"There's a range. The religion is very popular."

snort. "Sounds pretty familiar."

"Oh? This happens even with gods of arguable existence?"

"There's a religion called Christianity in my world. It's extremely popular and has followers of...wildly varying appeal, yes."

"They even sound kind of alike."

"I noticed that, yeah."

"Although for all I know that's the translation magic."

"That is possible! Bar, any insight?"

Proper nouns such as those under discussion are rendered as pronounced with few exceptions, none of which have come up in this conversation; however, suffixes such as "-ity" are translated.

"So it's still a weird coincidence."

"Yeah."

"Oh well, who knows."

"There's other religions around and a lot of people are polylatrous, anyway, it's not all Kherstianity all the time. Plus there's people like me who don't go in for actually worshiping anything."

"What does polylatrous mean? I think we have that in our world, it sounds familiar, I just can't immediately call it to mind."

"It means you actively worship more than one god. As opposed to monolatry, where you acknowledge the others enough to not get hit by lightning - pronouncing their names right at least most of the time, not committing obvious blasphemy - but focus your attention on one."

"Ah. Well, not getting struck by lightning as a result of blasphemy seems like a benefit of hands-off-to-possibly-nonexistent gods."

"I would imagine so, yes."

"Some people are absolutely convinced at least one exists, some people are absolutely convinced there's no such thing. Helen and I are pretty much agnostic."

"I mean, if they never do anything I'm not sure why anybody would expect them to exist... divine magic could be explained other ways, I know druids come in 'secular', but the gods personally do things now and then."

"I mean, people come up with books about magic and super advanced technology and what have you without any reason to expect that to exist. I think there was one guy who did believe in God who said that if He didn't exist people would still have made Him up."

"People don't believe in magic that doesn't exist, though, right? If they do I'm chalking the whole thing up to 'your world has people very subject to wishful thinking'."

"...Almost no one does, and almost no one who doesn't takes them seriously. As people, I mean, not just their belief in magic."

"...Which isn't the case with the believing in extremely quiet gods?"

"Quite. I don't know, some people think they used to be more active once upon a time, there are holy books filled with really overt miracles that supposedly used to happen."

"Oh, that's within normal parameters, Khersis himself has been really quiet for a long time, even."