Hypothetical: If religions had power, regulate them or not?

[Shroom Man 777]

If the dark ritual is destructive, can't these religions with destructive deities be classified as terrorist organizations?

[ShadowDragon8685]

If the dark ritual is destructive, can't these religions with destructive deities be classified as terrorist organizations?

That...

Well, technically, no. A terrorist organization seeks to force existing governments to bow to their will by violence. The cults in question don't give a damn about the existing governments since they just want to overthrow everything and make the Earth a demonic paradise.

So it's treason, not terrorism, by my reading. Still, since a cult cell would operate much like a terrorist cell, no reason not to use the tools developed in the war on terror against them.

[Shroom Man 777]

Either way, what they want to do will kill people and that's very naughty and not to mention against existing laws.

[someone_else]

The cults in question don't give a damn about the existing governments since they just want to overthrow everything and make the Earth a demonic paradise.

Another mindfuck.
If the cults want to overtrhow everything as you say above, then they are going actively against each and every government on Earth, from US to Burkina Faso. Thus qualify as something even worse than Al Quaeda (which they actually are, btw).

But anyway, governments don't "go against threats to the government" but against "threats to the citizens" (which is more or less against anyone breaking the law). At least in theory.

To me, it seems you are trying to find a reason to keep the governments from instantly ass-raping any of those cultists to let you have some fun with them. Just admit it.
It may be more fun to craft sensible and reasonable handwaving for that.

[ShadowDragon8685]

To me, it seems you are trying to find a reason to keep the governments from instantly ass-raping any of those cultists to let you have some fun with them. Just admit it.

I'm a player in this game, not the storyteller. Like I said, when I realized what had happened - that we'd busted up a cult that was behind all the naughtiness - I said "that's it, we're fucked. We're going to have to repeal the Establishment Clause and the other various similar laws in the EU and elsewhere."

And the rest of my party started flying off the handle - that could open the door to discrimination against normal religion, it shouldn't be illegal to worship the Yozis just to summon demons, etcetera etcetera.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I think you're being more than slightly idiotic. Or at least not thinking this through entirely. Freedom of Religion doesn't protect you from illegal actions. You can't commit crimes and then say "It's part of my religion, so you can't prosecute me!" I mean, you can certainly try, but attempts to do so are almost doomed to failure, especially when one of the major tennets of your religion is about summoning the demonic aspects of imprisoned, eldritch super-deities into the world.

At the very least bullshit like that has to be a violation of immigration laws, and you could probably interpret a whole bunch of other laws that would make it illegal. So you wouldn't need to change the laws regarding freedom of religion, because freedom of religion wouldn't make the summoning of demons legal. Especially not if the demons are hell-bent (malfias-bent? ) on the destruction of the world as we know it. That's kind of a threat to Homeland Security and all.

Edit: As an aside, a similar thing might crop up in my Exalted campaign, as I had my characters get summoned from the Exalted-verse into a sort of real world/modified Old World of Darkness setting (because I was getting bored with the campaign and decided to do something insane), and as a result they're going to start causing the fabric between the two worlds to start breaking down.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

Ghetto Edit: More to the point, if religions in the real world started behaving like religions in Exalted, with Gods and Demons and Yozi, which gain power from worship and can likewise bestow power upon their followers, then I don't think that any government would have a hope in hell of actually succeeding in suppressing their Freedom To Summon Unholy Shit And Cause ProblemsTM. Not unless they have Celestial Exalted on their side. Or millions of Dragonblooded and the equivalent of the Blessed Isle. That's what Wyld Hunts are for, boys and girls! /

[ShadowDragon8685]

Ghetto Edit: More to the point, if religions in the real world started behaving like religions in Exalted, with Gods and Demons and Yozi, which gain power from worship and can likewise bestow power upon their followers, then I don't think that any government would have a hope in hell of actually succeeding in suppressing their Freedom To Summon Unholy Shit And Cause ProblemsTM. Not unless they have Celestial Exalted on their side. Or millions of Dragonblooded and the equivalent of the Blessed Isle. That's what Wyld Hunts are for, boys and girls! /

The governments in this case do have the Celestial Exalted (for now) on their side: I'm a Night Caste vigilante with a nearly-complete Chungian defensive combat build, my circle (the PCs) include a Twilight-caste FBI agent, a Zenith-caste DoJ prosecutor with Solar Hero Style (Jon Chung's revised version,) and a Full Moons Lunar MI6 agent. The Twilight's Lunar Mate is also an FBI agent and his partner (in just about every imaginable sense of the word,) there's at least one Dawn working in the Air Force and one more Solar of unknown provenance working for MI5 currently guarding HM the Queen. Also my Lunar Mate is some kind of UN assassin/secret agent, and there are definitely Terrestrials working in various positions for the governments.

We can handle the Big Shit when it starts rolling downhill, the problem is that if cults keep popping up, we can't track them all down. Even flying around the world in a private jet, investigating murders takes time even with Solar Investigation Charms, and cults don't have to slice and dice. While we might be able to hunt down cults, they're one of those annoying things that keeps popping back up, and they're within mortal means to control while they're getting started.


Basically, the idea is that we need the mortals to stop the shit avalanche before it needs the Celestial Exalted to step in, because that's when it gets out of hand and we might have to resort to nukes if the bad guys have done something nasty like unleashed some necrosorcerous blasphemy and we need to erase it now. That happened several sessions ago, we had to nuke a small, nameless (probably fictional) South American country right on top of a drug plantation because it was a front for necromantic research that wound up unleashing some kind of necromantic booby trap we couldn't contain.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

See, that's the thing, a handful of super-badass Celestials is great and all. But they can't be everywhere at once. They can't act as enforcers. They're basically the clean-up crew for when the enforcers screw the pooch. And unless you either get the government itself to start making demonic pacts, or have those Celestials start creating and training task-forces of Essence-using Mortals, or, y'know, get an army of Dragonbloods and/or Mortals In Power Armor, there's not much in the way of shit all that the government can do to deal with even small outbreaks of Occultism, except send the Celestials off to deal with it.

And all it takes is half a dozen or so incidents of Infernals getting away and grouping together in hiding, and some followers being turned into Akuma, and then your Celestials will be evenly matched with the bad guys.

Basically, Modern Earth meets Exalted Powers = Earth is fucked. That's all there is to it. Unless you can get a Blessed Isle equivalent, or something close to it, things will eventually just go all the fuck to hell. If your Storyteller does things right, anyway.

[ShadowDragon8685]

So far there only seems to be one real circle of bad guys, one of whom shot herself in the head with a soulsteel magnum to trigger off the necromantic booby trap. We're capable of dealing with them, but, as you said exactly what I said; we can't be everywhere at once. The governments need to work on controlling these cults, which is what I've been saying all along. Mortals can handle things if they can get to the cult before their beckoning bullshit is complete.

So far, the only methods we've seen used involves a series of geometric slaughters on the sites of old deaths. I cracked that one myself with support from the FBI's BAU, but it didn't end very well... Well, it ended in that the cultists were stopped, but they had an Infernal with them who Shaped up some Sorcery on my ass. I gunned him down while he was Shaping, but it turned out he was possessing some poor mortal's body anyway... That was rather grief-inducing and tragic.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

If all your demonic summoning rituals leave nice trails of missing people and corpses, then perhaps it wouldn't be too hard for an almost entirely human government to track down that shit. But what you should be concerned about is some intelligent individual figuring out that you can, and preferably should, until you have an established power-base, make your demonic summoning rituals a little less uh... attention-seeking.

Ultimately, if this shit is getting traction as a legitimate religion with some people who generally believe the Yozi are their gods and they should obey their will, then the government cracking down on any sight cult activity will only foster more resentment and encourage them to be more subtle and secretive and careful.

Basically, in this campaign, if the government knows the location of a demon-summoning cult, they need to infiltrate it. Find out who the leaders are, who knows the occult rituals, where said rituals are stored. And then, once they know who knows what and what is where and only when they've learned everything they can, (within reasonable limits), they need to strike hard and fast and destroy everything and kill everyone involved. 'Cause that's how big a threat Yozi-worshipping Cults would be to modern day Earth.

A single Yozi-cult is like an Al-Queda terrorist cell multiplied by a few thousand. You need to be sure that shit is wiped out completely, not left injured to lick its wounds and rebuild itself and learn from its mistakes. Need to be god damn ruthless. And that really means that openly and publically trying to regulate them in an official capacity will probably hurt your efforts. It will, also, scare the smarter ones underground.

[someone_else]

To me, it seems you are trying to find a reason to keep the governments from instantly ass-raping any of those cultists to let you have some fun with them. Just admit it.

I'm a player in this game, not the storyteller. Like I said, when I realized what had happened - that we'd busted up a cult that was behind all the naughtiness - I said "that's it, we're fucked. We're going to have to repeal the Establishment Clause and the other various similar laws in the EU and elsewhere."

And the rest of my party started flying off the handle - that could open the door to discrimination against normal religion, it shouldn't be illegal to worship the Yozis just to summon demons, etcetera etcetera.

No, wait, people with superpowers have to bother about laws? When did that happen?

Otherwise agree with SilverWingedSeraph.

[ShadowDragon8685]

No, wait, people with superpowers have to bother about laws? When did that happen?

When we decided to bother with laws. My character's Motivation is, in fact, "Defend Western Civilization from its supernatural enemies."

I can (and do) break the laws to do that, but that doesn't mean I like it a lot. It also means I can't like, wind up on the FBI's most wanted list or I will be one of Western Civilization's supernatural enemies.


Besides, we're not in control of the government, and things still have to get done, and me, personally, given my druthers I'd rather the government not start to persecute a religion in contravention of the Establishment Clause if the option is present to ammend/repeal the Establishment Clause to make it legal for Congress to pass a law disrespecting an establishment of religion which is worshipping a supernatural foe of the planet Earth so we can do it legally.