OK, less than one-tenth of Ishee's population has yet to have a religion. Maybe we'll finish it off with this one!
That 1d20 I should have been rolling all along gives us a 17: rational atheism. This is a religion that has scienced, logiced or in some other way reasoned the divine out of existence. Wouldn't it be fun if the techgnostic Rose Brothers had spawned a retrograde, materialistic child of a faith? Sadly, despite that being hella rad, I'm getting tired of thinking of things as being ultimately tied to the Rose Brothers ~ I want some more diversity, dagnabbit!
2d6+3 determines our latest religion's Spiritual Aim with an 11, perhaps taunting my idea of separating from the Rose Brothers theological line. This is another religion dedicated to expanding the boundaries of knowledge through inquiry and speculation, much like the Lost Secrets. Let's go with what seems to be the way everything is going. Maybe the Rose Brothers schismed in half, with one half retaining Hermachis of the Horizon but losing its forward orientation, and the other half trading Hermachis in for a continued gaze toward the future.
The Devotion Required's roll of 13 on 2d6+4 tells that adherents are called to devotion only several times during their life. This sounds like its about completing projects (like the Azeyrenawti). Here's a thought: logicing away the divine has caused the religion to set the sights of its ambitions rather lower. No longer do its adherents seek to create a new technology, unlike any seen before, that changes everything that society is and does forevermore. Paradigm shifts no longer bring Hermachis of the Horizon into the world, after all, so now these faithful strive to be a bit more like Elon Musk. The idea is to focus intensely on one field, one Big Project, learning as much as possible and innovating incrementally for years or decades, until one's intellectual curiosity is absolutely and fully expended, and then to move on to a completely different field. It is the obsession and depth of their study that is their focus, not on the grandiose effects of their work.
An 11 on 2d6+6 tells us that there is no organization or hierarchy to the religion above the planetary level, and rolling 2d6+4 results in a 12 and services being informal study groups with extensive limits on allowable subject matter. When someone reaches the end of a period of delving into a particular field, they work with municipal, national, and planetary colleges of the faith to call a World's Fair and present their innovations and the results of their research to the church as a whole. Almost inevitably, these Fairs involve presentations and installations from several people. Though they may not be as dramatic as the annual Old Rose Brothers Future-Shock Festival, these conventions (which happen a couple or a few times a year on Ishee, I imagine) can still gather quite the crowd and garner press attention in multiple star systems.
Missionary Fervor gets a 4 on 2d6-2. Once again, there are active conversion efforts: missions, proselytes, etc. ~ but these efforts are largely divorced from everyday interactions. No member of this faith will badger others to join or push the issue when there is no consent to hear it. The speciesism that took root in Azeyrenawt seems to have, to a lesser degree, infected this religion as well, as they limit those missionary efforts to a limited number of sophont species. I would bet, however, that their claims about the differing neurobiology of the species goes the other way than in Azeyrenawt. Some species, they claim, lack the neurological ability to intensely focus and build upon previous knowledge like the religion would require. Thankfully, they do avoid the human supremacy in Azeyrenawt, but (with deeper consideration) is that actually helpful or better?
Confession time: this is not the first time in my life that random planet generation in Traveller has brought me into an exploration of race politics and their intersection with fringe religious movements through the medium of space opera. It seems to be quite the obsession for me.
Finally, how many people follow this religion? 3D6-4 gives us 8 ~ hundreds of millions of followers ~ and random.org gives us the exact number as a quite respectable 827,561,177 (more than dectuple the size of Azeyrenawt). Rolling on random.org for the percentage of Ishee's population that are among that number, we realize that, well, I'm not a fan of the result we got. 1% feels both frustrating, as I'm trying to get to the next step of the process and a little too small for one of two major denominations of what was once the dominant faith of the planet. Let's try again. 4.1% is still small, less than half of the remaining population, but more satisfying. We'll go with that number, which is 656,874 (somewhat more than a third of the Isheean Azeyrenawti population, so we definitely learn something about the underbelly of Isheean culture with this result).
And as for a name . . . how about the Clarencian Unit of Monastic Rose Brothers? Yeah, let's go with that. I like it.
The religious landscape of Ishee:
4,966,607 sophonts (31% of the population) atheist/agnostic/non-religious/other
7,690,230 sophonts (48%) Liberty Fellowship of Spirit-Listeners (known as Fellows, Associationists, or Listeners)
6 sophonts (essentially 0%) Lost Secrets of the Rose Brothers (generally just called gerontocrats or old fogies)
429,593 sophonts (app. 2.7%) Beaumont Cosmological Computing System (generally called Beaumonters, Algorithmists, or Systemites)
1,506,003 sophonts (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)
772,041 sophonts (app. 4.8%) not yet accounted for
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