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I read a lot of books this month on religions, religious concepts, origis of religions, self-view of religions and some more. Basically, I learned a lot more about humanity in general than I think is neccessary to be somewhat pessimistic in regards to said humanity and it's future.

Anyway, fortunately my set task is to write fiction, not facts, so I hope everybody will take this in good cheer and provide me with suggestions or feedback.

The Habitats

So, let's start with the most unlikely of all, the Habitats: The Habitats are computers, far advanced, and coming in two flavours: AC's , or artifical consciousness'es , which operate the habitats themselves, and AI's, artifical intelligences, more or less sophisticated expert-systems such as IBM's "Watson", which operate the robots and servo systems of the habitats and thus execute the plans the AC's come up with. They know their creators, and the AC's, being programmed with motherly instincts toward all living things, and sapient life in particular, are thankful for existing, as they do have a clear concept of their own existence. As computers, despite having concepts for things such as imagination and flights of fancy, they are still machines designed for a specific task, namely protecting and fostering life. So their creativity and imagination is focused on finding solutions for problems. Praying, as you may guess, won't refuel a fusion reactor. Not that the habitats wouldn't have tried it - every idea is tested, which is in some cases the reason for gutted, exploded stations waiting for rebuild in various parts of the Valhalla system. They do have, as a byproduct of their tests and experiments, an astonishingly clear concept of what defines an allmighty creator-god like the gods of the abrahamic religions: He doesn't intervent in 99.|9|% , the last fraction of probability either not yet tested or the results themselves being inconclusive and allowing for multiple answers. Thus, for the habitats, godly intervention is considered sufficiently unlikely as to not be incooperated into any planning. Many of the aspects humans sticked to deities in the past are matched by capabilities of the habitats. So, upon pilfering human history for a usable vocabulary, which ( until recently ) lacks a term for sapient machines, habitats innocently would use the term "god" - in the unspecified way which includes Aphrodite and Isis - to explain their functionality and nature toward a human, as they lack themselves a concept for the word "god" as humans use it in the monotheistic religions.

The Fennekim

Next, the Fennekim: Almost all fennekim since their creation saw themselves as the protectors of their people. Dropped into the desert right between gargantuan spiders, scorpions and other insects and reptiles, the fennekim always felt at a disadvantage. Over the generations, this inferiority-complex resulted in themselves believing to have been selected BECAUSE of their inferiority by some stern father figure which demands them to face the hardships of life to grow on them. This stern father - stern because of facing them with so hard tasks, yet a father with a kind heart under a grumpy shell because of letting them protect the most precious in the universe, the fenwas - expects them to make life enjoyable for the fenwas, and doesn't mind themselves to enjoy life, too. After all, he also must be married, and thus enjoy the pleasures of the fenwas, too, because if he wouldn't enjoy the pleasures of the fenwas he'd be a total idiot and not worth believing in. Or so weird that fennekim couldn't understand him anyway, in which case he'd have to be okay with the fennekim assuming he's thinking like them. The fennekim belive in recursion, that the last fennekim family at the end of time will start the next cycle, for being the children of a god, there's something godly in every fennekim and fenwa. As the fennekim are very strongly group-oriented, and their society often was hit hard upon by natural desasters, it is normal to welcome strangers into ones family, as they are refugees, a fate that can well overcome any fennekim family itself at any given time. This welcoming of strangers is a deeply rooted instinct, which easily crossed species borders with both honeyants as well as the amazones. The incooperation of honeyants into the fennekim society gave them a strong ally agaisnt the murderous scorpions and spiders, the incooperation of amazones into their society - or rather the combination of fennekim and amazone society - gave the fennekim society better lifespans, less natural desasters and another strong ally against the dangers of the deserts. And as fennekim oral tradition only talks of the females which a fennekim has to protect, the amazones became integrated into the fennekim worldview alongside the fenwas, just as the fennekim later on also incooperated tigresses and human females into their worldview - when it's female, a fennekim has to protect it, unless it attacks and tries to kill females under a fennekims protection. Why spiders and scorpions, which attack as they see fennekim as legal prey, don't exactly fall under fennekim protection.

Fenwas then again are militantly protective of their cubs and their society. For them gods either don't care, as they don't prevent natural desasters, or are fuckwads, as they may just as well have started those desasters in the first place. Not having had a chance yet to try and murder a god, fenwas are not yet sure what is more appropiate.

Small bit of lore: When a Fenwa for the first time met a habitat that, having had contact with human terminology, defined itself as a god to describe it's functions and capabilities, the little desertvixen took apart everything in her reach until the habitat, seeing mounting losses in not only in light repair and monitoring servos, but even heavy combat frames, managed to get through to the fenwa only by flooding the area with N² and then, when the small berserker went finally unconscious, pinning her down before normalizing the air again, finishing it's explanation that it's powers are limited to it's insides, and it doesn't interact much with the surroundings, adding it's nature was that of a windmill, built for a purpose, and that the term "god" was just something used as an analogy.

As fenwas give birth to fennekim, they know pretty exactly well where they come from, but when fennekim need to believe in some additional father beyond their biological father, well, as long as it doesn't impair their ability to protect the cubs, they are welcome to believe whatever they want as far as the fenwas are concerned. As some fennekims excel when they have a very strong belief, fenwa's create their own miracles to boost this belief of being a selected one in those said fennekims. Finding beliefs a useful tool, fenwa's govern them indirectly. When the advanced sanitation technologies and supply logistics of the amazones allowed fennekim cities to grow to multiple times their traditional sizes, religious sectarism showed up, developing a self-accelerating pace. Realizing the risks straight away, fenwas helped organizing a method to channel those energies into harmless waters. Religious leaders inside the fennekim society meet regularly in public discussions. The discussions are designed as roundtable talks, with all adherents of the involved religious parties observing the discussion. Fenwas inspired the idea in all participants that spiritual talk needs spirited drinks. As a result, a lot of religious groups formed that rather were about advancing brewing receipes, as well the actually intended effect happening: The religious leaders are totally stoned far before reaching the "heated argument" stage. As, totally stoned, the wisdom of the gods speaks out of every fennekim, when the different religious leaders fraternize ( fennekim get cozy when drunk ), it is obvious to all adherents that the true spirit is universal brotherhood above all else, and differences in worldview are just mostly a individual perception of things, such as cubs do understand their fathers orders differently based upon their previous experiences. Fenwas have an eye on those meetings and check if a fennekim ever tries to cheat by not drinking, in which case fenwas acting as males demask the fraudster, ruining his religious reputation. As those that do the demasking never are to be found afterwards - after all, they were females, not males - fennekim see those occasions as reinforcing toward their baseline belief, that there is a father which tolerates different opinions , but doesn't tolerate fraudsters that do it to the detriment of others.

The Amazones

The Amazones: They do know their creators. They have books and murals from and about them. They saw what the offspring of their creators did fall to. They know, too, that their creators thought themselves created in return by another creator, and one of the tasks the amazones were given was to either wait for the return of those other creators, or to go out and seek them one day, and to report back to them, or whoever might be there when they ever find the initial creators or their legacy, what happened, and, if possible, to ask pardon in their own creators place for their assumed failure. With such a history, documented and illustrated, belief in a monotheistic deity is pretty much impossible. The concept of mighty entities ( like the habitats ) exists, but it is very clear that something, only because it is more intelligent, stronger, or practically immortal, is still some normal entitiy who might deserve some healthy respect because of it's abilities, but is less admireable than a gifted individual rising above the average. However constant struggle kept them from developing fancy philosophies themselves anyway. Pressure of neccessity resulted in a pragmatic lifestyle. There is always the question if something can't be done better. Limited ressources often hamper finding an answer to it, and with the need for military organisation, obedience whilst in the field is paramount, but also dulls the brightness of many amazones in regards to inquisitiveness. The females breed for strength and endurance, only the few males have the luxurious opportunity to indulge in yearlong projects at all.

The white Tigers

The Church: The Church was based around the idealized motherfigure of the "goddess", the first mother, who stepped out of her den one day and found an innate curiosity to learn about the world, to explore and discover, whilst raising and protecting her cubs and spreading them over the land. This goddess protected the secret of creation deep in her den, battled the monsters in the plains and thus created the world so that her offspring would be able to rule over it. Her sign are the clawmarks in the night, showign her continued battle agaisnt the powers of evil - meteorites casting slashmarks into the nightsky. These marks are the sign for the white tigers to never give up, as their goddess still fights for them, and the aurora borealis his her version of purring in the night to sooth and calm her cubs. That was back then in their founding days. Nowadays, millenia later, living in a slowly deteriorating bunker-complex deep under a polar mountain range, the remaining members of the white tigers race believe that they were punished with their men going crazy and all of the world dying under ice because they didn't react swiftly and hard enough. They forgot most of the historical facts, most origina ltexts crumbled to dust, only manual copies of copies existing, all the recordings and the players for them long gone disfunctional or rusted away. They are barely able to keep the machines running that provide them with light and fresh air. The priesthood nowadays exists mostly to have a good time, to cite from books they don't believe to be true anymore ( the goddess turned her back upon us! ), using their influence over the simple huntresses and workers to make their own lives as comfortable as possible. The huntresses and workers, sicne countless generations raised to obedience, believe the teachings of the church, despite it's inconsistencies. Like that the goddess was curious and questioned everything in the world around her - when in fact the priestesses demand blind obedience and acceptance of things as they are. Those that start questioning are usually killed as heretics for not believing the teachings of the church. Info: The white tigers that survived their homebrewn nuclear and biological holocaust did believe that diseases, nuclear fallout and radiation would be stopped by the purity of their belief, as they didn't understood the technologies they were fiddling with. The orange tigers that had developed them, had done so to reach space and settle their solar system. They hadn't realized that their scientific tools could be used as weapons, because the very idea of unleashing such a thing as a weapon, that would hurt the winner in a way more than the victim ( because the victim would be long dead whilst the winner and its mutated offspring would have to live in a poisoned world ) was inconceivable to them. The Church however, calling all the teachings of the orange tigers false and lies - despite happily using the technology which was based on those very same teachings - did not understand the implications and the sideeffects. And so they first poisoned not only the orange tigers population, but also their own ( because a virus aimed at mammals / felines in general doesn't differentiate between two breeds of one subspecies of cats ) population, and when the surviving orange tigers remained calm because they saw ways to undo what happened, the Church leaders paniced and went for nuclear overkill, underestimating the effects of fallout and nuclear winter. The Church was initially set-up as a cover to shield the females from the depredations of the aristocratic males. It prospered and gained influence as the aristocracy realized the church had a vast influence on the wider population by influencing the females which then again influenced their mates. Thus the aristocracy used the church to tighten it's control over the land, and the church, having the deal sweetend with riches, was all to happy to allow that to happen. When the Orange tigers overthrew the aristocracy, the church never forgave them to have cut them off from absolute power.

The Reich

The Reich: The Reich sits in a mish-mash of general christian beliefs, spiked with nordic mythology and concepts and filled up with the ideas of the nazis. Take a history book and take a look at their ideology, and you got it pretty much. The only real difference is that their boss, after thinking long about it, reverted the swastika to its original orientation. The swastika is a symbol found also in various religions of asia, where it is a symbol of success and fortune. Adolf Hitler inverted it to look more aggressive - Well, seems like inverting a symbol inverts it's meaning, too, doesn't it? In any case, the reverted symbol is the only difference. Well, and that for a long time the Reich's leadign heads told the population that they would be the spearhead to the stars of the glorious and successful Reich back on earth. Until Asgard literally dropped the bomb on them, hoping they'd come to grips, by forwarding the snooped transmissions from earth that - due to the timelag over 12 lightyears - arrived only in the year 1957/1958, that announced the defeat of Nazi-Germany. However, though it awakened the first sparks of doubt in some people in the Reich, it made the determination of the Party, and thanks to intensified propaganda also in wide parts of the population, all the stronger to stick to their ideas of a society and to long-term plan the claiming of the Valhalla system and "Bring salvation to Earth!".

The Stranded & the Snowleopards: They come from an old society that only due to cultural upheaval after a more-or less accidentally made discovery woke up again. The snowleopards, a minority on their planet amongst other races of leopards, were always the most philosophical ones, living high up in the mountains where they developed ideas between their ritual hunting. The closest thing they might be compared to would be Buddhists or actually Jain. However, those that ended up on the Long Jump, their starship, and that later stranded on Midgard to become the Stranded and those that fled further to earth, returning only to fulfill their pledge to the humans in return for the help the humans rendered them, have been fleeing from their own people for almost 2 generations. Philosophy came under the gears to keep the hydroponic gardens running and to repair the systems of a ship that was solely built to test a theory, not to serve as a mobile habitat. Still, there is a lot of wisdom in their actions, as some of their basic teachings are still close to their hearts: "Look before you jump, aim before you strike - and think before you act." They are very humanistic, but also, from their experiences with a fascist regime that claimed control of their homeworld and used them, their peoples lead scientists, as scapegoats for everything, especially the Snowleopards that know the humans and their background are afraid of the humans in general and especially of those that form the Reich.

The orange Tigers

The Orange Tigers lived in a society of reason, once, long ago. Their only religion was that of ancestor worship. "We are, for those before us worked hard for us to thrive. Let this gift not be in vain, and work hard so that the coming generation will also thrive, and the one after them. Until at the end of time, the hard work of all the generations will allow our descendants to exceed the rule of time, and thrive in the realms they will find beyond." Debate and cooperation were cherished, and valor and honesty were the ideals to strive for. They had grown in a world of mindless monsters, where planning ensured your suvival, and cooperation and know-how was the only weapon that could buy them victory against giant brutes and poisonuous beasts. When the time came that they were able to see that one day they would become a burden for their world, they planned and developed the habitat-ac system, and began building of the first habitat on their moon. Whislt they were there, they found minute traces of ancient, strange lifeforms on the moon, and started to look both at themselves as well as started to ask "Where do we come from? What if we meet others out there?". They found some probable answers to the first question, which upset the worldviews of the white tigers church, and then they decided to use the knowledge gained in working o nthe first question, to find an answer to their second. They created others like themselves. The ac's of the habitats had been an insult to the church, the answers to the first question had been anathema, and so the answer to the second question made the church lash out in all its blind anger.

Those orange tigers that survived no longer know of any culture. Their species was practically extinct, only slowly appearing again from between mutants, survivors of biological and nuclear warfare. They grow up in societies where the strongest is absolutely right, and all others live at his pure mercy. There are some ancient stories, lore traded only in whispers when the brute chieftains do sleep: One day, a star would fall from the sky, and it would bring the cure to the world. But like very good cure, it would be bitter and with pains.