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The Emperor hates religion point blank period. If he rises does he get rid of the Imperial Cult immediately?

That cults deathbed God suddenly just got up and started doing things. That cult is going into a massive overdrive. A lot of people see the denial of divinity as a sort of first step in becoming a divine being.
The Emperor couldn't even get rid of religion when the doctrine of the Imperium was atheism, he certainly couldn't do it after 10k years of entrenched religious dogma.

 CKO wrote:
The Emperor hates religion point blank period. If he rises does he get rid of the Imperial Cult immediately?

im not sure he could, at least not immediately.

worship of the god emperor is so deeply ingrained into the Imperium, its quite likely an attempt, even by the literal God Emperor reborn Himself, could not remove it without causing a civil war on the scale of the Heresy. Half the priest wouldnt belive he was the real god emperor and denounce him as a false idol, half would believe him and hate him for it, and plenty of others wouldn't care were it not a threat to thier own personal power......

Yeah, personally I think the most likely thing to happen would be a massive civil war as the Imperial Cult declares him "the false emperor" or something.

Of course, it would also depend on what state he is in if he does "come back" from his corpse-like status. Would he still be super-weak? Would he be as powerful as before? MORE powerful even?

Bit of a factor really. At least, in my opinion.

It's a bit difficult because 10,000 years of constant worship towards him have made his warp presence far in excess of what he had prior to his entombment into the Golden Throne, which is saying something when he was already such a powerhouse back then. It's not clear if the Emperor that people worship has been forcibly amalgated into what the people believe to him to be, which is an actual god, and if the Emperor being freed from the throne would actually ascend to a full warp god with an earthly presence or if he full on leaves the Earthly plane. Since the opening of the rift, the Emperor has been able to more explicitly manifest miracles for his followers and channel his power. So I'm not even sure the Emperor would even care about the Imperial Cult upon coming back because he would use it as a means to an end, just like how he set up the whole Mechanicum and his arrival as their "Omnissiah" so he co-opt them as his personal manufacturing arm of his empire. Similarly, he was pretty fine with Lorgar worshipping him until Lorgar was seriously lagging behind in the Great Crusade for him to have to personally reprimand him. As others have mentioned, it's so ingrained into the Imperium at this point that to try and uproot it would fundamentally cleave the Imperium beyond repair. The Emperor would have to somehow go full Great Crusade 2, Electric Bugaloo and clear out all of the galaxy wide threats of Tyranids, Necrons, Chaos, and Orks before he could even consider working inwardly and moving humanity away from the 10,000 years of inertia from worshipping him.

 CKO wrote:
The Emperor hates religion point blank period. If he rises does he get rid of the Imperial Cult immediately?

Only the true messiah denies his divinity!


Its also not clear if the 'Big E hates religion' is actually true. He has enough future vision (and outright callousness) to play the long con for his own benefit.
Getting stuck in his own prophecy trap would be a bit too much on the nose for the inspiration behind the God-Emperor of Mankind, but that _was_ their starting point back in the day.

The Emperor might simply have changed his mind, after having experienced the increased power from being worshipped.

Alternatively, perhaps a change in mind might be from another source. In Godblight it is suggested by a Farseer that maybe the worship of all those humans has attached to and changed the original soul. This suggests that if enough people worship, their idea of what the Emperor should be like or want, merges with and maybe changes the original Emperor to be more in line with their expectations.

The fluff behind the daily psyker sacrifice also heavily implies that the souls of those psykers merge with the Emperor's greater consciousness. Plus the soulbinding that all Imperial Psykers undergo might do the same thing.

This would mean the Emperor, by simple count of souls, would no longer be majority the original souls. At most, he was a few thousand human psykers merged together originally. But in the 10k years since being interred he has had hundreds of psykers sacrificed to him daily. Most of whom will have been raised believing the Emperor to be a god. That would be billions upon billions of additional souls merged into him.

The cult started while he was alive and running the great crusade. No way he could get rid of it.

Plus he wouldn’t, he has been sitting on the golden throne for 10k years getting all bitter and building his god powers in the warp from the worship he receives. He was a genocidal maniac before nearly dying, after 10k years on the toilet he’s gonna make khorne look like a nice guy.

If the emperor ever rises the cult goes nuclear and there is a big clear out of soldiers, bureaucrats and marines that show anything less than the utter zeal demonstrated by the SOB and black Templar’s.

mrFickle wrote:
Plus he wouldn’t, he has been sitting on the golden throne for 10k years getting all bitter and building his god powers in the warp from the worship he receives. He was a genocidal maniac before nearly dying, after 10k years on the toilet he’s gonna make khorne look like a nice guy.

Yeah, I can't help but think that his outlook on religion may have changed drastically given that he seems like the kind of guy to get off on slavish devotion towards himself.

The problem is that what if he rises as a god? Then it sort of validates all concepts of godhood and religion. (Especially if its the devotion of the followers that determine the god's strength and he rises as an extremely powerful god because the religion of the Emperor).

That will make it rather hard for him to dislike or not believe in religion any more because he himself is living proof of a god.

So, I feel that it depends on how he "rises". But if he rises up again as a god, then no, I don't think he would destroy the imperial cult. It would be very very hypocritical of him to do so, because the imperial cult likely had a lot to do with his rise to god hood.

And he would be reducing his own power significantly by doing this. And I don't believe the emperor is that stupid.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I feel that the Emperor's original goal was to allevate all humans to a higher level of evolution through the scientific route. He himself was a psyker the likes of which had never been known, and his genes are so powerful they birthed the primarch and the space marines.

However, I note that none of the primarchs or space marines can reproduce. So, he literally created them as weapons and tools and nothing more. To him, he likely wanted to consolidate the entire galaxy under the imperium, and then when there was none left to oppose him, he would be free to do experiment and use science and psychic to bring the human race to its next level of evolution.

Its possible he dreamed of a future where the entire human race was all made up of individuals as powerful as he was. And that would gaurantee the supremacy of the imperium and humans in the galaxy.

And of course, if this happened, there would be no place or need for space marines anymore.

The Emperor never planned to lead humanity forever, rather his intention was to be the guiding hand that allowed humanity to evolve into a fully psychic species. The Imperial Webway was to be his greatest gift so that humanity would not be forced to rely on the mutant navigators for interstellar travel.
The Astartes were indeed a weapon but one that would serve as the guardians and in some capacity, administrators or public servants. The Primarchs would be their generals but eventually the plan would be that the Astartes would slowly die out. Erda's scattering of the Primarchs changed all of this and meant that the Primarchs were deviant from the Emperor's plan.
The Emperor was too arrogant to believe that His plan could fail and even without the intervention of the Chaos Gods, things were bound to go wrong. The Emperor may have had good intentions but its as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

So in the 40k universe massive numbers of people can generate psychic energy and affect the real world.

Get a few million cultists chanting and you can whip up a blood demon or whatever.

So what effect would trillions of people praying to the God Emperor have?

My theory is the original Emperor was a powerful psychic and superhuman. But the myth around him created a psychic God Emperor based on him but also based on what people thought he was.

Basically Elvis the dude, vs Elvis the King of Rock and Roll.

So the flesh and blood Emperor is basically a prisoner now of the psychic God Emperor construct and couldn't get free of it if he wanted...

Oh.

This could be good. I should write that story.

Those that die in the astronomican, didnt and dont get subsumed in the emps soul. Theyre sent out to fight the darkness.

Which could be why he wanted to stuff psykers in the webway, until he had enough to sacrifice in one giant astronomican blast, or eradicate all the plebs in the mortal realm. Or both. He might not have the psyker battery stash to even make it so.

Hes been described as void whalish by the eldar. Magnus ran into them, The emp wouldve as well. They could be remnants of races that reached the same stage as humies, but not quite manifested into gods

Now he could come back as a schizophrenic god as the heretical tome khaos child suggests.

Which if the god is half molded and physically appears, well, humans are in trouble. Though theyre in trouble just if he comes back.

The problem with the belief thing. Is of course da Ork. With the length of time theyve been around, they should probably have 2 gods striding the warp. Or have 2 gods they siphon power from more readily.

So without getting lost in the weeds of actual philosophy (a real hobby/academic study of mine,) I think that one of the things that would have to clarified here is the difference between: “A god” and “a godlike being”. On the surface, the two would appear pretty much identical, but the difference is actually pretty key to this discussion.

Essentially we get down to this:

If a being is sufficiently powerful in its abilities (perhaps a big psyker in the 40k universe, but this could also extend to such things as really-big-space-monsters and such as well) then we tend to classify such power as “godlike” without slapping them with the other seemingly established aspects of “godhood” as we understand them. In real life we simply can't understand godhood because we can't really point to a real, physical, universally acknowledged dude and say: “Like Steve! Steve is a God. Hey Steve, what are the properties that make you a god?” Obviously, religious belief allows us each to have opinions on what makes/doesn't make a god, but those beliefs are anything BUT universal, and so we can't really reach a consensus here.

In 40k things are different. We KNOW (through the lore/fluff) that there are at least a few actual gods mucking about in the universe. This gives us a metric to determine “god or not god” on a given entity. Really big psychic space turtle? Well, it doesn't seem to operate like the Chaos gods so it's probably not a god (or at least a god as we are led to believe exists). We can then take this knowledge to see if it applies to the big E if/when he wakes up from his nap.

Assuming that he then shares most of the properties of a chaos god, then even he would have to admit that he is now a god... right?

Well, there are still “gods” and “gods” though, and that's where things get tricky. Both share the same word, but their definitions would essentially differ. The first one might refer SPECIFICALLY to the kind of ethereal, philosophical and metaphorical abstraction for aspects or relations within the world (“I'm the god of cookies! I represent cookies in an abstract fashion and can be used for moral justification and storytelling within a cultural context! I don't have a physical form though, or anything like interaction without my abstraction... which kind of sucks”). The second definition would be simpler, something along the lines of: “shares some or all the aspects we commonly associate with a god as defined by the examples we have to compare it to”.

This sort of thing is fairly common in communication actually and is called a “Metonym”. Metonyms are a pain in the butt because they make topics like this far more complicated than they need to be. (See also the: “True Scotsman Fallacy” for more of these crazy shenanigans!)

Assuming that the newly awoken big E has those traits/aspects of a chaos god then he might well admit towards being a “god” in that context. However, both the imperial cult and the first definition might stringently argue for that first definition (the more metaphorical one,) instead. That one is, I believe, what the big E was always against, feeling that such cultural storytelling did more harm than good (hence his essentially anti-religion stance).

So, while the Big E would certainly be “godlike” and based upon a certain definition of the word he might admit to being “a god” he would probably still object quite stringently towards the label as he was always against the kind of cultural force that the word implies.

Or at least that's my take. Sorry for going on a bit of a rant, but I actually find these kinds of things really fascinating. Heck, I got into my masters program by writing a paper on the limits of omnipotence!

Thanks for reading though :-) topics like this one are one of the reasons why I still come to dakka!

I am enjoying these answers but to all of the people that say he would accept the fact that he is a God, I disagree. Research Thunder-Warriors who were basically Space Marines that he used until they had completed their tasked and something bad happen to them. I think the Emperor is that type of guy if it needs fixing he will fix it regardless of the sacrifice. I don't see someone like him changing his divine plan because of x. He cares about his divine plan and that's it.

 CKO wrote:
I am enjoying these answers but to all of the people that say he would accept the fact that he is a God, I disagree. Research Thunder-Warriors who were basically Space Marines that he used until they had completed their tasked and something bad happen to them. I think the Emperor is that type of guy if it needs fixing he will fix it regardless of the sacrifice. I don't see someone like him changing his divine plan because of x. He cares about his divine plan and that's it.

i aggree, but thiers "having a endgame without religion", and thiers "tearing apart the thing your trying to save to cut out something that is literally the foundation of that thing". Like i said, even if he still wanted to remove religion, its not likely he could succeed without basically destroying the Imperium in the process. He'd have to launch a new great crusade, against the existing Imperium. the effort involved would cause HH level damage to Humanity, and likely weaken it enough that the other races would be at near-peer levels of power, to say nothing about chaos.

in short, going for a purely dogmatic "no religion, stop that worshiping nonsense right now" approach would be highly counterproductive for his end goals. Much better to do as he did with the cult mechanicus and accept the religious beliefs (at least temporarily) and use it as a tool, until he'd "won" and could properly remove it in the safety of peacetime.

the ancient wrote:
they should probably have 2 gods striding the warp.

Umm, they do.

Gork and Mork exist within the warp. They just spend 99.9% of their time bashing each other because everybody else is too puny to give a good fight.