Peter2 wrote:n7axw wrote:Convert the whole population of Safehold??
Gimme a break...
Look around you at the world we live in. Can you seriously imagine the whole world we live in agreeing on anything, to say nothing at all about religion.
Don
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Exactly so. That's what I was saying, with illustration. You know as well as I do that there are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, despite the abundance of pictures clearly showing it is near-spherical. As an aside, it was one of Arthur C Clarke's unfulfilled desires to be present at a conversation between a flat-earther and one of those people who believe that the surface of the Earth is on the inside of a hollow sphere . . .
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The problem with trying to predict the long-term response is that Safehold’s religion is *very* unique because it’s so perfectly isolated from any competing thought; there’s really no analogue of a similarly isolated belief structure in human history. Even the flat earth parallel only goes so far.
CoGA’s problem in facing the post-Reveal world is that the Church’s theology has no history of scholarly interpretation. They’ve never had to deal with alternate gospels, interactions with other religions, divergent oral traditions that developed over time, or anything else that would force the development of an interpretive tradition or mindset. They don’t even have the concept of a “false religion” because they’ve never been confronted by anything like it. Actual apostasy is completely foreign to their thinking.
All of that means you have a religion that’s not prepared for a fundamental challenge because the Writ doesn’t give them anything to help them fend off such a challenge. Most likely because any flexibility would have inevitably invited the questions it wanted to avoid altogether. The Writ holds together; it’s a very strong straightjacket. But it’s also a very brittle one because of how they went about developing that strength (explicit promises, guarantees, easily disproven explanations once an outside perspective is thrown into the mix). Once the cracks start to propagate, it’ll shatter. Even attempting to argue against the revelations would require a radical departure from written scripture. To defend it, they have to get creative. And they need to develop that interpretative mindset while being bombarded with evidence to the contrary.
Long-term, you don’t have to convince everyone. You just have to make it next to impossible for them to convince others. Make the benefits of technology impossible to avoid. Inoculate large portions of the population with nanites right away; even if most people can’t quite understand them fully, the benefits will be obvious. Start with the military during the initial uproar and expand to civilians as soon as you can since the military will be most willing to follow Cayleb into this new, uncertain world. Include anti-aging drugs to increase your available manpower as you industrialize further and so people can witness the changes taking place. Be aggressive in training Pasqualites (doctors now) to modern standards and build modern clinics and hospitals across Safehold. Take foreign dignitaries and leaders for joyrides into space so they see how tiny humanity is on a larger scale. Leverage Safehold’s respect for the written word by showing them holo recordings of Earth and the command staff along with thousands of years of historical records. The sheer extent of those records will be overwhelming. Build modern buildings like the Temple to highlight future possibilities. Hell, disassemble the Temple to prove a point (physical access would let you do it without a kinetic strike); every faith in history has had to deal with the loss of holy sites. See how the hardcore try to interpret the demolition of a divine site on Safehold. Use electricity and other innovations to improve the lives of nearly everyone on Safehold. Flood Zion with cheap, steel thistle silk winter clothing so that the poor don’t spend each winter slowly freezing to death. Construct new canals on the mainland like Shan-wei originally built. Launch native-built airplanes that the people can see and hear above them.
There’s a lot they can do by judiciously using TF tech to bootstrap education and local industry from the beginning, even if that tech can't be reproduced locally yet. Medicine is the biggest one; there’s no downside to a healthier, longer-lived populace and a great deal of upside. Those who refuse just live their normal lifespan and die out naturally. Over time, the numbers will take care of themselves.
You make the cost of rejecting those benefits so high that the Faithful can’t evangelize to bring in new converts (assuming they ever figure that out). And once that happens, they’re done. In a century or two, faith in the CoGA will be about as common as flat earthers are today. Namely, not many and with zero social or political power.
Of course, they’ll get pretty violent when anxiety starts to set in over their lack of power to stop the changes on Safehold. But SNARCs and other TF tech (scanners at public places, radio comms for police forces, rapid response teams, etc. - no reason to not roll that stuff out right away rather than waiting for it to be developed natively) will help them identify hardliners and would-be terrorists and nip them in the bud.
