Imperial Truth - Imperial Truth: The Imperial Truth is the name given to the atheistic, rationalist, and materialist ideology promulgated by the Emperor of Mankind across all the worlds of the Imperium during the Unification Wars and the Great Crusade to reunite all the settled planets of Humanity in the last two centuries of the 30th Millennium.The Imperial Truth was pioneered by the Emperor on Terra even before the Great Crusade began. It was an ideology defined by the core values of reason, respect for the methodology of science and secular progress. It was intended to replace the older traditions of religion, superstition and faith that had long defined many of the worlds of Mankind that had fallen into darkness during the Age of Strife after the collapse of Humanity's first interstellar civilisation.At its heart the Imperial Truth held that the universe was rational, that knowledge defeated fear and brought freedom from the terrors of Old Night. With this assertion went the denial of the irrational, the superstitious, and faith in powers and principles beyond the knowable. In the unified Terra and Imperium of Man, there could be no mysteries of the soul, no sorcery, no gods. Those who clung to their ignorance were cast down, their lies silenced in the pyre's roar. The Emperor believed that the terrors of the past had grown in the shadow of superstition and false religious belief. If the Human future was to survive its rebirth, it could not tolerate the delusions of the past.That there were other dimensions, alien species and mutants who wielded psychic powers was not denied, only that they were supernatural. That some might call these phenomena "sorcery," or attribute them to gods, were simply the symptoms of an incomplete understanding of reality.With a foundation built upon the tenets of the Imperial Truth, Mankind achieved greatness, and though it was not destined to last, for two Terran centuries the Great Crusade was beyond reproach in its methods and in its glorious elevation of Humanity to become the dominant species of the galaxy.Of course, there was a degree to which the Imperium and the Emperor touched upon the irrational and ethereal. The new Imperium had grown from the Human past, and secular though it might be, much of its power and nature expressed itself in ways that had echoes of the spiritual. In practices such as the taking of Oaths of Moment, the names of the divisions of Imperial power, and the symbols of that power, the Imperium wrapped itself in the clothes of authority woven from dreams that were as old as the gods it had denied.And Humanity continued to have faith, faith in the omniscience and benevolence of the Emperor and His designs, faith through reason, in the Imperial Truth. Perhaps this was an intended spiritual crutch; that the Emperor in His wisdom saw the failings in the primitive hindbrain of every man and woman in His service, and recognised that He could only cast down the demagogue and the pontifex in this way. That He could only destroy the spiritual by using the language of religion, by preaching the faith of the empirical and the rational.It was an inherent contradiction in the Imperial project that was never truly reconciled. The onset of the Horus Heresy crushed the growing belief in the Imperial Truth by revealing many of its tenets to be a "Great Lie" -- the supernatural did exist, and religion soon proved to be a crucial component of Humanity's defence against the entities of the Warp.Ironically, by the middle of the 32nd Millennium, the Imperial Truth had been replaced as the defining ideology of the Imperium by a new and potent Human religion -- the belief that the Emperor of Mankind was Himself a god, as taught by the Imperial Creed.