Elcenia Spoilers

[Nemo]

Yes, but that is also true of deconverted humans in real life, and those exist.

It's obviously not going to help, but if vampires would otherwise deconvert then that by itself shouldn't stop all of them.

[Kappa]

Humans in real life don't have the same cultural pressures from inside and outside as vampires in Elcenia, I don't think.

Deconverted vampires probably exist, because people are people, but they have a really strong incentive not to mention it. Other vampires would probably be horrified by them and non-vampires would be horrified by the implications.

[DanielH]

I expect there would still be some publicly deconverted vampires¹, but I guess none of them have decided they disliked the standard vampire faith enough to actually reveal all its secrets. Or would they all be under geisha not to do so?

Are you saying that dragonishes don’t have any source of information on religion other than having really strong evidence of how other species came to exist? Jensal implied in the Matilda sandbox that they also had fairly uniform beliefs on the nonexistence of an afterlife, among other things. Did they just notice that most religions have incompatible-with-fact creation myths, and rarely if ever convert to the others?

I wonder if the number of dragons who wanted to convert to the vampire religion would be nonzero if the information that it had no creation myths (at least that the general vampire populace is aware of) or other information which is incompatible with draconically known fact leaked.

Warding a past event against scrying is not possible with modern public understanding of wizardry. Has nobody ever tried scying the creation of the first human to see whether Sennah did it in the prescribed manner? This could have been done by somebody who did not believe Sennah did so, if Sennah prohibits it. Is there some reason this sort of targeting should not be possible?

¹ People generally aren’t murderers and the current system actually works rather well for vampires, who would have to be idiotic to still drink too much or without permission; see: the real world and most people not actually thinking atheists are amoral monsters likely to steal from them at the drop of a hat even if they don’t understand why not

[Bluelantern]

¹ People generally aren’t murderers and the current system actually works rather well for vampires, who would have to be idiotic to still drink too much or without permission; see: the real world and most people not actually thinking atheists are amoral monsters likely to steal from them at the drop of a hat even if they don’t understand why not

Sweet Summer Child

[Kappa]

I can imagine that targeting "the creation of the first human" might not be precise in the right ways for it to work wizardishly.

[Alicorn]

Yeah, that's not a thing.

[DanielH]

¹ People generally aren’t murderers and the current system actually works rather well for vampires, who would have to be idiotic to still drink too much or without permission; see: the real world and most people not actually thinking atheists are amoral monsters likely to steal from them at the drop of a hat even if they don’t understand why not

Sweet Summer Child

What I mean is that if I went to the middle of a crowded area and shouted I was an atheist, I can imagine a lot of potential negative reactions, but actual fear of me being amoral seems unlikely. Fear of the crazy person who is violating social norms, sure. Hatred of the outgroup, sure. Hustling children away from me, potentially. Fear that I had no moral compass and would see nothing wrong with shooting them except for my future arrest, or that I might try to pickpocket them, not so much. Obviously it depends where I do this: New York City, Atlanta, Vatican City, and Tehran would all likely get very different reactions; similarly, it would probably be different in a discussion-based college course on comparative religion, a random street corner, or the middle of a church on Easter Sunday. On the whole, though, I expect fear of my lack of morality would be relatively low on the list of potential reactions in most cases.

What people say when talking is a different issue. People say they believe atheists to have no morality, but they rarely alieve it. Kappa seems to be suggesting that people would feel threatened and both believe and alieve themselves and their blood to be in danger from a vampire who was known to not follow the secret vampire religion, whatever that is, even if that vampire now publicly shares the same religion as most of the other people they know; I’m saying they’re likely to neither believe nor alieve this.

I notice that a lot of my questions in the past few posts (about Barashins who die in Elcenia, dragonishes switching to religions without creation myths, and deconverted vampires not spreading the secret) haven’t been answered; are they being explicitly ignored, or did discussion just center on the others? Also, you said that raising vampire children outside of the religion would be a good way to get those children taken away; what if a vampire known to not subscribe to marry one who did, and the latter were to make sure the children went to temple, etc.?

[Alicorn]

Current Elcenia publications don't address Barashins who die in Elcenia except to say that Bryn is nervous about it and wants Leekath to put her soul in a soulchain and manually convey her back to Barashi in the event of her death. Dragonishes may find more philosophical-type religions appealing but they don't tend to get major footholds in the dragon population at large for bootstrapping and lifespan reasons. It is significantly but not astronomically more difficult to find talkative deconverted vampires versus, say, talkative deconverted Scientologists or Mormons. A mixed-opinion vampire relationship where the kids regularly turned up at temple to do temple things would be fine.

[Kappa]

I don't think I necessarily mean that they'd feel threatened, but I think "vampires do not nonconsensually drink blood because of their secret religion which they universally belong to" comes off as a strong enough background assumption in the culture that hearing it contradicted would tend to be an alarming surprise. It does not seem like public knowledge of deconverted vampires is a thing.

[Alphabeta]

I don't think I necessarily mean that they'd feel threatened, but I think "vampires do not nonconsensually drink blood because of their secret religion which they universally belong to" comes off as a strong enough background assumption in the culture that hearing it contradicted would tend to be an alarming surprise. It does not seem like public knowledge of deconverted vampires is a thing.

I think it could be a shock, sure, but "we can enforce assault and/or theft charges about nonconsensual blood drinking now" could replace that assumption fairly quickly for deconverted vampires.

¹ People generally aren’t murderers and the current system actually works rather well for vampires, who would have to be idiotic to still drink too much or without permission; see: the real world and most people not actually thinking atheists are amoral monsters likely to steal from them at the drop of a hat even if they don’t understand why not

Sweet Summer Child

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