forum building religions?
Started by @dupliciaa
tune

people_alt 44 followers

@dupliciaa

How do you build religions from scratch? I realize that's a very general question, but I want there to be multiple religions in my world but I just don't know where to start. Any tips or advice on how to do this?

@cue-nervous-humming

Maybe a good place to start would be the overarching reason for the religion, or the main goal. What do people who follow this religion aim for? What is there to gain from following the religion? Because once you have that, you can build up the rest of the religion (rules/role of god(s)/traditions) up around that. To give you some examples (very rough I didn't have time to research specifics), the central theme of buddhism roughly would be to find painelssness/enlightenment/peace. Hence meditation, rules to be kind to everything around you etc. Or, another example, old aztec religions. They believed the gods had sacrificed themselves to create the world, so now humans and their sacrifices were responsible for keeping nature in balance, so they built huge temples, had regular festivals and timed sacrifices of things and people. They basically had wars just to get enough people to sacrifice,but to them, it was all for the greater good because one person dying meant nature wasnt gonna turn on them.
So maybe pick things that you want your religions to mainly aim for, and then you can go from there and build up traditions and rules around that. Also consider how beliefs you give each of these people will impact the way they see and treat others? Women? Children? The elderly? Money? Success? Upper/lower classes? War? Politics?
Hope this was at least slightly helpful :)

@ninja_violinist

Along with that, I think the idea is that most religions answer three basic questions:

  • How did we get here?
  • What are we here for?
  • What happens after we die?

and once those questions are answered, the answers help determine what kinds of things people would do in order to follow this religion.