The Cult of the Starsisters will also take a large number of entries.  Perhaps I will collect them all together in the editing process before the final submission of my report, perhaps I will just index them.    The Cult is a strange mix of self-serving contradictions.  It is a non-religious religion that the starsisters have built up around themselves and are using to slowly focus succeeding generations to idolize their rulers for the very crimes the people should hate them for.

It teaches that there is no God (or gods).  In the place of a higher power, the starsisters place the government of Nightfall itself–the state–which is the embodiment of the ideal of their “mother,”  Hai’Lyn.  While this is obviously a claim to be completely secular, from what I have been able to discern, the Cult acts and believes in all ways as one would expect a radical sect of religious believers.  While they claim that there are no gods, no personal being to worship, they manifestly and maniacally worship Nightfall and the starsisters themselves.

I find this doubly ironic, since the starsisters are manifestly of the same “stuff” the gods of old seemed to be made of.  But they aren’t supposed to talk about that–more on their views of reason and rationalism later.

While this sounds like a laughable combination, it is really a very effective means of control.  The Cult’s followers hold it in complete, mystical awe while at the same time disdaining all other religious claims.  Why?  Simply because the other religions, whose moral systems might reveal the starsisters for the monsters they are, are “religious” and the Cult’s beliefs are somehow “rational.”  Believers therefore hold the Cult to a completely different, naive standard of evidence that their own religion–for that is what it is–cannot itself meet.