This is a gigantic load of horsepucky.

I say this... well, partly because "horsepucky" is really funny to say. Go on, try it. You get that "uck" sound, which is really pleasant and cathartic, hence everyone's favorite four-letter word... and you also get "horse", which is just weird to twist your tongue around. So I'll use most any excuse for that word.

But I also say this because this article is a grand case of missing the point. Not even missing the point. It can't even see the point. The point is seven miles away and calling on a payphone, but this article left its cell at home and so it's not going to see the point for another good week or three. The abstract, unless I'm doing some grotesque misreading here, is "why are the deities and religions of WoW so absent?"

To which the answer is "they're not."

There is nothing but nothing stopping you from playing a Light-fearing religion dwarf, or the equivalent of a deist draenei, or an atheistic blood elf, or a spiritualist troll, et cetera, et cetera. Agatha (Elaine's main rogue) is devout to an almost scary point, and the hypocrisy of what she claims to believe compared to what she does is a major facet of her character. Her Horde main, Qin, was a leader of a cult. Truce is a religious leader by dint of being a practiced and dedicated shaman. It doesn't have any in-game benefits, no, but we'll get to that in a second.

You see acts of supposed gods in Warcraft any time you level a Priest, or a Shaman, or a Paladin or a Druid. Pretty much every damn thing they do is something that they would point to and say "there, act of Elune/the Light/the spirits/Cenarius." You don't have any proof because once Elune shows up and explicitly does something, it stops being a religion. Once you can confirm with certainty who or what is a real deity and what isn't, then you no longer have the ambiguity necessary for faith and piety. You just have a clear set of facts to decide whose orders you should obey - since worship is no longer relevant, when your deity just tells you what to do.

Why can't you pray for an in-game effect? The whole point of praying is that it's a way of trying to bring certainty into an uncertain situation. We pray for guidance and in hopes of seeing some pattern in things. Taking the uncertainty out of religion defeats the whole purpose of it.

Long story short - if religion isn't a major part of your character's life, then that means you are failing to place that in your roleplaying agenda for that character. And if you aren't roleplaying in the first place, what the hell would religion be relevant for anyway?