The Last Church

Was the church a christian one?
I found strange that there was no mention of crosses?

It feels like something written by the 15 year olds I knew back when I went to Catholic School. Edgy Atheists without much actual scholarly backing for their arguments but full of fervor about it.

Don't need to respond I saw the lexicanum entry.

>religious debates

Last Church touches on why the world's brightest philosophers have for millenia posited that the universe isn't greater than we comprehend, it's greater than we CAN comprehend - because the brain-smashing glimpses of this perfect 'system of systems' that their science could understand filled them with awe.

Modern atheists only know that there's no being more special than they are, so that must make thousands of years of enlightened philosophy wrong, rite gaiz lol?

So these threads only bait spastic, humorless fedora tippers and the kind of 'debate' that occurs when you give dumb people smartphones. The book ironically plagiarises the first of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament: Thou shalt hold no gods before Me. This is literally General Bob's mission statement throughout the whole book, but chucklefuck millennials think the story is about church burnings. So much for nuance ...

Because it involved Emps being called out for his outrageous hypocrisy to his face. This is the only time in the WH40K fiction this has ever happened.

Without having read the story itself, I imagine the Emperor's reason for being against religion and bringing up stuff like the Crusades was to show how more than a lot of things, perhaps anything, it can be twisted by a person or by a group of people to serve or justify an ulterior motive.

The problem is not usually with a religion in of itself, it's with humanity.

A religion directed towards him would still be (And likely is) a problem because the galaxy is a big place and its easy for Chaos to sneak onto a planet and slowly corrupt their religious practices or cause splinter sects to form in secret.

Telling people about Chaos would be a bad idea because humanity is seemingly still at the point where it can fall prey to them temptations of Chaos. Yeah, the Interex were told of Chaos by the Eldar and are supposedly devoted to fighting it, but that is all we're told. The Interex may have had secret cults within it that formed from their knowledge of Chaos or may have had to implement strong surveillance that was only possible because of the size of their domain.

I like it because it shows the Emperor to be hilariously ignorant, arrogant, and naive. He thinks that he is different from all other men he derides because of his supreme power, when all he shall accomplish is fail like they did- only in a far more spectacular manner.

Adding to this, the irony of the story is that while being written intended as McNeil tipping a fedora, with the Emperor's colossal failure it rather comes off as a scathing burn on him, casting his character as one who is doomed to repeat human history despite experiencing all of it.

Well it is shit. But that more makes it blend in with every other Black Library story

Fair enough but one would think he would trust at absolute least the Primarchs to not fall to Chaos by telling them of how subtly dangerous it can be.

>doomed to repeat human history despite experiencing all of it.

It's a beautiful piece of irony.

>No books from the dark age of technology
>No books on thunderwarriors

Fuck me. It's far more interesting than the horus heresy.

Because it's not

>Two factions are shooting and punching and kicking each other while grimacing intensely
>Third super badderest force shows up in the last act, forcing the other two forces to either begrudgingly team up or ignore each other to kick the third group back into whatever hole it crawled out of

I love 40k, I do, but I really wish they used their writing to explore the near boundless worlds of 40k outside of perpetual wartorn battlefields. There's a lot of creativity there that's never been tilled.

Because the concept is so good, but like most good concepts BL fumbles the delivery.

He did tell them something of it if Horus' conversation with Loken is any indication, at least that daemons exist.

Remember someone from FW mentioning the possibility of covering the Age of Strife, though it probably wouldn't happen until the Horus Heresy and Scouring are finished.

I prefer they stay as myth and legends only really referee to with ominous romanticisms like Old Night and names like the Unspeakable King or the Seven Neverborn.

As bad as Outcast Dead was I enjoyed the Lightning Lord's lament on the truly epic and titanic struggles between warlords that split continents being referred to as hyperbole by scholars despite them actual happening.

I want it to keep its mythic tone with only legends and medieval artwork as its only testament.

This'll never happen because that's not what the hobby is mainly about.

As a fedora-tipping atheist, this book offends me. It's babby atheism. "Ooh, the crusades and the Inquisition." Well, yeah. There were also misguided atheists who did dumb shit way more recently. The Cultural Revolution, for example.

The entire point of atheism is to be guided by rationality and facts. Going HURR DURR RELIGION IS EBIL is contrary to that, because now you're just one of the militant assholes you're complaining about. Don't you see the irony in fighting a war because you think religion causes war?

>Crusades were evil.
>That is why my galactic wide conquer war will be called the Great Crusade. And I am greatly evil.

Also shouldn't it be called the Great Thunderade or the Great Eagleade? I mean, they wear no crosses on their clothes (except for a fistful of IF)

Emps is an hypocryte. During the Age of Strife he went to the knight worl of Molech were a Old One corrupted warp gate was found. He entered and talked to the Dark Gods for more power so he could kill all the Perpetuals that opposed his plan of seize power and also to know how to create the Primarchs. John Grammaticus knew this well, hence he joined the Cabal because Emps was heading straight into motherfucking disaster. Sadly the only one able to stop him was Ollman Pious who much likely was Hercules, Arthur and other legendary heroes in the Age of Terra. The problem is that Ollman Pious was so depressed he couldn't and when he tried fucked up everything.

The Horus Heresy series was a mistake.

Yeah, I'm a bible bashing Catholic and I thought the same. It's the sort of shit that every priest that ever dealt with a teen has run into. It's not even good arguments, it's shit that theologians have been debating for literal centuries at this point.

I've no issue with a book with Strong Atheist Overtones in the same way that Narnia has Strong Christian Overtone but man, write something that actually argues your case worth a damn.

Daily reminder that the Crusades (which are the bloodiest and most hate filled wars in human history) were what awakened.

Many of his great servants were born from the religious zealotry and hatred of those wars.

So yes the Crusades were evil in 40K. So evil they brought forth the most powerful and terrible of the Chaos Gods.

Thanks Xitans

What awakened Khorne*

Only in old canon. That's all retconned now. Chaos is primordial and predates everything. It has no creation.

>Crusades
>(which are the bloodiest and most hate filled wars in human history)

Nonsense. It was created by the writers of 40k, and they can destroy it whenever they want.

I'm assuming you're trying to say Chaos Gods predate everything, which is horseshit in itself, since Slaanesh was born in fucking M25 and Warp was supposed to be a sea of tranquility before the War in Heaven and associated conflicts of that period.

Well, the sacking of Jerusalem was pretty insane. As a whole, the Crusades were fairly tame compared to most modern conflicts, though. It's simply a matter of logistics.

>Crusades
>Bloodies and most hate filled wars in human history
Whatever you say. And it wasn't the Crusades, it was either Genghis Khan or events around that time that were not related to human history.
It's retconned now either way.

>which is horseshit in itself, since Slaanesh was born in fucking M25

And yet he was there to elevate Be'lakor to daemonhood millions of years before that. Be'lakor the First Prince of Chaos who has memories of the first Necrontyr necropolis and the first of the Eldar homeworlds.

Explain this.

>(which are the bloodiest and most hate filled wars in human history)

Please tell me you aren't this fucking stupid.

>This story takes place in the impious ages of Old Earth, in a land known as Gawl, also called the Franckish Empire. A princely holy man of the Steel Era that followed the Bronze and Iron Epochs believed himself able to hear the words of his faceless deity. To reflect his self-proclaimed purity, he takes the name Innocent, and then he takes his followers to war.

>Lord Innocent calls a crusade to eradicate a heretical sect, which our fragmented histories refer to as the Karthur. He demands they be burned for their sins against the imaginary god. But these holy warriors – these knights – clad in primitive armour and wielding swords of steel, are the princes and lords of their realm. To them, the virtues of nobility and honour matter above all. The people of their empire look to them for justice, and theirs are the blades that defend the virtuous weak from the evil strong.

>Until their overlord, Innocent, blesses them. He declares their actions to be sacred deeds done in the name of the god they believe to be real. Any crimes they commit in this war will be ignored. Any sins shall be forgiven.

>Siegecraft in this bygone age is fought with catapults of metal and wood that hurl boulders of stone. City walls are brought down by these primitive machines, crewed by peasants and mathematicians alike, and once the walls fall the foot soldiers march in, led by their lords and princes.

>Albajensia, the fortress of the Karthur heretics, falls at dawn. The sword-bearing knights lead their holy warriors into the city, and with all their sins forgiven even before they are committed, the crusaders show no mercy. The heretics numbered no more than a few hundred, yet the whole city burns. Men, women, children...all butchered on the knights’ blessed blades.

>But what of the blameless masses? What of the children who know nothing of their parents’ heresy? What of the thousands of loyal, devout souls who have broken no laws, and do not deserve death?

Nope. Slaanesh has always existed and never existed. Hell even in one of the oldhammer books it was revealed that Slaanesh created itself- the first cult that 'led' to Slaanesh's 'creation' was formed by a Keeper of Secrets.

>>‘Kill them all,’ says Innocent, the primitive Warmaster of his age. ‘Kill them all. Our God will know who is loyal.’ He condemns thousands to death, not because they are guilty, but because he believes a mythological paradise awaits those unjustly murdered by his men.

>And thus, the city burns. An innocent population is wiped from the face of the world by the blades that should have defended them.

>Like every emotion and deed, this slaughter is reflected in the Sea of Souls. The hate, the fear, the rage and bitter sense of betrayal – all of it curdles behind the veil. Few things feed the warp as sweetly as war, and few wars hold the same rancid symbolism as those declared by the strong against the weak they are sworn to protect.

>Such slaughter gives birth to daemons within the empyrean. Countless mewling terrors born from individual moments of suffering and bloodlust. Above them, more powerful entities also swirl into existence: one born from a blaze, deliberately started, that claims a dozen lives at once; another arising from a mother’s abject horror at seeing her children spitted upon the lances of those she’d believed to be her noble and holy protectors. These acts, and thousands more like them, breed the Neverborn in the hell beyond reality’s veil.

>Sometimes, as with this crusade of Albajensia, a daemon is born that rises above its siblings, one that encapsulates all the miserable complexity, cruelty and blood-soaked shame of the genocide. Imagine that creature, born of this sublime betrayal. Imagine a spirit of war given life when a warrior caste turns its blades upon its own people, acting upon the words of a tyrant, in the name of a lie.

fuck BL

>Its skin is the bleeding red charcoal of scorched flesh, like the families who burned in their homes. Its armour is a fire-blackened mockery of the mailed knights whose treachery gave it birth. It carries a sword, just as those butchering knights carried swords, though its blade is graven with runic curses heralding the War God’s glory.

>The crimson and orange light that burns behind its eyes is the fire that lit the horizon as the doomed city blazed. When it opens its maw, each of its exhaled breaths is the echo of ten thousand dying screams.

>It calls itself the Ragged Knight.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade

Justify this Xitans. Not only did you awaken the Blood God, you gave birth to his first minions.

It's all your fault. You bloodthirsty bastards!

CRAWLIN IN MY SKIIIIIIIIN

I bet ADB thought that sounded really cool in his head.

This doesn't collide with the time of his/her creation.
Warp can and does do weird shit with time, tossing ships to the future and the past alike.
One can assume Chaos gods inherit the ability to exist across time, but this would rape the in universe events in a very literal sense and break the canon continuity as the big 4 would have infinite possibilities to fuck over all opposition literally anywhere, anytime.

So a war between two religious sects on a single planet that involved thousands and didn't involve any psychics birthed a deamon.

How many deamons have the Grey Knights created by this exact same method?

Holy fucking shit BL is dumb.

>Holy fucking shit BL is dumb.
Horus Heresy and beast arises are the 2 things that made 40k lore even worse then it already is.

So after seeing this fluff, can you blame the Emperor for mentioning the Crusades as the great evils they were?

He saw with his mind eye the creation of the daemonic behemoths and hordes of terrible Kharneth. Created by the hate and intolerance of the religious.

Religion was a mistake (in 40K).

And Stalin's purges, the Great Leap Forward, and the Holocaust get no mention?

I blame ADB for being a shit writer and edgy atheist
It was not even the bloodiest conflict in the world's history

The crusades were righteous

But so is emps religious cleansing, religions caused too much division for a galactic empire.
Plus, all of you whining about him acting like he's more than a man should kill yourselves as that's literally the case
It doesn't matter if he's wrong or right, his goal always demanded extremism, you faggots act like a fair and balanced approach to big changes is a smart idea as a despotic ruler.
Funfact: that is exactly while radical reforms (that includes good and necessary ones) are way easier to get done in dictatorships. For more information watch legends of the galactic heroes

The sacking of one city creates trouble in the Warp, which reflects a GALAXY of minds.

And itcs Cathars. Not one of the Romancs many many slaughters. Not Genghis "2000 years worth of Mesopotamian infrastructure and the entirety of secular Islamic scholarship" Khan. Not the fucking Holocaust, and not any of the galactic scale conflicts that took place in the past 2 million years worth of Orks, Eldar, Necrontyr, Enslavers, and assorted minor races.

>Holy fucking shit BL is dumb.
You have no idea. When it comes to the HH series, the writers actually have meetings every once in a while to coordinate things and bounce ideas off each other.

You're basically dealing with a series where some of the shittiest writers in the world have combined to collectively throw their shitty ideas against the wall.

This in turn leads to another horrifying notion. If these are their "good ideas" which passed all the discussions and editing, then just imagine the steaming shit that didn't get in.

ADB has severe daddy issues and takes it out on the Emperor.

I always thought of the Chaos Gods as evil Timelords. That they exist across from when the Immaterium became the Warp because of their Warp powers to see and affect all time. That Slaanesh was low-key before his/her birth was due to how the Warp was still tranquil. It's only after the Fall that the Warp was in enough turmoil for Slaanesh to affect the Materium significantly.

" Few things feed the warp as sweetly as war, and few wars hold the same rancid symbolism as those declared by the strong against the weak they are sworn to protect"

Xitans dun goofed by being exceptionally viciously evil while adding a shade of symbolism to their actions that secular atrocities cannot.

>Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, only that it flows
>unless it will help to spread my shitty agenda

Khorne cares not but the Warp does.

The greater the sin it witnesses, the more greater the evil that the Warp will reflect back at reality.

Seriously this.
It is canon that the Necron/OldOne's war and War in Heaven made all subsequent wars look like fucking jokes.
How come ONE FUCKING PLANET (with population under 1 Billion until 1800's no less) gave birth to THREE Chaos Gods?

Calling the Crusades evil and utterly ignoring Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, the Holocaust just makes the Emperor look like a stupid twat.

The man lived through the Battle of Megiddo, the rise and fall of Uruk, Egypt, Judea, Rome, Carthage, the Mongol Empire, Bzyantium; he saw the Arab Conquests and Spanish rule in South America, plus a load of big futuristic space battles.

It's babby tier edgy Western Athiesm, but that makes it great because the Emperor looks so small minded and petty. You can see how he is doomed to fail despite being so godlike

but it doesn't reflect back at reality
Otherwise Khorne would be a god of killing people you care about and you were supposed to protect and once again
>>Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, only that it flows

Contrary to popular belief, the Nazis weren't atheists. They were in fact mostly Catholic.

Also, the Last Church was a shit. Emps wanted to eradicate religion to deny Chaos another tool to corrupt humanity. But people forget that Emps also tried to replace religion with the Imperial truth, to use logic and reasoning to determine their actions rather than because a god said so.

The second user is right b ut he explains it really shittily

The point is that the warp is the collective emotional subconsciousness of all sentient races, so crimes that seem descpicable to the people involved will have a greater effect than those which do not

Is that why the Imperium has such blatant Christian symbolism?

>but it doesn't reflect back at reality

It does in the form of daemons.

Daemons are born from actions and emotions of mankind, their sins. The greater the sin, the greater is the daemon born from it.

>How come ONE FUCKING PLANET (with population under 1 Billion until 1800's no less) gave birth to THREE Chaos Gods?

I'm guessing ADB glanced at the old fluff but being the retard that he is, completely misinterpreted it.

Basically, 3 Chaos Gods awoke roughly during the Earth's Middle Ages which in turn caused the shit that humans did in that period as well as other shit like the Black Death.

ADB essentially reversed that mechanism and had human bad things causing chaos gods instead of the other way around.

You know how Jefferson had his own bible where he ripped out all the nonsense but kept the things that espoused virtues like "love your brother/neighbor ".

That.

They didn't birth them. The Chaos Gods were gestating in the Warp. Humanity's shenanigans was the final push that awakened them.

so if I mastrubuate I can summon a Bloodletter?
Is this how it works?
Sin is completely unrelated to what forms in Warp?

>so if I mastrubuate I can summon a Bloodletter?

No, you would create minor daemons of lust.These daemons are short lived mindless things that will fade back to the Warp.

If you start raping people and embrace debauchery, your sins will eventually span daemons.

But that was just another of Emperor's follies.

Chaos doesn't care about worship but feelings. The Emperor should have servitorized humanity to make a dent.

The Nazis debated replacing Christianity with a reconstructed Nordic race cult and some argued for the abolishment of Christianity as Jewish derived sect.

Albert Speer wrote that after meeting a North African leader Hitler lamented that Christianity was too soft and it was a shame Germans didn't follow a religion more like Islam, as he believed it gave North Africans a natural zeal and he wanted his Nordic Supermen to have a similar fanaticism. Check his biography.

>creation of the daemonic behemoths and hordes of terrible Kharneth. Created by the hate and intolerance of the religious.

>and so he launched a galaxy spanning genocidal CRUSADE, razed whole planets, killed billions upon billions of innocent people who just weren't too comfortable with sucking off some random golden dude who came outta fucking nowhere after 5,000 years of misery and demands fealty and tithes and shit.
He did this because he loves you and he wants to unite humans and direct their inner gullible violent monkey self towards an outside enemy, under the banned of his religion of non-religion, in the form of another xenophobia fueled genocide and conquer the whole galaxy no matter how many die in the process.

Love and tolerance all around.
Road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Empra fucked up before he even started,

No, he's Carnac.

Because GW.

>By the end of the Middle Ages all three of these Chaos Powers had awoken to full consciousness.

>the aggressive and unstable race of man must be largely blamed for the growth of disharmonious forces in the warp

>>the aggressive and unstable western Xitan civilization must be largely blamed for the growth of disharmonious forces in the warp

FIFY

>>the aggressive and unstable race of man must be largely blamed for the growth of disharmonious forces in the warp

That shit got retconned when Necrons were introduced. Now the War in Heaven is the reason why the Warp got so fucked up.

Not necessarily. The humans didn't create the Chaos Gods, they just pushed them to sentience. The warp was in turmoil but humanity's antics was the final drop of douchery that sent things overflowing.

Explains why the Chaos Gods weren't that active before humanity came along.

The problem with you reasoning is the fact the crusades were not the first and not the bloodiest war in the history of mankind.

BL is saying this war created Khorne beacuse of the fact they killed people they were supposed to protect
But if this was true,Khorne would be a god of treason and bloodshed not just simple blood

You fixed nothing. Evil lurks in the hearts of all men, not just your "Christian" dad.

>they just pushed them to sentience.
That is a wholly different statement than

>must be largely blamed for the growth of disharmonious forces in the warp

Either they are the main problem or they're just the straw that broke the camel's back. They can't be both.

>killed people they were supposed to protect
Is BL actually convinced that the Crusaders were supposed to protect Muslims, heretics and pagans?

Reading comprehension. This is about the Pope saying "Kill them all and God will sort them out".

There were God loving Christians mixed with the heretics. The Crusaders killed them all the same.

The Ragged Knight was born from the bloodlust of the crusaders and the outrage of the good Christians slaughtered by those who swore to protect them.

>The Ragged Knight was born from the bloodlust of the crusaders and the outrage of the good Christians slaughtered by those who swore to protect them.

But that's just......stupid. Suppose a cop shot a kid with a toy gun. Suppose the government did something bad against its citizenry. Suppose any number of similar situations. You'd have a daemonic invasion every other day.

Shit, that's even dumber than what I wrote.

Nobody is talking about causing daemonic invasions.

Atrocities give birth to daemons. They might invade today or 1000 days later. It depends on a lot of things.

Consider it in 40K.

The Grey Knights have been creating deamons on an industrial scale. They must have got a good few million Ragged Knights after the Armageddon purge alone.

And grognards raged about it, and now GW doesn't talk about it (granted, those things aren't necessarily linked; it's hard to imagine they even could be).

Because it was poetic that humanity created their own worst enemies, no?

>Comparing a necessary evil against an act of absolute evil

>humanity created their own worst enemies
they still did
they are called traitors

>You're wrong! My genocide if JUSTIFIED!
lmoa

I can't see how the Armageddon concentration camps were justified.

If it was really necessary to kill every mortal man who saw Chaos then they would need to exterminate Cadia after every minor skirmish.

And it didn't work. The Changeling still got away.

So not only are the GK weakening the Imperium they are also shit at their job.

Keeping Cadia around is a necessary evil.

Normal people who know about the existence of daemons or have encountered them must be eliminated or else they will cause further problems in the future. The corruption of Chaos requires uncompromising measures.

>And it didn't work. The Changeling still got away.

That's a different cleansing.

Okay then. Killing the legit christians was a necessary evil since they couldn't tell them apart from the heretics and couldn't afford to let them escape.

Isn't that prett ymuch the established way how demosn are created? All emotions reflect in the warp, and feed the Chaos Gods, who in turn create demons. There's been mentions of groups of chaos cultists committing ritual suicide in a specific way so that the emotions induced would cause their souls to coalescend into a demon. That's pretty much the same thing, only instead of deliberately done it's a result of several hundred people killed while undergoing similar strong emotions (in this case fear and anger over perceived betrayal).

>Comparing mercy killing Chaos tainted civilians to slaughtering your own people because you couldn't tolerate the faith of their neighbors

Staaahp.

>Carnac
Who?