cazfi wrote:We should not make statements about religions by implementing rules that "religion x is so much better at y that it gives bonus z".
Agreed. Taking (or appearing to take) positions on that kind of issues is a can of worms we shouldn't open. Driving people away isn't the only issue. The quality would suffer if bonus X was added to real world religion Y in a rule set distributed with Freeciv. The huge flame war about what effects each religion has, what granularity to choose when dividing them and what should and shouldn't be considered a religion would hopefully stop it. If it didn't the support would probably end in a compromise. A compromise will suffer from not stepping on toes even before the patches to "fix" it starts coming in... (Rule sets distributed and developed outside Freeciv could of course avoid this problem)
Arbogast: When you read the rest please remember that I'm not a native English speaker. It is hard to express disagreement in a way that is accurate and that sounds polite when you don't master a language well enough. To make up for that I have tried to flatter you by using French examples*.
Arbogast wrote:Free of politics, religion or race.
I agree that Freeciv shouldn't take positions on those issues. (Cult of Reason, Cult of the Supreme Being, Laïcité, Roman Catholicism and Calvinism are all positions.*) When that is said 100% neutrality is impossible. In the civ2 rule set time is counted BC and AD. In the default rule set it is counted BCE and CE. In alien it is counted BGE and GE. Each way of counting has its own religious implications. A religious idea they all share is the Christian idea of linear time. In the story line of the alien rule set you will see many religious ideas (that are common in science fiction). Take a look at any rule set to see the consequences of the various governments. Take a look at everything a player can or can't do. The only way to create a truly neutral game is to remove the story AND the game play. That is: not create it at all.
Arbogast wrote:There is NO such thing as a Fictional Religion.
There is. If you make up a religion and no one, including your self, believes it that religion is fictional. If someone would start to believe it the religion would no longer be fictional but the religion would still be fiction (since you made it up).
Arbogast wrote:That sounds like fanaticism to the power of 10.
The intention behind a feature like that is to be able to model "fanaticism to the power of 10" in the game. An example of where it could be useful is in a scenario with a custom rule set based on the French revolution.* It can be used to model what the Committee of Public Safety did to those that refused to convert. Note that someone playing or creating a rule set like that say as little about their real life positions as someone reading or writing a novel about it.
* I see your location is in France. I therefore assume you are French. I really hope you French feel as flattered when a foreigner know stuff about France as most of my country men are when foreigners know stuff about Norway. If not I just wasted the time I spent on Wikipedia checking that my memory was correct.