Assemblies of Gods

The field of computational theology was founded by High Illuminator Dr. Heinrich Stafford in an offhand comment in the margin of a paper he was grading, which has become a relic since his canonization as a saint. Noting the use of ritual and repetition within religious devotion, Stafford theorized that religious ritual could be abstracted into an algorithm, which could then be implemented by any universal computer, allowing the ritual to be repeated at hardware speed over every computational core. When this marginal note was discovered, it sparked a flood of research into the algorithmic representation of ritual and the digital representation of symbol, most of which was immediately anathematized. The bulk of these anathemas were lifted in the following decades, allowing the products of its research to be aired openly. Within computational theology, a program whose execution corresponds to the performance of a particular ritual is known as a divine assembly, and the library of divine assemblies that have been written by computational theologians is referred to as the Assemblies of Gods.

The Assemblies remained a rather academic affair until the 960s, when Shaster was rocked by agitation from misosophers and economists who wanted to replace all religious activity in Shaster with divine assembly executions, thus eliminating both the philosophical quandaries of divinity and all bank holidays. The so-called "computational reformers" gained a foothold in the Senate, which allowed them to hang on to relevance for most of the decade until the untimely death of the movement's leader, Ik Severent, in a shipwreck. His successors, Harry and Isabelle Writsmith, were incompetent to the task of defending the movement to the Senate. Within the year, the country tired of their shenanigans, and banned computational theology outright. A brief resurgence a few years later was quickly quashed when the Senate threatened to have a national university posthumously award Severent a dysthetics degree. The Senate even proposed naming computational theology as a Dark Pentad discipline, though the measure was quietly tabled after the Panark Fleet, a bosom ally of Shaster, expressed significant disapproval of the motion.

Most usage of the Assemblies of Gods is done on Panark servers, either by Panark itself or offered as a service to other countries. On most holy days, the Fleet offers complementary cycles to countries to run divine assemblies that correspond to observances for that day. This has become a point of tension with Kingsland, whose complicated religious landscape all but ensures that every day is a holy day for at least one Kingslander cult.

In the wake of the incident in Shaster, the offering of divine assembly executions gradually became normal throughout the 970s. This contributed to a decrease in the number of sectarian conflicts, until a series of investigative journalism reports in 979 uncovered a dark underside to the Assemblies of Gods. Two years earlier, an anonymous Panarkian technomonk of the Desert Fleet (believed by many to be the alleged professor Marvin Fitch) had written a series of hymns that, when compiled into a divine assembly, injected various curses into other assemblies running on the same machine. This precipitated a massive scandal for the Panark Fleet, which their sovereign deftly handled by nationalizing the malicious hymn-software, gathering the nation's best programmers to reverse-engineer it, and adding it to their business model. Now sectarians can pay top dollar to Panark's technomonks to have hymns composed to attack their religious enemies' divine assemblies or defend their own against such attacks. As physical sectarian conflicts have continued to decrease, the international community has collectively agreed that this is an acceptable conclusion to the whole affair.

Citations: Professor (allegedly) Marvin Fitch