Wow isn’t a pro-faith story but it is also not at all a anti-faith game. It just depend on what kind of faith you know/believe in.
It is really not representative of christian/muslim kind of faith as there isn’t a all good omnipotent god and most of the in game faithful group that believe in only one true power appear to be zealot.
On the other hand, wow is really representative of other faith such as greek, scandinave, etc, faith that have have many god who are just more powerful being. For those, the loa/wild god in game fully their role as god way more often.
I will say that religion as depicted in Zandalar is by far the best writing that WoW has done on the deity front. It’s still very Western pop fiction but that’s also WoW’s genre, so big surprise.
WoW writing is often at its best whenever the writers aren’t at the mercy of fitting whatever into the raid metaplot.
The whole being good for eternal reward seems to unique to the Abrahamic religions. I choose to be good, because well, that’s just common sense. That and the gods will make your life a nightmare otherwise.
I just put my faith in that there’s something better after this mortal life is over. In the meantime I try my best to be a decent human being because it’s the right thing to do
This is a pretty common feature of proselytizing religions, including the more popular forms of Buddhism. Devotion in this life to get a reward in the next is the key feature of Bhakti Yoga, the most popular form of Hinduism (in as much as Hinduism can be simplified in that way) highlighted in the Bhagavad Gita.
On that note, characterizing Buddhism as a godless religion (as I have seen come up in this thread) immediately flags the speaker as someone who has read their history but is at best familiar with Theravada Buddhism or the Japanese export form of Zen (which is an interesting bit of history; the external conception of Japanese Zen is intentionally distorted from the internal practice as a result of 19th/20th century international political considerations). It is not reflective of most practicing Buddhists. Buddhism’s core principles are god-neutral and thus syncretized heavily.
Siddhartha Gautama, who most Westerners think of as the Buddha, is not even the most popular Buddha among Buddhists.
Likewise, the ‘eternal reward’ isn’t an Abrahamic feature, it’s a feature specifically of the proselytizing variants of Abrahamic religions, most famously Christianity and Islam. I am uncertain the origin of this in Islam but in Christianity it reflects the influence of early Jewish eschatology which was itself heavily influenced by Greek religion. Mainstream varieties of Judaism do not really ascribe much importance to the afterlife.
Is atheism a religion ? I’d argue that depends on how you define both terms. If religion means “the belief in and worship of one or several deities”, and atheism means “the lack of belief in gods”, then atheism is not a religion ; but if religion means “a set of stories, philosophical considerations and rituals that come to constitute a belief system through which one perceives the world”, then it’s possible that atheism fits that definition. It ultimately comes down to what one means when they say that they’re an atheist. I’d definitely consider the unconditional belief in Progress and Science as a religion, for what it’s worth.
I for one wouldn’t qualify myself as anything really, though with the years “pagan” spiritualities and ways of interacting with the world have grown on me. There’s something about those that just clicks with me. Christianity is as alien to me as it can possibly be to a European person, though I have nothing but respect for religions in general, so that includes Christianity.
Also, I didn’t found the Xe’ra and Illidan thing to be particularly cringe. The authoritarian and hegemonic tendencies of the Light were long known, but until Illidan, no one had really been seen rejecting the Light because of these tendencies. It sort of sets the balance right.
Atheism is nothing more than a statement of “I don’t believe” It begins and ends there although quite a few Christians and others can’t accept that there isn’t more to the “ism” part.
