> >> Hypocrisy implies an intent to deceive. A worshipper would only be
> >> hypocritical if he claimed that he loved the god when he didn't (since the
> >> issue of existence isn't really relevant in Glorantha).
> >
> > Tell that to the Brithini.
>
> Yes, but the Brithini are much closer to an orthodoxy system, having
> been modelled essentially on the medieval Catholic church.
I can only assume you're thinking of the Rokari, here, or the liturgical, deist West in general. The Brithini are immortal, atheistic cyphers, who have no (known, at least) credo, and whose 'philosophy of life' one might regard as being 'orthopractic', in the extreme...
> Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are not the only ways of classifying religion.
> But it is one valid set of oppositional concepts that all act to categorize
> religion. All RW religions that I know of fall into one of those two
> categories.
Not clear to me which most forms of Buddhism or Hinduism would be, by your definittions (or rather, by your apparent application of them).
> But despite that, modern Christianity is firmly
> in the Orthodoxy category, just as surely as ancient paganism is firmly
> Orthopraxic.
If you mean by that classical Paganism, then I certainly agree. Those are, if anything, misleadingly 'neat' examples of the two extrema you propose. I definitely don't see greco-roman religion as a good model for the Orlanthi, in this sense. It's fortunate that 'What would Zeus have done?' was not a popular saying among the Greeks -- fortunate for Western civilisation, at least!
> The whole reason that I brought up this point in the first place was to
> demonstrate that there is a completely different way to think about Orlanthi
> religion than by focusing on the question of belief, which is certainly far
> less important than practice.
For a sufficiently broad definition of 'practice', and a sufficiently narrow one of 'belief', at least. Certainly the Orlanthi have nothing one would really characterise as a 'dogma', 'doctrine', or 'credo'. Not as distinct from social norms. custom, and law, at least. However, you seem to be taking the large area in between the two, to do with non-ritual behaviour, morals, ideals, etc, etc, and either ignoring it, or redesignating it as 'orthopraxis', which seems to me to at least be counter-intuitive.
Cheers,
Alex.
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