CHAT: Conculture Telepathy and Religion

Emaelivpahr Roger Wills:
>Very nice.  Hope you won't mind if I steal/adapt something like that for the
>Kash, who are also telepathic, and don't really believe in an Afterlife.
Sure! ... But only if at the end of your adapted ceremony everyone chants,
"Hail Arthaey the Asha'illen." ;) But to be serious, I'm pleased that you
like my idea. Let me know what you do with it!

Speaking of a (dis)belief in an afterlife, how are you handling religion
for the Kash? The Cresaeans' planet has a "lifeforce" sort of thing -- I
don't like any words for it in English; I prefer the Asha'ille word
<lor'an> -- which binds them together and creates the basis of their
telepathy. (Different species have evolved different types of interaction
with the lor'an.)

I don't know what the Cresaeans did, religion-wise, before humans settled
on their planet. Terran religion may have more followers on Cresaea [1]
than on Earth because there are more visible results from prayer. For
example, if there are n number of people all praying that Little Johnny get
well, the concentrated effect of everyone sending get-well patterns into
the lor'an may actually have a physical impact on Johnny. He miraculously
gets well! But this only applies to the humans who have been living on
Cresaea for many, _many_ generations and have adapted to the lor'an. In
other words, pureblood Earth humans would barely interact with the lor'an
at all, being totally foreign to the planet's ecosystem. As for having more
religious followers than Earth, the larger percentage of scientists among
the settlers might have lowered the number of religions/religious followers
imported to Cresaea, perhaps it evens out to about the same number...
Anyone have any numbers on percentage of religious scientists as compared
to the general population?

[1] Cresaea is the planet's name as interpretted by humans. <cresdin> means
"home" and <aea> means "land". Therefore, <cresaea> originally meant
"homeland". The humans took this to be the planet's name even though the
Cresaeans themselves didn't think about their world in such large scales.
I've only recently been told by the Cresaeans :) that the term "Cresaean"
was a human invention and that they called themselves something else. So
far, my Cresaean contacts refuse to tell me what the native term is. ::grin::


--
Arthaey

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