How To Convert entire populace

SciFi90 wrote:

kaid wrote:I don't see the entire population ever fully converting. You are going to have sizable portions that will simply refuse seeing it all as the work of the devil. Short of something that appears as divine intervention.


I think it would not be unlikely to see a grayson/masada type split eventually. A part that while still very religious at least is pragmatic enough to use what technology they are required to use and another part of people who will utterly refuse to believe and will likely be intractably aggressive. Think the middle east issues with people who know with 100% "certainty" what god told them to do.

It is very likely you wind up having to simply leave them on safehold as humanity goes back to the stars and colonizes other worlds.

"A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still." Conversion of the entire populace of Safehold is unlikely, in view of human nature. Current events today show what would be likely, if Safehold were reality.

Thank you SciFi90... Took me back to the Dale Carnegie course and capsulized a point of significance that the inner circle must deal with. Human history is loaded with examples of people who "knew which way the wind blew" and took advantage of the prevailing factors to discredit their enemies. Changing religion to gain power is a well documented trick.
If the inner circle wanted to try to convert the entire planet (goes against their history of letting temple loyalists have their own churches) but an aspect of this relates to undo the harm that Langhorne caused and not even flying over the cities in a recon skimmer and dropping broadsides will convince everyone.

People have to want to be convinced.

People will have economic reasons to want to be convinced.

Luke 12:34
Matthew 6:21

Up to now the way to get rich was to be in on the CoGA graft train. No longer.

C. O. Thompson wrote:
[snip]

Changing religion to gain power is a well documented trick.

[snip]

How right you are. I don't know if you have ever come across the old song "The Vicar of Bray"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Bray_%28song%29
but if you haven't, it's worth a look .
.

Peter2 wrote:

C. O. Thompson wrote:
[snip]

Changing religion to gain power is a well documented trick.

[snip]

How right you are. I don't know if you have ever come across the old song "The Vicar of Bray"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Bray_%28song%29
but if you haven't, it's worth a look .
.

Peter2,

Well... there you go but there is more and it has been one of the more fascinating subplots or themes of these stories... how we cannot tell what a neighbor believes or thinks until they act. The double agent that attached himself to Corlis when he was sent into exile with Iris and Davein... the guy that blew up the powder mill or the agents of Helm Cleaver and even more... who could tell by looking at Merlin that he is really Nimue in a PICA's body.
The inner circle was very wise not to try to "dictate the conscious" of the people or to make it an obvious advantage to switch religions or a disadvantage to keep Temple Loyalist views, only if they produce acts of aggregation and violence were actions taken against them.
Your little song... I need to do more research on which religion Charles II as I don't know the difference between the Church of England and the High Church but this poor Vicar is in a jam no matter what as Charles II was executed and so his choice of temporary convenience is like a ping pong ball and it looks to me that the differences he faced were insignificant compared to what the people of Safehold have to deal with... yet they are dealing with them even when they don't know the extent and think only to reform the church in Zion. I think that David Weber is leading us more toward the conclusion reached in this contemporary song. The story told is a documented fact (see Christmas truce From Wikipedia)

John McCutcheon "Christmas in the Trenches"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1mnIG48S48

The real problem that humanity face in these stories is not that of the Gbaba but the need to overlook our petty differences to build with our common strengths. Today, we face the challenge of getting out of our gravity well so we (as a united race) can take advantage of resources which can be developed without further pollution to our home... but as long as PACs buy our government and deflect our resources to their own profit, we will not be likely to succeed.

Is this also a problem of "conversion"? Am I preaching to the choir?

What could we accomplish when we work together... God said "Nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them"


Genesis 11:1-9

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

Oh well... happy holidays

The big issue Merlin faces is the platform and the unknown under the temple. The fear of something waking up in under 10 years is what makes this war so important for Charis to totally dominate and the church to be crushed into tiny pieces. If it was not for the need to expedite the war due to unknown under the temple or the restraint of movement by platform, Merlin could wait the generations needed to let human nature and curiosity take over.
Once the temple is under the inner circles control and Paiter Wylsynn gets in and tells the platform to let merlin and owl take control the war against the gbaba can begin. Human kind can take all the time in the world to experiment and learn and grow and get out of the tech dark ages. Merlin and the inner circle can recruit people (and take all the young impressionable orphans giving them neral implants and NEATS) to the cause of fighting the Gbaba and join with OWL the way Nahrmahn Baytz has and THINK about how to improve the TF weapons and ship designs in the computers at accelerated rates, start up "Operation Arc the Sequel", keep a tab on safehold with probes that alert when they are 1)found by Gbaba,2)start to explore space beyond safehold and the moon longhorn,or 3) have started to go backwards in their tech/knowledge base.
From the new planet by "Operation Lesser Arc" the TF can pick up were it left off leaving behind all the worried warts on safehold. The new TF comes back once and a while to collect more recruits that the inner circle gets and none are the wiser. Soon stories of alien abductions get the people thinking about space and other forms of life.
2000 years after the Gbaba are destroyed Safeholdians encounter the TF and hugs and kisses go all around.

I very much doubt, based on our own history, that the entire populace could be converted. It's just not going to happen. Believers believe whatever they believe and nothing can convince them otherwise. The key is to marginalize those zealots and get the majority of the population convinced. A tough slog, if you ask me.

I was reading this thread from the start and there has been a lot of tangential threads to this one, so let me add a few more.

1. I've been wondering if it is morally OK to drag Safehold and it's people into another fight with the Gbaba. Apparently they are safe as long as technology is restricted, so should we force technology on them and put them at risk? I think of the "hidden tribes" or whatever discovered in the 20th century in Africa or SA and the question of whether it was right to expose them to our way of life or to just let them be. People on Safehold, while obviuously not in perfect harmony with each other, are still/or were relatively happy in their lives.

2. I've also been wondering about how we would know when we're ready to face the Gbaba again. It seems that we were technologically even with them (or very nearly), but they destroyed us anyway. I'm thinking it may be more of a numbers issue than a technological issue, as it seemed in OAR that they just sent overwhelming numbers of ships to destroy us. The TF put up a great fight and it took "literally years" for the Gbaba to finish us off, so during those years we were unable to build enough ships to stave them off. So, if that's the case, we don't really know how many ships we would need to win. Now maybe all it would take is to make our ships faster so that they could outrun the Gbaba scout ships so that they couldn't track us so easily, but I don't see how we could know how much faster or how much better we would need to be to succeed without going against them again - and we'd better not be wrong.

3. I just can't help but think that the thing under the temple is a red herring. I really doubt that it would be some sort of "Terminator" come to take out anyone and everyone that's been innovative. And of course only the Wylsynns (and now the inner circle) even know that something is supposed to return. And if something does return, why would anyone believe that he's an archangel? I mean we have people saying they're JC himself and just about nobody believes them. And our populace even supposedly believes that JC will return someday. Safeholdians don't even have that.

OK, hope I didn't diverge too much.

TBird50 wrote:I very much doubt, based on our own history, that the entire populace could be converted. It's just not going to happen. Believers believe whatever they believe and nothing can convince them otherwise. The key is to marginalize those zealots and get the majority of the population convinced. A tough slog, if you ask me.

I was reading this thread from the start and there has been a lot of tangential threads to this one, so let me add a few more.

1. I've been wondering if it is morally OK to drag Safehold and it's people into another fight with the Gbaba. Apparently they are safe as long as technology is restricted, so should we force technology on them and put them at risk? I think of the "hidden tribes" or whatever discovered in the 20th century in Africa or SA and the question of whether it was right to expose them to our way of life or to just let them be. People on Safehold, while obviuously not in perfect harmony with each other, are still/or were relatively happy in their lives.

2. I've also been wondering about how we would know when we're ready to face the Gbaba again. It seems that we were technologically even with them (or very nearly), but they destroyed us anyway. I'm thinking it may be more of a numbers issue than a technological issue, as it seemed in OAR that they just sent overwhelming numbers of ships to destroy us. The TF put up a great fight and it took "literally years" for the Gbaba to finish us off, so during those years we were unable to build enough ships to stave them off. So, if that's the case, we don't really know how many ships we would need to win. Now maybe all it would take is to make our ships faster so that they could outrun the Gbaba scout ships so that they couldn't track us so easily, but I don't see how we could know how much faster or how much better we would need to be to succeed without going against them again - and we'd better not be wrong.

3. I just can't help but think that the thing under the temple is a red herring. I really doubt that it would be some sort of "Terminator" come to take out anyone and everyone that's been innovative. And of course only the Wylsynns (and now the inner circle) even know that something is supposed to return. And if something does return, why would anyone believe that he's an archangel? I mean we have people saying they're JC himself and just about nobody believes them. And our populace even supposedly believes that JC will return someday. Safeholdians don't even have that.

OK, hope I didn't diverge too much.

With reference to your number 1, who has the right to be making choices for others. On Safehold it was the church. Without any reference to the Gbabba, the church sanctioned a social system that made slaves out of millions of Desnairn and Harchongese serfs. The church in the name of enforcing the proscriptions condemned millions to premature deaths by preventing the discovery of cures for disease. The church insists on doing peoples thinking for them to the point of imposing the greatest intellectual straitjacket in history. The mere fact that so many have accepted this state of affairs doesn't make the situation a happy one.

As for the happy state of the noble savage, I don't buy it, not for one minute. Life for primative peoples was mean, brutal and short. That they didn't realize that there are alternatives for their situation or know enough to be unhappy doesn't mean that their situation is a happy state of affairs.

Don

-

I'm remembering the guy with Alzheimer's whose wheelchair was used as a bomb. Merlin reflected that Alzheimer's was easily curable with TF technology. For routine trauma cases, no electricity means no X-rays.

I'm remembering Cayleb in the skimmer for the first time, grimly saying "So this is what they took from us".

I'm thinking of all the Newtons and Rutherfords and Faradays who went to their graves without the chance to fulfill their destinies.

That said, Merlin's conscience should trouble him about using the Safeholders for revenge against the Gbaba. It's not their fight if they never touch Gbaba space.

[/quote]

With reference to your number 1, who has the right to be making choices for others. On Safehold it was the church. Without any reference to the Gbabba, the church sanctioned a social system that made slaves out of millions of Desnairn and Harchongese serfs. The church in the name of enforcing the proscriptions condemned millions to premature deaths by preventing the discovery of cures for disease. The church insists on doing peoples thinking for them to the point of imposing the greatest intellectual straitjacket in history. The mere fact that so many have accepted this state of affairs doesn't make the situation a happy one.

As for the happy state of the noble savage, I don't buy it, not for one minute. Life for primative peoples was mean, brutal and short. That they didn't realize that there are alternatives for their situation or know enough to be unhappy doesn't mean that their situation is a happy state of affairs.

Don

-[/quote]

Don,
You are almost making my point. You're saying that the CoGA did not have the right to decide for the people of Safehold how they should live. I absolutely agree, but how does that make it right for Merlin and the CoC to do so? Plus the CoGA as you say sanctioned a system that condemned a lot of people to premature deaths. But what Merlin and the CoC are proposing puts the whole world at risk of annihilation. Is that any different morally? It could possibly be argued that it is worse because it's putting everyone at risk.

What part of their decisions about how to live is Merlin usurping?

The Church of Charis has freedom of conscience as a core doctrine. Temple Loyalists worship and meet freely.

If they don't want to live in a technological society, well, we have Amish today.

If they want to live in peace, they are being prevented from that. It's not Merlin's fault. Merlin didn't start the war, though admittedly he would have sooner or later.

The Empire of Charis is increasing choice and freedom in all its territory.