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Originally Posted by Sindri
Precisely this. Legends of, for example, being kicked out of paradise will certainly exist but should be viewed by players in the same manner as such legends in a subcreated fantasy world.
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Very well. Assuming you want to retain real-world religions without alerting your players (note just getting rid of real-world religions and replacing them with Fantasy pantheons would be much easier), you'll need to come up with plausible reasons for the changing of names. This is going to depend heavily on your setting, of course, but for descendents of today's humans to not know they are on Earth is probably going to require some sort of large-scale cataclysm. We'll assume a great deal of knowledge was lost during this, and sufficient time passed before old documents were rediscovered that language had changed, such that something written in English would be unreadable, so when a King James Version of the Bible (for example) is discovered, the scholars have to go through and retranslate it. Alternatively, the only versions of the religious texts that survived the cataclysm are written in languages that mostly
didn't survive. Enough other documents survived that the texts can be translated, but it's imprecise work and sometimes the translators had to insert educated guesses. This was particularly the case with names, as nobody is certain how the words of the dead language were actually pronounced, so you end up with similar-but-divergent versions of present-day religions, with the saints/gods/prophets having names more befitting the setting.
Naturally, you don't have to explain any of this to your players. You just make the modified religions and say "Hey, here's the religions of the setting." Throw in some standard - and not-so-standard - fantasy religions while you're at it and the players will probably just think "Oh, the GM must have based the Knights of Trinity on Christianity, and the Holy Struggle on Islam," not "ZOMG we must be on Earth 'cause those are obviously Christians and Muslims!"