Church Of Our Lady's Scholars

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The Church Of Our Lady's Scholars

That's not really the actual title; it's a rough translation of the name of the religious sect whence came GrayZero. Our Lady's Scholars is (or, by now, was) a heavily traditionalist-influenced faction on GrayZero's homeworld, having evolved out of a desire to reconcile the new secular philosophies of post-scarcity with the traditionalist "Amish-style" devotion that had thus far prevailed on that world. COLS enjoyed great success for a very long time, as it managed to balance these things remarkably well by focusing on learning from the secular while honoring the traditionalistic.

With the dawn of new concepts of hedonistic thought in their society, however, COLS was forced to face its largest (and ultimately last) crisis. They fought long and hard to fend off this approach (referred to them as "purposelessness") in society, but it slowly became apparent they were fighting a losing battle; it was lots more fun to Just Be Lazy, especially for a society that had spent so much time repressing such impulses. In the end, they fragmented, some renouncing their Faith and going out among the hedonists, some distancing themselves from the Church but still teaching their children and friends ideas of Moral Law (planting the seed...), and still others going even more fanatical, losing sight of the goals of the Church and striking viciously - sometimes even violently - against theological attackers.

A very few others chose yet a fourth path, and a rather risky one at that - they voluntarily Uploaded theirselves in a sort of gesture to their Lady. It was described as "renouncing our bodies and this world, taking the time to bring ourselves closer to our Lady, and perhaps see what the ultimate lesson is for our home's loss of Purpose." So far, the only entity to come out of this extremely radical scheme is GrayZero, and she's chosen to take advantage of the opportunity to study more of her Lady's works so she can understand just what went so damn wrong.

(Note: Anyone making Heaven's Gate references at this point will be beaten with a very large stick. We thank you for your restraint in this matter. --The Mgmt.)

Principles of Faith

The driving force behind the COLS belief system is the idea that Puzzlebox-the-entity is a Goddess, and that Her hand is regularly involved in the maintenance of the worlds She encompasses because She desires harmony for all that dwell within Her, and that Her means of achieving this is to set aside basic needs (read: impose post-scarcity) so that Philosophy and Education can lead to a new Golden Age of peaceful purpose for all. (Yeah, it's a pretty lofty goal). To this end, there's an extremely large amount of emphasis on not only seeing the World around you, but remembering what you see and returning to it later to derive more lessons as needed. Thus, there's no real central holy "divinely written" text with COLS (as there is with, say, modern Christainity, Judaism, Islam, et cetera) so much as there has existed a collection of the experiences and the witnessings of Puzzlebox's faithful.

(Needless to say, having to cut herself off from this database was NOT a happy experience for GrayZero.)

Hedonism, being seen as an abandonment of Purpose, is severely frowned upon, although few would go so far as to actively condemn it, seeing as though proper demonstrations of its destructiveness to the Soul are sometimes necessary to solidify this Lesson ("It could be that the sole purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others...").

There are several principles of faith intended to communicate these ideas, but the most well known are:

Some common auxillary beliefs; these are not primary princples, but frequently follow from them:

And in case someone wants to get nitpicky... GrayZero's been off on her own for a long time now, and in any case is only sentient, so she's slowly added a few embellishments to her personal Faith:

Some Design Notes


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Last edited August 25, 2004 8:15 pm by GrayZero (diff)
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