I believe monks should be replaced according to the religion. Currently, these are very catholic and there are many non-catholic civs.
This would include a modification of the name and the skin.
Their stats and abilities would be the same for all, but depending on the civ you would be able to create a monk, priest, imam, shaman, etc.
In addition, the monastery name change might be considered as well.
Moreover, if we want to go even deeper, some of the monastery tech images might be changed for a generic image that suits for every religion. Not all of them, only those who are explicit of the catholicism, such as theocracy, faith and sanctity.
EDIT: Regarding the techs, my suggestion is to change their icons, not their names. Those that are mentioned have as icons or images a rosary, a stained glass window of a saint, and a grail, which are quite christian.
Theocracy and Faith aren’t that “Christian”. Theocracy is just any government run by religion, and Faith is literally something you need to be religious. It doesn’t get much more generic than Faith.
Sanctity too, it’s just seeing some things as sacred.
Seeing some reactions in Pakistan about some religious matters (violent protests about some cartoons in Europe, thousands of km away…) indicate it’s definitely not some christian exclusivity, not even close…
As I understand the words, Redemption and Atonement are specifically Abrahamic (but not specifically Catholic), and I think Heresy was probably more commonly punished under Abrahamic religions as well. But the rest of the abstract concept names seem quite generic to me.
What I don’t like about the way monastery upgrades are handled is that they don’t really communicate anything about the civilisations. Every medieval society was super religious by modern western standards, but the distribution of monastery techs between civs seems totally haphazard to me. (My specific personal bugbear here is Celts not getting Illumination.)
I think there is something similar in buddhism. Maybe a bit different, Buddha once refused to forgive a man that had wrong him while angry, as he said he was not the same man in a different state of mind. Thus there was no need for forgiveness.
That sounds sort of like the opposite concept to me – although I admit I don’t really understand this type of Buddhist story, so I’m probably misinterpreting it.
Regarding the techs, my suggestion is to change their icons, not their names or concepts. Those that are mentioned have as icons or images a rosary (theocracy), a stained glass window of a saint (faith), and a grail (sanctity), which are quite christian. The idea is to have a more generic picture that is not directly bounded with any specific religion.
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