Annotated 16-15
“There is no limit to the ways one person can touch another. ALLOW ME TO DEMONSTRATE.”
Although I’m sure certain shippers would interpret that line in another way.
Creation myth interruptus.
Annotations Every Day - Written by T Campbell & Flo Kahn - Illustrated by John & Jason Waltrip
“With proper training, we can—”
…perform acts of suicidal stupidity, apparently.
…snap someone’s spine!
I am not a very religious person, but I always find it very odd in these game settings that everyone isn’t. Seeing that you can actually freakin’ channel a god and straight up insta-heal wounds and revive people… Kinda hard to not just be a Cleric or Paladin when it’s presenting obvious, undeniable results.
There’s a difference between “these entities give actual power” and “these entities are worthy of worship.” H.R. is a perfect example.
And being a divine spellcaster doesn’t actually make you more powerful than studying magic, or (on the conceptual level, at least; there’s more of a debate here depending on whether “these game settings” means tabletop RPG settings or morepig settings) than simply training with weapons.
I’m not sure how the first sentence relates, but if all you gotta do is say “Cuthulu is the tits” every day to get to shoot a beam out of your hand, it’s a very palpable and easy serious power. Magic is usually understood to require a lot of intellectual cultivation and while swordsmen can get amazing they will never just freakin’ insta-cure your STD by a swipe of the hand and stop that river of blood coming out of your mouth.
Religion is OP in fantasy. And pretty easy to obtain. All you gotta do is “really believe” which seems super easy to do IF YOU CAN SEE IT ERRY DAY. It’s no asking you to believe in magicman in the sky that never does anything, it’s asking you to believe in rain.
I think every word you just said about how divine magic works is, at best, treating every fantasy setting I can think of that has divine magic as exceedingly permissive with regards to how you get it, and, in the vast majority of them, actively contradicting large parts of the letter of the rules.
So there we are.
I will point out that, in this setting, you’re expressing this belief in reaction to a character (Rachel) who has dedicated her life to religious orders and a character (Frigg) who is hugely frustrated by her lack of understanding and control of her own divine powers, not any characters who get massive powers just by saying “Yes, I believe whats-his-name exists.”
If, as you say, proof of the gods’ existence is being displayed every day, then clerical magic should be actually very hard. Seeing proof of something means you no longer need to believe, because you know, you have evidence. Proof supplants belief, therefore the ones who perform clerical magic need to be the sort of person who still believes even after seeing proof of what they are doing is possible, which is much more difficult than the sort of belief that continues even after seeing proof that what is believed is impossible or utter bollocks (like flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, or Brexit/Trump supporters)
It could be that. Or it could be a matter of believing simply isn’t enough to make them actually like you.
Or, perhaps, believing in their existence doesn’t automatically make you capable of speaking their language well enough to ask for favors.
Or, in one setting I played in, belief alone was enough. They’d hand as much raw power as was requested to anyone who asked for it. Hope you know how to channel that to a useful end without burning out your nervous system! (It did make killing true believers really dangerous since they could easily take you with them if you weren’t careful.)
I think you’ve conflated belief with faith.
Rachel has both and Frigg, as far as any sort of divine entity goes, has neither. So neither is a necessary or sufficient condition for being able to create massive glowing maces out of thin air sometimes.
That makes no sense whatsoever.
By that measure, “clerical magic” should be easy in our “No evidence of gods whatsoever” universe.
Seriously, that’s some very distorted thinking right there.
I can see it. Some folks are going to want to court the gods’ favor. Other are going to want to stay out of their way or have little to do with them. Especially if the world has multiple gods that often don’t see eye to eye.
And we know the gods aren’t omnipotent. The world has almost forgotten gods. And we’ve seen multiple occasions where gods get killed.
I never said the gods were omnipotent or anything. I could see a small number of people just “staying out of it” because of rivalry but in our world we have people killing each other over made-up magic easter bunnies taken to the extreme, and a small subsection of people that just wanna opt out because they just don’t believe (which wouldn’t exist at all in a Fantasy Setting). If we each could shoot a different flavored ice scream just for believing in them the entirety of the planet would be picking one up faster than people pick football teams.
And with more fanaticism too. Helluva lot more wars would be fought over Pistachio Vs Praline than Jeebus Vs Shao Khan. There would even be Aflavism that just believe in straight up vanilla (who would still participate) but fuck those people.
I think the real-world example is kind of a fallacy; here, the gods influencing people to kill each other seem to (currently) always be omnipotent, omniscient, infallible beings that make declarations similar to “all good things come from Me, all bad things come from Not Me”.
In the fantasy setting, I agree that most, if not all, people would be followers of some deity, at least casually. The issue comes with how that divine power is accessed. It seems that it’s typically only used by true adherents, not just followers; that is, people that have dedicated their life to the standards put forth by God A or God B, both of which have different philosophies and desire different things of people.
Then there’s people that might feel like using godly powers is taking the easy way out, or that they just don’t agree with any of the gods they’ve met.
I imagine it’s because not everyone is worthy of being given a portion of a god’s power, no matter how hard they worship them. Like, everyone could, theoretically, win the lottery. But your chances are astronomically low and you’ll spend a lot of money trying even if you only buy one ticket every Sunday. The same is the same with becoming a cleric- you could spend every day of your life in quiet contemplation, or singing gospel, or in prayer, or fighting for your god, but still might not be granted any divine power.
So most people just don’t bother trying. Their lives are better spent on other pursuits.
I feel like adding my two cents, so here goes:
In the real world, in most religions (and that’s including some non-theist ones), not just everyone can be a preacher. Indeed, a lot of would-be, wanna-be, and actually ordained preachers seem to struggle when it comes to adhering to the dogma and/or scripture and/or the general tender tenets of their particular religion – especially the phony ones.
There are histories, interpretations, rites, and ascetic insights that only those steeped in the faith in question really “get”. This may be because the structure of language leaves things open to interpretation – certainly, to give a very basic biblical example, it’s possible for one to have selectively read or been selectively taught, so that there are worshippers who literally think that “x begat y, and a lay with b” literally implies virgin births and reproduction just by sleeping next to each other.
It may also occur because the leaders of the faith are protective of ideas they hold to be true, to consolidate their authority or “keep the faith pure” by not leaving those ideas in the hands of those who would bend them to other, or “base”, purposes. For example, sermons given in Latin that the common folk could not even understand because they spoke other “common” languages instead, could not be given by those same people.
Many settings where the gods are real and their powers manifest mostly only through similar gatekeepers are exactly the ones you’re talking about.
It may not even be about whether there’s some divine test of morals, but simply “do you speak the language necessary and have direct access to the scripture that informs mortal practitioners of divine magic how to use it?”
*throws the phone on the ground for creating the sentence “tender tenets”.
I think it really depends on the setting. But if you think about it, in our own religions “miracle workers” are always a part of the lore. Jesus and the apostles were said to have raised the bleedn’ dead! Just the stories of those actions have been enough for a buy in from an awful lot of people. Now if there’s Cleric’s under every bush and in every tavern, sure, you’d be right.
But, A) That’s assuming there isn’t just as much a learning curve in the particulars of the use of divine magic, as there is in other forms of magic. Which seems unlikely as practicing your God of Choice’s divine magic, might be completely different than mine (War gods and love gods likely have different practices, death gods and gods of hearth and home likewise etc.) and it’s unlikely either god is going to be chill with you not knowing exactly why we scatter thirteen drops of red wax on a body before we feed it the diamond when we are raising the dead. Wizarding is usually closer to science in the sense that is standardized, but most settings heavily imply the priesty types have a lot of book learning (though we don’t see either folks actually studying that often in narratives, cause it’s boring).
And, B) In a world where if one has the right mental elasticity, determination and luck, one can control forces powerful enough to alter the fabric of reality in fun and explosive ways, what does it mean to be a god? It may not be that faith is lacking–they believe in the existence of a god, even if they’ve never seen evidence of it, because int their world it’s not that big of a leap–but more of a matter in not believing being a god is that different than being a powerful political or national leader or, in their case a wizard. In the Witcherverse, many wizards believe gods are merely a euphemism for another method of sorcery, or just powerful beings that are really just up-leveled wizards. Either way, they don’t believe they are worthy of worship, though they are possibly worthy of respect, much like one does not worship a nuclear reactor, but one takes the interactions one has with such a thing seriously.
Personally I’m of the mind(unless the setting is explicit other wise) that magic is not something most people see in their lives, and that the average believer in a god has no more access to that gods power, than the average citizen has control over the application and distribution of their local power plants ability to dispense power. Though they may benefit from that power in their daily lives, and do things which ensure they continue to do so, they have no real understanding of the power they enjoy. In this metaphor a Cleric would be an Electrician, and a high-priest would be the head of operations and the workers at power stations. People who’s activities are important, but rather arcane to the average joe.
Like being an electrician or an engineer, or a priest for that matter, I’m betting being allowed to wield the power of a god, even if only in a minor way in the grand scheme of things, requires more study than just going “I believe in you can I now hurl thunder, and heal wounds/raise the dead? K THNX BYEEEE!!!” and that if you’ve never been direct witness to the benefits of that study and effort, you may think the whole thing is a crock.
That Rachel glare in the second to last panel needs to be a reaction image.
I reject your alt text and replace it with “SNEAK ATTACK, BITCH!”