Religion in Scifi Games

I tend to take a little from columns A, B, and C. A lot of religions from Earth stick around, in more or less the same form; some now ones form, often based around a similar ideology to existing faiths but not necessarily; and some radically alter to take space travel and potentially aliens into account.

Also since it's relevant, have a link: knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/01/islam-has-rules-for-praying-in-space/

Thanks
It's structured around flashing between his thoughts on the journey and destination, and readings from the recorded history as he plans his final sermon/lecture to the crew.

What sucks is I'm super inspired to finish it right now.
And at the end of my one break between six hours of classes and five hours of work today.
If this thread is still up tomorrow I hope it will get me pumped again for my day off.

A mixed bag. Some religions have survived for so long they'll probably survive the Space Age too, and won't be very impacted. Others will have to change a lot. There'll also be new religions like there have been new religions every time society changed a lot. Most will be gone quickly, some will endure.
Also much depends on the conditions of the people. In one of my settings I have humans gengeneered to live at 0g and manage the great Generation Ships humanity used to colonize the cosmos: those people believe in Vyah, the God of the Void, and call the colonists they're transporting Babylonians, because they believe planets are intelligent and evil demons that corrupt those that insist living there. I took inspiration from Rastafarians, Gnostics and Buddhists for them. That's just an example of a possible new sci-fi religion.

I leave religion out of my campaigns, period. I live in a region where any sort of religious discussion just dissolves into political shitslinging or even threats. Entirely fictitious deities like those in D&D are fine, but anything that draws parallels with real-world religions is not. People around here simply do not possess the emotional maturity to handle fictionalized versions of their beliefs.

Leave it open in a tab on your computer, user, so you can see and read through this thread even if it falls off page ten.

Get hype. Get write.

Where is this fresh hell, dare I ask?

The very rural U.S. South.

I'm sorry for you this must suck horribly

Perhaps used fictionalized versions of someone else's beliefs?

A game I ran long ago had religions spread along with early explorers. As soon as self-sustaining colonies became a possibility, pilgrims started forming settlements around the galaxy; some were utopian communities formed around charismatic leaders, others happened as part of organised efforts, such as the Jesuits installing missions across the planets to explore and understand the new frontiers.

Catholicism and Islam were the two biggest religious entities, as both had unique characteristics that made them well-suited for the spread-out nature of space colonisation. The Catholic Church, for instance, created multiple Astral Curias overseeing a single system each, endowed with a large degree of independence but still bound to the Roman Curia back on Earth (they had jurisdiction on local matters, but still depended on Rome for the naming of bishops and cardinals, and had no power over dogma. Worked well since the Church is already used to function over extremely long periods of times for these things, so waiting years for the Pope on Earth to send a bull regarding relationships with a newfound alien species was well within a "reasonable timeline").

Meanwhile, Islam spread and sustained itself thanks to its great degree of relation between government and religion, with local caliphs becoming the main figures on different worlds, without needing to coordinate with each other.

I'm pretty certain religion with spread around with the same rate as human colonisation an witll be as prevalent as it is today. It has always felt lazy to me when sci-fi works gloss over the concept of religion altogether or somehow replace it with single meta-religions; if anything, we're going to be seeing more denominations show up as we spread out, probably still with a handful of extremely big institutions but with a lot of local variations.

Triggered much, user?

In my setting, there's a powerful nation that simply forbids religion and religious beliefs in all planets. They are humanists first and foremost and believe that any and all supernatural belief needs to be banish, for the inherent irrationality of religion and required to believe damage their ideals. Instead, the closest thing they have is a group of people that, like 'preachers', voluntarily give sermons on moral and good habits, the value of science and rationality and the birthright of humanity to the stars, in special places that would be the closest things to churches. This guys aren't amateurs, but they go through a lot of training to serve as psychotherapists and such for those dealing with depression and other types of mental struggle that they would normally go to religion for. This particular nation is also has a strong sentiment of Genetic selection through social Dwarnism and mapping the human genome, so to ensure those with the best potential genes will pass on their legacy they rank citizens and give benefits to those with higher genetic ranks that expand if they have children and the more children they have, while lower ranks have to pay for the privelege. This means a strong state control of private life, and the 'church' of Humanism there is a tool of the state to convince people this is for the best of humanity, long term. Their governant is strongly technocratical. Focusing on trying to put the most capacitated person in administration and legislation rather than those elected. This has had mixed results so far.

But these guys are the exception. Aside from some christians, muslins and buddhists still around many planets, with new sects of their own faith and the old ones, there's also religions that take the space expansion as part of their lore and tradition. Such as the Gaians, which believe each planet has it's own spirit and the beings living in each planet will take part of that specific kharmic wheel.

I have a setting where religion exists, but Earth-centric religions are heavily frowned upon because Earth is a violent shithole that no longer gets a vote in galactic affairs because it doesn't have its act together like the colonies do. Old Earth religions are not banned by any stretch, but there has been a long period of social engineering by the colonial council to downplay the importance of Earth and what happened there so as to distance the average space citizen from considering Earth to be all that important or relevant now.

This is not just dickishness for the sake of dickishness, mind you. Nations on earth used to try to involve their space based colonies and allies in what amounted to local politics, which during WW4 ended up spreading into a civil war on Mars and shots fired between various outposts across Sol, until the more established Colonies were forced to go in and blocked everything in Sol and say 'Earth doesn't get to own anything not on Earth anymore' and basically destroyed the economy of all developed nations on the planet overnight.

So you might have a colony that deifies the command staff and colony planners that originally founded their world, but their idea of Christianity is basically the same as our idea of ancient Greek mythology even though, scrolling back over to Sol, there are still people practicing several different variants of Chrstianity.

That sounds like a really interesting and well-thought-out way to include an almost Orwellian society into a setting in a way that would still be believable and not immediately invite intervention from every other power.

obligatory Homeworld mention

The Sola faith was a religion that has it's roots in sailors who made observations about the stars (primarily using them for navigation of course) and the various stories and moral lessons they passed on based on them. There is no centralized version of the faith and are just as many cults to the various planet-deities as their are pantheistic ones that worship all of them as a whole along with other religions.

It's popularity gained traction when the setting gained the ability to actually go into space.

>knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/01/islam-has-rules-for-praying-in-space/
Every religion has dealt with it.
Jews have kosher space food, Catholicism has some rules, and Russia is super-open about it.
Also, fun fact. The first thing consumed in space was the Eucharist.

There is some controversy under who's ordinary jurisdiction the moon falls under, though.

Maybe you guys can help me out regarding my space setting.

Earth manages to get into FTL. You get your standard wheeling and dealing in the local part of the galaxy set up, the normal stuff. But what about the people who join Alien Organizations? Think of stuff like Doctors Without Planets, Greenpeace in SPESSSSSSS, etc. Would their children and grandchildren, who are born on Alien Worlds, still be considered Earthlings? How would you fill out their paperwork if they wanted to come to Earth for a visit?

Well that depends. Do they still consider themselves Earthlings? (I perfer the term Solars). Are their any earth administration that can register them in the same way an embassy does for foreign nationals in other countries? What is the nature of these other planets relationship to Earth?

I think that, in situations like that, the humans would not actually integrate into alien society like that due to the differences in not just culture but biology and living environments. You would, instead, have a Greenpeace ship that is staffed with humans. It may operate in alien space, and its crew may rotate, but the ship and its crew never stop being tied to the human culture and government.

Humans becoming citizens of an alien world, and vice versa, would be an enormous legal clusterfuck without precedent. You could honestly write a whole book about just that situation. That is, essentially, what the core premise of Stranger in a Strange Land starts off as.

I was thinking that there wouldn't be much of a Solar presence after a few jumps. Sol is mostly worried about its colonies and factories, but they can only be so far out.

I'll try to think about the rest. The Humans the player characters will be are people who wanted to go out and explore, Starfleet style, but there best chance was to join an Alien organization.

Hmm, I might have to reconsider a few things with this.

Thanks for the help.

If there is already an alien organization, starfleet style, that the humans are joining? That's different, because while there may not be a precedent as far as the humans are concerned, the aliens have a precedent themselves.

How this gets handled, then, is probably agreed upon based on whatever treaty gets signed that allows these multiples races to cooperate in this manner int he first place. Her are the rights that are given up by humans that join medfleet, here are the rights that are retained, etc.

Is this the improvised /wbg/? I can't find it in the catalog.

I've always liked the question of how Islam would be expected to work in a spacefaring civilization, given the whole "pilgrimage to Mecca" thing, plus praying towards the place 3(?) times a day.

Mecca already has trouble accomodating all the pilgrims that visit the place just from other countries on Earth, to the point that the Saudis have had to build a giant, hive-city-esque hotel right next to Masjid al-Haram. I can only imagine how crowded the place would get if it was also accepting Muslims from extraterrestrial colonies.

And how would Muslims on other planets know which way to face in order to pray towards Mecca? Would they need to keep some kind of cheat sheet on them at all times, to know where in the sky Earth is? What if the planet they're on rotates really fast? What if they're not on a planet, but in deep space far from any reference points?

One possible solution I had was for there to be a split in doctrine over the issue, between "centralists" and "equalists". The centralists would be the more traditionally-minded group, and hold that all pilgrims should travel to Mecca on Earth, and that extraterrestrial Muslims should direct their prayer towards Earth.

The equalists would be a more liberal group, building new Mecca sites on other planets based on the original mosque on Earth, and encouraging all planet-bound Muslims to pray to their local Mecca instead of Earth's, while deep-space Muslims should pray towards the nearest inhabited world.

Naturally, both sides would believe they're maintaining the spirit of the law, and that the other side is practising idolatry.

I just started a thread on a topic. No lineage here

What if you had the colony mosques contain stones taken from the original mecca, to serve as a spiritual link between their local site and the original? Obviously, taking one of these stones from Earth across space is considered a BIG deal, so you still only get one mecca per world, and most worlds are not considered worthy of the task.

Worlds without those stones still have local equivalents that they pray towards, but their hope is to become big and important enough to request a stone of mecca and legitimize their local site. It becomes something of a certification process.

And then some centralists get pissy about people pulling apart the Masjid al-Haram, and start obstructing the equalist's efforts. This leads to the equalists taking stones from other places of deep significance to Islam, along with unscrupulous dealers passing off random lumps of masonry as holy relics...

Yep. Good background conflict there. Faking holy relics is a time honor tradition. There are a bunch of 'foreskins of christ' hanging around even in modern day earth.

Look it up.

My Kiith-Sa

Thank you...Those guys are my favorite of the four great nations I ended up creating for that setting.

No nation gets to own the moon. I don't see why any religion should.

An order of monks in space that focus on introspection and self awareness as the path to inner peace and outer success. They practice and promote humility via liberal application of sick burns. If you cannot laugh at yourself, it is because you are not able to accept your faults. Recognize the weakness in others, voice them in a way designed to promote laughter rather than anger, and in doing so better equip yourself to recognize your own faults.

This! I was just about to post something like this regarding Islam in space. Either they pray towards Earth and the original Mecca, or they create a Mecca in each colonized world.

Another thing that would be interesting would be if we meet an alien civilization with a similar religion to ours. Maybe so much so that you could swap names around and it'll be virtually indistinguishable. What would we do then?

We would either get into a fucking holy war (Jesus is the true messiah! Hyorbyiak is a false prophet!) or the two religions would bleed together and consider each other distant cousins (Jesus was his earth name, Hyorbyiak was his Silurian name. Both were the son of the Great Maker, incarnated in the flesh).

I have always liked the idea that religion, in any form, is a human thing. Its entirely unique to humans, and indeed the other spacefaring races don't really understand the idea of worship. The important thing here is that you never use this to paint religion in a negative light, its not something that makes us inferior or superior. Its just something that makes us different.