The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,113
empowered by the Pope, but then by the Inquisition. They believed that the material world was essentially evil, and that only the spiritual world was good. They deplored sex in general; indeed their bonhommes, or perfecti, wouldn’t eat meat because it was the result of sexuality. Fish was all right: they didn’t know about underwater sex – or plant sex, for that matter. They were totally celibate, and deplored sex even in marriage. There was a ceremony, prescribed for attainment of the perfectus state, a single sacrament, the consolamentum or consolation. It involved a brief spiritual ceremony to remove all sin from the credente, or believer, and induct them into the next higher level as a perfectus. It was commonly performed as death approached, so that the believer was not condemned. Belief in its effectiveness, however, was by no means universal.
Presumably their anti-sex views would weigh against having children, so that any such belief system would be likely to lose its adherents as time passes, but that seems not to have happened. They were remarkably successful in Languedoc, perhaps mostly through conversion. In this they were the cultivated roses of religion, propagated not through sex but by taking cuttings. Considering the practices of Catholic priests, whose behaviour at that time was a distinct contrast, it’s not surprising there were many conversions. That is probably why they had to be annihilated.
The Jews of Poland in the late Middle Ages were mostly confined to ghettos, and restricted to a few trades including usury – money-lending. Their beliefs were complicated. Males learned Torah (Old Testament, Five Books of Moses) from a very young age, and then graduated to Talmud, a compilation of commentaries on the Torah by mostly-Babylonian rabbis. After the Bar Mitzvah ceremony at about age thirteen, which included reciting, and usually singing, a piece from Torah and commenting on it, they continued to study Jewish texts, especially the Talmud and the Gemara (additional rabbinical comments).
Boys who continued to study were frequently maintained by general ghetto funds, such as they were (even today in Israel, boys of Orthodox clans are allowed not to do national service). Females had to learn to keep a kosher household, which involved a whole complex of issues, not simply having kosher meat, but also separating milk dishes from meat dishes, keeping separate cloths and cutlery as well as dishes, and cleaning house, particularly for the Passover, which required a different set of menus. The reward system was not, basically, Heaven or Hell; it was simply that doing these things led to a good life, consonant with what God (Jehovah, but his name must not be said) wanted for man, and to some extent woman.
In the 1550s the rules were collected into a great composition, the Shulchan Aruch, by a Sephardic rabbi in Israel, or possibly Damascus. They became the greatest compendium of Jewish law, especially for the Ashkenazi communities of middle-Europe (Sephardi and Ashkenazi are two separate streams of Jewish culture). This belief system has continued, with much evolution, to the present day. Jack’s rabbi has said that he’s the best atheist in her congregation.
Scientology evolved from L. Ron Hubbard’s earlier invention, Dianetics. L. Ron (‘Elron’) was a fairly successful science fiction author, but his entry into belief systems was distinctly more successful. Few scientists would agree with his claim that Dianetics was a science, but it sold a lot of books; he had audiences of thousands, and after the editor John W. Campbell described it in Astounding Science Fiction it really took off. Martin Gardner’s claim that science fiction fans were very gullible seems to have been true. However, in the longer term Dianetics failed, and Hubbard produced Scientology, which has gone from strength to strength on the basis of a set of beliefs not very different from those of Dianetics.
Basically, the idea is that a set of ‘engrams’ is induced in people by their experiences (including when they were an embryo, before the nervous system develops). Engrams are records of bad experiences, especially very bad ones, which have to be erased for people to become clears – a step upwards on the evolutionary ladder from ordinary humans. People have souls, thetans, that have jumped from alien to alien over billions of years. The important issue for questions about belief is that this system derived from the imagination of one man, who failed to sell Dianetics. It now has tens of thousands of adherents, at least; it claims millions.