Fantasy religion and culture

[salamandraga]

So originally I was thinking about adding a few little things to help flesh out my fantasy religion while avoiding cultural appropriation. I've created the mythology and come up with the structure of the faith. My characters pray, blaspheme, and utter minced oaths. I've made holidays, festivals, and folklore. I've got holdouts still clutching to

Comments

[giveyoulife]

Your main trouble seems to be because you've drawn mostly on the Abrahamic faiths in the first place. Prayer beads were a HUGE giveaway; the religions that even use prayer beads are Abrahamic to start with, or were heavily Christianized.

Or perhaps it's because you're calling them prayer-beads, and not something more generic like "fidget toy/beads/string" . Not to say that you absolutely can't have prayer beads, but semantics are very powerful and when I see something like "prayer beads," I immediately think of a rosary.

First: no. Prayer beads exist in many religions outside of Abrahamic ones, fully outside of Abrahamic influence. Just because you associate them with Christianity doesn't make them Christian.

Prayer beads themselves don't carry the same connotations in those cultures. In Christianity, obviously, they are used almost exclusively for prayer, and additional circumstances are incidental. But in Greece and Islamic nations, they're mostly seen as fidget-toys and status symbols. If a Christian plays with their rosary, it would be a HUGE religious faux-pas if not cause for outright concern, because most Christians will only fiddle with their rosary when they're extremely stressed or worried. But if a Greek/Muslim plays with their beads, it's pretty much accepted that they need to kill time.

Where the hell are you getting this from? Because this is also not true. Hell, rosaries are fashion accessories in many parts of the world where Christianity is the dominant religion.

[crossoverqueen]

And again, I realized that I've been drawing on experiences with Catholicism, not Christianity. I keep running into that problem when I try to talk about my former religion.

On rosaries being fashion accessories: I do indeed know that rosaries are a dime a dozen because, since my family has them all over the place. The OP, on the other hand, was calling her accessories "prayer beads"--that specific phrase in itself would be very hard to conclude with "accessories that happen to have religious details."