Tholish said:
Atheism is a religion for the reason that it is a belief about God based on faith. Agnostics have no faith, but Atheists unreasonbly believe in something they have not seen proven, namely the certainty of the nonexistence of a certain entity. Further atheism functions as the state religion of communist countries.
I dare you to go to Internet Infidels and say that. Oh, also:
http://www.squidi.net/comic/tales/view.php?ep=3&id=1. Ignore the strawmen and blatant anti-agnosticism and notice. Atheism is not about faith any more than basic every day life is about faith. When you walk down the street, you "unreasonbly [sic] believe" that there isn't an invisible wall in your way. You "unreasonbly [sic] believe" that the ground isn't just an illusion and you're not going to fall into a bottomless abyss at the drop of a hat. We use Occam's Razor for everything, but it's "unreasonble" to use it for deities? Also, I don't think anyone here wants me to repeat the "state religion" thing.
Tholish said:
Also, the word Paganism should not be used, it should be Polytheism. Paganism is a word applied by monotheists to all non monotheists. Polythiesm is belief in a pantheon of superior beings.
In what context are you speaking? Civics? A religion called Paganism? In both cases in makes no sense to substitute in Polytheism. In the former case it just adds to the headache of non-mutually exclusive religious civics, not to mention the weirdness of having a Polytheistic government before the discovery of Polytheism. In the latter case, it just doesn't sound like a single religion.
Also, Paganism is not directly equivalent to Polytheism, nor is it just what Monotheists call their religious opponents. Pagans believe in the holiness of nature; i.e. everything has a deity in or related to it. One can have a non-pagan polytheistic religion, or one can have a pagan monotheistic religion (pantheism). That's why it works as a civic.
Tholish said:
Different places have different pantheons but all pantheists are friendly to alien gods, the Romans taking in Isis and Mithra and so forth for example. The question might be, is Hinduism then a distinct religion at all. Is it not just polytheism with a caste system? The elements which became parts of Buddhism are distinct from basic polytheism, but maybe these Eastern religions should be combined to Karmaism or something.
I reject your premise. While polytheism is by its very nature open to new gods, it is by no means a single religion. The concept of "false gods" existed under polytheism. People still went to war over religion. I think your main problem is that you don't seem to understand the difference between belief and worship. Living in a monotheist-dominated era can sometimes make it difficult to understand how true polytheism worked in ancient times. Say a group who worshipped Egyptian gods went to war with a group that worshipped Greek gods (this is based on no specific historical event, so don't worry about the details). Now, these days the idea of "holy wars" is that they are about who's worshipping the one true god, as it was in Judeo-Christian history, but this war is not. The Egyptians believe the Greek gods exist and the Greeks believe the Egyptian gods exist. In this time, denying it would be like denying the person standing next to you. It was seen as obvious (interesting aside, by this the Jews would have been the contempory equivalents of atheists.). The war is not about which god is false, but it's an actual battle between the gods. As the mortals fight on earth, Osiris and Zeus duke it out in Godland. So what was my point? Oh, yeah. You have an overly romantic view of polytheism.
Tholish said:
Confucianism isn't really a religion, and Taoism isn't a major religion but rather a form of Pantheism, which is like there you are. Pantheism is another religious option.
Traditional Taoism is like Confucianism but opposite (Confucianism concerns itself with duty and so forth, Taoism teaches that if you sit back everything will work out the way it should). Popular Taoism is polytheistic, not pantheistic. I would leave it in, for popular Taoism. You would not, for your overly-inclusive Polytheism-as-one-religion thing. By the by on that, you might as well scrap Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and just make "Monotheism" by that logic, as they all worship the same God. Right?
Tholish said:
But that kind of thinking is about categorizing religions based on ideology. Perhaps what should be a religion in civ is what has a shrine, a single place that all the aderehts look to. That covers Jerusalem Mecca and Rome, but do Hindus or Buddhists or Confucianists or Taoists really have a single main shrine? What about non centristic religions without shrines, but maybe with some compensation.
Hinduism is a very old religion and is much more widespread than the other major very old religion (Judaism) so it has multiple holy sites. I don't think it would be too bad to pin it down. I don't know about Buddhism as a whole, but various sects have sacred sites to them. Confucianism and Taoism aren't really religions in the same sense as the others (popular Taoism is more like Chinese polytheism tacked on to Taoist philosophy than originating with Taoism), and do not have holy sites.
Tholish said:
For specific scenarios of course you want to have appropriate religions, that you would never propose for global civ. If you were doing the middle east, you would want to differentiate between the branches of Islam, for example, or if the 30 years war between Catholics and protestants, or maybe further between Calvinists and Lutherans and so forth.
Yeah, there's one mod in particular that does whole schism things with python or something. Dreadfully complicated. For this, though, I'd suggest keeping it simple at first, and splitting up sects if it seems necessary.
Tholish said:
Which you would want art for. Which brings me to this question. You can change the icons for religions in many places, but where is the one that goes over the little bar under the city to says the city has that religion in it?
GameFont.tga and GameFont_75.tga. Get a guide from the Tutorial forum, though, editting them is a major headache.
