Will spacefaring races take their polytheisms with them into space? This happens in James Blish's Cities In Flight and in some works by Poul Anderson, e.g.:
"'The gods who forged our destiny saw to it that our ancestors did not learn the secrets of power from humans, who might afterward have paid heed to us and tried to stop our growth. It was others who came to our world and started the great change." (p. 245)
The greatest possible change, from pre-industrial to interstellar. A people who already believed in gods would continue to think in that way and therefore to suppose that their gods had directed "the great change."
"(A bugle: the gods defied!)"
-copied from here.
5 comments:
An industrial economy involving advanced AI might well be absorbed without a thoroughgoing cultural modernization by people who could never have produced it themselves. And the Terran Empire’s technology seems to be rather static, they wouldn’t need to be able to innovate. But the social strain would be immense.
Japan went from full blown feudalism to being a Great Power capable of competing with the Big Dogs in only 50 years, but you could argue that persisting habits of mind handicapped them badly —the tendency to tell superiors what they wanted to hear, for example, which hurt them badly in the Pacific War
As for religion, the ancient paganisms tended to be strongly linked to a people and a place, and to be rather philosophically incoherent. The surviving ones in our own era are ‘late’ pagan, like Hinduism or the Shinto/Buddhist synthesis of Japan, which have acquired (or copied) a more sophisticated set of tools. Even so, while they hold their ground against the universalist faiths, they don’t travel as well.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The technology of the Terran Empire might seem "static" to you, but it's plenty advanced to me! Terraforming of planets (Venus), aircars, quick us of cloning for replacing organs and limbs, FTL, an at least modest extension of human life spans, etc.
And the forcible imposition of Islam in places like Bali does not seem to have wholly extirpated the older Hindu faith of that island.
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
Sean: Bali is solidly and overwhelmingly Hindu; the only Muslims on the island are some recent immigrants. It was never ruled by outsiders until the Dutch conquered it.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected! I had the vague impression Bali was conquered by Muslims who then forced Islam on the islanders. Mea culpa!
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
Sean: that certainly happened in -other parts- of what's now Indonesia/Malaysia. Bali survived, and the Spanish got to the Philippines and converted most of the people there before the Islamization process got north of the Sulu Sea and southern Mindanao. (Filipinos are linguistically and ethnically closely related to Malays and Indonesians.)
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