The possible ways to break Church doctrine

Dilandu wrote:Well, so who is right: the wolf, who need to eat the rabbit to survive, or the rabbit, who need to escape the wolf to survive?

Who is right has nothing to do with what is the truth. Rabbit has to be eaten for wolf to live and wolf has to let rabbit go for rabbit to live. There are no two truths. The truth is "only one can survive".

Similarly, in case of Safehold, there are no two truths. The history - the Earth, the Terran Federation, the Gbaba, Langhorne's illegal modifications - are the truth, written in stone. No room for discussion here. Whether people believe it or not, it is what happened, so you can't argue that there's no final truth, and you can't feed them lies, justifying them by saying "there is no truth".

Moving on to less philosophical topic I'd say that if the OBS is destroyed and advancements continue to be developed, fall of the doctrine will happen naturally. Sooner or later, electricity will come, and with nobody to kill the idea (like Inquisition would), it will spread. By doctrine, Rakurai should punish using lightning by mortals. It will be gone, though, so no reaction.

Seeing that, some people will start thinking. Maybe if it didn't react to that violation, it won't react to other things? So flight, balloons, zeppelins and so on. Again, no Rakurai, no reaction.

Soon, people will simply stop caring, since it's not going to react anyway. And that's the right time to reveal the truth.

You don't understand the problems. The problem is, that there is a fundamental deficite of alternate philosophy.

I believe this is a crucial point.

The answer is thus quite simple: develop an alternate philosophy. In all the charisian empire, you can try to have people discussing about part of the writ, especially parts that may oppose themselves.

And with the development of Science, you have a second tool: obviously at least some of the things that the Angels told were not fully accurate, there are ways now to explain some of the thnings that were before declared curses and so on...

Obviously, the Angels did not ly to us, they just presented the truth in a way that we were able to understand. How nice of them! But now, we are able to understand the reality of the world. Don't we owe them to go back on thr writ and check if there are other occasions when they made thnings more simple for us?

By acting on the contradictions of the Writ, and the lies about more scientific aspects, you will destroy something crucial: the fact that the Writ is untouchable. Do that and, step by step, it will start to unravel itself. After enough unravelling, you casn start make public some old documents "recently found" that will present more direct attack on the actions of the angels before they left. Giving the full truth on massive scale is too dangerous to be done before the writ and the real motivations of it have been questionned very strongly...

Of course, it will take time...

I'm on the side that thinks you can't social engineer the thing. Presupposing Nimue's mission is the belief that people as individuals have to be allowed their personal dignity and encouraged without coercion or manipulation to think for thenselves.

So put the truth out there as firmly and persuasively as possible. Then insist that everybody tolerate the other guy's point of view. Accept the fact that this is going to have to be paid for in blood more than once even after the G-4 is gone.

There really isn't another way. Technology will advance in the EOC and Siddarmark and anyplace else where thought and innovation are encouraged. But for a long time there are going to be vast parts of Safehold, probably the majority of the population who continue to embrace the old beliefs and ways of thought.

So be it. Just make sure they can't impose their perspectives on those who think the other way...and vice versa.

Don

Well said Kakai!

Dilandu wrote:You missing the point. BOTH of this "alternative religious views" is based on the absolutely same doctrine, and divergent only in formalistic parts. The actual difference between CoC and CoGA is much less than between the Catholics and Protestants on Earth.

No you are missing the point. Whatever the presently public differences between the churches, we as readers know that the CoC is going to encourage enquiry, change, scientific method and development of technology in any areas under it's control. Whichever part of it is responsible for overseeing the Proscriptions is going to progressively grant more and more dispensations. They are not going to be prosecuting any violations. They are not going to be persecuting anyone who turns their questioning minds to matters of philosophy or religion instead of technology. To say that is only a formalistic divergence is nonsense.

The CoC is ultimately person centred rather than church centred. I rather suspect that they will take the line that God is big enough to defend himself and doesn't need the church to do it for him.

The rest of the world can either obey their church and end up poor and helpless and buying everything from the CoC areas or they can stretch their conscience a bit, copy big chunks of the 'Charisian' approach and have actual jobs and industry. Guess which will happen?

Dilandu wrote:Please. The "ultimate truth" is a worst possible lie. In the wolf&rabbit system, there is no "ultimate truth" for both wolf and rabbit: the wolf think the truth is that the rabbit should be eaten by wolf (so the wolf could exist!) and the rabbit think that the truth is that the rabbit should escape the wolf (so the rabbit could exist).

"Everything is relative" is a common sophism used by those who would want to do anything they want (including doing it to others) and not do anything they don't want (even when others depend on them).
Somehow, when others do things to them, or when others refuse to support them, they change their philosophy rather quickly.

Dilandu wrote:And in such giant system as planetary-scale religion, there is simply no way to do something without at least SOME lie.

Merlin did it without direct lies. Yes, you could argue that he lied by omission, but you will find in any number of places in all the books that Merlin intentionally did not make any straight lies, for the reason that when the time comes for him to say the full truth, people would not believe things he said, because of previous lies.

Dilandu wrote:You are free to try direct solution, with the unbeliveable carnage and the all too possible collapse of the whole Safeholdian civilization, of cousre.

Unbelievable carnage is only possible if both sides are on the same tech / industrial / weapons level.
When the truth is revealed on Safehold, the side of the inner circle will have control over the most powerful industrial and weapons base, AND as soon as they solve the OBS problem, they can, at need, jump as far ahead as they want (using the Owls library).

The other side, if they want to say that tech is proscribed, cannot even try to use electricity or anything beyond that without contradicting themselves.

Any war between them is not going to last long.

Even if as a plot device you wake up someone from Langhorne's team, and he leads some sort of rebellion against Charis, he can't pull it off without having the Faithful build modern tech, industry and weapons.
And the more modern it is, the closer the Faithful will come to being able to see that he's not an archangel at all.

I think breaking the church doctrine and revealing the full truth are 2 completely separate problems.

Using Nynian's documents should prove COGA total corruption easily. Using SSK ones permit to revert to a milder writ.

The church of Charis then only need to demonstrate the basic falseness of the proscriptions by revealing the underlying truth (germ theory vs curses for illness). That, with the level of life increases that comes with, should discredit the doctrine nicely. They already renounced to the whole inquisition. The role of the Imperial College as example will be crucial.

Revealing the full truth is a much thornier problem, because it is likely to cause rejection and fall back to the comfort of a known doctrine. But presenting half truth or small lies would be worse, I think. Timed discoveries of documents in the ruins of the temple could help

Dilandu wrote:You missing the point. BOTH of this "alternative religious views" is based on the absolutely same doctrine, and divergent only in formalistic parts. The actual difference between CoC and CoGA is much less than between the Catholics and Protestants on Earth.

The differences between Catholics and Protestants is far too late in the evolution of Christianity in Europe. Safehold is just at the beginning of the process where there is just total Catholic domination of society and education and Martin Luther.

There is more difference between the CoGA and COC than there was between the Catholic Church and Martin Luther and proto-lutheranism. The competing philosophies will develop from that small difference in time, eventually Safehold will develop a full-fledged Protestant pantheon but at the moment it only has the CoGA, the CoC, and various reformists within both formal churches.

We know there are different philosphies, as seen with the levelers. SO why not introduce others, some that are about pasifism, some that are about meditations, others about vegatisms and vegans. they need not be big and complicated, they need only exist giving people options. Once people are more open to a different way of life, the ground is prepared for possible alterations to religion.

Hi ALJ SF,

Thank you for pointing out something I'd forgotten.

The older Holy Writ texts don't have the book of Schueler and Chihiro, thus validating Maikel's rejection of the punishment, arguably he's following Langhorne more than the church has.

If the grand Vicar has been using the newer version as he has, then has he been in conflict with Langhorne?

If Seijin Khody's journal is revealed about the mortal nature of the archangels, that will be a severe blow to the authority of the CoGA coming from near God himself.

But how to get it out and accepted?

I'm sure the SSK have long had such a plan, I'm just very curious what it fully entails.

L

alj_sf wrote:I think breaking the church doctrine and revealing the full truth are 2 completely separate problems.

Using Nynian's documents should prove COGA total corruption easily. Using SSK ones permit to revert to a milder writ.

The church of Charis then only need to demonstrate the basic falseness of the proscriptions by revealing the underlying truth (germ theory vs curses for illness). That, with the level of life increases that comes with, should discredit the doctrine nicely. They already renounced to the whole inquisition. The role of the Imperial College as example will be crucial.

Revealing the full truth is a much thornier problem, because it is likely to cause rejection and fall back to the comfort of a known doctrine. But presenting half truth or small lies would be worse, I think. Timed discoveries of documents in the ruins of the temple could help

Lyonheart, is that spoiler material?