☕ fantasy religious orders ?
Mostly they're not very good! There are two broad categories: sloppy copy/pasting of the Catholic Church and sloppy copy/pasting of Greek or Celtic polytheism. And I think the problem with both is either that they're written by people who aren't religious themselves and so don't believe that religion is really important to people or that they're written by people who don't understand what the function of religion in a society is, or both. You tend to get people who are going through the motions and fanatics, with no in between.
And not to get all "in the Oxford English Dictionary, religion is defined as," but the etymology of "religion" is that it is something that binds - it constrains actions and behaviors, maybe, but it also binds a community together. For the most part, an animal sacrifice in the ancient world isn't a gory bloodletting, it's the beginning to a communal meal (that's why Zeus gets the fat and offal and humans get the meat in the Prometheus story). It binds you to your neighbors; to your city; and to your people. If, as in a book I otherwise liked, the sacrifice is used to drain the blood of the animal (enough for a full-grown man to submerge himself in, which is just silly) and then the meat is burned, that will actually damage the community, because you don't have enough animals to sustain it.
I admit, it's hard to do it well! The fact that the writer is creating it means that they don't believe in it, and it's hard to make rituals you don't believe in feel real. But despite my own agnosticism, I love ritual actions and belief that can't be proven and the acts which that belief can inspire, and battlefield inspiration, so I wish people would try just a little bit harder.
