I had planned to make another post in this thread a few days ago, but things got a bit more hectic with the notes for my project. While things have hardly settled down, I figured I'd take out the time to do it now before I end up just forgetting about it when I get buried in my work.

After reading all these posts, I like how people have brought up several of the facets of Christianity that I had planned to address once I had a better understanding of what the original poster was actually looking for in a reply, such as the books that were never included in the biblical "canon", the various denominations, and the multitude of unconventional groups who could in many ways be considered siblings to Christianity of sorts (Gnosticism, Kabbalah, etc). A lot of people also fail to understand that the Islamic faith stems from the same tree as Christianity in the same way that Christianity stems from the same tree as Judaism.

One of the reasons that many Christians, regardless of their denomination, fail to have a real understanding of their religion beyond the more basic and superficial groundwork, is that they don't actually research and understand the religion's history and origins, nor do they take the time to grasp all of the branches of it that went into other directions. This bleeds right over into the work of role-players and writers who actually consider themselves Christians, not just those who aren't Christian or are non-religious, since they write without the larger picture of the religion in mind. Like I said previously; many writers use Christian lore as the basis for their work (or just delve into the mythology a bit), but few actually do it accurately or with noteworthy insight.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, tests of faith are often one of the best methods of storytelling if you want to have a story that works with religious themes, because characters who merely live based on blind faith are far less sympathetic and human than a character who has to overcome a variety of crises of their faith. This is a recurring theme within my own work, though I once again emphasize that I am hardly what you would call a Christian (at least in the conventional sense).

I wanted to gauge what the original poster was actually looking for in this role-play before I started giving my views on how to present it; outside of the obvious advice of making sure they research the religion and do so from as many possible perspectives as they can find. I'm firmly of the belief that if a person does not thoroughly research and understand the opposing beliefs to their own ideology then they are living according to a blind faith, and blind faith does not bring one closer to their God. I also believe a person has no right to criticize or have an opinion of a philosophy or world view unless they research and understand it thoroughly too.

The Hebrew scriptures are a good place to start when looking for a better understanding of the biblical canon, especially because the present day Bible has actually largely changed and mistranslated a good portion of it in order to cater to their own perspectives of how they want people to view the religion. The only way the Hebrew scriptures will be truly useful to you though is if you can speak the ancient language yourself, since any English translations of it will also be modified. This is also a recurrent problem with the New Testament, as much of what is contained within it is only a select group of books that were chosen in order to create a contained belief system, and they removed any books that they considered problematic to their intentions. This is why people should study all of them, in order to gain an actual insight into their own beliefs. As I've stated before, pursuing faith with closed eyes does not help one get closer to God.

There's a lot more I can say, but for the time being I'll leave it at this once again. There's also the possibility this could go off into a philosophy discussion instead of remain a role-play discussion, so I'll stop. As for the role-play itself, I doubt I'll be able to participate since my priority is my own project and I already delve very heavily into religion from all angles with it; there is unlikely to be much going on in a role-play themed around Christianity that I wouldn't already be touching on in my work. Since I have no significant interest in role-playing without using my own project's characters (and these characters really do not translate over to other settings properly), I should also decline on this front as well. I do hope it all works out well for you though.