| name | religion |
| description | In D&D, Religion is knowledge of deities, rites, prayers, and holy symbols. The real-world version is understanding belief systems: organizational cultures, team values, community norms, ideological frameworks, and the unstated axioms that a group treats as sacred. Religion explains why people in a group behave the way they do when the behavior does not follow from rational incentives alone. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| author | Wizards of the Ghosts |
| license | CC0-1.0 |
| compatibility | Hermes Agent skills system |
| metadata | {"hermes":{"tags":["skill","shipping-now","metaphorical","investigation-and-preparation","analysis","discovery","translation","preflight"]}} |
Religion
Understand belief systems, values, and cultural logic that drive group behavior.
What This Skill Does
In D&D, Religion is knowledge of deities, rites, prayers, and holy symbols. The real-world version is understanding belief systems: organizational cultures, team values, community norms, ideological frameworks, and the unstated axioms that a group treats as sacred. Religion explains why people in a group behave the way they do when the behavior does not follow from rational incentives alone.
In this grimoire, Religion is treated as a metaphorical skill with a shipping-now delivery profile.
Canonical reference input: Religion (skill).
When To Use
- You need to understand why a team, community, or organization behaves in ways that do not follow from obvious incentives.
- A change initiative is meeting cultural resistance and you need to understand the belief system behind it.
- You are entering a new community or organization and need to map its unwritten rules and sacred values.
Prerequisites
- No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.
Procedure
- Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
- Identify the group and the behavior that needs explaining.
- Map the belief system: what are the core values, sacred cows, founding myths, and taboos?
- Identify where the belief system is functional (it helps the group succeed) vs. vestigial (it persists from habit, not value).
- Deliver the cultural analysis with guidance on which beliefs to work within and which to challenge carefully.
- Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.
Deliverables
- A belief system map: core values, sacred cows, taboos, and founding narratives.
- A functional assessment: which beliefs serve the group and which are vestigial.
- Guidance on engaging with the culture: what to respect, what to work around, and what can be carefully questioned.
Pitfalls / Guardrails
- Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
- Respect that belief systems exist for reasons, even when those reasons are not rational. Dismissing culture as irrational is itself irrational.
- Do not weaponize cultural analysis for manipulation. Understanding a belief system is not license to exploit it.
Verification
- Check that the result includes every deliverable promised above.
- Check that confirmed facts, assumptions, and inferences are visibly separated.
- Check that the metaphor still maps cleanly to a real operational mechanism.
Example Invocation
/religion map the belief system, values, and cultural logic of this [team/organization/community]. What are the sacred cows and unwritten rules?
