FWIW many many Christians do not invoke God to solve earthly problems. Indeed, the relationship between doing good works on earth and being personally saved is a big doctrinal split. Some believe holding faith is enough in itself, others that one must act in accordance with the principles the Lord has laid out and better the world themselves in order to see divine salvation. The idea that all Christians just pray and hope shit works out is very much inaccurate.
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That’s an interesting point. So why is so much charity work done in the name of the church or the love of God? Even though it seems like it would be okay to do it in the name of humanity or simply myself , as I claim.
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I mean, why do you need an ideology to follow to do good things? Needing an ideology makes about as much sense as needing a religion. For a lot of us faithful, it’s because God endorses doing these things in scripture and advocates for acts of kindness and charity as a holy act. You don’t necessarily NEED to do it in his name for it to be holy but someone worshipping a deity or other figure that advocates for certain actions is likely to be inspired to perform these actions by their faith and so naturally, they often broadcast that they do it as an act of worship (unless the faith in question states not to).
Also, while there are several different interpretations of scripture in this regard, Jesus is often interpreted as saying that good actions are inherently in alignment with God regardless of whether they’re intentionally done in his name, while bad actions are inherently opposed to him, even if done in his name. We can debate whether certain actions are good, bad, more good than bad or vice versa etc. but regardless, with this interpretation (that I adhere to), any good action is in alignment with God, since God embodies goodness itself (among many other things).
There’s a common fallacy I see people who oppose this view use that I’m gonna get out of the way now. Namely the idea that needing religion to get you to do good and not do evil makes you somehow worse than someone who doesn’t. This is nonsense. People are inspired by all sorts of things to do good (or bad). Religion, ideology, personal investment in certain causes or issues, cultural values etc. Generally wanting to do good and help people by and large is not something you necessarily need a specific motivator for but let’s face it, there’s a lot of problems that need solving and there’s no way to focus on all of them. You can of course just pick ones that stick out to you for whatever reason, or that you’re in a position to address in some way, but belief systems are also huge motivators for people’s decisions on what exactly they dedicate their time, effort, and resources to solving. We all need to pick something, and we all have our reasons to make our decisions, and it doesn’t always matter too much what we want to solve because everything needs someone working on it. Religion is no better or worse a reason to do good than any other motivation. If it wasn’t faith, it’d (hopefully) be something else. And while you don’t need inherently faith or ideology to motivate you to be a good person, sometimes it does indeed motivate people who just didn’t realize before why certain things were necessary or why they should care about certain things.
There’re all sorts of ways to arrive at the right answer, but in this case, it doesn’t really matter what so long as you get there. You can even have more than one. I’m a Catholic Communist. I find both beliefs often lead me to the same conclusions. So, what does it matter if my beliefs are motivated by one or the other or both?
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Yeah, I’m not against doing good deeds or having them be based on religion.
I just have questions about Christianity or the Abrahamic religions’ perspective on goodness and its practices.
In other words, if God is the embodiment of perfect goodness and love, isn’t it impossible for humans on earth to imitate it?
In other words, God’s salvation has nothing to do with good deeds performed by human standards.
Of course, I know that this is an extreme predestination-based understanding of the Bible that many Christians will not accept.
I also believe that humans should do good deeds to others based on human standards.
However, I believe that, based on the original spirit of Christianity, God and faith should be completely separated from human good deeds.
Of course, this is my personal belief and I don’t intend to impose it on you. I just wanted you to know.
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Well, the specific theological implications are going to vary a lot between said religions. We may worship the same god but our ideas of how God works are very different. Explaining how Jewish and Muslim theology works is best left to people more knowledgeable on the subject. They naturally also have many different variations on their beliefs and some sects and traditions of one faith will have more in common with some sects of the other faiths than others.
Well, no one is perfect, we all have flaws and make mistakes, but perfection is not a requirement. You just need to do as much as you can.
It’s fairly contentious whether that’s the original spirit. What you’re quoting sounds like Martain Luther’s doctrine, believed by many protestant sects (like Lutheranism). I don’t think it ever applied to Catholicism, even in the old days.
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Congrats, you’ve invented the doctrine of sola fide. It’s as old as the Protestant Reformation and very much not a universal thing. You could probably spend weeks talking in circles about it, there’s a reason Christianity has been splitting for it’s entire institutional existence.
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Fully agree here, and there’s a very neat fault line exposed by this analysis (that also further distinguishes this setting from early Christianity in the Roman Empire) when we push it further:
We know the Hegemony will fall in this lifetime.
And so the source of its resilience becomes its fatal weakness:
An imperfect analogy for what I could easily see the once-Hegemony experiencing is the flourishing of myriad philosophies in the Spring and Autumn and subsequent Warring States periods: though actually living through such an age would not be pretty, and maybe only comprehensible in hindsight after all the starving and fighting is done.
Ideas, new and old, will have a chance to take root once the oppressive weight of Hegemony is lifted.
That’s one more crime we can add to our list (hypothetically), as the Sarinatou brothers can testify to…
That does raise an interesting question of how legally enforceable or not verbal agreements (of the sort reached when promising to deliver a certain discreet box by a certain date) are in this setting. At some point it probably defaults to the will of the powerful.
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It is the strongest possible sign of my commitment to getting a playable draft of Ch 2 out there ASAP that I’m not yielding to the temptation to answer this immediately. 
I will, eventually, at some length. So there’s something to look forward to, or dread, depending on your tolerance for Havenstone havering. But for now, I’m staying focused on Irduin.
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So what you’re saying is that we should all post our theological hot takes:tm: to get you to write faster…
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Hey Havenstone, quick question: do you think the Bible really says that we shouldn’t murder people, or is it just one of those read-between-the-lines things? I would also like to know the answer as soon as humanely possible, please.
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It’s actually been argued that “thou shalt not murder” is a superior translation of the text. Using “kill” implies self defense, warfare, and capital punishment are forbidden by the Ten Commandments, but the Bible calls for these things in several cases.
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Ooh my turn! Not a hot take but a question:
I’m not super knowledgeable about religion but my impression is that in (most? Idk) forms of Christianity, there is a concrete idea that there are various behaviors that are sins. Even if things get fuzzy around the edges, the “rules” are stated somewhat clearly.
By contrast in XoR it seems like there aren’t really specific “sins,” but you risk spreading Xaos with every action. Everything one does must be carefully calibrated to avoid doing so; in a way it seems almost more consequentialist in that a behavior can be well intended and not breaking any stated rules but still spread Xaos?
Is this a fair generalization of Christianity and the game religion, and if so are there any interesting exceptions in either case?
This feels like a super central question so apologies if it’s been asked before.
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Don’t you know? Havenstone’s work is a level of intelligence that no mere human could create 
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You’re all killing me.
Edit: though murder may be a better translation of the text…
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Not sure if you are trolling Havie, but if not I believe the Hegemony’s cannon is as theological as pre-reformation Catholicism. There is emphasis on parsing the literary cannon for the sanctioned and heretical, and there are rumors of the OG Shayardine Codex which revels the unmanipulated truth of the Angles. This to me implies there is a text to study, debate, and interpret like the Bible with various books being considered sanctioned or heretical by church institutions.
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Yeah, I guarantee the Codex has some weird rules we don’t hear about but some Ecclesiast is real ticked about.
“Kids these days don’t even wash their meat in flowing water.” Or some such.
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Yeah I guess it’s maybe perhaps a teeny tiny bit unreasonable to expect Havenstone to write an entire holy text within the text… so there will be specifics of the game religion that are present only through implications and “feel”
After all that’s what the forums are for. We ask @Havenstone to invent, analyze, and explain an entire holy text on the FORUMS. 
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Yeah, I’m so far holding firm in my determination to write a highly scripture-centric religion without actually writing the whole scripture…
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Christianity isn’t actually united on whether there are specific sins either. If you want to go full Calvinist, for example, then specific sins don’t matter, because everybody’s guilty of something, and the only hope is that God has chosen you to truly accept Jesus and will give you mercy - everyone else is going to Hell.
Meanwhile, whether anything in particular is a sin in the Hegemony depends on your Ecclesiast. Linus might agree with your interpretation, while Zebed would argue that a helot disobeying their superior is fighting for Xaos regardless of the reason.
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Well according to him there can also be no homosexuality among helots as that is against the creed of breed, breed, breed! (which isn’t very smart with the impending huge famines).
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