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This week: Creating a Fictional Religion Edited by: Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline  
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When you are writing a story, you can find yourself creating a fictional religion. It can be an interesting process!
This week's Spiritual Newsletter is all about the questions to ask when developing a fictional faith.
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When you are creating a fictional world, religion is one of the things to think about. Do the people in your world believe in a higher power or powers? How does that affect daily life? Do these higher powers exist? If there are religious people, do they follow a single religion, or are there various ones?
Designing a religion can be interesting. How far back does it go? How did it begin? Where? Is it the original religion of the society in question, or were there others first? If so, what changed? Are there still people who (secretly or not) stick to the old faith(s)?
What does it mean to follow the religion in question? What are the rules? What are its morals? Does your main character follow this religion? How does this affect his or her decisions and actions?
Have they ever had any doubts? If so, why? Is the religion a strict one? Are there any punishments involved? Can a person leave freely, or would they be in danger?
Is there an afterlife? If there is, what’s it like? Does it depend on a person’s actions in life?
If there is more than one religion, do people following these religions get along peacefully? Or has there been tension? Can this tension be resolved? How?
As you can see, there are many questions to ask yourself when thinking about this aspect of your world/society. It is worth it, though. Faith can have a big influence on a person and how they interact with their society.
Faith can help someone belong, or make them an outcast. It can affect the way they see themselves and their place in the world. Bad experiences can scar them. Good experiences can give them an anchor to cling onto in dark times. Faith can bring hope, or despair, or perhaps even both.
It can be a key focus of your story or novel, or it can be a background theme – just one layer of the world you are building. Perhaps it will only show in small actions, like a character mumbling a brief prayer during a dangerous time. Even if it is but a small part of the wider picture, it helps you, the author, to know what it means, what that prayer is founded upon. And it will create a richer experience for the reader.
Personally, I am not someone who creates character maps, let alone world maps. But I do think things through, and find it quite fun to do so. I like to drift of, pondering how my fictional world is different to the one we inhabit, and how it’s similar. Maybe it’s better. Maybe it’s worse. Maybe it’s a mixture of both. Faith is no different in that respect. In our world it has its good sides and ones that can be improved upon. It’s likely that it will be the same in a fictional environment.
I find that thinking of fictional religions can also make me reflect upon my own beliefs. That’s no bad thing. It can be healthy to check sometimes why I believe what I believe and why others might believe what they do. I know that there’s room for personal improvement on that front. It’s possible that there always will be.
Maybe that’s why it’s good that we have fiction. Sometimes it can help us figure things out. But even if not, religion will always be a fascinating aspect of world-building.
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline
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Wishing you a week filled with inspiration,
The Spiritual Newsletter Team.
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Spiritual: November 29, 2017 Issue [#8624]
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