A Slow Fall Into Madness, Part 4. (Unfiltered)
A delicate touch is needed, here.
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Faith, Shaken
The only saving grace of the Consolidation Wars were that they were not religious conflicts. It took time for humanity to confront the ominous implications of Galactic mass xenocide, let alone come to terms with it. A worldwide crusade or jihad might have resulted in billions of casualties, rather than hundreds of millions.
This in no way implies that Earth properly handled the spiritual implications of Zeroth Contact. Entire worlds had been eliminated ruthlessly, even cruelly, and without exception. None were spared. Worse, many of those species had faith systems that human beings could understand, and appreciate. Indeed, the most common religion among the species closest to humanity was a hauntingly familiar, fundamentally decent monotheistic faith (see below). Why were they still slaughtered? What sins justify xenocide?
Most human faiths survived, although ironically the technically atheist ones finally collapsed in the twenty years before the Consolidation Wars. Humans could ultimately come to terms with the idea of a God that permitted horrible, species-ending suffering, for His own reasons; but there was ultimately no place in the dialectic or secular ethics for literal apocalypses. Those faiths that accepted the existence of actual, supernatural demons had a much easier time grappling with the implications of Zeroth Content; but all of them suffered crises of faith, and most took refuge in encouraging stronger faith in their congregations. Fortunately, they also all shied away from encouraging yet more armed, sectarian conflict. There were enough corpses in the Galaxy as it was.
The Rise of Iluvatarism
The largest repository of information about the Amalgamation ever found by human beings was… a children’s library, half-burned. The books were written in a version of the Amalgamation language that humanity would have used, and covered a wide variety of topics about Galactic culture and society (albeit at a child’s level of understanding). Best of all, they were actual books, instead of now forever-lost electronic data.
One of the books found was a beginner’s primer of what humans call Iluvatarism. The faith is a straightforward monotheism, with an omnipotent and benevolent god (named ‘Iluvatar’ by humans; the best guess of the pronunciation of the original name is ‘Hazmar’). He is opposed by the Enemy, a rebel creation that was once the most powerful of His servants, but not omnipotent itself. Aiding Illuvatar are a host of angelic beings, with fourteen of the most powerful elevated above the others as the Exalted. Iluvatarism has a recognizable version of the Golden Rule, and strong prohibitions against murder, theft, adultery, and covetousness.
It is also uncomfortably like the pantheon used by a legendary Twentieth Century fantasy author (called by Iluvitarians the ‘Chronicler’) for his extremely popular epic fantasy series, down to the roles of each Exalted, and his or her habits and personal attributes. It’s not a complete correspondence: while some of the adventures of the Exalted do show up in the Chronicler’s fiction, it was only incidentally. Also, none of the tongues found in his major works have any correspondence to any known Amalgamation language. Certainly the Chronicler himself remained a Roman Catholic until his death, and there is nothing in his surviving papers that would shed light on the mystery.
Iluvatarians had and still have lively debates over whether all of this represents a divine revelation, or whether the Chronicler simply somehow found a copy (or was told) of the relevant scriptures. Non-Iluvatarians typically assume the latter, when they allow themselves to think about it at all.
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