White wrote: ↑Mon Aug 22, 2022 5:30 pm
But, do the Loroi have any major non-diestic or agnostic religious movements. Or any contemplative traditions that focus on, well, focus. And, if so, have the telepathic Loroi come to any conclusions that are vastly different to the general, vague consensus that's formed across the earth's myriad traditions.
I would argue that a "non-deistic religion" is not a religion. There are a lot of elements of human culture that get wrapped up under the heading of religion -- philosophy, morality, tradition, law, science, education, art and spirituality, to name a few -- and I don't think that any of these subjects are dependent upon what has become the usual human concept of "religion." (I also find darkly humorous the assertion that there is a "vague consensus" among the world's religions... but let's not get into that right now.)
In particular, I don't accept the common narrative that morality and sense of purpose spring from religion. Human beings (and our hominid forebears, and chimpanzees and gorillas and many other social animals) have systems of morality and codes of behavior that predate even the earliest languages, much less the earliest religions. A sense that there is a whole greater than the individual and the notion that it's not okay to murder your friends and family is a requirement for the functioning of social species; we could never have survived to the point where we could build the first civilizations without already having these codes. They are an integral part of who we are, not foreign concepts handed down to us by supernatural beings.
The earliest human "religions" (the animist or shamanistic traditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors) were their cultures' attempts to answer the basic questions of existence: who are we? Where do we come from? How does the world around us work, and why? What is the correct way to live? And what is the meaning of all this? Humanity answered these questions through one of our most powerful tools: storytelling. Our stories about the natural phenomena we experienced and the great (and infamous) deeds of our ancestors were more than just entertainment; they were how we worked out the questions of our existence, and how we disseminated these answers to our fellows and our offspring. Over countless successive retellings, these stories became sagas and myths and scripture, and the protagonists in them became heroes, and legends, and eventually gods, more fiction than fact. But I can tell you, as a professional storyteller, that the power and meaning in a story has very little to do with whether that story is factually true. Humans seek truth and affirmation even in stories that we consciously know are pure fiction (like
The Lord of the Rings) because they fulfill the same purposes as our oldest myths: they tell us who we are, and why we are, and what is expected of us.
Now, this cycle of storytelling, in a different form, is exactly what the Loroi have in their telepathic sagas. They're part history, part heroic myth, part philosophy, and part ancestor worship. They're disseminated and interpreted by a dedicated "priesthood" of sorts (the Nedatan and related orders), and so they have some of the same shortcomings as our organized religions -- the tendency for the needs of a bureaucracy to get in the way of the "better angels" of our nature -- but also many of the same virtues. They're also more factually accurate than many of our myths, owing partly to accuracy of telepathy and Loroi memory, and partly due to the heroes of their sagas being ultra-tech beings commanding genuinely god-like powers.
And because even the savage post-fall Loroi still had vague memories of an ancestral interstellar civilization in their stories, as well as living examples of psionic individuals able to manipulate the world around them, they didn't really need to invent supernatural explanations about how the sun rises and sets, or to ascribe animist spirits to the rocks and the trees and the water. (Though some still did, on occasion -- there were some genuine religions in Loroi history.)
As to spirituality, I think the telepathic Loroi probably spend more time in their own heads than most humans do, so to speak, as for them it is an established fact that the mind extends into a reality beyond the physical world. But this is something that we'll get more into in the course of the story.
(And yes, it will continue soon. Soon.)
… Insects might be too tricky since they might be too primitive for a Mizol to detect.
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