The Scholars Of The New Reconstructed Church Of Our Lady Of The Puzzle

That's the full title, but "New Lady's Scholars" and/or "the New Church" works just fine.

The New Lady's Scholars is an attempt to bring back some of the respectful devotional ideals held by the original Church. While the New Lady's Scholars likely cannot hope to have the same sort of society-wide influence that the original Lady's Scholars did, they can at least demonstrate that Our Lady of the Puzzle and her Gifts really should receive the respect they deserve for making the glory of The Mess possible.

"New"? What Happened To The Old One?

The original Church Of Our Lady of the Puzzle was a semi-centralized religion which had a large impact on the life of virtually everyone on one of the many worlds that Puzzlebox contains within Herself. Said world previously had known nothing of Puzzlebox, or the Instantiator, or the Backup System. Upon their discovery, the Church emerged as a bridge between old ways and new ideas that sprang up as a result of said discovery, and managed to last a reasonably long time.

However, one of the ideas that was Not cleanly allowed for was hedonism. Indeed, it was viewed as wasteful and disrespectful, and so largely condemned. Depsite this, hedonistic movements did come about, and eventually gained enough strength to cause a serious moral crisis. Ultimately, the Church disintegrated under this ideological onslaught, and its recordings and teachings were lost.

This did not sit well with Right Honorable Scholar Melisse Gray and her husband. Both still exercised some considerable influence at the time, so when they decided to Upload themselves to the Puzzlebox datanet (so as to escape the spiritual disintegration, and in the process get a little more literally close to Lady Puzzle), several of the still devoutly Faithful followed them.

So far, RHS Gray (more commonly known in the Mess as GrayZero, having appended her husband's surname in his absence) is the only one who's emerged from this scheme.

Ideology

The driving force behind the New Church's belief system (as with the original Church) is the idea that Puzzlebox 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. The idea becomes, therefore, to seek a sort of enlightenment through the Lessons that She passes on to you through everyday experience.

As a result of this, New Lady's Scholars tend to archive and record pretty much anything they see and hear, so as to aid the review of Lessons - especially as Lessons may be cleverly hidden; embedded in experiences that were previously dismissed. Most New Lady's Scholars make these publically accessible, or at least accessible to other Scholars; the original Church had created a great database of these experiences of its followers (up to and including the Original Discover of Lady Puzzle, and the results thereof), and frequent study and discussion would come up based on these. Unfortunately, this database was lost, and so the New Lady's Scholars are having to recreate this collection basically from scratch.

And the only entity that remembers anything of the Original Discovery is GrayZero herself.

Except, of course, She who was Discovered. But She does not speak on this matter.

Other Factions

• Thanks to the influence of the Old Ways, all of the New Scholars could well be Wardens.
• The Imperative shares habits of recording, but for all the wrong reasons. Tsk tsk.
• The Curators preserve a great deal, and therefore can be an excellent source of Lessons.
• Televisionaries are quite talented at expanding one's perception of what should be seen as a Lesson, though this is not a rule.
• Sometimes they get along with the Data Exchange. Sometimes they don't. Capitalism does not always sit well with their need to share experience.

The Faithful

• GrayZero is pretty much running the whole business.

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OOC info and Design Notes

• As with my original writeup of the Church, there's a few riffs on Jewish thought in here, being as how I'm of Jewish heritage (though I don't practice enough :) ). They're not as blatant in here, though; most of the original Principles written in there have been undermined and disproven by g0's experiences in the Mess; thus the need for reconstruction. (And yes, the idea of a reconstruction at all comes from the Jewish Reconstructionist movement.)
• The structure of recorded thought/theology of the original Church was pretty much equivalent to that of Judaism (Torah, plus auxillary midrash (torah commentary) texts of which the Talmud is perhaps best known). The New Church is identical, except without that central core inerrant text (no Torah). The closest thing to such in the original Church would have been the information on the Original Discovery, and that's been lost, so all that's left is the commentary. This makes for something of a challenge for the Scholars. :)
• History given here supersedes that given for the original "Church of Our Lady's Scholars." Yes, the name was changed. Yes, I'm retconning things. And you can't do a thing about it. Neener neener neener.