Tuesday, September 4, 2018

The face is not always the same as the heart, sadly (Traveller Tuesday #11)

We've got religions on Ishee of every size from tiny to immense. Let's see what's up with this one . . . 1d20 gives us 13 ~ ah! Deism, with its watchmaker God who created the universe, set its rules and systems like gears in a watch and then walked the eff away. This is the most remote divinity of the theistic religions of Ishee Rolling a 9 on 2d6+1, we see that believers perform charitable acts to create a better society for posterity. I've been thinking about this option in terms of the Rose Brothers ~ that family of traditions seems to suffer from an over-focus on Great Scientists and a lack of focus on using technological breakthroughs to actually like, I dunno, help people?

The faith requires devotional services only once a year (12 on 2d6+2). I wonder if this religion doesn't have a bit of a chip on its shoulder about it being the Rose Brother tradition to actually engage with the problems of the people. Perhaps this annual devotion is largely composed of dedicating everything one has, including all technological possessions, scientific knowledge, and innovative inventions, towards helping those less fortunate than them. It's one day where everyone does this.

Only those within easy communication can effectively make decisions about how to help those who need it, so there's no hierarchy above the planetary level (11 on 2d6+5). We also get some more information about that day of helping: evidently, it emphasises communal teaching with only limited ritual, which fits my image of it pretty well, I think. Some theological and ethical teaching and a whole lot of passing on science and technology to those you're helping, and a little ritual mixed in as well.

Adherents are active in their proselytization efforts ~ again, there's a recruitment drive but no intense push ~ and it only reaches out to a limited number of sophont species (4 on 2d6+2). Probably, they've determined that Hermachis of the Horizon built other rules into the clockwork of the universe to help those beings and so any efforts by the church would be wasted. One does wonder how they came to that determination, however . . . .

These conversion efforts seem to have paid off! A 10 on the 3d6-4 roll gives us tens of billions of adherents! I daresay that this religion is what most of the galaxy thinks of when it comes to the Rose Brothers, and would be quite surprised to visit the Azeyrenawt-dominated Guild-State. Random.org gives us 81,874,634,730 followers in total. Considering the respective numbers and my positioning of this religion as a fourth splinter sect of the Rose Brothers, I'm just gonna say that it accounts for all of the remaining Isheeans. Although, double-checking, the Clarencians have like 10 times as many faithful as this religion, so they're probably the actual galactic face of Rose Brotherhood.

Now we roll dWikipedia for a name: the Open and Assistive Galactic Rite of Rose Brotherhood.

The religious landcape of Ishee:
7,690,230 sophonts (48%) Liberty Fellowship of Spirit-Listeners (known as Fellows, Associationists, or Listeners)
4,966,607 sophonts (31% of the population) atheist/agnostic/non-religious/other
1,506,003 humans (9.4%) Azeyrenawt (generally called Azeyrenawti)
656,874 sophonts (4.1%) Clarencian Unit of Monastic Rose Brothers (generally known as Clarencians, Science-Monks, or (the) Unit)
582,307 sophonts (app. 3.6%) Open and Assistive Galactic Rite of Rose Brotherhood (generally called Assistants, (the) Rite, or Rose Brothers)
429,593 sophonts (app. 2.7%) Beaumont Cosmological Computing System (generally called Beaumonters, Algorithmists, or Systemites)
189,667 alien!species#1 (app. 1.2%) Mellis (generally called Mellits)
67 bioroids (essentially 0%) Barnwell Tradition of Scientological Witchcraft (generally known as Bio-Witches or Barnwells)
6 sophonts (essentially 0%) Lost Secrets of the Rose Brothers (generally just called gerontocrats or old fogies)

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