F.A.Q. ~ Players ~ Powers ~ World ~ Main
Then God said "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground"
- Genesis 1:26
Homo sapiens have regarded themselves as masters of the world for countless years, aided and supported by various religions and doctrines. Since the game is currently in North America, much of the religious beliefs the characters encounter will be the Jewish, Christian or Muslim as will many of the religious npcs. However, in this game clerics can (in some rare cases) work magic. What is to stop them from divining the truth about Jesus, the bible and other such things? Cynics who know or suspect magic claim they fake doing it and get the answer they want most.
The inability or unwillingness to hate makes a person worthless. If we do not hate detestable things, the quality of our character is suspect. The Bible commands that we hate.
-H. A. (Buster) Dobbs, Editor of Firm Foundation magazine and Church of Christ preacher, from the June 1994 issue.
humans have used religion as an excuse for war for millenia. In a world of vampires and weres, both groups have reason to fear humans discovering them and naming them the children of satan or some such and trying to exterminate them. Many church wars of the past against these beings have been disgused in inquistition, mistakes, crusades and the like. In point of fact, if weres embrace any religion then tend towards wiccan beliefs and worshiping nature and/or the world eventually, though some stay with the religion they grew up with.
"I am sorry for the people I killed and the people I hurt. The reason you don't see any more tears is I have been forgiven by God.''
-Luke Woodham (the teenager who shot and killed two high school students and wounding seven, after his conviction on June 13th, 1998)
The churches (like the governments) are obviously aware of magic and the lords of life and death. It is widely held by the vampires that the Catholic Church maintains a group left over from the inquisition with magic and weapons dedicated to eradicating the vampire from the face of the world. "Lilith" was a possible vampire from the ancient Hebrew Bible and its interpretations. Although she is described in the book of Isaiah, her roots are more likely in Babylonian demonology. Lilith was a monster who roamed at night taking on the appearance of an owl. She would hunt, seeking to kill newborn children and pregnant women.
We should always be disposed to believe that which appears to us to be white is really black, if the hierarchy of the church so decides.
-St. Ignatius Loyola (1500)
The Church itself is not immune to the mix of lore and fact of the vampire legend, nor, considering the similarities between impaling and crucifixion, would we expect the Church to be immune. Where Christ was hanged "on a tree" (impaled), the vampire and Vlad's enemies were also impaled. Where Christ was nailed to the cross, the vampire was nailed in the head (which image also recalls the crown of thorns). Where Christ was speared through the heart, the vampire is staked through the heart. Where Christ shed his blood to give life, the vampire takes blood and gives death or a "living-in-death."
But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.
-Jesus' alleged words in Luke 19:27
The vampire, though clearly a thing of evil and a pagan myth, had its believability reinforced by preexisting Christian doctrines such as life after death, the resurrection of the body, and "transubstantiation." This was a concept based on the Last Supper and the dogma of Pope Innocent the III in 1215 A.D., that the "bread and wine" and its equivalent during Christian Communion literally transubstantiated into the actual body and blood of Christ. People who adhered to this belief, and who consumed the blood of Christ, would have little difficulty in believing the corrupted corollary to this -- the drinking of blood by evil demons, namely, vampires.
Kill them all, God will recognize his own.
-Arnald-Amalric, 1208 (when asked by the Crusaders what to do with the citizens of Beziers who were a mixture of Catholics and Cathars)
Leo Allatius (a Church scholar) studied the vrykolakas, the Greeks' concept of the vampire. In his 1645 work called On the Current Opinions of Certain Greeks, he concluded that vampires were often the result of excommunication. Proof of their vampirism is that the body does not decay, indicating that it cannot leave this earthly plane. A swollen body was also evidence of possible vampirism. Leo Allatius may have been one of the first scholars to declare officially that vampires were under the power of the Devil and that they prowled at night.