The Antichristian Phenomenon

I was all ready to agree with you, but …

Morrigan: Evil? Seriously? She's definitely screwed up and she's short sighted, but I wouldn't go so far as to call her evil. She's not even terribly immoral if you're attentive to what concerns her. She identified the Blight as the primary obstacle along with the darkspawn. It's literally capable of destroying all of humanity. As a Grey Warden, your primary goal is to stop it. What Morrigan objects to is stopping along the way to stop disputes that at first glance seem to have absolutely no bearing on your primary goal. People will always kill each other, succumb to greed, etc. Morrigan is just very pointed in where she wants to expend her energy. Yes, you could save the villagers, but you might be sacrificing valuable time and resources to that cause when you could be directing your attention to the more serious threat. The Blight is the greatest and most pressing threat. If anything, she's a utilitarian.

Leliana: Not a goodie-two-shoes. She may come across as very religious initially, but as you travel with her, you will begin to realize that she's somewhat opposed to organized religion and has a very checkered past that will come back to haunt her. There's also a way to get her to abandon one of her vows.

You forgot the most important character in the game: You. It's very easy to play as an atheist in Dragon Age. I turned away from Chantry blessings, was critical of the Chantry on numerous occasions, helped the Blood Mages, etc.

…

It's a fantasy game. If anything, it does a good job of showing how well religion fits into the whole FANTASY theme.

I understand what you're saying but still, one has to wonder why it's primarily the Atheists that are being dicks. :-/

How about greatly approving the demon possession of a child while marginally disproving killing the actual demon?

Why is letting that demon posses the child considered absolutely evil? Is it because they're called demons? They're spirits who were abandoned by their Maker who only want to experience living.

Being an atheist in a world where god and the supernatural actually exist and show themselves is as stupid as being a theist in a world where they don't.

You’ve clearly not played the entire game all the way through, then.

The game explores in some detail the oppression of the Templars towards the mages – the opening scene for the human mages explains how they do this.

Alaistair, your pretty much constant companion explains how he doesn’t like being a Templar, nor how the Templars are quite oppressive.

Morrigan is pretty well set in her ways, though she is meant to be portrayed as being ‘wild’ rather than ‘evil’ – chaotic rather than just bad. She wants people to suffer the consequences of their actions rather than be reliant on others, which is why she wants the villages to defend Redcliffe themselves, and why she wants Connor to suffer his demon possession.

As to Shale not being religious – virtually no Dwarves are deist at all. They respect their ancestors and their Paragons, but know full well that these people are just dwarves like they are. They think worshipping the Maker is a bit weird and the one Dwarf who does worship the maker they find peculiar.

Additionally, in no way is Leilana ‘good’. She is convent raised, but she is atoning for her past as a spy. She thinks a convent is a good place to hide at first and is then granted a vision which compels her. Depending on how you role play your character, you can find her really naive or you can believe what she does. But she has more facets to her personality than just religious = good.

I suggest you play the game a bit more thoroughly. Depending on which character you choose to portray, you can be pretty dismissive of the religion. Compared to a lot of high fantasy, religion plays a pretty minor part – usually clerics of some description are explicitly granted power from their deity, both good and evil. In this case, the most they do is provide some charity and provide a blessing – in Redcliffe, the Knights ask for more direct examples of power, and are soundly rebuffed by the reverend mother.

Further, Bioware are making pretty big strides in the ethics of the game. Whilst some of their other games, like Knights of the Old Republic really are very black and white – and you are either rabidly evil, pretty much destroying everything in your way just because, or saintly to your own detriment Dragon Age has a pretty good morality chain.

Most of the choices in it that are difficult are so because there is often no easy choice – sacrifice the mother, or the child? Let Loghain live because he is powerful, or fight a civil war?

I don’t think any agenda is really being pushed here, because there is ample opportunity to resist it as you see fit.

Again, even though all are dicks to a degree, the Atheists take the cake. There's a difference in being good but flawed and in being downright evil or a misanthrope.

Then I'd say yeah, she's definitely evil.

This being posted from a website dedicated to bashing Christianity. Am I the only one who see’s the hypocrisy here?

Well, if I ignore the poalrized dialogue and silly atheist-baching parts, the game is decent. But of course I also liked KOTOR which is almost the same thing in style. There's far more killing going on after the introduction of course.

Problem is, if Western RPGs are not immersive enough, then you're frankly out of RPG option as JRPGs are even worse. I've yet to find a more decent a gritty modern RPG to tell the truth. Low fantasy and Swords and Sorcecy style would be far better than high fantasy of course but nobody makes those.

You thought the templars were portrayed as justified? To me they came across as total persecutors, with the Chantry practically enslaving mages (taking them from their homes as children, killing any who try to leave the Circle, deciding where they go, what they do, how they use their powers…) and plenty of them abusing their positions of power. If you talk to Wynne when you're playing as a City Elf, she'll tell you how there are stories about templars who don't simply kill the mages they hunt, implying that they rape, torture, or otherwise abuse them. If you play as a mage you get the full story with Jowan, which to me seemed to play out that he had been worried he wasn't a talented enough mage to survive or even qualify for his Harrowing, so he took up blood magic to try and improve his skill, which backfired horrendously because his practices were discovered, and left him with the options of either trying to escape or essentially having his personality sucked out. He provides an example of a mage who does something categorized as 'evil' – blood magic – and yet is strictly a victim of circumstances, with every bad deed he commits coming about as a result of being stuck in an impossible situation. The existence of abominations doesn't really justify the templars' actions so much as provide a basis for them. Even the majority of Uldred's followers only signed on with him because they wanted to escape the templars and the prejudice of the chantry. Morrigan, if you listen in on a conversation between herself and Alistair after the Circle quest, will say that she quite expected the tower to be filled with abominations and templars ready to kill every mage in sight. Possibly this is because, with her familiarity with magic, she would guess that mages who were constantly controlled and had both literal and metaphorical knives at their throats would be more inclined to find a *reason* to make a deal with a demon.

What actually bothered me more than the portrayal of the templar/mage dynamic or the fact that both atheist characters were clearly on the evil side was the Urn of Sacred Ashes. The game mostly does a bang-up job of keeping magic and religion seperate… and then goes and gives you a quest for a religious item with magical healing powers. Which kind of throws a cog into the whole works, because if, say, the Shroud of Turin suddenly started curing cancer, it would make a pretty good case for Jesus being more than a mere mortal, no? Yet this is never brought up by anyone in the game. Also, you would think that if the player character was, say, an atheist, or a Dalish Elf or Dwarf with their own culture's beliefs, they would be about as inclined to go chasing after the Urn as Sten was. It's not like Isolde makes a convincing case for herself, since she basically spends most of her screen time screwing up monumentally, flipping out, or else insisting that this one mythical item will inexplicably save her dying husband. In any setting other than a video game, who would honestly go on that quest? Even the religious figures in the game mostly doubt that the Urn exists at all, nevermind that it does what it's rumored to do. When Sten threw his hissy fit I was looking for the line of dialogue where I got to agree with him, and we went and found some Dalish Keeper with obscure herb lore or a particularly skilled mage who knew some as-yet-untried healing magic instead. But instead not only do we find the Urn, but it does exactly what it's supposed to, and no one ever mentions it or argues about what that does or does not prove.

Do any of you have Wynne in your party… she is clearly a "morally right" Atheist…….. if you have leilana in your party and her they talk about it.. and Wynne i think specifically says… i do not need to believe in a higher power to do good….. it is very unfair to say this game bashes atheists, i think Bioware is very tolerant in a lot of ways and they don't deserve to be viewed in this light….. if you don't have Wynne, do a playthrough with her you'll see how wrong you are about Dragon Age

1. This game also has quite a lot of christian bashing. An intolerant church which hates magic, yet teaches its own army similar methods? A church which has a monopoly over an addictive chemical and forces their followers to use it in order to make them adicts? And the Chantry is based obviously upon christianity. THAT is not christian praising exactly. The most fanatic followers (ex: the mage Keili) are insane.

2. Morrigan is not all that evil. She’s just on the other side of the coin. The Chantry loves the whole “sharing, being a good person, etc”, yet they have all the mentioned flaws. Morrigan is an individualist who loves her own freedom, and that of those who are oppressed by the Chantry (Sten and Jowan). Leliana, on the other hand, while she is generally a good girl, she has her darkside. She was an assassin and a manipulator. The Chantry would help a child, Morrigan would not. The Chantry would kill a child of an apostate, or lock him in a tower to pit him against the wolves. Morrigan would not.

3. I hardly doubt that the christian church would approve one of their biggest follower’s bisexualty. Leliana is bisexual.

Could be.

Morrigan was also my fav character just for the way she pwned Leliene but the whole "Look how evil I am" just annoyed me.

I don't think that Bioware are bashing Christians exactly. In a way I think they are bashing the institution. And yeah, there are a lot of messed up Christians and Atheists in the world.

But I think I've said this before about Morrigan… A lot of people here think that she's evil in the game, and that she is the main character that symbolizes Atheism. However not every Atheist, living, that was brought up in the world, was persecuted by the Chantry and the Templars. She and her mother were a special case. They felt the full brunt of persecution, by these two institutions. And it is of little wonder to me why Morrigan would feel animosity towards these institutions, which have left her isolated and alone from the rest of the world.

I mean… would it piss you off?

It'd piss me off… but that's just me.