Zachary Jacobi asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

So often in fantasy that involves deities, they feel like rote miracle-granting machines. D&D takes this to absurd heights, where even the miracle of resurrection can be had at the cost of a couple of diamonds and a short prayer. Chalion is different. It's almost Kierkegaardian in it's theology; the gods are beautiful, absurd, and incomprehensible. I wept from the beauty of it. How did you create Chalion's theology?

Lois McMaster Bujold The short, facile answer is I Made It Up; the long one, which would be as long as my autobiography, that it evolved out of a lifetime of learning about, contemplating, and reading about real-world religions. The smattering of writing I've read from and about real mystics across a variety of faiths gave me a sense that they were all indeed honing in on some same thing, whether the godhead or the 60-cycle hum of their own biology being unclear. (Presuming the two are not the same.) Also from reading about the social functions historical societies carried out, and still carry out, with and through real-world religions -- teaching, medical aid, charity, orphanages, occasions for art, all sorts of community self-organized self-help. I wanted my fantasy-world religion to partake of both these serious endeavors. (Politics, like the poor, may always be with us.)

It also gave me a chance to argue with dualism, which is, in my view, a mistaken construction of the world that has done much harm through history. I wanted to make my gods both profound and evolutionary, based on a frame of the concept of emergent properties, which is about as far from the rigid simplicity of dualism as anything I've yet encountered.

And, of course, wanting to write my fantasy-world religion this way was indeed a reaction the the facile D&D-style constructions of religion.

Ta, L.

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