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Christianity

Old Earth religion based on belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ

Christianity
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Christianity is a monotheistic religion that developed during the Roman Empire and regards Jesus Christ (Yeshua ben Yosef, Yeshua of Nazareth) as God and, in traditional sects, the second person in the Trinity (the Triune deity consisting of Father, Son and Holy Spirit). It became the dominant religion in Europe and by the industrial and atomic age, thanks to aggressive missionary activity, had spread to the rest of the world, becoming the largest religion on Earth with 33% of the world's population. By the mid Information Age it had been supplanted from this position by Islam.

Christianity went into a slow decline thereafter, a process hastened during the early Interplanetary period by the emergence of the Catholic-derived Universal Church, as well as by the rise of a number of "new" or "space age" religions. However the faith refused to die, persisting in some outer solsystem religious colonies even through the Technocalypse Age. The EOCC was influential in the later dark ages of Solsys and the very early years of the Federation, especially at Saturn and some other parts of the outer system, but explicitly avoided any formal political role. While Christianity never again became a truly dominant religion among Terragens, various Christian sects and offshoots of Christianity such as the Reformed Catholic Church, the interactive Virch of Jesus Christ, and the omegist Church of Saint Teilhard, and the EOCC continue to exert influence among many modosophonts in the current era.

Doctrinally, Christianity varies widely. The Evangelical Orthodox Catholic Church has beliefs, and for its human members practices, that would have been recognized by most Christians from the first thousand years after Christ. The neoprimitive Church of the Fifth Evangelion requires a stern and literal allegiance to the revealed texts, especially the Fifth Gospel. The Church of Saint Teilhard is a lot more tolerant, and accepts inquiry into other omegist faiths as ways of deepening one's own understanding of the Omega Point. The Argelander (NoCoZo)-based Jesus The Borg takes a more funky approach, but they can be known to become aggressive to those who question their historical claims. Some Christians, like the Holy Jerusalem Creed (descended from refugees from Dionysos) state that sophonts will end up being eternally punished in hell unless they are "saved" (with special tortures being reserved for any erotocrats). The Reformed Catholic Church teaches that salvation is obtained through repentance and authentically nanofabricated church sacraments. The Church of the Cosmic Christ interprets hell symbolically, not as an actual place of punishment. All sects are in agreement regarding belief in a usually supernatural God and the divinity of Christ, who is regarded as either the, or, in the more liberal sects, one possible, means to Salvation.

As with the other Old Earth pre-singularity religions like Buddhism, Islam, Saint Marxism, and Nuagism, Christianity remains locally popular in numerous polities in the Middle and Outer regions, in predominantly human near-baseline communities in the Inner Sphere, and among some of the very traditional houses of the old core worlds.

 
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Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev
additions by Stephen Inniss
Initially published on 24 September 2001.

 
 
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