Originally Posted by Saerain
Sorry for the slight necro, but this has been bothering me. I just can't get a handle on what they mean by religious, here.
To me, religion necessarily rests on faith, and faith is belief without evidence. What's lacking evidence here? That the Vanu existed? No, they're standing on mountains of evidence. That technological progress is good? Please.
If there's some kind of religion in the Vanu Sovereignty about how some guy back on Earth prophesied that this would happen, or that this apparently dead race will some day come back to uplift them, then whoop-de-do, but how that makes the Sovereignty itself religious, from what we know about it, is beyond me. That's about as acrobatic as saying vegetarians are religious because of what the Jains believe.
Let's just say that if we dug up Elohim spacecraft, ray guns, and data logs, it would be pretty odd for our currently perfectly rational disregard of Raëlism to continue.
It's certainly possible that SOE has revamped the VS in a way that is religious, I'm just saying that from what we do already know, it seems like a bizarre description.
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I think a big reason this came about is many VS detractors heard that a few VS were hearing the voice of Vanu "in their head," and given how the vast majority of 20th century media has portrayed such experiences it's no surprise that they latched onto the idea that the VS must think they are talking to God and so they must be crazy.
They seem to have concluded that it must be a religious experience whilst discounting the very real possibility that it was instead technologically-based telepathic communication.