Hi!
This draft has been kicking around for a bit, so I wanted to send it out and see what you thought. I wanted to come up with a cult that was out there but not so much as to be laughable. Well, not _entirely_ laughable.
There's an actual Ramtha Cult out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramtha
I built elements of that into the 2300AD Ramtha Cult. Whether that's a good idea or not, well, I don't know.
Thoughts on this, and the rest of this, would be welcome.
***
Ramtha Cult
History
When Tirane was discovered and explored, Terrans were taken aback. Leading theorists had speculated that Earth-type life would be rare, and that these Earth-type biospheres would likely to quite deadly to unprotected humans, triggering fatal allergic attacks or inflicting lethal for unprepared humans. The discovery that, orbiting Alpha Centauri A, there existed an Earth-like world that not only possessed as complex a biosphere as Terra's but one that was just as hospitable to humans as Earth, stunned many. More, as at least one observer
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dheb/Tirane/PdB/PdBAcre.htm#_Toc462675113
noted, the fact was that Tirane was arguably more suitable for humanity that Earth, with a distribution of biomes (fewer deserts, less tundra, somewhat smaller polar ice caps) that made relatively more of Tirane's land surface available to human habitation than Terra's. Orthodox religious authorities were able to adapt easily enough to this discovery.
The later discovery of Nibelungen and Beowulf on the French Arm in the 2140s, followed by the explorations of Han Shan and Chengdu on the Chinese Arm and Beta Canum on the French Arm later in the 22nd century, revealed that broadly Earth-compatible biospheres quite commonly existed on the very different worlds in the stars that happened to be closest to Sol. Garden worlds could orbit very young stars like Neubayern or Epsilon Indi or old and highly evolved stars like Delta Pavonis, be tidelocked like Nibelungen or possess a normal rotation period like Chengdu, be low-g like Nibelungen or high-g like Chengdu--it didn't seem to matter. How, a large number of people asked themselves, did this all come about? Orthodox religions felt that the abundance of worlds constituted proof of intelligent design. Others of a more secular bent believed this to be confirmation of the theory of
natural panspermia, with the implications that the galaxy would be populated by Earth-like garden worlds. Many, like the
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dheb/Tirane/Wellon/CWCultSoc.htm#Religion
Edenites of Wellon and the rest of Anglophone Tirane who believe that Tirane was the actual Biblical Eden, adapted existing religions.
Others were unsatisfied by these two arguments. In 2198, Emmeline Gbagbo, an electronics engineer who had immigrated several years earlier to Nouveau Provence from the Guinea Coast, had a series of disturbing dreams, of earlier residents of Tirane and war. Concerned and confused, at a voudun ceremony in her adopted home of Mirambeau Gbagbo presented herself for an extended exorcism. Gbagbo astonished everyone present when she announced
that she was possessed by Ramtha, an ancient Terran warrior last present in the 20th century who possessed great knowledge about past history and guidelines for present conduct. At future sessions, Gbagbo continued to channel Ramtha, who not only communicated an ethical system based on the denial of the concepts of original sin and an undesirable material world and the embrace of knowledge in all of its form, but told listeners that life was everywhere in the neighbourhood of Sol because of the Precursors, an amazingly advanced civilization with paraphysical and physical manifestations. For thousands of millions of years, the Precursors had roamed the universe, seeding life on lifeless worlds and protecting living worlds from catastrophes. Alpha Centauri was a major Precursor centre, with two garden worlds, one orbiting each major component. Eight hundred million
years ago, a great conflict broke out within this civilization when a faction of would-be conquerors tried to make these seeded worlds into an empire. The war ended up destroying both sides, with the last survivors of the original Precursors sealed on underground caverns on a Limbes that was made an uninhabitable hell. It was humanity's responsibility, Ramtha said, to free them.
Gbagbo's visions were mocked by most Tiraneans, but her undeniable charisma and the content of her communications were taken seriously by a few. Many fellow practitioners of voudun believed in the authenticity of Ramtha, adopting him as a loa and making Gbagbo his medium and priestess. Some members of Tirane's New Age religious movements claimed Ramtha as their own and also came closer to Gbagbo's orbit. Elsewhere, the Ramtha Cult's
emphasis on the need for critical thought and research appealed to many technically trained people, particularly to Garteners who saw links between the Cult and their colonies' well-managed planning. After Gbagbo's death in 2254, the Cult survived, slowly evolving and elaborating over time. Gbagbo's appointed heir, Nordgartener Lena Schneider, continued in her tradition, expanding on the first revelations and formalized the training the Enlightened, spiritually and socially attuned members of the Ramtha Cult who would propagate the movement's goals--and membership--in wider Tiranean society.
In recent years, the Cult has gone from strength to strength. Freihafen has become a major focus of the Enlightened, as their nationalism combines with their technocratic tendencies to create an interesting potential market, but the Cult has established at least a nominal presence in nearly all of the Tiranean societies. It hasn't hurt that the movement has made a series of canny political choices, opting to remain quiet in Nouvelle Provence during the junta, supporting independent Freihafen, and applauding the establishment of a rationally-planned French Empire. Some of the beliefs of the Cult have begun to spread into mainstream religions, some rationalizing Ramtha as an angel or a djinn. The Cult has even begun to spread beyond Tirane, taken to a Terra that's seen as playing a critical role in the
liberation of the Limbes Precursors and to a Nibelungen that's seen as one of the Precursors' greatest achievements. With an estimated two million followers, the Ramtha Cult is a movement to watch.
Ideology
The Ramtha Cult is an increasingly well-disciplined movement that's devoted to the perfection of knowledge about the spiritual and physical worlds, as communicated by Ramtha through Gbagbo, Schneider, and their eventual successors. The Cult is flexible: it can be practiced as a polytheistic religion, with different loa appearing in different forms, or as a monotheistic religion, with different loa all ultimately subordinate to a supreme creator. As such, it's potentially compatible with established religions: at no point has Ramtha explicitly denied (say) the divinity of Jesus Christ or Muhammad, or the precepts of Buddhism, or the existence of the Hindu pantheon. It's quite possible for members of the Cult to consider themselves in good faith to be good Lutherans or Ismaili, whatever their fellows might think.
Members of the Cult are concerned with achieving Enlightenment, a state of being marked by--in Gbagbo's original words--"a lucidity that will illuminate the universe." This Enlightenment has traditionally been achieved by the engagement of the body and the mind, through activity devoted to the betterment of the human community and through a process of self-examination traditionally achieved by meditation, although the ingestion of psychotropics has also played a role. Cybernetic enhancements are also starting to be used towards this end, particularly one's influencing the mind, although they are still controversial to the body of Cult members.
Once Cult members achieve Enlightenment, they are expected to work toward the Cult's goal of freeing the Precursors from their Limbesian exile. Simple methods, like simply blasting the Limbesian crust away, are seen as profoundly unacceptable, like the acts of the Destroyers. Instead, the Cult believes that the Precursors can only be freed once Limbes again becomes the beautiful garden world that it once was. To do this, Cult theology teaches that human knowledge and technology must advance rapidly, with bio/nanotechnology and information technology and space technology all combining to produce a technology capable of shifting Limbes in its orbit and stripping away its superdense carbon dioxide atmosphere for a garden environment. As soon as that task is achieved, humans--and other, suitable, sapient species--can become as one with the Precursors. Until that time, humans--and, again, other suitable sapient species, the Sung being most frequently mentioned in this vein--must work to perfect their technology, spreading life to as many worlds as it can as it builds its strength.
This draft has been kicking around for a bit, so I wanted to send it out and see what you thought. I wanted to come up with a cult that was out there but not so much as to be laughable. Well, not _entirely_ laughable.
There's an actual Ramtha Cult out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramtha
I built elements of that into the 2300AD Ramtha Cult. Whether that's a good idea or not, well, I don't know.
Thoughts on this, and the rest of this, would be welcome.
***
Ramtha Cult
History
When Tirane was discovered and explored, Terrans were taken aback. Leading theorists had speculated that Earth-type life would be rare, and that these Earth-type biospheres would likely to quite deadly to unprotected humans, triggering fatal allergic attacks or inflicting lethal for unprepared humans. The discovery that, orbiting Alpha Centauri A, there existed an Earth-like world that not only possessed as complex a biosphere as Terra's but one that was just as hospitable to humans as Earth, stunned many. More, as at least one observer
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dheb/Tirane/PdB/PdBAcre.htm#_Toc462675113
noted, the fact was that Tirane was arguably more suitable for humanity that Earth, with a distribution of biomes (fewer deserts, less tundra, somewhat smaller polar ice caps) that made relatively more of Tirane's land surface available to human habitation than Terra's. Orthodox religious authorities were able to adapt easily enough to this discovery.
The later discovery of Nibelungen and Beowulf on the French Arm in the 2140s, followed by the explorations of Han Shan and Chengdu on the Chinese Arm and Beta Canum on the French Arm later in the 22nd century, revealed that broadly Earth-compatible biospheres quite commonly existed on the very different worlds in the stars that happened to be closest to Sol. Garden worlds could orbit very young stars like Neubayern or Epsilon Indi or old and highly evolved stars like Delta Pavonis, be tidelocked like Nibelungen or possess a normal rotation period like Chengdu, be low-g like Nibelungen or high-g like Chengdu--it didn't seem to matter. How, a large number of people asked themselves, did this all come about? Orthodox religions felt that the abundance of worlds constituted proof of intelligent design. Others of a more secular bent believed this to be confirmation of the theory of
natural panspermia, with the implications that the galaxy would be populated by Earth-like garden worlds. Many, like the
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dheb/Tirane/Wellon/CWCultSoc.htm#Religion
Edenites of Wellon and the rest of Anglophone Tirane who believe that Tirane was the actual Biblical Eden, adapted existing religions.
Others were unsatisfied by these two arguments. In 2198, Emmeline Gbagbo, an electronics engineer who had immigrated several years earlier to Nouveau Provence from the Guinea Coast, had a series of disturbing dreams, of earlier residents of Tirane and war. Concerned and confused, at a voudun ceremony in her adopted home of Mirambeau Gbagbo presented herself for an extended exorcism. Gbagbo astonished everyone present when she announced
that she was possessed by Ramtha, an ancient Terran warrior last present in the 20th century who possessed great knowledge about past history and guidelines for present conduct. At future sessions, Gbagbo continued to channel Ramtha, who not only communicated an ethical system based on the denial of the concepts of original sin and an undesirable material world and the embrace of knowledge in all of its form, but told listeners that life was everywhere in the neighbourhood of Sol because of the Precursors, an amazingly advanced civilization with paraphysical and physical manifestations. For thousands of millions of years, the Precursors had roamed the universe, seeding life on lifeless worlds and protecting living worlds from catastrophes. Alpha Centauri was a major Precursor centre, with two garden worlds, one orbiting each major component. Eight hundred million
years ago, a great conflict broke out within this civilization when a faction of would-be conquerors tried to make these seeded worlds into an empire. The war ended up destroying both sides, with the last survivors of the original Precursors sealed on underground caverns on a Limbes that was made an uninhabitable hell. It was humanity's responsibility, Ramtha said, to free them.
Gbagbo's visions were mocked by most Tiraneans, but her undeniable charisma and the content of her communications were taken seriously by a few. Many fellow practitioners of voudun believed in the authenticity of Ramtha, adopting him as a loa and making Gbagbo his medium and priestess. Some members of Tirane's New Age religious movements claimed Ramtha as their own and also came closer to Gbagbo's orbit. Elsewhere, the Ramtha Cult's
emphasis on the need for critical thought and research appealed to many technically trained people, particularly to Garteners who saw links between the Cult and their colonies' well-managed planning. After Gbagbo's death in 2254, the Cult survived, slowly evolving and elaborating over time. Gbagbo's appointed heir, Nordgartener Lena Schneider, continued in her tradition, expanding on the first revelations and formalized the training the Enlightened, spiritually and socially attuned members of the Ramtha Cult who would propagate the movement's goals--and membership--in wider Tiranean society.
In recent years, the Cult has gone from strength to strength. Freihafen has become a major focus of the Enlightened, as their nationalism combines with their technocratic tendencies to create an interesting potential market, but the Cult has established at least a nominal presence in nearly all of the Tiranean societies. It hasn't hurt that the movement has made a series of canny political choices, opting to remain quiet in Nouvelle Provence during the junta, supporting independent Freihafen, and applauding the establishment of a rationally-planned French Empire. Some of the beliefs of the Cult have begun to spread into mainstream religions, some rationalizing Ramtha as an angel or a djinn. The Cult has even begun to spread beyond Tirane, taken to a Terra that's seen as playing a critical role in the
liberation of the Limbes Precursors and to a Nibelungen that's seen as one of the Precursors' greatest achievements. With an estimated two million followers, the Ramtha Cult is a movement to watch.
Ideology
The Ramtha Cult is an increasingly well-disciplined movement that's devoted to the perfection of knowledge about the spiritual and physical worlds, as communicated by Ramtha through Gbagbo, Schneider, and their eventual successors. The Cult is flexible: it can be practiced as a polytheistic religion, with different loa appearing in different forms, or as a monotheistic religion, with different loa all ultimately subordinate to a supreme creator. As such, it's potentially compatible with established religions: at no point has Ramtha explicitly denied (say) the divinity of Jesus Christ or Muhammad, or the precepts of Buddhism, or the existence of the Hindu pantheon. It's quite possible for members of the Cult to consider themselves in good faith to be good Lutherans or Ismaili, whatever their fellows might think.
Members of the Cult are concerned with achieving Enlightenment, a state of being marked by--in Gbagbo's original words--"a lucidity that will illuminate the universe." This Enlightenment has traditionally been achieved by the engagement of the body and the mind, through activity devoted to the betterment of the human community and through a process of self-examination traditionally achieved by meditation, although the ingestion of psychotropics has also played a role. Cybernetic enhancements are also starting to be used towards this end, particularly one's influencing the mind, although they are still controversial to the body of Cult members.
Once Cult members achieve Enlightenment, they are expected to work toward the Cult's goal of freeing the Precursors from their Limbesian exile. Simple methods, like simply blasting the Limbesian crust away, are seen as profoundly unacceptable, like the acts of the Destroyers. Instead, the Cult believes that the Precursors can only be freed once Limbes again becomes the beautiful garden world that it once was. To do this, Cult theology teaches that human knowledge and technology must advance rapidly, with bio/nanotechnology and information technology and space technology all combining to produce a technology capable of shifting Limbes in its orbit and stripping away its superdense carbon dioxide atmosphere for a garden environment. As soon as that task is achieved, humans--and other, suitable, sapient species--can become as one with the Precursors. Until that time, humans--and, again, other suitable sapient species, the Sung being most frequently mentioned in this vein--must work to perfect their technology, spreading life to as many worlds as it can as it builds its strength.
