Era of Madness

Curch of Genova

Tyler had, indeed, already heard about Genova's curch, though not on Glactia-62 -for once it wasn't thank to a stolen book- but while he was studying history. Thus, he knew that Genova was currently, by a substential margin, the most practised religion in the galaxy.

Throughout history, religions had undergone large changes. While, in the beginning of the third millenial, eight persons out of ten were religious, this percentage had significantly lowered.

It was common knowledge that one of the main factors that allowed religion to rise in the first place was the ignorance of humans and their powerlessness when it came to changing things about most things surrounding them, which only started to fade in the last third of the Modern era, at the beginning of the 18th century.

But progressively, the seemingly absolute domination of the numerous religions over the world lowered. Until, starting from the rise of the Fefnir technology, the religions were put in a calamitic situation: with the colonization of space, the resolution of nearly every main crisis humanity was facing, the drastic augmentation -at least for most people- of the living conditions, the number of out-of-despair practicants lowered to an unbelievable extent.

There was also the apparition of a new type of science with the Fefnir technology: people felt like finally, they had understood all the mysteries of the world. And if there was any interrogation left, they could still attribute it to Nova beasts anyway.

But most of all: during the galactic expension, the Paradise Council had done its absolute best to limit forced religions all over the galaxy, it was one of the merits Tyler couldn't take off from them. Thanks to them, religions working off fear had almost all disappeared, the times were people could get sanctionned, imprisonned or even killed for not believing in something were now over, except for a few rare planets, and apparently in a large part of the Andromeus-Silveren empire -Tyler couldn't be sure, informations about its inside were mostly classified.

Therefore, the demise of religions had lasted so long it only stopped one century after the beginning of the Trinity era, with its lowest peak being slightly less than one person out of ten practicing any of them, at least openly. Surprisingly though, the percentage had stabilized to two out of ten people in the second half of the 34th century.

This was where the curch of Genova entered in the story: slowly, the curch grew larger and larger in-between the 30th and the 34th century until, before anyone could realize it, it had become the first religion in the entire galaxy, even above the few religions that had kept part of their importance, such as christianity, islam, hinduism and buddhism.

Its believers now represented nine percents of the overall population of the galaxy, thus being just slightly lower than the majority of religious people. The main theory of how they had manage to spread their faith this fast was that many members of the Paradise Council throughout history were Genova's believers, but nothing was ever proved.

'Now that I think about it, faith is truly impressive... over the time, most thing changed, disappeared or were replaced, but even though its scale diminished, faith is one of the rare thing that remains unchanged over time, and even concerning its scale, the slightest change still takes decades or even centuries. That's impressive... but also hella scary, thinking about it' Tyler thought.

There was also the religion wars, the great plague of the world before the arrival of the Fefnir technology... to think that faith, something based on the unproved existence of a god nobody ever saw, could provoke so much chaos and order, and still survive the passing of history, even keeping such importance in today's society, which was dominated by absolute science and logic... indeed, that was pretty scary.

"So, Yohan, are you like those Jehovah's witnesses that disappeared during the Fefnir era, always harassing random people to convince them to join your curch and feel less lonely?" Tyler asked, half-joking.