God

God is the common name given to the being that is believed to have created the universe and brought about the existence of all life. God is said to be all-knowing and all-powerful and to have endowed us with a divine soul that after death, should one have lived a virtuous life, will be reunited with God and exist externally beyond the physical universe. This state of existence after death is typically referred to as Heaven or the After.

## Refering to God

The primal religions of ancient Earth had many different names for God and beliefs about God's nature as can be seen in The Sacred Texts where God is referred to as the Lord, the Father, the Mother, Destroyer, the Light or is even multiple different beings or none at all. The most common belief about the nature of God in Acheron Rho, held by both the Messianic Church and the Repentent Church is that an element of the divine truth existed in each of the Primal Religions. That God as the being of creation therefore encompasses all of those things, and no one of them.

### The High Church of Messiah-as-Emperox

The High Church believes God to be a spirit being without Gender that exists in The After outside our physical realm. Singular with no aspects or pantheon of lesser Gods.

The High Church refers to God by many terms, the most commonly used of course simply being God, but others such as the Almighty, the Creator, the One, the Divine etc. have also been used and are widely accepted. While many references to God or aspects of God in the Sacred Texts refer to God as a specifically male being, and sometimes a female being, the Chruch's doctrine states that God is a being that is without and beyond all of our human biological/psychological conceptions of gender. The gendered references in the texts are used as allegory rather than descriptively, coming from a time when humans lived in much different social structures to the one that exists in the Empire, in order to assist people better relate to their creator.

Indeed, it is not unusal practice among priests who tend to serf congregations to continue to use gendered terms for God in certain contexts, particularly when the languages involved do not use genderless cases and contructing neutral arrangements or borrowing terms can seem awkward to the common listener or reader. The popularity of such usages within the church and nobility however tends to vary geatly depending on the stylistic fashion of the time, place and the individual preference. For example during the reign of Empress Aquila 'The Blood Eagle' there were increasing references to God using exclusively feminine terms while under Emperox Lyra 'The Masked One' it became fashionable to shift the use of pronouns often throughout a text or conversation, sometimes even within the same sentence.

Currently the common style for addressing God remains the exclusively neutral usage(they/their etc.) Though there is a small trend, especially among those identifying with the Orthodoxist branch of the High Church, that prefer to adopt the usages found within the sacred texts. The iconic archaic language is believed to emphasise the ancient history of the Church has grown from and therefore more easily inspire the appropriate awe of its message.

### The Church of Humanity, Repentant

All concepts of God used within the CHR are either direct derivatives, or in some deep way influenced by the theology of the High Church. If a specific High Church concept or idea is not specifically countered by the beliefs of an individual member sect or the three tenets, it can generally be assumed that the sect or individuals in question follow the same beliefs as those of High Church Doctrine.

There is one overal distinction, however. As the CHR has embraced a much more pluralistic form of theology, and thus of God, it has become common within the Repentant faith to exchanged the word God for that of "the Divine". Though both forms are considered acceptable and widely used dependent on the setting.