Religion & Morals

Religion and Morals

Sogmians don’t believe in the afterlife. Instead, their cult of duty and morality serves as the transcendental baseline that each Sogmian strives to achieve in order to transcend.

To become famous and known in their species and through the galaxy is the measurement of success for the Sogmian society.

This all started after Segal, the first true sogmian as his people know him, discovered that for his species to work, they needed this very harsh set of rules that created different groups within the sogmian society. This multi-level, meritocratic ruling enabled them to work together and evolve beyond the semi-feral state under which the sogmians lived.

Thus the houses system, together with the Sogmian vows, were created to civilize the Sogmians and allow them to cooperate with one another for the greater good of their species.

This system works in three folds.

The first refers to the Sogmian laws as a species. Those are general laws that every member must obey regardless of their house. Those rules are usually targeted around keeping peace within their species and having the different houses settle their dispute through honorable and non-bloody means.

The Second fold refers to the house rules. Every noble house has its own core values and has created around them a list of rules that enforce those values to its members. This second set of rules is often embraced by the members of a noble house as the defining traits of their personalities.

Finally, the third system is the personal rule that every sogmian must declare as they turn adult and choose one of the noble houses to follow. This rule is established as the person's individual founding truth and will be observed by the nobles responsible for recruitment from the noble houses to see if the individual would be a suitable addition to their clan.

The personal rule comes as the declaration of the core value of the Sogmian, his truth, and the taboo associated with it. A taboo is a rule that this sogmian will never break under any circumstance. Should he break his personal rule, (for example, never lying) the Sogmian will trigger a chemical reaction in his body that exhales a pheromone, which will let any other sogmian that comes close to him know that he has broken his personal rule, and therefore, he is not a civilized Sogmian any longer, but someone who is not a civilized sogmian.

The more restrictive and impressive the Sogmian truth and the taboo are, the more status it gives to its owner. Nevertheless, most of the young sogmians never go too far, because they incurr the risk of creating a rule that’s easy to break, and risk being banished from their society.

Since every sogmian is very different and passionate about their core system of values, Segal's order allows them to live peacefully alongside like-minded members of their species, and Segal realized this before everyone else, hence why he is perceived as the father of the sogmian species.