Okay, I know this one. Religion is integral to the plot because the basic hook of the series, if you will, is that they landed on a planet where the human psyche shapes reality. So religion, being something that has a large impact on the human psyche, suddenly became a central question of much importance.
Ten thousand years later, there are basically two types of religion. There's the "pagans," which makes up most of the population, who worship one of a variety of hundreds of different little gods, the advantage to that being that the gods are effectively real and give real and immediate answers to prayer and worship. Then there's the "Church of the One God," and they're committed to the worship of a single god who never answers prayers, and in fact there's a sort of unspoken agreement that this single God doesn't actually exist at all, but it's still important to worship him for reasons which are really better explained in the plot.
The main character is actually a priest of the One God, and his religion is hugely important in defining his character, his sense of right and wrong -- even though he's aware that on some level his 'God' doesn't really exist. The Church of the One God is also hugely important to the second main character for extremely different reasons which it would be very spoilery to explain.
In the second book there Church of the One God plays another very key role when the heroes come to an isolated part of the world where there are no Pagan churches -- everyone's part of the Church. Awesome, right? Well... maybe.
Anyway, yeah, religion in a bunch of different forms is very important in that series, and I totally think you should read it anyway.
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Date: 16 Mar 2006 11:35 pm (UTC)Ten thousand years later, there are basically two types of religion. There's the "pagans," which makes up most of the population, who worship one of a variety of hundreds of different little gods, the advantage to that being that the gods are effectively real and give real and immediate answers to prayer and worship. Then there's the "Church of the One God," and they're committed to the worship of a single god who never answers prayers, and in fact there's a sort of unspoken agreement that this single God doesn't actually exist at all, but it's still important to worship him for reasons which are really better explained in the plot.
The main character is actually a priest of the One God, and his religion is hugely important in defining his character, his sense of right and wrong -- even though he's aware that on some level his 'God' doesn't really exist. The Church of the One God is also hugely important to the second main character for extremely different reasons which it would be very spoilery to explain.
In the second book there Church of the One God plays another very key role when the heroes come to an isolated part of the world where there are no Pagan churches -- everyone's part of the Church. Awesome, right? Well... maybe.
Anyway, yeah, religion in a bunch of different forms is very important in that series, and I totally think you should read it anyway.