Generations ago, likely on the coast of the Neosho, the Sy went their own way from the Fi, the traditional belief system of the Alithinoi Anthropoi.
The Sy's trident symbolism suggests the first Sy were likely fishermen and sailors. Maybe, then, they pulled away from the Fi as they felt the influence of the new cultures and religions they found in foreign lands. Or maybe they pulled away yearning for a more satisfying personal spirituality or a sense of the sacred than the Fi allowed. Or maybe -- maybe -- they simply had greater expectations about life -- and hopes beyond death -- than the Fi offered. Regardless, the Sy movement spread, and eventually the Sy intermixed throughout Alithinoi Anthropoi society, and then into the world.
The Sy feel the universe is governed by an all powerful Universal Spirit. This Spirit can be anything or everything it wants at any given moment. Thus, it can also always be whatever people want it to be. This is The God of All Things.
To the Sy The God of All Things is a kind god, a giving god, a listening god, an empathetic god.
It is so encompassing and so universal that it can be anything to anybody and everything for everybody, always and at all times. It hesitates in engaging only to prevent people or things from being hurt or to allow better things to occur someday in the future -- a wait that might even take until the afterlife. It understands these things in its deep enveloping wisdom, inscrutable to those less than it.
The Sy often picture The God of All Things as a large, rotund, perpetually happy, often laughing man, with full lips and small knowing twinkling eyes, curly dark gray hair and a short gray beard, with chubby fingers and wearing a worn plain green tunic tied with a rope. In this form he is usually called "Patri." But he can be called anything. He can appear as anything. He can be she -- and often is. He may become Mother Nature or simply any she. She may be the Source of All. She -- or it -- can be many different things at the same time if it wants. It can even be many universes at the same time if it wants. It can be anything.
Many Sy sense of the Ring is that it is a physical manifestation of the God of All Things, constantly encircling the Earth, caring for it, protecting it. And doing that for all that's within it or on it. The Ring is a reminder from the God of All Things to the Earth's occupants that it is looking out for them.
People see the God of All Things in the form and way It may be most comforting or accessible to them.
He -- or she -- or it -- often comes to people in their dreams to talk to them and just as much to listen to them and to their travails and their hopes. The Sy often have their own personal pet names for The God of All Things which they save for their quiet hours to communicate with it alone. And some think it might appear for other things, too -- not just people -- maybe to deer as a majestic deer or maybe to whales as a beautiful whale -- and communicate with those things in a way they too can understand in their unique ways.
The Sy believe in the goodness of The God of All Things because within The God of All Things are the spirits of each thing. Being good to each thing is being good to itself. Goodness is inherent in existence, the Sy believe, for goodness, at its heart is being good to -- loving, respecting, and nurturing -- that which exists.
Some say that evil destroys itself. While good is to one end, evil goes to numerous selfish ends. An evil God of All Things could not exist because, in the end, it could not survive its own being. "It would eat of itself," the Sy believe, and perish.
The Sy's feeling about the afterlife is as a mystical area where peoples' everlasting spirits -- and those of all things -- reside. Those who acted and felt most in Patri's spirit -- kindly, generously, empathetically; with love, respect, and nurturance -- feel the most joy and grace in this afterlife since they have the most of Patri's spirit.
Yet those who did not are not "punished." They just supposedly sense -- in degrees -- their own unkind acts during their life preventing fullness in their afterlife -- an emptiness lasting eternity. Even then Patri may give the truly repentant a chance for redemption by allowing them to be reincarnated and living to do good. No one though -- the Si believe -- would trade even a moment of the afterlife for evil acts with a hope Patri would allow redemption -- and -- they believe -- Patri -- who knows all -- would not be fooled.
The Sy see "acts in the spirit of Patri" -- their "good acts" -- as acts harmonizing with The God of All Things.In fact many Sy still share some Fi beliefs.
The Fi believe that everything has a spirit -- rock and field, cloud and sky, love and hate, good ideas and bad. "Things" to the Fi are not just physical things. Things are ways of acting, feeling, thinking, dreaming, sensing, and moving. Time and dimension are things. Forces are things. And all of these have spirit/gods. And things that are really collections of things -- or collections of collections of things -- have their own spirit/gods, too. The Fi do not worship the spirit/gods but seek -- sometimes with priests -- "harmony" with them. The Fi's "Spirit of All Things" is not a powerful god -- it is spread out and amorphous because spirit/gods "over" more things are also weaker over individual things. So some Sy still "harmonize" with all the Fi gods -- their notion of harmonizing with -- and the nature of -- the "broadest" spirit/god is just different from the Fi.
Since many Sy also do not follow Fi beliefs, and the Sy also believe their relationships with Patri are personal, there are no Sy "priests" -- instead some Sy become monks and nuns.
Sy Nuns and monks are self-proclaimed and have especially strong devotion to Patri. They are especially dedicated to "goodness" -- as part of that they often try to help others connect with the God of All Things, individually or in groups -- and they are well known for their healing skills and magic. They train each other in this. Their "payment" is usually comes as donations. Some monks and nuns are more respected than others and have more influence -- but there is no formal hierarchy among them.
Since the Sy do not have priests they also do not have a large number of public scholars and intellectuals offering Sy apologetics.
Some of the many Fi thinkers, on the other hand -- such as Ziton, Kenzen, Harmione, and Sophrosyno -- have been highly critical of the Sy. For instance, Ziton has called belief in Patri "evidence free," said "there has never been a request of Patri that harmony in an individual Spirit could not have met and better," and derided prayer to Patri as "otiose and absurd." The response of Sy nuns and monks to these attacks is usually to smile or laugh and complement the Fi intellectuals on their wit.
Similarly, the scholar Canto Claypott -- who was originally a Fi then became a quasi-Sy and refers to The God of All Things as the "ultimate collection of things" and the "absolute infinite" -- which he called "Omega" -- a term he later changed to "Tav Aleph" when a radical Hobbiti group -- founded, incidentally, by a former student using Claypott's Sy-degenerate notion of the "will of power" -- took "Omega" as its name -- said, when asked whether he really believed in Patri, "It doesn't matter here what one believes or even what is true, for it is better for people in the whole that individuals should act in the good towards one another. That is true even were no gods existent."
The Sy's feelings about "goodness" has led some people who are not Sy to see the Sy as naive and ripe for exploitation.
Exploitation of the Sy sometimes works -- of course, that could be said of any group -- but the Sy's sense of goodness does not prevent self-defense or defense of others. And the Sy believe a person does not need to simply give into another's desires or blindly believe what other's say. Most do not believe -- as there are Sy ascetics -- that goodness requires ignoring one's own needs and desires. Eating and living involve using things from the world. One can eat and do what else is necessary to thrive. One simply tries not to exploit others or to exploit the world in a way that would offend Patri -- for Patri always sees.
When some nameless genius far out on the ocean -- under the spell, perhaps, of the countless stars filling a night sky or of the endless expanse of water filling the sea -- realized the possibilities of the infinite and changed the Fi to the Sy, did he or she see the possibilities of changing people? Belief in the Sy has steadily expanded in Pyth the last 20 years, and it has become the path forward for thousands.
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