"Folsom was in San Francisco when it was destroyed and-- it's one of the things the Gileadites hate about us. That some people here have weird sex and kinky sex and gay sex and public sex and sex with strangers and that-- it's okay, that we don't hate them or exile them or send them to prison or kill them--"

"There are definitely worse vices. Like killing 2 million people."

"I don't think it's wrong at all. At least if you have contraception and a baby shortage."

Jing Yi has never had an ethical opinion IN HIS LIFE. And he has definitely never had one where he knew something was wrong even if he wanted to do it.

"That would help."

"There are lots of people here who don't have weird sex. By preference or because of their beliefs. We took in some refugees from Gilead who are non-Gileadite Protestants-- uh, people who disagree with the Gileadites enough to get in trouble but not enough that, like, Tree would be able to tell them apart. I think most of them just stop off here for a bit and then fly to a different continent but we do have any who stuck around."

"Fly?"

"Oh, yeah, people in the future built machines that can fly."

"That certainly sounds very handy."

"Now I'm trying to think about things that would be surprising about Cascadia to a person from a thousand years ago. Uh, women can do anything men can do-- trans and gay people exist, you already encountered that one-- we educate everyone, everyone can read and write and do math-- probably you would be unsurprised by our level of youth rights and the fact that people own pigs they eat, for once-- you vote for the person in charge instead of having an emperor-- oh! Monotheism!"

"The kids tried to explain monotheism. Not well, I don't think, but they tried."

"The most popular religion in the world is Christianity, which believes that there is one God who created the world. Humans committed sins and were separated from God, so God became a human and taught people not to sin and died on a cross as a sacrifice. The sacrifice caused the sins of anyone who believes in God to be forgiven. People who accept God's forgiveness will go to Heaven when they die and live in eternal bliss, while those who don't will go to Hell when they die and be tortured for eternity. The Gileadites are a sect of Christians whose beliefs include that it's sacred for women to have sperm placed in their vaginas without having sex so that they can give birth to babies which will be raised by someone else. So naturally after the fertility crisis they became quite popular."

"Oh, Christianity! I've met a couple back home, bit of a weird bunch. I'm surprised it ended up so popular, but I can see how the fertility crisis would help."

"I'm Jewish! The Christians stole our religion and then murdered a bunch of us for two thousand years!"

"--Although Christianity actually became popular when, for complicated historical and economic reasons, the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe instead of China and thus Europeans were the ones who could build all these nifty machines you see around you and thus their religion took over the globe."

"Well, the murder's not ideal! And that maybe makes more sense than the fertility crisis by itself."

"There are definitely Chinese people in Cascadia but I don't know how much your religious practices have changed in the past thousand years. Also the Chinese government got taken over by an officially atheist ideology but I think a bunch of immigrants aren't?"

"Well, I'm not much help either, because I don't know what's happened in the past thousand years either." not doing the maths, not doing the maths... "We'll just have to sit in shared ignorance for a bit."

"In Cascadia people can worship whatever deity they like or no deity at all."

"That's good. ...I'm assuming from the way you phrased that that it's not universal?"

"In Gilead it's technically legal to practice religions other than Judaism and the Gileadite religion but it's not legal to proselytize, for a definition of 'proselytize' that includes most group rituals and mentioning what your beliefs are. In Mexico and a bunch of other places it's legal to practice other religions but you'll have trouble interfacing with the government because it runs things through churches. In some places it's outright illegal."

Okay that's boggling. "Another good reason to be grateful I landed in Cascadia!"

"Isn't your Emperor, like, literally a god, I feel like you should be familiar with theocracy."

"He's the Son of Heaven, yes, but-- you can do what you want? There's no 'sorry, you're the wrong kind of monks.'"

"But what if you were like 'our kind of monk thinks the Emperor isn't the Son of Heaven.'"

"Well, presumably they would be rebelling, in that case? Then it would depend on how their rebellion goes."