Okay, this has been a subject that has troubled me for some time.

I'm a religious person. I'm a strict monotheist, actually. Most people who are religious believe in one Divine Being. I'm not looking to start an argument here, I'm just stating that the way most people look at religion is in that fashion. It was also true in Europe of the Middle Ages (which is the loose basis for much fo DnD). So why the polytheistic approach to religion in DnD? What's with the pantheons?

I personally think it got started as a homage to the Conan books. Every major source of fantasy literature that existed pre-1974 was a basis for some part of the DnD game. Most of it is based on Tolkien, but everybody made it in somewhere. The Conan books were full of various gods and goddesses. The popular Marvel comic book hero Thor helped too.

The gaming basis for it was to make clerical magic different from that of the magic-user (what early DnD called the wizard). Why can clerics wear armor and not wizards or sorcerers? Thus the separate forms of magic, Divine and Arcane.

Putting aside for the moment the issue of sending magical energy from the Outer Planes to the Prime Material plane, and how inefficient that would be, ask yourself if this makes gods in DnD much different from very powerful epic level characters. (Somebody made this point on the Eberron site recently.)

Now for many people this isn't an issue. You pick your domains, your god, your spells, and you play. To them the whole thing is a reference point, and that's it. It's just a game, picking a god and a religion is like buying a hotel in Monopoly.

To me, and to other people I know to whom religion is a more important part of life, it was a little more troubling. Questions of good and evil, right and wrong, and how to worship, and indeed what to believe, seemed more important. Too important to put aside for a game, when the game itself doesn't rely on it all that much. So at first we finessed and ignored it. After all you can play DnD any way you want. But that grew unsatisfying after a while.

My friends and I developed a different system for clerical magic, which doesn't impact the rules of the game, but treats cleric spells as a pseudo-psionics. (Making the fact that the spells are absed on wisdom much more realistic. If a cleric's god is channeling spell energy to him/her, why would willpower be a measure of that?)

In a nutshell, the force of a cleric's belief grants him/her a way to tap into energy for spells, be that energy extra-planar or pure willpower. In essense I have traded multile gods and goddesses for multiple ideologies. Erythnul is no longer a god, it is an ideology that enphasizes survival of the fittest, raw, unchecked, bloody strength. Nothing has changed in game terms, but we good clerics feel confident that when the bad guys die and stand in Judgement that the one Divine Being sends them to hell for all of their sins, including their various evil ideologies.

What's the point you ask? None really, only that you can play DnD without making your religious principles 'nervous'. This truly is the most flexible game ever created.