I don't want this to get into religious bashing, as that is fairly pointless. I am just curious if this is always the way the game has been written, or if it was changed to this in a later edition to remove potential religious contentions.
I ask as there's several things about the religions in the way they're described (holy wolves/dogs for example, which isn't a concept that works in Judaism or Islam, both religions believing that canines are inherently unclean and Islam specifically going a lot farther than that).
Only really gotten in to 5e myself, so not familiar with earlier editions.
Mandatory disclaimer of "Dominion actually extends beyond Abrahamic religions, with Zoroastrianism, Neoplatonism and Roman pagan Cult of Sol Invictus and any other Monotheistic faith revering the one God/Creator/Intelligence."
I heard from a friend (so take it with a grain of salt, I don't have the materials) that in some of the previous editions Islam was Infernal, with the game being centered more on Europe and what Europeans thought at the time. Granted, if this was from 3rd Edition, damn near everything is Infernal (Looking at you, Vatican...so even a broken clock is right twice a day ).
But jokes aside; the best way I've heard it summarized is that all of the aforementioned faiths possess a piece of the puzzle that is the Dominion, with none of them being able to claim monopoly on divine wisdom. Each of them gets things wrong, but are still close enough and earnestly trying to receive Divine favor, whether the local religious authorities like it or not.
In second edition, there was no comments regarding other faiths beside the Christian one, and it was about the length of a paragraph (plus the rules for miracles).
This is what I was getting at though, some of the ideas described in the books can't really work this way, so I was wondering if this idea was a Band-Aid over a potential problem of causing offence to one or another religion.
Why not? It certainly works better than solely designating one denomination to be the one in the right. Plus, a setting in which only the Medieval European-Christian worldview is correct would be a more boring one. That is to say; no Magic Realm, no Faerie Realm, only God and Devilry.
It could also be an attempt to portray the evolution of Abrahamic faiths. I'm by no means an expert, but to my understanding, Islam builds on many Jewish beliefs and incorporates some Christian ones. Christianity started as an offshoot/sect of Judaism. Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrianism - it is one of (potentially the) first religion we know of with the dualistic worldview of Supreme Good vs. Supreme Evil...So where did God come into the picture of this foundation?
With Neoplatonism, who strive for spiritual and intellectual pursuits over the wordly concerns
so they could move closer to understand the single cause that they considered divine, and indiscriminately referred to as “the First”, “the One”, or “the Good”....Well, if you squint hard enough, that almost sounds fairly....Christian? Abrahamic?
As for the matter of offense, well what can you do? IRL, they do generally consider each other "people of the Book" (or was that primarily an Islamic belief), though there is also no love lost between the groups over historical grievances. Zealots you can never please, so why bother? Neo-Pagans might not like the Realm's pecking order either. Its an exercise in futility.
Worth noting that Mythic Europe / Ars Magica is a fictional setting inspired by certain IRL concepts; its not meant to be 1 for 1 accurate though a respectful portrayal was attempted. The Abrahamic faiths are all sanctioned by God, yet their worldviews in Mythic Europe are not entirely accurate, for really, who is to claim to truly understand Divine Will? And I think it leaves the setting richer for it.
The Cosmology I personally decide on is, the big bang happened, Dinosaurs, etc, however, the one difference to our world is magic. Magic manifests not only as hedge magicians power, the order, the gift, fae, etc, but also as a manifestation of the combined will of enough people.
If enough people believe in Zeus, etc, they come in to being. Enough people believe in the Abrahamic God, he came in to being. The Jew, Muslim and Christian all being able to get benefit from True Faith, is because enough people believe that the divine can and does work through the person with true faith.
That allows all the contradictions to work. Somewhere there is a regio where Apollo is literally pulling along a sun, yet the Sun made by God is also in the sky.
Can't really get in to it without potentially being "hate speech". A nice example that shouldn't ruffle too many feathers is the Christian attitude towards Christ. Both Judaism and Islam consider this to be a form of polytheism (and indeed it is one of the primary arguments against Christianity from Muslims). In order for all 3 religions to all be part of the same "divine monotheistic realm" this has to then by default mean that Christ was in fact an aspect of god (as this is the only way for the Christian attitude to not be polytheism), and so invalidates both Judaism and Islam, and because you can tell that things are divine or not through skills such as sense holiness and unholiness so it is not a matter of debate this would then completely shatter both Islam and Judaism. And Judaism and Christianity have the same issue with Muhammad.
Anyway it isn't that only one denomination is right, it would make more sense for each denomination to have their own divine realm and corresponding infernal realm (for those religions which have an infernal equivalent).
The only way you could square the circle is to say that the actual beliefs of each religion are irrelevant and that it is the morality they try to instil which is what leads to the divinity, but this also does not work for 2 reasons. The first is that you actually interact with manifestations of those beliefs (such as the angels) and that the moral systems of all three religions, never mind sects of each religion, are significantly different.
What you suggest is already in the game, all of the non abrahamic gods are classed as Fae powers and came about because people beleived in them, there's multiple references to this. Which is why handling the "divine" differently is odd.
No, it does not have to be that way at all. Christians may or may not have been right about Christ being God, but even if they were wrong this doesn't make Christians polytheists.
You wouldn't be able to tell if he was God or not afterwards, at most if he was associated with the Divine.
None of the religions are right in all aspects, none of them are wrong about everything. That they disagree on important points does not mean they do not all worship the same God and are all part of the same Divine realm.
It does. Polytheism means worship of multiple gods. Because Christians worship both god and Christ, that would, if Christ was not an aspect of god, make this worship idolatry, which is one of the greatest sins in Judaism and Islam (and also Christianity itself).
Not all of them. While most of the old pagan gods are Faerie powers, a significant number of them are Magical and exist completely independent of any belief in them.
Even the faerie gods have existence and power independent of belief, they just draw sustenance from interaction with humans, where worship is one the better (from the faerie point of view) forms of interaction.
The idea that belief shapes reality is not how the canonical Ars Magica world works. Gods and other powers don't just pop into existence because people believe they exist.
As long as they believe it is the same entity, it is monotheism. If Jesus wasn't God, then Christians are wrong, but not polytheists.
But, no mortal knows for sure if Jesus was God or not, and there is no way of finding out for sure except asking God himself.
Except this would make them fae entities, and not divine entities. The divine itself means that there's some truth behind them, as the divine is its own thing. And this is a massive contradiction to one of the key elements that behind divinity in this setting, monotheism.
Since divinity is an external thing to beleif, that has to mean the Christ was an aspect of god for Christianity to be a monotheistic, and so divine, religion
Which is a somewhat different thing. Faeries shape themselves around human imagination.
People imagine there is some unspecified being behind thunderstorms, and faeries start putting on the role of diverse thundergods. Then, after meeting them people start believing more specifically in Thor, and Zeus, and all the rest.
That does not follow at all. Monotheism is a matter of belief, not of reality.
Really, it doesn't matter if Christ actually was God or not, for Christianity to be a monotheistic religion. Nor does it matter for Judaism or Islam being monotheistic religions.
Could you perhaps contact said friend for details? I can't find it (my .dtf copies are notoriously bad for searching in), and the box insert I can vaguely recall, mentioned that the christian church indicated that muslims were infernalists.
As best I can recall, or tell by a quick review of several books, 3rd edition didn't address whether any religions other than Christianity could be aligned with the Dominion, either to affirm or deny it.
There is language in the 3rd edition book Pax Dei which to my eye reads as implying that only Christianity can be aligned to the Dominion, with the author feeling uncomfortable with the idea of asserting it. For example, the bit . . .
The Righteous Dominion does not distinguish between Muslims, Jews, pagans, faeries or Magi. The crusading mentality considers all to be enemies of the Church.
. . . ends a section on p.25, and is followed after a heading on that same page by . . .
Although the power of the Righteous Dominion is great, the will of God is what truly perpetuates it. If for some reason a crusader deviates from that will, he suddenly finds the Righteous Dominion gone, and the Aura does not return to him until the crusader comes back in line with the will of God.
. . . but that's still short of an outright assertion.
It certainly was not there from the start, but I do not think this is the main reason for the change.
Early editions worked because they did not say too much. Ars MĚ€agica was a game set in Christian Europe, Islam was plain and simply out of scope.
Third edition got in touch with Islam when they made the Iberia supplement, but seem to dodge the question nevertheless. No aura is mentioned for Cordova, and all the cities with divine aura seem to be under Catholic rule. I may have missed something, of course, but I think it is safe to say that they do not put such emphasis on the divine realm at all.
I seem to remember that this and related questions were heavily debated on the Berkeley list in the nineties, but I won't claim my memory is particularly good. The need to place Judaism and Islam with the Realms of Power rose gradually, as players wanted to play a wider range of cultural backgrounds, and the publishers wanted to make money on a wider range of supplements. If it feels shoehorned, that is probably just because a shoehorn was exactly what they needed.
Eastern religion is obviously still out in the open, simply because there weren't enough money in the supplements to write one about the far East, Hinduism, or Buddhism. I am inclined to think that's a good thing.
Fact is, stories break down when you make it too long and far-reaching. I am convinced that the authors who created the four realms back in the day, simply did not think of Islam at all, not because of a lack of cultural awareness, but because they had to restrict the scope of the game.
).