Editing Great Crusade (section)

==The Emperor Emerges==
For much of the 20,000's, [[Terra]] and the other human colonies were consumed by war after the rebellion of the [[Iron Men]], an era later known as the [[Age of Strife]]. The techno-barbarians (uhn tiss uhn tiss uhn tiss baby) ruled little fiefdoms on once-proud [[Earth|Terra]], and all hope seemed lost.

Then the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|Emperor of Mankind]] appeared in M28, and started conquering Terra piece by piece in the [[Unification Wars]]. His army consisted of the predecessors of [[Space Marines]], the [[Thunder Warriors]], using prototype [[Mark I: Thunder Armour|powered armor]] that wasn't even void-sealed (of course they still had massive [[pauldrons]]), who were in fact preposterously OP even relative to Marines millennia later but unsustainable collectively and genetically unstable individually.

This was approximately the time that the Emperor decided that religion was bad for humanity and violently implemented the [[Imperial Truth]], the conclusion of which can be seen in the story [[The Last Church]]. The reason why the Emperor's being atheist is so weird and doesn't click into the lore smoothly is because originally there was nothing atheist about him or the Imperium, to say nothing about how literally not a single cause of the fall of the [[Dark Age of Technology]] had anything to do with religion (to wit, humanity's [[Men of Iron|race of sapient android houseslaves]] rebelled ''en masse'', dozens of enslaved or uprooted alien species launched simultaneous campaigns of revanchism for their colonized star systems, and the [[Fall of the Eldar|birth of Slaanesh]] caused human psykers across the galaxy to lose their sanity or control of their powers while [[Warp|warp storms]] grew cataclysmically common and powerful while the [[Daemon|creatures of the Warp]] [[Enslavers|multiplied and invaded]] like swarms of locusts.) So shoehorning him into that doesn't work well at all.

The human federation before the Imperium may or may not have been secular, but there is no indication that religions had gone extinct within it beforehand, and indeed it is implied religions existed during it and  within it, existing peacefully both with each other and with any secular or atheistic individuals and philosophies within it. Thus both religions and atheism spread together throughout the stars while humanity was at the height of its technological and societal glory, laying the seeds of what would grow during [[Age of Strife|Old Night]] and be found later during the Crusade. There was also no mention of what the Imperium originally was in the old lore, only that the Emperor came to be worshipped as a god, and the early quotes (e.g. "He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods") implied a polytheistic or religiously inclusive view similar to that of Ancient Rome, with a deified leader. The Emperor being an atheist [[Skub|may be argued to be sensible]] considering he has lived long enough to "know" there are no gods and that the things in the Warp aren't worthy of the title "divine," though at least one other [[Perpetual]], [[Ollanius Pius]], who had lived longer and seen more, disagreed.