Comments interspersed

On 13/5/22 06:09, Jim Vassilakos - jim.vassilakos at gmail.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> Here are two excerpts of an essay I'm writing. Would
> appreciate constructive criticism.
>
>
> _Origins of the Imperial Church (aka the Church of Sylea):_
>
> <snip> However, probably in an attempt to keep control over Maarist
> dogma, it was decided by the United Council of Kel Ten Zons (masters)
> to restrict the publication of commentaries to Old Sylean, this
> despite the fact that the religion was philosophically opposed to the
> very concept of intellectual property.
>
Do as we say, not as we do?
>
> By this point, however, a great deal had already been written about
> the Maar Ki Zon (The Book of the Way), and it had been translated into
> numerous languages. Because the religion itself advocated for the
> common ownership of ideas, whether technical, artistic, or otherwise,
> it was essentially impossible to police this prohibition among its
> adherents, especially since so few of them were fluent in Old Sylean,
> so a splinter church soon arose, calling itself the Free Church of
> Maar Zon.
>
Own goal, much?
>
> <snip> And second, was the original religion born of a single
> philosopher, as was commonly supposed, or was it essentially
> synthetic, consciously created by a council of Sarnese priests from a
> variety of different faiths of that era who were attempting to
> synthesize their religions into one for purposes of strengthening the
> Empire’s social cohesion?
>
_Synthetic_ or _syncretic_ ?  I'm not sure which, as at least one of
your possibilities outright states a mash-up.
>
> <snip> the old sects re-encountered one another, they consolidated by
> embracing the /Doctrine of Divine Mystery/. Regardless of how one
> answered these questions over Maar Zon’s twin origins, <snip>
>
Sounds like a fancy name for "agreeing to disagree".
>
> By the end of the Long Night, the Free Maarists went by many different
> names, and their beliefs about the essential nature of God had been
> influenced by the doctrines of other faiths, most notably the
> monotheistic faiths of the Solomani.^3 <#sdfootnote3sym> So as they
> consolidated, they relied on this /Doctrine of Divine Mystery/,
> essentially an acceptance of human ignorance, and, to the degree they
> were able, they systematically expunged certainty as to the will and
> ultimate nature of God from their dogma. Even the word “God” was
> dropped, in favor of “the Universe”, although various congregations
> that espoused certain commonly accepted ideas about God, such as the
> /Doctrine of the Three Omnis/ (omniscience, omnipotence, and
> omnipresence), were conditionally sanctioned, so long as these beliefs
> didn’t cause undo friction with other sects.
>
"undo friction" ?  From context, shouldn't it be "undue friction"?

How many sparks flew when this mob ran into the Terran Catholic church?

> Because the church had changed so much in terms of its teachings, it
> was generally recognized that it could no longer claim to be purely
> Maarist, so during a council of elders during the reign of Grand Duke
> Cleon Zhunastu (later known as Emperor Cleon the Great), the Free
> Maarists petitioned Cleon to recognize them as the official Church of
> Sylea^4 <#sdfootnote4sym>, which, after certain oaths were made and
> credits transferred, he did, and over time, with more oaths and even
> more credits, they eventually became the Imperial Church of Sylea, and
> finally, the Imperial Church.
>
And Cleon co-opts a potentially competing power centre into his _tour de
force_ of social, political and financial engineering, the Third
Imperium.  Sounds like the Free Maarists got played, not like just a
violin, but the entire string section.
>
>
> _Origins of the Restored Canon Church of Sylea:_
>
> Note that there is another well-known Church of Sylea called the
> Restored Canon Church of Sylea^5 <#sdfootnote5sym>but it isn’t Maarist
> in origin. It actually originated as an offshoot of the Reformed
> Catholic Church of Sylea^6 <#sdfootnote6sym>, which itself originated
> from a Catholic mission on Sylea dating back to the Second Imperium.
> As the Long Night took hold, the Catholic missions lost contact with
> one another, and the community fragmented. Without the larger
> interstellar community, even the congregations on individual worlds
> began to splinter.
>
Why would they splinter?  Evaporative belief cooling?
>
> There is a human psycho-evolutionary tendency, when times are good,
> for populations to shed their traditional values in order to
> experiment with new values and philosophies, and while times were not
> good on many worlds during the Long Night (particularly toward the
> beginning), they weren’t so bad on Sylea.^7 <#sdfootnote7sym> So the
> Catholic Church underwent a schism, the liberal half calling itself
> the Reformed Catholic Church of Sylea (RCCS_1 ), and during the next
> few centuries, this splinter church grew while the original Catholic
> Church of Sylea, still doing its services in Latin, waned in popularity.
>
Did the original Catholic mob survive the Long Night, even as a tiny
remnant, or did they end up completely subsumed?
>
> However, by the Long Night’s third trimester, there was a convulsion
> of scandals within the RCCS_1 which culminated in a
> counter-reformation. It’s worth noting that the word /Catholic/ did
> not go back thousands of years on Sylea, as it did on Terra, and so
> the congregants, many of them Syleans and Vilani, were not as bound to
> it as the Solomani. In response to the scandals, a charismatic bishop
> gathered a group of like-minded priests and led a counter-reformation
> against the RCCS_1 and, in an attempt to bring along as many members
> as possible while at the same time avoiding the anti-Catholic
> sentiment that was sweeping over Sylea as a result of the scandals, he
> branded his splinter faith the Restored Canon Church of Sylea (RCCS_2 ).
>
> Of course, the RCCS_1 did not go away, and they weren’t too happy
> about their acronym being stolen, but because of their scandals (or,
> at least, their apparent inability to cover them up), they continued
> to lose popularity and fragment, spawning a variety of religious
> sects, and so the RCCS_2 became the dominant Catholic Church on Sylea,
> eventually incorporating what little remained of the original Catholic
> Church of Sylea, even though the word /Catholic/ was no longer in
> their name.
>
"Oi, you nicked our acronym!"  "Shouldn't have been asleep at the wheel
then, should you?"

I'm guessing "The Life of Brian" ended up remade a few times. Either
that, or Brian (poor sod) ended up somewhere in one of the RCCS rosters
of saints.

Again, how many sparks flew upon (re)contact with the Terran Catholic
church?  How about the Terran Orthodox one?

<snip>
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