A touchy topic.

My series WIP occurs a few hundred years into the future - after a series of religious wars (crusades), and a global collapse of governments because of climate change. Religion has been abandoned because of the violence and destruction it brought. My characters refer to the Old Gods in profanity, but that's about it. Religious beliefs play virtually no role in the story - until the third novel in the series, when a new religion is founded on prophetic dreams many people have of a 'stick-man' - spoiler, the religion falls apart in the end.

I do have a demon of sorts though - but he's actually an artificially intelligent space probe that was lost in multidimensional space and has gone insane.

MaeZe said:

So what do you do with this god creator when you are writing about societies living on other planets, be they aliens we encounter or humans emigrating to new solar systems?

Is it background noise? Do your societies have religion(s)? What do you picture future societies believing? Or not?

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My fictional societies have religions, yes. Like in the real world, I write worlds with many different societies and an abundance of different religions and belief systems. Not all of it makes it into the page, but I do like diversity in my fiction.

My bias is that scientific-evidence-based-beliefs will replace god beliefs because they will fill in gap after gap until creation by god(s) becomes obsolete.

What I don't know is what to do with god beliefs in the near future. I'm writing a story only a century or two from now. And the readers are from today where people have not yet let go of god beliefs.

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I don’t really fully understand this idea that science and religion are at odds with each other or that one would replace the other. Or that “religion” can be compressed down into “belief in god(s)”. To me, religion is part of culture. Do the peoples in your worlds have cultures? Then at least some of them probably have things resembling religions.

I can certainly imagine societies with cultures without anything resembling religion, but I don’t think that’s inherently related to how scientifically advanced they are. Religion serves a greater cultural purpose than only explaining natural phenomena. It can create history, identity, community, purpose, meaning, and much more. You don’t even have to “believe” in it in any literal sense to find usefulness in those things.

MaeZe said:

This is intriguing, lots of different beliefs.

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This is another thing. The idea that “in the future, XXX will be true.” Well, true for whom? Probably not for every society. Of course different cultures will have different beliefs. I don’t like monocultures in my fiction. I don’t find them realistic. And I’m probably not represented in them.

I have a Quaker in one of my WIPs (set in the 1850's). I tried to spend as much time as possible understanding the culture and theology of Quakers at that time. This meant reading some Quaker Meeting minutes, reading some of the writings of the founders/thinkers of the religion, and picking up a few secondhand books on the topic. It was important to me to get it as right as possible because there are still Quakers, of course, and because of the massive contribution they made to American society in the time period I'm writing about.

lizmonster said:

Personally, I think the desire for ritual is somewhat innate in humans. I certainly know a lot of people who, when pressed, are ambivalent at best about "god beliefs," but attend church and funerals and celebrate holy holidays because of the sense of connection with the past, and with their present community. I don't know how religion figures into your story, but to me there's a big difference between including religious ritual and asserting that your fictional society "believes."

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It's like I said before, some people in this thread don't seem to know what religion actually _is_, which might be colored by the U.S. centric board leaning, with a very vocal 'God > Science, earth 6K years old, evolution boo!' Christian segment to color popular perception. This isn't a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, where Science beats Religion. It'd be like playing Rock, Paper, Green.

There's a Jewish rabbinical proverb that I think fits the situation very well. "If in our exploration of God's magnificent creation, we find something at odds with our interpretation of the Torah, then it is our understanding of the Torah that is mistaken. If there is a difference between God's world, and our understanding of God's words, the fallibility is with us. Who would be so prideful as to claim perfect understanding of God's words?"

I've seen a ton of other religions disrespected so I just think it is a thing that comes out of hate which makes writing sloppy. If a critique of religion can be made in a unique way then that's a bit different. A lot of early literature would question Christianity through character or societal development which is interesting. I think it all depends on how you approach it but I can completely see why you would like to stick with fantasy because then you don't have to worry about being offensive or portraying a religion in an inaccurate way.