Religion in RPGs

WISH 75: Reli­gion and Con­tro­ver­sy (from Per­verse Access Mem­o­ry):
A lot of neogamers I play with are uncom­fort­able with tak­ing real reli­gions and putting them into play. With all the “Satanist” back­lash against D&D that there’s been, do you feel com­fort­able hav­ing any reli­gion in your games? Do you scrub it of any­thing controversial?

I’m not sure I count, since I don’t run games. But I don’t hon­est­ly see how you can have much of an RPG with­out some reli­gion sneak­ing in. Peo­ple tend to cre­ate or cling to reli­gions. I can­not see inter­act­ing with believ­able char­ac­ters of any sen­tient race very deeply with­out encoun­ter­ing some reli­gious belief or practice.

I don’t see much wor­ry about con­tro­ver­sy in our gam­ing group, which has includ­ed athe­ists, agnos­tics, pagans of var­i­ous sorts, LDS mem­bers, Sev­enth Day Adven­tists, Bap­tists, and (I think?) an Epis­co­palian. Reli­gion hap­pens. It’s in a fan­ta­sy world. Peo­ple in the D&D game tend to have either no or very per­son­al rela­tion­ships with their deities. Those who don’t get very religious/spiritual don’t care about such things until they need heal­ing for some reason.