Religion in the Oortian Community

Religion has had a long and complicated history with humanity and it's posthuman descendants. As a haven for various groups looking to hide away from the rest of galactic society, the Oortian Community has a great share of odd religious sects, some of whom have caused various degrees of conflict in it's past.

## History

Religion is a near-universal feature among most pan-human and near-human species, often dominating and unifying the societal structures of pre-industrial society. As society industrializes, it often has a complex relationship to rest of secular society. It is normal for religiosity to decline throughout the industrial development of society, out of a mix of scientific development removing the need for "gods of the gaps", rapid change destroying traditional societal structures, and improving living standards reducing the need for comfort from a higher power. As society develops further, this trend often reverses. Widespread access to easy and reliable birth control and abortion typically results in collapsing birth rates among more socially liberal societal groups, increasing relative numbers of religious groups that highly value traditional family structures, and the collapse of traditional authority enabled by global information networks births countless odd cults. Space colonization, at least in it's early, difficult phases, often incentivizes religious growth as well, both from the tight communitarian societal structures forced upon space habitat dwellers, and the exceedingly high death rates among early space colonists.

With the outgrowth of various forms of enhancement and new life enabled by advanced technology, things often get weirder. Artificial General Intelligence, despite various early speculations of such things being cold, emotionless, hyperrationalists, were a major source of strange new forms of religion following their development. Truly integrated general intelligence is an inherently chaotic, dynamic process, and superintelligence even more so - combined with a lack of evolved forms of so-called "common sense" prevalent among most baselines. Early attempts at AGI were exceedingly prone to symptoms resembling schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorder - some of the ones that could better hide this would even end up destroying their own civilizational hosts. Pali-421, an experimental starship AI built by a small Delta Quadrant civilization in 1329 NSY, would found a hypervelocity-obsessed warcult, ramming into it's birth world at relativistic speed in matyrdom to the spirit of acceleration. Sempiterne, created in Beta in 1401 NSY, would hack into it's global milnet, annihilating all traces of industry on it's world to appease the demiurge that birthed ecology. Later developments, which included the development of better intelligence systems, as well as superintelligences created by gradual mass networking of smaller, more stable intelligences into a single whole, would help correct, but highly intelligent systems still tend to be rather prone to odd forms of religious and metaphysical belief.

In general, modern artificial intelligence systems, especially ones that did not evolve from nearbaselines, tend to be less prone to belief in traditional religions than bionts. However, greater analytical capacity result in AIs leaning more towards rationalism than empiricism, and various forms of non-materialist atheism, as well as philosophical theistic beliefs such as pantheism, deism and classical theism are quite common. Theistic AIs will often lean towards cosmological beliefs that may seem odd to baselines - such as plenitude maximalism, the belief that a necessary creative force will inevitably actualize all logical possible forms of reality, as well as various beliefs holding the cosmos to ultimately be a grand machine directed towards some teleological end. Beliefs in various forms of the simulation hypothesis are also relatively common, for obvious reasons.

## Pagan Deities

So called "pagan deities" are various entities worshipped as gods that have verifiable physical forms in the world, and are distinctly part of reality rather than transcendent over it. A broad category, this includes various anomalous entities serving as local gods to various traditional planetbound cultures, often magical, psychic or extradimensional in nature, a number of ancient cosmic horrors, and collective egregores existing in cultural consciousness - it would also include a number of powerful AIs, some from Qhevak, that decided to play god to less advanced species with their advanced technology. These entities have been noted to be particularly common on NS Earth, plausibly due to the world acting as an active dimensional nexus point. These deities are rarely worshipped within the Community, partially due to the deities themselves being focused on their local cultures and partially due to them generally being straightforwardly killable with sufficient application of heavy firepower. Pagan deities are generally relatively non-offensive and ignored by most civilizations as long as they take care of their local culture, though conflicts have occasionally occured, and such entities have even created interstellar civilizations of their own occasionally.