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In 40k lore, I remember reading that apparently, everyone on Terra miraculously stopped believing in all religions because the Emperor threatened to kill them all. Since in Terra there are obviously no more people like Christians or Buddhists living there anymore, what about in other worlds? For example, maybe there are a few undiscovered human colonies out there that still worship the old Abrahamic religions, albeit in a different kind of way.

What do you all think of this, is it possible or unlikely in the grimdark galaxy?

It's just about possible but every planet the Imperium encounters is evaluated and if you don't worship the Emperor then you get destroyed.

To be fair to the people on Terra the Emperor didn't threaten to kill them all. He hunted down every single priest, religious location and believer and destroyed them.

It's entirely possible but not in the manner that we know them today, 30k had a "catheric" after all, so it's likely that some elements of old religions survived but again, not that we would outwardly recognise

I imagine a lot of these old religions that survived also ended up going the way of many old pagan religions after the rise of christianity. stamped out but many of their practices stolen and applied to the modern chruch.

pm713 wrote:
It's just about possible but every planet the Imperium encounters is evaluated and if you don't worship the Emperor then you get destroyed.

To be fair to the people on Terra the Emperor didn't threaten to kill them all. He hunted down every single priest, religious location and believer and destroyed them.

Its an interesting idea, given that the "Old" Abrahamic religions copied most of their traditions, sacred days, and even background story for Jesus from older pagan religions. Emp is more than powerful enough to perform "Miracles" it would have been easy to convince the people he was the next reincarnation of god/jesus/whatever.

Why did the Emperor slaughter rather than assimilate?

The dating system of the Imperium seems to acknowledge the Christian Calender that uses Jesus' birth as the year one (which is a bit weird when you consider that the Emperor probably percecuted Christians).

 Beersarius Drawl wrote:


Why did the Emperor slaughter rather than assimilate?

Religion and the belief in gods - feeds the actual gods of the Warp.

 KiloFiX wrote:

 Beersarius Drawl wrote:


Why did the Emperor slaughter rather than assimilate?

Religion and the belief in gods - feeds the actual gods of the Warp.

That can be debatable, i've actually heard that worshipping the Emperor actually stops feeding the chaos gods, rather than total atheism.

I think yes, but in very limited forms, like some secret cults.

Despite the Emperor's best effort, he couldn't destroy 100% of all religious texts and force the ideas out of peoples mind. After all, fighting against an idea is more difficult than fighting against believers of that idea.

Ollanius Pius was for example rumored to be an actual Christian. In 30th Millenium.

It is very possible. However how religions are practiced and how to interpret the source materials and even source materials gets changed over time. We can see this in current religions. It is doubtfull they would survive intact in the way you think of them today.

If some source materials survived and were exported off Terra to a secluded world way back in the early days of the Imperiums expansion then perhaps some backwater worlds might well be able to woreship such texts. Esp if they fell out of contact with the Emperor and the greater portion of humanity.

That said the time scales are vast - its the 41st millennium and today we are only in the second. That's many many many thousands of years so its very likely any original texts are long gone and what might survive might be fragmented and changed so heavily that we'd not recognise it today.


So in theory other religions can survive, though most in the 41st are going to be adaptations of Emperor Woreship. Some might survive, but it will be rare for them not to be twisted by the taint of chaos.

 Beersarius Drawl wrote:

pm713 wrote:
It's just about possible but every planet the Imperium encounters is evaluated and if you don't worship the Emperor then you get destroyed.

To be fair to the people on Terra the Emperor didn't threaten to kill them all. He hunted down every single priest, religious location and believer and destroyed them.

Its an interesting idea, given that the "Old" Abrahamic religions copied most of their traditions, sacred days, and even background story for Jesus from older pagan religions. Emp is more than powerful enough to perform "Miracles" it would have been easy to convince the people he was the next reincarnation of god/jesus/whatever.

Why did the Emperor slaughter rather than assimilate?

The Emperor wanted to spread the Imperial Truth, the idea that there are no gods, everywhere. He didn't want to be seen as a god. So priests etc were given a choice of abandon religion and join his side or get set on fire. I think there's a short story of him speaking to the last priest on earth somewhere but I can't remember the name.
Although I have to say that trying to prove there are no gods is a really silly idea in a universe where there really are gods and they do spend time interfering with mortals.

 KiloFiX wrote:

 Beersarius Drawl wrote:


Why did the Emperor slaughter rather than assimilate?

Religion and the belief in gods - feeds the actual gods of the Warp.

Wait, but...that makes no sense. The worship of some random deity fuels the warp, but slaughtering all the followers of that religion doesn't fuel, oh I don't know, khorne?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

pm713 wrote:

 Beersarius Drawl wrote:

pm713 wrote:
It's just about possible but every planet the Imperium encounters is evaluated and if you don't worship the Emperor then you get destroyed.

To be fair to the people on Terra the Emperor didn't threaten to kill them all. He hunted down every single priest, religious location and believer and destroyed them.

Its an interesting idea, given that the "Old" Abrahamic religions copied most of their traditions, sacred days, and even background story for Jesus from older pagan religions. Emp is more than powerful enough to perform "Miracles" it would have been easy to convince the people he was the next reincarnation of god/jesus/whatever.

Why did the Emperor slaughter rather than assimilate?

The Emperor wanted to spread the Imperial Truth, the idea that there are no gods, everywhere. He didn't want to be seen as a god. So priests etc were given a choice of abandon religion and join his side or get set on fire. I think there's a short story of him speaking to the last priest on earth somewhere but I can't remember the name.
Although I have to say that trying to prove there are no gods is a really silly idea in a universe where there really are gods and they do spend time interfering with mortals.

He wouldn't have had to kill them if they would have just DEBATED HIM!

There is a story called "the last church" in the 40k universe where the emperor destroys the last church and kills the! Ast preacher, and starts a clock ticking that signals the end of the world.

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_Last_Church

Consider all the world religions we have evidence for.

Consider how many still survive to the present day.

Then consider how many of those haven't changed since, say, Roman times.

Chances of any surviving into 40k? I'd say virtually nil.

No the old religions didn't survive, because (hear me out on that one) it's not thematically appropriate.

How dark parody version of them might. Especially if, like, they got something from current days and completely misinterpretated it! Like, if they believe Jesus actually rided a raptor or something.

That one is thematically appropriate!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Consider all the world religions we have evidence for.

Consider how many still survive to the present day.

Then consider how many of those haven't changed since, say, Roman times.

Chances of any surviving into 40k? I'd say virtually nil.

Consider whatever belief system the people who painted the famous Lascaux cave images had. We have no idea, and that was only half as long ago as 40k is into the future.

My understanding was that some old religions had survived (changed but there) and new ones had appeared, but they under went syncretism and the main'/chief/mono god was identified as the emperor and the lesser gods/saints with the (loyal) primarchs and imperial heros.

So long as it is the emperor they are worshiping officially its ok, though of course everyone sees their version as the most correct and tries to convert everyone else...

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Consider all the world religions we have evidence for.

Consider how many still survive to the present day.

Then consider how many of those haven't changed since, say, Roman times.

Chances of any surviving into 40k? I'd say virtually nil.

Your Forgetting Henry the VIII forcing the Great bible into English churches, that was written in 1539 and then King James bible re-written in 1611 so Christianity has been changed at least twice since roman times, and splintered by differing points of view Catholic/Protestant and sub groups like 7th day Adventists. so quite a bit of change since roman times I'd say.

also digital records are far different to analog records.

 Hawky wrote:
I think yes, but in very limited forms, like some secret cults.

Despite the Emperor's best effort, he couldn't destroy 100% of all religious texts and force the ideas out of peoples mind. After all, fighting against an idea is more difficult than fighting against believers of that idea.

Ollanius Pius was for example rumored to be an actual Christian. In 30th Millenium.

That's true, you can't kill off ideals, they'll always find a way to survive. This is a morbid person to quote, but I think Adolf Hitler even agreed with that, which is why he figured the USSR would take forever to subjugate because of its stalwart communist population.

Back to 40k, that's actually pretty interesting hearing of Ollanius Pius, I'll have to read more about him when I get the chance.

well words are still words.

We currently have a difficult time understanding Shakespearan dialoque.

Now that 'curseff' is not taught....how long til it is a PHD only known skill and even then they wont be good at reading those texts.

The King James was written by 60 Mathemeticains, Priests, Scholars, etc. And surprisingly it holds up well to comparative earlier editions....they did a good job.

Still....many words change meanins. For instance the Greek bible used for many later editions had 22 different meanings for the word Darkness.

There are at least 3 different versions of Inn in Hebrew..Thus a lot of confusion of the Christ birth story.

Lets look at more recent changed words from religions.

NOEL is short for Now All is Well

Goodbye is short for God Be With You.

So with 10's of thousands of years going by. The disarray of the future. And the changes in dialects and meanins….it would be a challenge to recognize much of anything from today.

 Jazzylee wrote:

That's true, you can't kill off ideals, they'll always find a way to survive. This is a morbid person to quote, but I think Adolf Hitler even agreed with that, which is why he figured the USSR would take forever to subjugate because of its stalwart communist population.

That's also one of the reasons why neo-nazis and commies are still around even today, despite being defeated and their ideas proven dysfunctional decades ago.

Back to 40k, that's actually pretty interesting hearing of Ollanius Pius, I'll have to read more about him when I get the chance.

It's just a rumor I heard, don't take it as granted. A hint might be that on one of the artworks of him, he has a necklace in the form of a cross on his neck.

 admironheart wrote:
NOEL is short for Now All is Well

No it isn't. It's a borrowed French word, originally from the Latin 'natalis' ('birth').

Goodbye is short for God Be With You.

This one is correct, though.

leftovers from the dark age of technology might aswell still have some systems under controll somehwere, it would very well be possible that they still have their old religions.

That does depend on the scattering of the humans at the time though.

Here's a snippet ...

The latest Warhammer Community Apocrypha Necromundus article mentions an Escher gang leader by the name of Sadie ‘Original’ Sinn. Does that mean that particular element of Christian theology has remained down through fifteen hundred generations? Possibly.

I kind of go back and forth on this but it’s unlikely anything resembling current religions (that’s not the imperial creed) exist on imperial worlds.

But this should be qualified somewhat.

On the face of it, it’s simple. If a Crusade expedition turned up in a human system, that system had two options – embrace imperial rule and with it the (secular) imperial truth, welcome the crusade, or be invaded to enforce compliance.
A campaign of compliance was not necessarily extermination, but a war of conquest to remove the old power structure, enforce imperial rule, and then followed-up with imperial propagandists known as iterators to win the hearts and minds of the conquered people. If this campaign failed, then extermination was the last resort and we know that this was very uncommon.

Once done, the crusade would move on, leaving a garrison behind to enforce imperial truth.

We all know how that all ended up but in short, the idea of the crusade was to remove religious belief from humanity. (The Emperor’s motives in this are unclear, depending on your point of view, but even with the “why” to one side, that’s what happened).
We do know that some texts (Shakespeare etc) did survive into the crusade era, though I don’t think any old “real-world” religious texts are mentioned or quoted in Heresy novels. It does seem likely (and in-character) for these texts to be purged as part of unification and compliance.

Now, into the 40k era, two things are very different. The imperium is hyper-sensitive to any nonconformism even over and above the crusade era and has structures (Ministorium, inquisition) that did not exist at that time and are much more focused on enforcing compliance with what is now the imperial creed.

We do also know, though, that heretic cults (chaos, genestealers) do exist on imperial worlds despite the forces of the emperor, so it’s possible that an underground cult of a current religion could survive, but it would have major competition as the cult down the road is offering you greatly enhanced physical strength, a claw for an arm, or insane pleasures that you certainly aren’t going to get from a dull old monotheistic Abrahamic religion. Plus, to be honest, given the timescale, if you’re talking about something monotheistic, if there were sects then they could quite easily be swayed that it was the Emperor all along. While it’s hard to kill an idea, having 10,000 years and the weight of a galaxy behind you is probably enough to skew it into what you want when it’s not *that* different.

But.

It’s a big galaxy, and there may be human worlds that have lain undiscovered since the days of old night, worshipping something that resembles a modern religion. Even so, 38,000 is an almost unimaginably long time for something to survive, being many times longer than human written history.

pm713 wrote:
It's just about possible but every planet the Imperium encounters is evaluated and if you don't worship the Emperor then you get destroyed.

To be fair to the people on Terra the Emperor didn't threaten to kill them all. He hunted down every single priest, religious location and believer and destroyed them.

The impression that I got was that the Emperor did reach out and try to sway them to his side, to persuade them to leave it all behind. The only ones he outright killed were those folks that were in... Antarctica, I think? They kept shooting his envoys so he sent them a recreational nuke.

The Imperial Creed would probably try to absorb any Abrahamic religions it encountered, in the same way that Christianity absorbed pagan religions in Europe - convince the Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc, that their god is actually the Emperor - they've been worhsipping Him on Earth all along, but don't worry, the Imperium is here now to correct their doctrinal errors.

The ministorum is actually fairly flexible on the subject, as long as other cults accept that the Emperor is divine and should be worhsipped, and that the Adeptus Ministorum is His instrument in the Galaxy.

There's also the concept that follows.

If you somehow managed to remove all Holy Texts from the world, then the Religions that followed would be radically different.

Do the same with Science, and the same discoveries will be found again in the future.

Religion is ultimately mutable, after all. It shifts, it adapts, either through doctrine or natural 'word of mouth' drift. An example is the Christian religion not being written down for a long old time. Who knows how accurate it's teachings might actually be a result? Please note, I am not knocking people of faith. Just giving an example of how Gospel may not in fact be Gospel etc. You do you, and live your life how you think it should be lead

If you somehow managed to remove all Holy Texts from the world, then the Religions that followed would be radically different.

Well apart from the one that is the true word of God... that would be exactly the same!

I think it is possible that echos of today's religions would survive in 40k, but the timescales are so mind mindbogglingly large that it would probably be quite different to what we are used to.