Spliting up Africa and Modern Religions IN SPACE!

[sunfall_shadows]

Setting: Fandom tangental, but the only relevant part is that it's just like our world until the late 1990's, where the whole world is united basically overnight into a largely peacful magical kingdom. From there I'm taking a sci-fi route and throwing people onto multiple generation/colony ships and sending them out into the universe, never to

Comments

[sunfall_shadows]

What I want is kinda wishy-washy really. I suppose what I'm looking for is a top-level kind of general culture, like 'European' and 'American.' There's room for diversity under them, but there's still a general cohesiveness. If that makes any sense. I've probably seen that link before, but I'll look again and maybe play some more with the population numbers.

I hadn't thought to look at the climate change issue, I will remedy that. However, it seems to me there's a considerable difference between not being able to go on hajj due to factors not entirely under your control, and deliberately choosing to make it impossible for yourself and all your descendants. There won't be any travel back to Earth once they leave, and this is known well before hand. Maybe they can alter Islam to allow for that, but I don't have the impression that it is as easily spun-off as, say, Christianity. And it would further split across the half dozen or so colonies it could be present on, which will be isolated for centuries in transit before they can really interact again. Then again, maybe that is something perfectly reasonable to happen, I just don't know enough.

[channonyarrow]

Honestly, I think you're overthinking the Islam issue (I have read your replies to me and to other commenters). I mean, if you're not doing this level of thinking about Jews being unable to rebuild the Temple and fulfill the promise/prayer "next year in Jerusalem", or Buddhists being unable to visit Bodhgaya, or the loss of many other sacred sites, some of which undoubtedly have a "required" component to their devotees, that's an issue, I think. And I suspect it will be much more noticeable to say "all the Muslims stayed behind on earth!" than to not know for absolute utter certain that there is a circumstance where Islamic scholars and leaders would decide it is okay to leave Earth permanently.

Additionally, there is the same variety of faith in Islam as in any other religion; I'm an ex-Catholic and I never bothered with eating fish on Fridays or going to confession other than the once, so compared to my friend's cousin who doesn't use birth control, and goes to church multiple times a week, saying that we have the same reaction to a Vatican decree is a little silly, and a little offensive. I suspect that if imams came down on the side of not being able to leave earth, there would still be Muslims who left and who considered themselves to be Muslims in good standing.

I get wanting to get it right and be respectful, but if I were still an in-house editor and was working on your book, I would gently tell you that I think you're overcorrecting too far in an attempt to be correct that's becoming exclusivist.

[sunfall_shadows]

I'm still in the planning stages really, and I do intend to give as equal treatment as I can to all the major religions, I'm just doing things piecemeal. I specified Islam because I knew for certain that there was a physical place central to the religion and one of my characters, of Persian descent, is asserting that she wears a headscarf, so I wanted to try and determine whether it could be a religious signal, or merely a cultural one. I hadn't thought about Jews and Jerusalem, which is a brain fart on my part, and I did not know at all about the Buddhists, so thank you for pointing them out.

As for the rest, all I can say is I'm quite ignorant of religions other than Christianity (and that too, to a lesser extent), and most of what I do know is from the general (American) media. For example, I know about the Shia/Sunni split in Islam, but it never occurred to me there could be as many denominations as in Christianity. That's on me, of course, but that's why I've searched around and I'm asking questions before I go nailing things down too much. Ignorance can be remedied, and better now than later.