Would'nt There Be a Bigger Religious Presence in a Post Apocolyptic World?

[Moksha8088]

 

There was a swamp cult in Fallout 3 and in Fallout New Vegas there were Mormons.

I completely forgot about that, I was honestly surprised that they went there as featuring a real world religion is dangerous enough in PC society but the Mormons are a contentious issue among many of those who would not have any problem with actual religion being portrayed in the game.

 

This of could have been an answer in the Elder Scrolls universe where marriage is possible and it was hard to choose between Vilja, Cerwiden, and Zora Fair-Child.

 

In the Fallout universe which more or less borrows on our reality, having religious groups that mirror the real world seems natural. Not sure about the politically correct nature of a game avoiding religion when it demands lethal violence and continually offers drugs and booze to young players.

[bmt12]

 

 

In the Fallout universe which more or less borrows on our reality, having religious groups that mirror the real world seems natural. Not sure about the politically correct nature of a game avoiding religion when it demands lethal violence and continually offers drugs and booze to young players.

 

In most markets drugs, sex and violence are not a major political issue, though of course there have been a few exceptions where games had to be censored for certain markets because of drugs and what not but in general that's all kosher for the demographics the games are targeted at.

 

But religion is a very contentious issue, you will either have members of one religion or the other objecting to either how their faith is portrayed or how others are-or you will have the militant atheists who at least tend to be the vocal majority in most cases and will cause a fuss unless the region is painted in a mocking light.

 

Personally I love natural controversy in games that reflect the real world, most modern video games are so sanitized of anything politically offensive while going overboard with the drugs, sex and violence...in other words boring as soon as the shock value wears off. As I said in the other thread it's the same reason I find games that treat women warriors no differently than men to be uninteresting(I was primarily talking about TES and other ancient themed games not Fallout which is a different setting), I want to role play as a women who breaks the societal norms, otherwise what's the point of it all?

[Fkemman11]

Something I found and didn't know. Massachusetts was named after a tribe of Indians that lived there. I'm actually developing a character who is at least partly of Indian heredity and I'm thinking that some part of her people's beliefs and customs were passed through the generations enough that she learned them. But did not practice them as they had no place in "modern society". But now that she finds herself over 200 yrs in the future and almost nothing of the society she knew exists- she finds herself remembering the things that her Indian grandmother had taught her as a little girl.

 

So with this I am exploring a "religion" from people who originally inhabited the greater Massachusetts area. Since I myself am a tiny bit Sioux Indian I find their (all Indian) customs and beliefs to be of great interest. In a post apocalyptic America where the slate is basically wiped clean....whose to say what religion to follow or what political ideology to embrace. So maybe not just "traditional religions" make a comeback. The basic assumption being that so long as one person survives with any particular set of beliefs then it would be possible to spread them to the ignorant savages of the Commonwealth. :thumbsup:

[mkr1977]

Hubology!!!

 

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Hubologists

[charwo]

Actually, if anything has been learned from the late 20th and early 21st century, it's that brutality and corruption leads to highly, HIGHLY agressive relgious movements that call for social purification. Salafism in the Islamic World, Evangelical Protestantism in Nigeria and I suspect the crass brutality of the Burma regime is why Buddhists there are ethnically cleansing the Rohingas, who are Muslim.

This is a very important question, something a better post-apocalyptic series would try and tackle. But Fallout was never designed to be a serious look at the apocalypse. I've always held that way, from the very first game. But with every game, it becomes increasingly clear that SCIENCE! will triumph over science camp over innovation and the rule of cool over logical explanations.

You want a Fallout that takes itself seriously? Where the campy stuff is acknowledged and deconstructed until it becomes a symbol of moral and intellectual rot? Read a fanfic. Hell read mine, I could use a new review:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9509533/1/Caitiff-of-the-Wastes

But understand it's not really Fallout. The TVs in story are actually 3D, stereophonic, holographic projectors that beam s#*! directly into your brain....unless you don't pay TV service, in which case it's 2D in black and white, but free. Because not having color TV by 2077 is STUPID, unless it happens because someone is nickle and dimming you to death.

[Ethreon]

If you want serious fallout, you play Wasteland.

[charwo]

If you want serious fallout, you play Wasteland.

 

I'd like to have my tailfins and seriousness too. Something horrifically bad happened to pre-war America, and this notion that they "never got out of the 50s" is one of the laziest uses of artistic licence I have ever seen. Culture doesn't stay static, and Maoism couldn't be kept up for a 120 years in CHina because no one would be left alive. No, this world REGRESSED, and they built theme park versions of their 50s to assuge some serious cultural crisis. The Byzantines did this right before they fell too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemistus_Pletho

[Fkemman11]

Well damn Charwo! I didn't think anyone else understood exactly what I was getting at. But you do! Yes there would be a strong religious movement or three after the devastation of a nuclear war. People would be humbled and desperate to the point of rethinking everything they had ever known about themselves and the world around them. Someone was trying to say that people would be to busy trying to survive to worry about anything else. I can say from experience that when your ass is against the wall you damn well reevaluate everything. And I don't mean on some instinctual level. I mean you think -HARD.

 

Now probably some people aren't capable of such deep soul-searching and will happily believe in whatever religion someone is preaching- so long as that is what other people are doing. So I say again that some of those old- world, forgotten religions would have a very good shot at revitalization. Even against newer pseudo- religions that have much less to do with the "human condition" or soul.

 

Again I will state that I do not seek to advocate any one religious idea. This is purely a hypothetical topic set in FO4. :geek:

[Moraelin]

Well, Pletho was not very successful, but others were more so.

 

It's in fact how all golden ages end, and probably how the current golden age of the West WILL eventually end. Maybe soon, maybe much later, but they don't last for ever. It's easy to be progressive and cosmopolitan when things are going in your favour, but eventually things start going downhill, and the dumbasses start to want to return to some idealized past where everything was supposedly better (but actually really wasn't,) and make it great again.

 

Probably a better example than the Byzantines is the end of the golden age of Islam. Those guys had a hell of a golden age of science and learning, but then a guy named Al Ghazali spearheaded basically returning to some distorted version of the 7th century to make the Caliphate great again. Basically, all you need to know is in the Quran and anything else is your downfall. He wrote an impressive number of books about how the philosophers are just confused when they go on about science and evidence, and about how mathematics is the very language of the devil himself, and so on. And yeah, that golden age ended.

 

So, yeah, it could well have happened to the Fallout 4 America. Someone actually brought back the 50's to make it great again, yo! :wink:

[Moraelin]

@Fkemman11

Reminds me, I still want to give those people some good old Norse religion. Make that big tree in Sanctuary a holy tree, and sacrifice some raiders to Odin. Should put the fear of the gods in everyone else :wink: