The church was called The New Covenant of the Buddha Christ Redemptor. Big name, big crowd.
I let my friend guide me through the double doors, all the while fighting to let go of the feeling of being an impostor. It had grown on me as soon as we stepped on Hercules Prime. At first I thought the discomfort was caused by the change in gravity. I wasn't used to high-g planets. In fact, I wasn't used to being anywhere else other than Earth. Sure I'd been to Mars and the moons, like any respectable twenty year old, but I had never been outside the System.
Basically, the hype around this new church came from this crazy idea that the Buddha and Christ were one and the same. That they were both incarnations of some higher being—some called it God, but most, like me, weren't comfortable with the term, not after what had happened during the Religio-Atheist Wars. After the Atheists had won the third war, the word 'God' had been banned, back on Earth. And people scowled and were shocked if you dared mention the names of Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Shiva or Yahveh. Being called a Christian was just as bad as being called a nazi.
But on a remote world like Hercules Prime, anything went.
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