Editing Religion (section)

===Religion as a Good Thing/Proponents===
There are several Science Fiction and Fantasy writers who either are religious themselves and want to promote their worldview, look upon religion positively and put that into the story or both.  This is more common in Fantasy than Sci-fi, partly because with the supernatural being THE fundamental element of the genre, this gives opportunities to explore many aspects of religiosity.  This is less common in science-fiction, but not unheard of, such as Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" where God's signature is found in the digits of pi.  These authors usually put more thought into their fictional religion plus its central figure (although they have a tendency to go all "Crystal Dragon Jesus"; that is, resemble real-life religions but with a few details changed), and try and have it be at least a somewhat good influence, although religious institutions and leaders are usually hit-and-miss affairs.  

Some people make a fictional setting with figures from real-world religions, either in the real-world or [[CS Lewis|an alternate world like Narnia]].  Others use fictional religions that either visually resemble real-life religions or figures from them.  Religions that often get this treatment are the Abrahamic faiths (most often Christianity), Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology and Norse mythology (albeit often a sanitized version of the latter three).  In other cases they all but abandon any form of subtlety, with the fictional religion being distinguished from the real-world religion by only a handful of minor changes. Naturally, those kinds of works tend to come off as preachy, to say the least. 

Another route this uses is the route that faith itself provides the power as per "[[Belief Function|Belief Function]]" (think Morpheus' "your mind makes it real" quote, but applying at the cosmological level).  In fact, Warhammer often goes the route that the gods are powered by faith as well as from their sphere of influence which has either [[Sigmar|caused some people have risen to godhood]] or [[Ynnead|caused new gods to be born in the setting]]. In fact, this has proven the greatest weapon against Chaos in every Warhammer setting (and why the Emperor's plan to starve the Chaos Gods with atheism was doomed to fail from the start).