Remember that you visit the God's house during worship ceremonies and Holy Days. Every time you try to learn magic, you go on a heroquest in the god's place. Each advance in worship level (Initiate, Dedvotee, Rune Lord, whatever) requires a closer personal bond to the god. So yes, "infiltrating" a cult requires lying to the god, especially if you're going to become priest or (shudder) High-priest of the cult, as the original question asked.
Both are
> healers with a practical approach to who gets help. Same with
> Lhankor Mhy and Irripi Ontor. They are a god and immortal of
> learning.
Err, so what? They are still not the same immortal being. Just because they share the same interests/areas of expertise does not mean that they will somehow "overlook" fake worship from someone from the other cult. All gods have their own rituals, blessings and way of doing things. LM worshippers use yellow Hi-Lighter pens on the Sacred Texts while IO worshippers use pink Post-it notes. This is because LM owns the Hi-Lighter(tm) corporation and gets money each time someone buys a Hi-Lighter, while IO owns stock in Post-Its (The Red Moon owns Majority share in Post-Its, of course). So the LM uses his Hi-Lighter while pretending to be an IO worshipper. IO gets nothing from the "worship". And the rest of the cult start asking questions...
> We also know that the God Learners managed to infiltrate many
> cults and they didn't even believe in the gods. So it is possible.
Sure, and look what happened to *them*.
Sure, through Heroquesting and other "big magics" you can make connections between your own god and the one you are faking, but that's in the realm of "extreme measures", and has a truly scarily high resistance. Maybe if you got the entire culture behind your heroquest effort you could do it, maybe it would only take the Kingdom of Sartar to do it. The Godlearners had lots of support in their efforts, and had the benefits of experience after the first few times they did it. It certainly wasn't a sure-run thing the first time, and it was neither easy nor quick.
> Since when has politics reliably put the best candidate in a
position?
Reliably? Never. But remember that the God has some say in who becomes their priest, especially High Priest. (Not that gods in Glorantha are invalible, but they can, at least, tell if their primary worshipper is faithful or not).
RR
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