I'd thought previously they'd always been pretty big on the idea of making all the religions practically identical, the only differences being for the sake of having different names. Like in Civ4, it wouldn't make any practical difference if they renamed the religions to 'Religion A', 'Religion B', etc. and gave them generic icons. The names were just for flavour.
That was OK with Civ4 where every religion was only distinguishable by the position in the tech tree, but I think if you make it customizable and give possible traits, there should be restrictions for certain religions because they are just too different. I don't think a political and moral philosophy like Confucianism should end up exactly like an abrahamic religion in my former game.
I'm on board with the thought that the actual religion is purely aesthetic. Mostly for the fact that if they give each religion specific abilities or a limited pool of abilities (as in Christianity can have Just War and Buddhism cannot), many people from each religion will get offended and potentially speak out against the game publicly. Giving selective certain abilities to individual religions will essentially be stereotyping some religions, and we all know how that gets negatively scrutinized in today's world, whether the stereotype holds true or not.
I thought this was the reason for not giving civ4's religions unique properties or powers.
Here's the thing: People can complain that Christianity and Islam have (optional) military beliefs, but the Islamic conquests, the Crusades, the Teutonic Knights and the Thirty Years War are historical realities and if someone complains about
that he's the kind of person who'll complain about
anything. There's no sense pandering to peole who are overly sensitive and just look for a reason to be offended. (There was a hillarious article about how cIV is leftist propaganda because it has global warming, and Liberalism is a tech you'll want early, but I can't find it now.)
If you don't want to offend anyone, allowing all beliefs for all religions isn't the way to go either. It might even make matters worse. Military enhancing beliefs and religious justifications for war in Abrahamic religions are grounded in historical realities, but what if you have options that are anathema to real life religions.
The screenshot shows Religious Idols, which is OK for Christianity. If you've ever been inside an Eastern Orthodox Church you'll see lots of idols, some of them really garish and tacky (I'm allowed to say that, I'm Orthodox), but what about Islam ? Idols are a pretty big taboo in Islam and having Religious Idols as a choice for Christianity
and Islam could be more offensive to Muslims than to replace it with somethng else: 'So, in my civilization every Muslim has a statuette of Mohammed, just like all Christians have a cross somewhere in their house'.
