VS and the religious element

I find the VS a weird faction, it was my first faction, and I still find something appealing in the ideology.

Alright, I am down with this completely.

But then when it comes to the religious stuff I am totally lost. Why exactly do they need to worship a dead alien race? Why not just use it to further evolution without going completely cuckoo for vanupuffs? Is it a result of over-use of the tech messing with their heads? Are there still Vanu with a more scientific perspective on things?

Pls ixplain.

It's called "Lore". It doesn't have to make sense.

probably because they couldn't come up with anything else that was interesting. so they went with the Option that doesn't make any sense.

Because SciFi lore writers, who wrote the backstory for PS2, but it's a general trend across most of all sci-fi....

rarely ever makes actual sense.

Lets ignore the fact that scientists would be the LEAST likely to become zealots of some weird alien worshipping religion.

It made for interesting story in the writers perception... and thus it was born.

Personally, I ignore the religious nonsense.

Science FTW.

ONE man who interfaced with the Vanu device went crazy and killed himself, and that somehow made all the other reasonable scientists lose all common sense and start worshipping Vanu? Yeah, ok scifi writer.

EDIT: Also, each of the factions has some questionable motive behind them... TR are ruling with an iron fist, NC are just corporate goons, VS would just be scientists fighting for the right to pursue scientific improvements if they didn't have this idiotic religious backstory to them. They'd be the unequivocle "good guys", or at the very least, NOT bad guys or anything bad about them at all without it. So it helps add some layer of question on which side is the right side to fight for.

There is no religious aspect to this. There is a respect for the technology that the Vanu left behind and an embracing of it. You might call it 'cultish' behaviour but not religious.

Watch this and be enlightened(Parts 1 - 4)

Read some backstory. Hell, just listen to the zealotous dbag commander, or the voice callouts of the soldiers.

Faction lore has VS being religious nutbags for some idiotic reason.

It bothers me, on a logical level, and so I just ignore it... but it is MOST DEFINITELY there.


You could just write it off as anti-VS propoganda put out by TR to give them a bad name (and parroted by NC cause they don't want to lose soldiers to VS either) BUT FOR the fact that the stupid VO's in game are there.

Who cares?
Its all about game and killing people, not some story.

Actually it makes perfect sense to me. It reminds me of the "cargo cults" of WWII. Essentially you had a really weird social phenomenon where Pacific Islanders, who previously had been untouched by "modern" civilization, suddenly found themselves in close contact with Americans who were building airbases all over their islands. And along with this came all the advanced technology like aircraft, radios, jeeps, etc.

After WWII was over many of these bases were abandoned by the Americans, but the Islanders wanted them to come back. To do so they started creating false effigies and imitating the behavior that they saw of the Americans. You pretty much had a religion where they were worshiping airfields.



Now it's important to point out that these Pacific Islanders weren't super religious (not more than anyone else) before contact with the modern world. They weren't less rational or scientific or anything. The only difference was the discrepancy in technology level. And this resulted in the formation of cult worship, because according to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I figure the VS are like this. You take a bunch of overgrown monkeys and throw amazingly advanced technology at them, like technology that magically lets you live forever, and those monkeys will react in the same way that the Pacific Islanders did. What they can't scientifically explain they can only hope to imitate and fetishize.

Plenty of good examples from science fiction with this idea. The Techpriests of Warhammer 40K for example, who don't actually know how technology works but go through various maintenance drills disguised as religious rituals. Or the Foundation from Assimov's series, which creates a technology-religion to overpower its neighbors. Science fiction is filled with examples of "scientists" turning to models of faith, because really both religion and science are to a degree grounded on faith.

Lemme stop you right there.

If aliens came down, floated on air and did some other "magic" **** I wouldn't suddenly be star struck and worship them.
I'd recognize advanced technology for being god damn advanced technology.

And we're talking about a thousand years in the future with space faring craft that hyper jumped through a goddamn wormhole..

and somehow these SCIENTISTS who make their life work experimenting and developing new technoligies are going to look at higher tech with any sort of ZEAL!?!?

Are you kidding me? Seriously???

It's about as dumb as WH40K's inquisition in space BS. Of course, that universe has ACTUAL MAGIC so there's a bit of an excuse for their lunacy.

They're going to be interested in it from a scientific point of view and THAT'S IT.

END OF STORY.



The Scientists would be awestruck by the power of the technology, and they'd REFUSE to not pursue it because only an idiot gives up potential technological advancement because of illogical, and ignorant fear... but NO WAY IN HELL would an intelligent, scientifically midned individual become a bloody cultist.

This is an interesting post.

But there are a few key differences/issues:

#1. The Alien tech wasn't completely magical to them, obviously Terran Republic was already understanding it well enough to make use of it before the Vanu Sovereignty formed.

#2. The Vanu seem to be dead. That really, really should say something more to the VS that they don't seem to be getting.

#3. Science is not grounded on faith. It's a systematic method of gathering information through asking making testable predictions about things and then...testing them. There are some philosophies related to it/relying on it/surrounding it but it's not a philosophy or religious idea on its own by the most common definitions at least.

PS2's lore is different than PS1's, though.

It could be that the Vanu technology used in... Well, everything on Auraxis (E.g. The nanites that tend to the flora, the nanites that we use for construction ETC that we found the Vanu blueprints for) is rigged, and so infiltrate our bodies (actually, they wouldn't need to : We're made of Vanu-origin nanites) and "poisoned" our minds, but a foreign brain is too difficult to fully control with just nanites (hence the lack opf animals?) and so the nanites influenced people to have seek out tech, and when the proto-VS incorporated the tech into their being, it "told them" to start a war, and they ran off and, well, did it (although the war was well on it's way anyway).

We know that the Vanu tech can talk to people, as it did to Henry Briggs, so maybe the Vanu left technology lying around so that they could ultimately infuse their being with the hosts (in this case, the VS) and come into existance again: The wormhole was their method of luring creatures such as humans into their system to... I guess, to eff with them.

I don't know, just a theory (thanks to K0Pers1 for giving me some most ideas for this).

Think you're limiting the vast historical basis for, if not cultish behavior, at least highly eccentric behavior and beliefs exhibited by some of the most undoubtedly intelligent scientists and thinkers. If presented with technology vastly superior to what they had before, who's to say how they'd react, especially if their leader and foremost scientist among them harbored such beliefs.

I'm specifically not talking about geniuses of the past, and only of present day and future.

Maybe I give humanity too much credit but I think we're past believing in Magic... at least for scientists.

I agree.

The nanites in the air may release neurotoxins at times, that correspond with certain base-pair sequences that the VS implanted or edited to fool the brain at times.

Or maybe the nanites that we're made of in PS2 rearrange neurones or block certain trains of thought by inhibiting nerve impulses so that the brain is fooled, as a result of the technological oddities "installed" within the VS by themselves altering nanite "coding".

Either way, it probably effects VS only (Or maybe not?) because of the self-experimentation.

The Vanu don't worship the aliens, they hold them in deep respect and revere them like Buddhists revere Buddha or Christians revere Paul of Tarsus and Abraham.

From the lore archive;

Yeah, it's illogical and makes no sense. The saving grace is games are about gameplay, but I definitely stop reading/watching non-interactive entertainment when characters don't act believably enough.

I mean sure, robots nuke a bunch of colonized worlds. I can accept that. Maybe there are only 50,000 human refugees remaining and they're fleeing in a ragtag band of spaceships. I can accept that. But if you hold goddamn presidential press conferences that have more than 10 attendees then that's where I draw the line. Do you think maybe one person could report the news, and we could train the other 9 to do useful humanity-saving jobs instead, like repairing Raptors between battles? Just maybe!? It's only the extinction of the entire human race on the line, you vacuous, malodorous do-nothings!

Sure you might, but that's not how societies as a whole work. There are two main reasons why you're wrong on this issue:

1) The grunts and footsoldiers and the vast majority of the VS aren't scientists. Because in what crazy world do you take your top scientists who got their PhDs in Alien Linguistics or some esoteric subject, shove a rifle in their hands, and point them to the front lines? It's the same reason why you don't see the "suits" fighting for the NC, or why you don't have actual generals in the midst of battle with the TR. The soldiers fighting the war on Auraxis are (as have been in pretty much most modern wars) probably your lower class peasantry who either have nothing better to do or were simply forced/brainwashed/bribed into doing it.

2) The question is only if the VS scientists are still in charge, or if the VS has evolved into more of a cult than a research foundation. Sure it might be possible that the VS scientists have created the guise of religion in order to control and motivate the masses (much as how religious extremists are motivated to military action through their interpretation of religion), but I think it's equally possible that the more "radical" non-scientific branches of the VS have long overthrown the scientists. I mean if you're a silly VS commoner and on the one hand you have a goofy scientist stammering, "well we don't know exactly how Nanites work but it is possible..." and on the other hand you have a charismatic religious fanatic screaming, "Nanites work because it shows that the VS are destined to return the glory days of Vanu, who have given us the gift of eternal life", it's not hard to imagine that many common people would turn to the politician over the scientist (as they do today).

You're giving a lot of credit to people who might very well be "intelligent". Too much I believe. Smart people do dumb things and believe in dumb things all the time. Those "cargo cults" I mentioned earlier weren't full of dumb people; you don't manage to survive on your own with such scarce resources for thousands of years by being dumb. They were smart. Just that when confronted with things they can't even begin to comprehend or explain, they did what was biologically natural to the human brain and turned to religion and superstition.

For a fun-to-read list of our brilliant top scientists who also believed in batpoop-crazy ideas, just read this.

I dunno. I mean the cargo cults saw that the people bringing them all those magical technological devices were people who were just like them. Hardly stopped them from believing that there was a higher power involved. People are willing to overlook all sorts of details when it comes to religion and cults.

It is actually, philosophically speaking. We all learned about the scientific method way back in school, but at its most basic there are "leaps of faith" made in science at every step of the way. You have faith in your observations, in your variables, in your measurements, and in your analysis. You can't know that any of them are correct, you simply take it on faith that it's the best you can do. Neither a scientific "theory" nor even "law" are immutable or ever 100% correct.