Hey, what religions do people here practice? There seem to be a disproportionate number of Jews, several Mormons, what else? I'm not asking about the nature of your specific practices or beliefs, just religious culture.

I'm terribly curious about what kind of religious nature would bring someone to this kind of game.

Uh, just to start things off, I'm Jewish.

I'm an LDS son of a Bishop.

I grew up in small town Utah but was raised a mainline Christian protestant, Baptist then Lutheran. Ten years ago my dad converted to Judaism.

I'm an agnostic and don't practice anything in particular but I spend a lot of time studying Bhuddism, particlarly Zen and Mystical traditions of Judaism and Chrisitanity.

best

Trevis

I'm an atheist.

-Vincent

I'm a non-practicing and basically agnostic Jew, but my professional interests lead me to know far more about Catholicism, particuarly Scholastic theology, than about any other religions.

Dogs, and Vincent's background in general, are of particular interest to me, as mine's not that different, just set in Alabama. I'm the son of two Protestants, Southern Baptist for most of my childhood. My parents left the church a few years ago because they thought it didn't focus enough on "the Spirit." Their new church involves laying on of hands, random dancing, and other "Spirit-led" activities. My father often tells me things like "I've been fasting for three days" or "I can see people's spirits easier than their body."

Me, I'm an atheist - usually. You don't spend 18 years in that background without something coming out of it, so I alternate between hard-core reasoned atheism and "spiritual humanism," which I take as "something's out there, and it's out there specifically because we believe in it."

This is really, really interesting.

Since others have offered little stories, I'll append mine: I was raised Jewish by a Jewish father and a mother who converted when I was, like, 5 or so. The technicality of my mother's conversion after my birth has given me no end of clashing with Jewish orthodoxy, whom I otherwise consider my siblings in religion. It's given me a profound disrespect for orthodoxy and dogmatism of all kinds - be it Jewish, atheist, Catholic, or what-have-you (those are the varieties I run into most often).

My religious studies tend toward the mystical and linguistic, and I've been atheist at many points, like any good Jew.

I'm a Quaker.

I was raised Roman Catholic (CCD classes up till confirmatioon, the whole nine yards). It wasn't until I was introduced to the idea of transubstantiation (the idea that the bread and wine of the communion ceremony actually physically change into the blood and flesh of Christ during the mass...) in a college Humanities class that I realized I had no idea what the actual beliefs of Catholicism were. By that time I had become a hardcore "rot-in-the-ground" atheist. In my old age, I have mellowed into a "I can never know for sure and neither can you so let's all just respect each other's beliefs and try to get along" agnostic, believing that real atheism is a much an act of faith as belief in a religion.

John

I've spent time in the LDS church and the Lutheran church as a kid; Buddhism as a young adult; and an increasing commitment to Judaism as an adult and a parent, with exposure to both the Sephardic Orthodox and Reform movements.

Hi,

Nikola's second question was:

"I'm terribly curious about what kind of religious nature would bring someone to this kind of game."

Now, I haven't even gotten a chance to read the rules yet (though, as the internet is aglow about it, I know a lot about it) so I won't respond to this thread at this time.

But I'd love to hear people's answers to this second question.

I doubt it will come down to a specific "religious nature." Dogs seems to be about Conflict, sorting out what is Right, what Behavior is Right in what circumstances, and Storytelling. Which is, as a practicting Catholic, what I think the best of religion is about. (Orthodoxy and Fundemantilism reach out to different branches.)

But what do the players who play it think in terms of their "religious natures" -- or lack thereof?

Best regards,

Christopher

Hey,

I was raised Catholic but I would classify myself as enlightened agnostic. I don't have my copy of the game yet, but got the opportunity to flip through it at GenCon. I have to say I was more drawn to it from a love of Westerns than any sort of religious conviction. Perhaps when I get my copy I'll have a different opinion of it, but it just made me think of Pale Rider (which is my secret love).

Keith

Christopher Kubasik wrote: But what do the players who play it think in terms of their "religious natures" -- or lack thereof?

Deist.

Hmmmm...

thanks for the link, inthisstyle. Good thread.

But let me be clear, because the sentence you quoted was muddy on my part.

Nikola's second question wasn't about bringing Dogs to a player's own religious nature. He asked what was it about one's "religious nature" that brought one to Dogs.

The designer of the game is an atheist. I suspect there's something else going on here besides the appropriate religious nature exciting interest in a religiously colored game. What is that something else? I'd love to hear more about that.

And I think that Nikola's curiosity about this matter is a sound one.

Christopher

Christopher Kubasik wrote: Nikola's second question wasn't about bringing Dogs to a player's own religious nature. He asked what was it about one's "religious nature" that brought one to Dogs.

And I think that Nikola's curiosity about this matter is a sound one.

The second question isn't easy to answer, but I'll give it a shot.

What brought Dogs to my attention was Paka's thread on RPG.net entitled "Psuedo-Mormon Gunslingers in the Mythic West." This about a month after Pramas made a most satirizing Mormonism made me click on and read, as I'm more than a bit defensive of my religion. This comes from any combination of things, from a projection about my own problems with the church to the fact that as a kid I was the victim of what we'd now call a hate crime due to my church affiliation. However I found nothing offensive in Paka's post, and was intrigued by what he said -- intrigued enough to order the game. Of course, that's what brought it to my attention, not what kept my attention.

Having read it I found myself very deeply interested in what the game said to me, what it was about in my little world. This has much to do with my academic background in philosophy, my own rather heterodox take on Mormonism, and my take on personal and social responsibility. The Dogs fit into a very tricky place in those beliefs, a place where I find the stories they inspire to be powerful things, but where if they existed in the real world I would find them objectionable in the most extreme sense of the word. The divisions between self and society, faith and law, personal responsibility and social force are all things in which the Dogs mission falls perpendicular to my own standards of behavior – but does so in a way that shows clearly why they do what they do and why, in their world, it is a good thing to do. It isn't that I find the Dogs evil, but that they're good people who believe in a world quite like mine but take radically different stances on what that means towards personal behavior and social force.

This leads to a game in which I am very unlikely to identify with my character, but find it almost impossible to not find them fascinating. The Dogs represent the best and most hopeful of the things I see as most unacceptable, and thus run headlong into situations where hard decisions that make for real examination of topics that are important to my personal life are handled in a “fantastic” enough way to make them meaningful story fodder.

I was raised in one of the most liberal Southern Baptist churchs in North Carolina, so liberal that we got kicked out the Southern Baptist Convention for blessing the "holy unions" of homosexual couples. The problem with growing up in a very liberal church, though, is that they're not sure what to teach you about religion for fear of "indoctrinating" you (most of the older adults came to the church to escape the oppressive religion of their childhoods). So I didn't really learn about the Bible until I started taking courses on it in college, and I'm a big fan of the holy texts of other Abrahamic groups too: the Qur'an, Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi texts, Sufi poetry, the Taiping in China (which I'm studying now), syncretic Native American/Christian beliefs like the Longhouse religion and the Ghost Dance, Santeria, etc. So I dig heresy like nothing else, but don't consider myself a member of any particular religion. Kind of an "ecumenical Abrahamist with pantheistic tendencies," since there's no denying my cultural affliliation with that prophetic tradition, though I often seem to equate "God" with "the Universe" or "Life," which is why Dogs' "King of Life" really works for me. I can view God in semi-Animistic ways.

So I bring to Dogs a strong concern with how orthodoxy is maintained in a religious community, since differently people will doubtlessly have different ideas about how things work: spirituality being ultimately a personal thing, often clashing with the organized religion of the larger group. There are clearly ways in which maintaining orthodoxy can be supportive and spiritually nurturing (which is what I didn't get in my own "anything goes" upbringing, no foundation or religious education to build my own beliefs on), but then it obviously can also be oppressive and destructive to personal faiths (when you believe something to be true but the larger community denies it; this is where Pride comes in).

First of all, I'd like to say thanks to John Marron and Jonathan Walton. I'm that guy, the one you took that course from in college Humanities, who told you all that stuff you never knew about your religion. I always get sort of weirded out when all these kids say, very intensely, "Yes, I'm very serious about my religion," and then I find out that they know nothing whatever about it except that they've maybe seen The Ten Commandments and have heard that Jesus is very important. So here's me, non-practicing agnostic Jew who studies things like demonology, teaching a bunch of Boston Catholics about sin. You know? Anyway, thanks.

Second, I came to Dogs through Forge forums and didn't even realize it had anything much to do with religion until I started reading. I got about five pages into it, though, "Uh oh, this sounds like something I'm going to get really ticked off about," then read some more and thought, "Jeepers, that's really clever." And I started to wonder, in fact, why I couldn't think of other games with strongly religious themes that handled it in as sophisticated and thoughtful a way.

Not to make Vincent's head any bigger, of course....

clehrich wrote: I always get sort of weirded out when all these kids say, very intensely, "Yes, I'm very serious about my religion," and then I find out that they know nothing whatever about it except that they've maybe seen The Ten Commandments and have heard that Jesus is very important.

I'm an ex-Fundamentalist Episcopalian seminarian. Who read the Book of Mormon cover-to-cover at the age of sixteen. After defending it while a missionary with a very conservative missions group. I come to Dogs in the Vinyard as a potential didactic tool. Too few of the people I know have bothered to examine the big question: "What do I believe and why?" If played well, the question "What does my guy believe and why?" can get people started on the hermeneutical/ontological questions.

That and I'm a sucker for a good Western.

I don't know if this has come up before, but Orson Scott Card's Saints is a very good book to use as an ideas-mine.

Actually, and I cannot emphasize this enough, practically _anything_ written by Orson Scott Card is encouraged reading for this game.

Ender's Game? No, not really, but it's a good read anyway.

Folk of the Fringe? Post-apocalyptic Mormons.

Alvin Maker series? The first three especially.

The Homecoming series? Blatant retelling of the Book of Mormon, and it is _full_ of conflicts.

Stone Tables? The story of Moses told from an LDS viewpoint.

Women of Genesis? The stories of Sarah, Rebekkah, and Rachel and Leah.