Expert snuggler wrote:Duckk's archive fu, in another thread, turned up
"David's words, emphasis mine.
And, third, the notion of lightning as sacred and not, under any circumstances, to be profaned by mortal hands provides the permanent remembrance of not just Langhorne's existence but of the consequences of Langhorne's wrath."
There's wide agreement here that the Safehold population, even in Charis, has an electricity taboo as part of their core beliefs and would turn against anyone trying to introduce it. Further, that an electric civilization has to wait until someone can "nullify" the Writ.
How is that even possible?
I wonder just how far that taboo is taken. Rub two pieces of silk together - heck, rub a fuzzy head of
hair vigorously - pet your cat lizard in dry weather - and you're generating static electricity. Do Safeholders seriously believe that's profaning the Rakurai?
I know that some people with sincere religious beliefs grounded in different social background and lifestyles here on Earth today will have taboos that most of the rest of us would find just as bizarrely easy to transgress. So that question isn't actually quite rhetorical. But by the same token, if there's room to make the strictest adherence to a taboo look a bit silly within a worldview, there's a wedge to loosen the taboo entirely. So maybe those are some of those wedges for Safehold, if the electricity taboo is that strict.
After the Reformation, after the Enlightenment, people of today's Earth will often die rather than violate a key article of faith. This is after our equivalent of The Reveal.
No religion I can think of has ever renounced its scriptures, and the Writ is provably correct, making it even harder.
Well - its injunctions have, for the most part, tangible and accurate penalties for their violation, and its historical account is remarkably consistent with the available early historical documentation (the Testimonies). But where the Writ can't be disproven without the technology it denies Safehold, it certainly could be with it, and rival accounts could crop up if (e.g.) microscopy could back up a germ theory of disease. And historically, it's not going to square with suppressed accounts such as that of St. Zherneau and others.
One thing terrestrial religions have had going for them is that they have had centuries of tradition that resists taking them literally enough to be vulnerable to falsification. The Writ hasn't had that kind of defensive fuzziness, because there was no expectation that it would ever
need it, so it could be safer just being "perfect" and inviting totally literal, straightforward reading. With the Reveal(s) coming, that strategy will backfire.
The only path I can imagine working is gradual re-interpretation motivated by money. Even a fresh "revelation" from an apparent archangel visiting every church on the planet wouldn't work, not on people programmed from childhood, and that approach is opposite to Merlin's goals anyway. Ditto every archbishop on the planet hearing voices saying that the archangels's plan all along was to re-introduce electricity.
Perhaps the answer includes the Church of Charis "aiding" their, uh, brothers in religion by taking over funding of primary education. A lifetime later, there's a population who's been taught from childhood "it's not to be taken literally".
One way or another it has to happen. They're not going to fight the Gbaba successfully without electric power and computers. But how?
That's one possibility. Another is retreating from literalism piecemeal, as needed - and with it, retreat from taking the Writ quite so seriously, except as some sort of symbol of a religious community.
Don't get me wrong - that can still be quite serious. For that matter, I think it's in just that sense that most theoretically literalist believers on Earth take their religion now: community first, practice second, dogma somewhere along after them. That's sadly quite enough to get people serious enough to chop up other people, but not seriously enough to keep them from using a cell phone.
