jupiter might be my Zeus, but it’s really the same guy, right? Well, the Jews, Christians and Muslims would say no. There is an interesting article on this called Moses the Egyptian by Jan Assmann, in which the author looks at monotheism as a kind of reactionary religion, an anti-religion, if you will, for its day. To say that there is only one God would’ve been tough to swallow; to add that ‘your Jupiter Optimus Maximus is not my Yahweh’ would’ve sounded unbelievable.

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Well, I'm not just talking about monotheism here... although by the 1st century AD, the Greek and Egyptian religions were moving more in the direction of henotheism with many of the gods being more derivations of a greater creator god. But that's besides the point. The point is that for them, the concept of god had moved well beyond the much more primitive interpretations that marked an earlier era. Their interpretation of god, while different from Christians to be sure, had established just as much meaning by this point.

And even still, this only deals with the religions of the mediterranean nevermind the religions of central America, Africa and Asia. These too we can say a great deal about.

My point in the end is that these suggested minor religions are not so fundamentally different from the seven religions featured in the game (Confucianism isn't even really a religion) that they should be treated so differently.

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Gaius Octavius said:

I propose we add seven more religions for a total of 14. Now, I can hear people saying, “but there’s a reason there are only seven--it was done for game balance.” I agree, which is why we won’t be adding full-fledged religions--we’ll be adding minor religions.

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Minnor religions sound cool but could become to complicated. Also people who follow those religions would probably not appreciate it.

The other possiblity is that you add more religions but not all of them appear in the game. Each leader would have his favorite religion and he would found it at one of the seven tech. Once seven religions have been founded no more can be. So if there are 14 religions only 7 would be founded in any one game. This would preseve the "supposed" magical number of seven but allow for more religions.

I personally wish they had Zorastrinism