What if gods were real?

I went to two church services in the last few days, it being Holy Week. The first, the Good Friday liturgy at the local Anglican church, was attended by not more than a dozen of us; the second, Evensong on Easter Sunday, took place at Durham Cathedral, one of the finest buildings ever constructed and a world heritage site, and was attended by a large crowd. You couldn't really get two more dissimilar occasions in many ways, but at root the emphasis was the same: God's becoming real in the person of Jesus.

Don't worry - I don't mean to smuggle Christian apologetics into my blog through the back door. Instead I mean to raise the question as to what human behaviour would be like if there were in fact real D&D deities, who inhabited the physical world, who had personalities and needs and desires, and who one could talk to and otherwise interact with and perhaps some day even rival, fight, slay. Not to get too Joan Osborne about it, but what if Gruumsh was one of us?

In some respects, of course, it would make religion even more important than it is, and was, in human societies in the real world - which is to say, very important indeed. Religion governed basically every aspect of our ancestors' lives; they not only prayed and worshipped as though they meant it, knew what saint's day it was each and every day, worried incessantly about the afterlife, and confessed their each and every sin. They also constructed the entire political economies and legal systems of their society on the basis of what they considered to be divine right, and imagined the exercise of government itself to be a reflection of the proper relationship between God and creation. They were, to the modern eye, complete fanatics. 

Now imagine what they would have been like if there was a realistic possibility that Poseidon, or Zeus, or whoever, might show up one day, hurtling lightning bolts. Everybody's lives would hinge on what would or not be pleasing to them to an even greater extent than would have been the case for a 12th century French peasant or 5th century BC Spartan. And that would be rather a lot.

At the same time, though, the relationship between the human individual and the divine would be much more familiar and knowable. One of the great peculiarities of human religion is that it is contingent on guesswork: whether one is a modern Christian or Muslim praying, an Aztec priest pulling out some poor fool's still-beating heart, or an ancient pastoralist making an offering to the hearth god, one is making what can only be described as, well, a leap of faith. Will my god hear me? Will I get what I want? Will it work?

People in a D&D world would not have this problem. They would live in something more like a spiritual economy, in which one could be pretty sure what one's god would want of one in any given moment, and in which one could ask him or her directly to intercede on one's behalf - and therefore make trades and bargains: I'll sacrifice a dozen gorgons to you if you grant me a safe voyage across the ocean; I promise to never tell a lie again if you heal my sick child; if you give might to my sword arm when I make war on the men of Fnarr, I'll convert them to your cause when I win. And so on. By the same token, it would also be the case that one could be pretty sure - depending I suppose on the caprice of the god in question - whether one would be rewarded for doing x, y or z. 

The result would be a much more pervasive and important, but also more transactional relationship between deity and devotee. If one really wanted to, one could really push the spiritual economy point and imagine a system emerging in which rewards bestowed by gods could be represented by tokens and traded for one another or even exchanged like cash - redeemable from the god in question on a 'pay the bearer on demand' basis.