Rahadoum being a fascist theocratic state would be unacceptable because it's putting the (downright cartoonish) evils of that nation at the blame of a real minority group's unique beliefs.Rahadoum's dogma doesn't really map to any real world minority group though.
He is claiming that the minority is atheism and that it maps to and that this is anti-atheist propaganda like evanglical christians would say that atheists are atheists just because they hate the Christian God.
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He is claiming that the minority is atheism and that it maps to and that this is anti-atheist propaganda like evanglical christians would say that atheists are atheists just because they hate the Christian God.Rahadoum being a fascist theocratic state would be unacceptable because it's putting the (downright cartoonish) evils of that nation at the blame of a real minority group's unique beliefs.Rahadoum's dogma doesn't really map to any real world minority group though.
But a key tenent of the Laws of Mortality is that gods are real, but represent an alien threat to the mortal world.
While I know in some extraterrestrial groups the idea that religion is misinterpreted alien contact exists, that's still not a great fit and definitely not broadly applicable.
The Laws of Mortality are also highly dogmatic and contain their own core commandments. Atheism, not as a rule but generally speaking, tends to be individualistic and rejects organized dogma. Arguably rejecting organized dogma is the whole point, moreso than just the rejection of the divine (in fact it's not even uncommon for atheists to sometimes hold onto a couple of supernatural or quasi-spiritual beliefs).
Fundamentally, the Law of Mortality is an organized religion. It's even codified in the game as one, with edicts and anethema and favored skills. You can lose your Law of Mortality granted powers if you stray from the faith!
The only connection to atheism here is holding a negative view of the concept of god, but even there there are radical differences in both theory and praxis, which makes it remarkably tenuous outside the most surface level of connections.
I guess you could draw stronger parallels to like... edgy mid 2000s 4chan misotheism, but I don't know why you'd tie yourself to that belief system or try to paint it as representative of nonbelief more broadly, because it clearly isn't.
Yes, the foremost issue is the inappropriate/ incorrect labeling the Golarion group as "atheists." Removing that label would be the most impactful change to lower the sky-high "yikes levels."
By itself, without Rahadoum, that mis-labeling is more confusing than yikes. (though a lot of the Pharasma stuff is still quite yikes)
Atheism, not as a rule but generally speaking, tends to be individualistic and rejects organized dogma. Arguably rejecting organized dogma is the whole point, moreso than just the rejection of the divine (in fact it's not even uncommon for atheists to sometimes hold onto a couple of supernatural or quasi-spiritual beliefs).
thank you, 100% yes. People who have been burned by a dogmatic religious system will naturally be more likely to be oppositional to any similar form of rules / govt / etc.
If a writer, even an outsider, was making an honest attempt at what an atheist country would look like in Golarion, they would absolutely play up angles like this one. Make it politically gridlocked w/ constant arguments in govt, ect. Even other angles such as lack of unified cultural dogma making things like weddings and families fractured and scarce would be an "honest" approach.
*Any* minority group or "random quirk" country could be painted as a smiling police state. There's 0 reason why the atheist country makes sense for that. Again, any church could have taken over and been a mono-state and Rahadoum would only cosmetically change a bit.
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But choosing to write Rahadoum as a child-killing police state of pat-down inspections, where everyone appears to fully support the fascism, is directly out of American fundie propaganda *for that labeled minority group*.
They have been fear mongering about this exact atheist rule for decades; stories where one-world-government takeovers make bibles illegal and atheists hunt Christians.
Such as in this movie, where the spooky atheists leveraged covid to take over: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13788842/
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This creates a very bad combo where you cannot ignore the direct use of the "atheist" label any more, because now the only real-world minority group label is directly tied to a propagandistic representation meant to slander the same group that's killed IRL to this day.
Which gets a further "yikes boost" because Rahadoum is the only "happy, knowingly fascist" nation in Golarion, afaik.
While how well or poorly the nation is thriving is irrelevant to the problems above, if anything, portraying this kind of "successful" fascism is a big writing no-no.
Because "at least the trains run on time" was always a lie, and every historical example was a slip-shod mess that had to drum up a war against the newest enemy group-label to distract from the internal problems. Those fascist states did a lot of parades and propaganda to *pretend* they were all unified and orderly, so if a writer has the fascist state genuinely achieve public unity and prosperity, that is itself an echo of real fascist propaganda.
It's way to complicated too get into, but every example of "state atheism" I've look at was not about atheism, their "atheism" was instead about removing the competing power structure of the church, and doing the "fascist blame game."
iirc, even in the soviet union where churches were absolutely smashed and burned with gusto, with ra-ra slogans like ~"no religions to enslave us," they never actually outlawed religion.
That's a pretty key indicator as to what's up. It allows them to keep that group as a blamee on standby forever, shows the rulers were worried about the populist push-back it might provoke, and generally that those in charge never actually wanted/cared about removing it.
Another indicator is if you've got a strong man ruling on top. It's hard to "blame atheism" when it's the authoritarian whims of the dictator.
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Sorry, the point is that you're right about RL "atheist states" but that's why they are *not* a match with Rahadoum at all. Rahadoum seems downright idyllic, if you are a normal citizen. It's an incredibly stable country where citizens are free to travel, and they have a govt structure that represents its people quite well. The harms of the avg Rahadoum citizen are all written to be genuinely external and not the govts fault, such as plague, foreign aggression, etc.
The "atheist states" IRL were the opposite of that, with ice-pick assassinations, mismanaged famines galore, etc.
It's not an exaggeration to claim there has never really been an atheist state IRL. USA tried to split the difference w/ "the wall btwn church and state," but that's not the same thing. And how to consider asian countries with less history top-down easy to label religions, and more individual shinto, etc histories is yet another can of worms.
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Atheism is really not a persecuted minority group, and I say that as an atheist. Please do not act like Rahadoum is somehow massively yikes on par with actual bigotry, thank you.
Atheism is really not a persecuted minority group, and I say that as an atheist. Please do not act like Rahadoum is somehow massively yikes on par with actual bigotry, thank you.
Not in the modern West by authorities, no. But there is bigotry toward atheists. I know of people who've lost jobs and spouses after revealing their atheism, or who've been harassed at criminal levels. Worse yet, some countries execute atheists. It is easier to hide from that kind of persecution since most atheists can feign retaining their belief, but many do have to hide. Which is why one call out is for atheists to make themselves known so that it becomes safer for other atheists.
ETA: Most bigotry against atheists comes from people who are also bigoted against many other groups, most of whom get treated worse. And those bigots organize against those other groups, even rally around that evil banner as an identity marker. Not so much against atheists, other than in a few theocratic countries.
End ETA.
That said, Rahadoum's pseudo-atheism does not mirror any Earth atheism. Atheism has diverse and conflicting options just like theism does. Hatred of active deities who've devastated one's region makes little comment on absence of belief in deities even existing. If anything, Rahadoum's story paints theism as the worse of the two camps. Yesterday I'd written a lengthy response to Trip that apparently was deleted w/o notification, so I'm reluctant to expound. But in short there are no societies on Earth, nor sub-cultures as the case is here, that one can point to and say "Those Earthlings have the same worldview (et al) as these evil guys on Golarion." Meanwhile many other countries & cultures do have corollaries on Golarion, and I doubt the French are offended by Galt, as grim as that country gets.
Atheism is really not a persecuted minority group, and I say that as an atheist. Please do not act like Rahadoum is somehow massively yikes on par with actual bigotry, thank you.Not in the modern West by authorities, no. But there is bigotry toward atheists. I know of people who've lost jobs and spouses after revealing their atheism, or who've been harassed at criminal levels. Worse yet, some countries execute atheists. It is easier to hide from that kind of persecution since most atheists can feign retaining their belief, but many do have to hide. Which is why one call out is for atheists to make themselves known so that it becomes safer for other atheists.
ETA: Most bigotry against atheists comes from people who are also bigoted against many other groups, most of whom get treated worse. And those bigots organize against those other groups, even rally around that evil banner as an identity marker. Not so much against atheists, other than in a few theocratic countries.
End ETA.That said, Rahadoum's pseudo-atheism does not mirror any Earth atheism. Atheism has diverse and conflicting options just like theism does. Hatred of active deities who've devastated one's region makes little comment on absence of belief in deities even existing. If anything, Rahadoum's story paints theism as the worse of the two camps. Yesterday I'd written a lengthy response to Trip that apparently was deleted w/o notification, so I'm reluctant to expound. But in short there are no societies on Earth, nor sub-cultures as the case is here, that one can point to and say "Those Earthlings have the same worldview (et al) as these evil guys on Golarion." Meanwhile many other countries & cultures do have corollaries on Golarion, and I doubt the French are offended by Galt, as grim as that country gets.
Fair point, they do suffer persecution in the world, but also other groups are getting a lot worse treatment in those areas, and may need some more help immediately than Atheism.
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To be honest I've been trying to figure this out myself, but google is useless and all I've found mentioning it are dodgy fandom wikis and forum posts that seem equally unsure of themselves. So I'm curious of the source for that info as well because it would be an interesting read.So... when looking at earlier posts, someone mentioned the idea that Pharasma feeds Groetus the souls of atheists in order to stave off the apocalypse?
Where did they get that idea from???
Oh! I can answer this one!
I'm not sure when's the first time this concept ever entered print, but at the very least it appears as a reference in the Groetus article in Inner Sea Faiths (2016). It probably appeared in an article or setting book before that, but I haven't traced it that far back.
From the section on "Relations with Other Religions" it notes that the 'crystallized souls of true atheists' repel Groetus (it is not clarified what makes a 'true' atheist, but this seems to me an obvious reference to those who reject all afterlives entirely and haunt the Graveyard of Souls, as in other references) - "both incidentally by their proximity, and sometimes directly when the Lady of Graves 'feeds' him the essence of one (although whether this is a literal feeding or a transfer of essence is unknown) to push him away." (p.50-51)
And then as I've noted earlier in this thread, the newer source in Planar Adventures (2018) seems to treat this as more of a whispered rumour than an objective fact, but nevertheless does bring it up in the Boneyard section on Groetus.
Unrelated to that, because I just found this out myself and thought it was interesting, in Inner Sea Faiths, one of the "dooms of Groetus" (i.e. one of the three main ideological sects of his followers) believes that Groetus' role aside from destroying the cosmos is to collect all the greatest essences of the cosmos ("heroes, villains, dragons, earth, fire, and other fundamental concepts") and shelter them...
Going to be honest, SEO, the idea that Groetus eats/is repelled by atheist souls sounds like something a writer came up that was never supposed to be canon.
Like the Cult of the Dawnflower. Which got removed because Sarenrae's own creator said that "Sarenrae, a goddess of healing and redemption, would never allow followers that militant to keep her favor".