This week I’ve been mainly reading, no. 153.
Each of Emma Newman’s Planetfall quartet explores a different aspect of the same overarching story of religious driven intergalactic migration. In Atlas Alone (2019), the fourth story centres on an elite gamer & their attempt to uncover & then take revenge for a crime against humanity. To say much more would ruin the plot for you, but as with the others, this is great, fascinating sci-fi, which has a great payoff at the end.
@ChrisMayLA6 @bookstodon I’m always puzzled by galactic scale SF which has religion as a thing. Surely, one might expect, by the time any civilisation has reached galactic scale it will long since have left religion behind it?
@TimWardCam @ChrisMayLA6 Not necessarily. I think the greater scale has the potential to expand religion because the immense distances would reduce the potential of clash between ideologies. Looking at it historically, you can see the ways that sects of Christianity evolved and flourished when expanding from Europe to the American continents. It also proves that religion is a really good way to control masses of people. Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books explore that a lot. @bookstodon
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The sole purpose of religion is and always has been to control large masses of people.
There has never been any other purpose for religion. Take people’s minds, take their labor, take their shekels. That’s all it ever was for, a tyranny and a con so the worthless parasites incapable of making anything useful can leech off the masses and elevate themselves above their hosts.
Christians are especially guilty of this. Revelation says that God hates the heirarchical, pastoral grift model, calling it, ‘The deeds of the oppressors of the people, which thing I hate.’
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Who knows? Not only has religion asserted its power in this century, we have also seen pseudo-religious ideologies with their messiahs, promised land, sacred texts - based on rigidly secular philosophies.
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Secularism is the religion of the state. Secularism is ecumenicalism taken to its most logical extreme. It is a religion that subverts all other religions to the power of the state. Secularism was the religion of the Roman empire and remains so today.
Go into the capitol building and look up at the dome rotunda, and you will see their secular gods painted a la fresco for all to see.
