Christianity in Space

Why do religious themes never play a role in sci-fi worlds? How would religion and the church work in space?

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amazon.com/Shadow-Night-Lamb-Among-Stars/dp/1414313276
A novel series written about Christians in space.

Religious themes play a role in tons of sci-fi worlds. They just, unfortunately wind up being the bad-guys most of the time. Either their portrayed as quaint and out of date, or utterly corrupt.
It's an easy target, but 40k is huge on this. Religion is either crazy and dogmatic to the point of self-defeat, or a scam for the gullible, or both.
Even in more moderate settings, religion gets lost to the wayside, mostly because of a conflict of style.
Religion is about faith that the unknown is being handled by the powers that be.
Most sci-fi is about "Fuck the Unknown. We're going there and we're gonna take picture and use the stuff we find to build lazers and ships made of go-fast!"

Because deities don't commonly work on anything bigger than a planetary scale in most settings. And this is usually because they are basically just powerful outsiders.

Of course it's bait, user, everyone knows Islam is the religion of the future.

>mormons go to space
>actually find out their "heaven" where they all get their own planet is an intergalactic empire and their religion was based off of psychic feedback their founder got and he tried to make sense of it.
>he got the magic underwear right though

I remember a comics where space vatican was fighting space nazi. Space vatican resurected an ancient pope/cardinal and the first thing he did was fucking the purple haired girl who was a commander for space Vatican. Don't remember the name.

Fuck that's good

Nah it isn't, I just find it a cool subject and I'm also trying to bait some cool images for my new campaign.

>Amish go in space

I mean, there's space religion in 40k, there's space religion in Dune, there's space religion in Star Wars, and the list goes on ...

>How would religion and the church work in space?
Depends on the religion.

why are there two jesuses? jesii?

I'm LDS and I'd totally play a game with that premise.

>mormons go to space

youtube.com/watch?v=J206CKoG1R0

>there's space religion in Star Wars
Not that most of the movies really depict it as a religion.

Double the fun.

A lot of sci-fi writers are either atheists or don't care about religion, so either they don't write about it or they have a throwaway line about how "we gave up superstition long ago". Its pretty depressing, because religion is such an interesting part of culture and society, and there's all sorts of great stories it can tell.


Pic related - its a hermaphroditic species that converted to Islam.

Fuck it, I'm posting the whole series.

According to the Book of Mormon musical they are Mormon and Moroni from ancient upstate New York.

Space crusade when?

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They're God and Jesus appearing to Joseph Smith.

Dune was very much about religion

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>They're God and Jesus
>God appearing as more or less a normal guy
Surely you're joking? Is that how it's supposed to have gone down?

>We're going there and we're gonna take picture and use the stuff we find to build lazers and ships made of go-fast!

this is my religion

>God appearing as more or less a normal guy
Well we WERE made in His image.

>Is that how it's supposed to have gone down?
I'd imagine that's more of less how he went down on Mary.

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That's a metaphor. God shows up to talk to people multiple times in the OT and he never looks like a normal person.

>in b4 the History Of The World Part 2
>in b4 the nazis blow their cover

And that is the artist taking the metaphor literally.

Farscape had some neat space religions. One of the main cast for a long time was priest of sorts.

thanks user, these are great.
But what would a protestant alien look like?

Wearing a WWJD band.

>How would religion and the church work in space?

Every ship has a Chaplain. Remote outposts are manned by monks. There are no atheists in lifepods.

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Even if you're an atheist you can recognize religion as an interesting and important aspect for adding realism and fun to your setting. Just because you don't believe in the existence of gods, doesn't mean fictional characters would. Of course, if you really understood science you'd know that completely rejecting the possibilty of something is as far from scientific as you can get.

What do you expect? The Jedi are a sort of wandering celibate warrior priests, follow a code, have their own texts and all.

You don't need to have churches and services to have a religion.

I just want there to be a space pope.

+1

No, I mean it's usually just depicted as weird space magic. The most it's ever looked like a religion was in Rogue One with the weird monk guy.

>No, I mean it's usually just depicted as weird space magic.
You've never seen the jedi temple? The trials?

This is what we get most of the time someone wants to project religion into the future: simple-minded, hamfisted attempts.

Jedi training is quite religious in more ways than one, and you see the philosophy brought up more often than just with the Rogue One monk.

I don't know, have you had religious education yourself?

>You don't need to have churches and services to have a religion.
Do you have any examples of religions without ceremonies or sacred places?

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usually

>This is what we get most of the time someone wants to project religion into the future: simple-minded, hamfisted attempts.

Well when it comes to sci-fi i have not seen many examples of a deep exploration of religion except maybe in post-apocalyptic fiction and some obscure slav movies.

youtube.com/watch?v=HFf5BGNpnJ0

Wait... there's a new issue out?

Fuck, that's exactly the aesthetic I'm going for. What is this? Reverse search didn't show anything.

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>Wait... there's a new issue out?
Uhhh, that's a three part series from '99 to 2000.

comicvine.gamespot.com/heavy-metal-magazine/4050-19498/object-appearances/4005-18099/

Thread shitting all over that, then moaning that there's no OC anymore:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz Read moar.

Also, Dune.

youtube.com/watch?v=PhiSgXz_l20

I'll save you the time on the latter:

Durkas. In. SPAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

I think a lot of spacefaring sci-fi settings prefer to use religious analogues rather than actual religions. It's a shame, because adapting to multi-planet populaces could be very interesting for highly structured sects like Catholicism or really any belief system that has a proper leader. Many religions that don't have a singular leader would probably be unchanged by space colonization, they would just spread to colonies and keep going as usual. The really fun thing to address would be non-humans and religion. Some religions might not care in the slightest but most would immediately start figuring out how to start proselytizing. Whether its sapient machines, aliens, or tube grown humanoids it wont matter, someone is going to want to preach. Someone is going to want to exterminate yes, but that's been done to death already.

The author have to address the human reaction (Holy war and conversion? Peaceful preaching? Holy order colonies and aid missions? Uplifting technological inferiors? Did we make the things, did we find them, or did they find us?) They would also have to address the reaction of the others. Do they accept our preaching wholesale? Declare it a heathen blasphemy? Politely listen and secretly reject it like the Japanese do with everything? If they reject it, does the proselytizing religion come back with weapons, or do they simply push in as quietly as possible keeping in the shadows and spreading despite persecution? It's all fun stuff.

I'm sure there are plenty of sci-fi stories that address these things, but I can't think of a really popular one. I realize every day that I'm becoming a lazy bastard who never reads things anymore and that old sci-fi has so many gems that we don't ever remember nowadays.

I mean if the sword won't get them the cross will has always been a good tactic

I agree with you, but be fair to the guy; his main criticism was how the vast majority of sci-fi writers either avoid religion, or drop throwaway lines about "outgrowing silly superstitions" as if systems of belief weren't a major factor in how cultures develop.
Which is a fair criticism; the number of sci-fi works where systems of beliefs and faith are actually explored are miniscule compared to the glut of works where religion is either a)treated like a juvenile mindset that species collectively discard when they discover space travel, b)portrayed as nothing but a bunch of raving fanatical lunatics who are obviously wrong, or c)alluded to still exist in some capacity, but never actually shown or having any real influence on the world.

Martian chronicles has a short story called the "fire ballons" in wich the priest want to convert some blue spheres.

>Someone is going to want to exterminate yes, but that's been done to death already.

agreed, pic related

I think that part of it is that an interstellar civilization can outdo its old gods with two good engineers, a workshop and a gallon of coffee.

We'd need new religions with a scaled up power factor, at minimum... Odd as it may sound, to a type 1+ civilization, Xenu makes more sense than Yahweh.

Hey I was there for this quest! It was a trip, what happened to the QM? We were promised a sequel.

Most atheists don't understand the history and subtleties of religion even if they see it as "interesting and important". I say this as an ex-atheist. One of the defining characteristics of the other atheists I knew or followed was that they didn't really grasp theology or spirituality on anything but a deeply superficial level.

You should talk to Matt Dillahunty on that one. Atheism is sometimes begotten out of a desire to learn more about theology.

>Ex-atheist

Nigga we've been doing Christianity in Space since Appendix N.

It really was just a phase.

He says that he doesn't think he could do a sequel well right now, so he'd rather wait and do it properly when it can.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/57747266/

It wasn't a bad quest, but it wasn't that great. I appreciate that the QM stuck with it even when only 1 or 2 players showed up.

And it's definitely more relevant to this thread than

The manufactured false dichotomy between religion and science tends to cause anyone creating a futuristic word to assume that religion has been either disproven or simply left behind due to progress in whatever field they believe in that isn't religion. Usually when they hold onto it as something of at least neutral value and not treating it as a pure negative it becomes unique for that alone. Like firefly did for example.

A phase of non-belief in an unseen divine power?

My melanin enriched friend

Yeah. I did a good quest, I'd rather take the time to do another good quest.

I went to seminary and became an Atheist.

Ten years and a different degree later, I started working for cosmologists and astrobiologists and became a Deist.

It happens. Ultimately, I doubt that it matters much. We are mankind, our footprints are on the moon. If the last trumpet sounds and the beast rises from the pit, we will kill it.

A phase of misunderstanding the fundamental concepts and functions of religious beliefs, combined with falling for the idea that "logical parsimony" is a law of physics and not a simple heuristic for (very roughly) estimating probabilities.

To some extent, I think the genre convention was born of a lot of the groundbreaking authors (and more importantly, editors and anthologists) being militantly humanistic. Asimov's the golden boy for this, but there were a lot of salient examples in the 60s-70s.

You know, I've seen Christianity in space, and Buddhism in space, but you know what I have never seen in fiction?

Scientology in space!

That's just Scientology with extra steps.

Oh no?

Has anyone played that the angels are real out there in the heavens but they're really weird and easy to piss off?

Star Trek disagrees.

But Scientology isn't a religion user. It's a celebrity tax evasion scheme. Though I suppose they'd still have those in the future.

Google "Vorlons"

sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf

Enjoy!

I've recently seen commercials for Scientology on tv. I dunno if this has been happening for a while, or if it's trying to re-surge itself. Sadly, or not, my time on the internet has made it so whenever I see any mention of Scientology I can't help but laugh. Especially when the fucking commercial ends with someone googling "What is Scientology" As if that's not literally the worst thing to do if you're trying to recruit people.

goodreads.com/book/show/338325.The_High_Crusade

In the year of our Lord 1345, brother.

Do it like A Maze of Death. In the late 21st century a physicist discovered you could contact God with a sufficiently powerful radio beacon and wrote a holy book/technical manual detailing his forms.

The Mentafacturer, the divine creator, who can be prayed to to reverse time and undo mistakes
The Intercessor, who can be called on to suffer in our place
and the Walker-On-Earth, basically bro-Jesus who shows up and gives life advice while helping you pack your space car.

True but God also made it so that no one could look at his face after the golden calf

I thought he was just tired of reminding us how grovelling we all were.

Sha
French comic
This image is apparently from book 2? Soul Wound

>god is a person
memesters shall depart

Pic related, though admittedly only sometimes.

youtu.be/sNiPe0r1Aog

>not one mention of Hyperion Cantos or Gene Wolfe
Anyway, there's "The Way of Cross and Dragon" by GRRM
"All The Way To Teelee Town," about a nun running a mission on a planet of stubbornly Materialist primitives. by Ronald Anthony Cross
I remember this book about a young Jesuit travelling to a remote planet to learn the (hostile) native's language and proselytize, I think space travel was accomplished through portals? way too long ago to remember clearly.
C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet
>that last graph
iktf

I mean he's so much more than that, but in simplest terms he's three persons.

That said, no, it had nothing to do with grovelling, God was disappointed with people being shallow and worshiping idols.

People who think of God as being little more than cosmic wind or some philosophers first mover can depart with the petty man mythological diety memers if the thread is to discuss Christianity in any capacity, since they're not in the right minds to.

>cosmologists and astrobiologists
these people actually have real jobs other than making ''history'' channel shows?
can I help do field studies on Pandora when ya'll find it?

I'm glad someone brought up Wolfe. Can't have a thread about sci-fi with Christian themes without mentioning the best.

Illum and Olympus while tending towards a much heavier focus on Greek myth compared to the Hyperion Cantos also has a pretty interesting take on Christianity in space. Instead of humanity coming to convert aliens to Christianity humanity have largely forgotten God and it is an immortal alien entity with power over both space an time that follows a ideology resembling Christianity.

Pic attached is from a sci-fi game I'm working on that revolves around Christian and Jewish mysticism with a goodly helping of giant mecha.

So a concept that's been kicking around in my head for a while is that humanity's first wave of colonies, the ones before whatever bullshit sci-fi FTL shit comes along, are going to get extremely heterodox. Some colonies will proclaim themselves chosen above all other worlds, others will have their faiths mesh and mingle, still others will have brand spanking new theologies spring up, others will lose the faiths their original colonists brought with them, and yet others will take it up despite a relative lack among initial crews. Some will despise the Earth as corrupt, others will venerate the homeworld's legacy, some will forgo any spiritual aspects and throw themselves behind a national destiny or great leader. Even those who keep to the conventional stuff will be cut off from the rest of humanity by years of delay in communications at best, so they'll be free to diverge wildly from established doctrines.

So yeah, space will be full of heresy is what I'm saying.

Wouldn't a human be the equivalent to a character designer's scribbles?

If God is perfect, I assume that if He wants to make us in His image He can make us perfectly in His image.

It really depends on the religion. Buddhism's "everything is suffering" schtick probably won't survive into the interplanetary era. How can the world be meaningless with rocketships and space colonies in it? Islam is unable to leave Earth's gravity well in any meaningful form. The vast majority of its adherents are inbred retards, but they'd need a six axis rotating prayer mat and a clock that counteracted relativistic frame drift and light delays in order to meaningfulluly pray towards Mecca at the appointed times.

I think the most successful religions in space will be one or more forms of Christianity for the simple, practical reason that all you need is a paper book or a few megs of ASCII to carry them to a new world.

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