Musing: Religion Part 1

There are two major forms of religion on the Bluestone Isles, druidism and deity worship. Both are intrinsically linked to one another, but the separation of ideology between them means they will forever be at odds.

Druidism is the belief that everything has a spirit, be it a living creature, inanimate matter, or a concept or idea. The spirit may be a part of something (the souls of all living things) or the spirit could be a guardian and caretaker of it (like the spirit of a river or the spirit of war), but it a force possessed by all things. The ultimate testament to the faith is the Druid, someone who can commune with spirits to obtain an array of powers and abilities.

Deity worship, on the other hand, is the belief that the powerful beings worshiped as gods created the world and everything that exists on it. They created all living things, set about the laws that make the world work, and developed every concept from love to war. When a soul dies, it travels to the plane of the god that the being worshiped and who's tenets it lived by the most, or the plane of the god that is most befitting the being's punishment, if it worshiped no god or violated his god's tenets. The ultimate expression of the power that the gods wield is that of the Cleric, someone who can focus the very power of the gods into a variety of spells and the ability to drive away the undead.

Both religions have many ties to one another, those that worship the gods very much believe in the souls that exist in them, while the druids cannot deny the power of the gods, nor their duty to claim the souls of those beings that die. However, their are core differences in their beliefs that have stopped the two from ever existing fully entwined.

While practitioners of druidism believe in the gods, they do not believe the gods created all that is. The gods are simply a group of spirits, powerful indeed, but not even the top of the spirit hierarchy. While their positions are important, their are things that have existed long before they did and play a much more important role in the world.

Those that worship the deities see the gods as the ultimate powers in existence, and that everything that is, is because of them. Also, these worshipers do not believe that everything has a spirit, certainly not non-living things and concepts. More extreme believers (but not the followers of all gods) do not even believe that unintelligent living things (such as many monsters, beasts of burdens, and wildlife) have souls and the most extreme do not even think that all intelligent species (their enemies in particular) have souls, so killing these beings is not any worse then cutting down a tree.

So who is right? Are the gods supreme beings that created all that exists and have the power to destroy it on a whim? Or are they simply just part of a larger spiritual hierarchy that has always been and always will be? These questions ensure that while the two religious ideologies may not always be at one another throats, they will never truly get along.