What's a good way of making Sun-Worship a sinister thing? Even Exalted with its grimdark setting makes the Sun a pretty cool god.
What's a good way of making Sun-Worship a sinister thing?
What's a good way of making Sun-Worship a sinister thing? Even Exalted with its grimdark setting makes the Sun a pretty cool god.
Desert culture. The sun is the god of thirst, and death.
https://invidious.perennialte.ch/watch?v=plgg9sSLRvQ
In Hebrew folk lore Ra was the evil god that opposed El, Ra means evil coincidentally.
Thats why in the plagues of Egypt the eclipse covered the sun.
Outside of israeli myth, though, no one considered Ra evil. I wonder where the israelites ever got the false notion they'd been slaves in Egypt. It's very specific and detailed for a totally fictional myth cycle.
it wasn't fiction. israelites even ruled egypt at one point.
There is no credible evidence of the israeli enslavement in Egypt. That the Egyptians had israeli slaves, yes. But this was a cosmopolitan kingdom, they had slaves (and kings) from many nations.
Regardless of this historical myth, it doesn't change the central point that Ra was not sinister. Of course your enemies will call your gods evil. If you want an evil sun god, there's that Aztec one that demanded mass murder in his name nonstop.
>they weren't slaves
>but yes they were
How is having slaves from other regions relevant to the israelites?
How can you not tell the difference between "some israelites were slaves" and "my entire tribe were slaves?"
Maybe make them venerate a nemesis star?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star)
Judeans fled to Egypt and back again and they were slaves its historical fact.
we are talking about how Ra is evil but it makes poltards mad
>venerate a nemesis star?
This is a good idea. Make the sun a god star about to fry the world, with evil priests trying to appease it, Aztec style.
Or you could engage in divine fraud. A cult that fronts as being for the more wholesome stellar god, when in fact they're trying to bring the Nemesis closer using the unenlightened as dupes.
Yep, hippies are always secretly evil and punks are wholesome.
Schizo theories like the nemesis star are my favorite.
>Ra was not sinister
https://invidious.perennialte.ch/watch?v=vEAktm0iH1Y
>Ra was not sinister
Well, remember Akhetaten's heresy and the almost civil war it caused. I bet Ra wasn't very popular for generations after Amon became again the top god.
I wonder if the eye of evil is connected to the Eye of Ra.
The Eye of Horus is supposed to ward against evil but also can be a curse.
The Eye of Ra is violence and fury and power
>If you want an evil sun god, there's that Aztec one that demanded mass murder in his name nonstop.
Huitzilopotchli only needed one sacrifice every 52 years to keep the sun rising.
The "nonstop" sacrifices were to eliminate political rivals and prevent the neighboring countries from ever amassing enough strong young men to form a military because sacrifices were considered honorable and noble in Aztec culture. You were literally "sacrificing" yourself and your teotl to the gods so the world could flourish.
Ah, that explains why all their sacrifices were criminals, prisoners of war, and slaves. The honor was too great for any regular citizens or soldiers of the Triple Alliance to accept it. It also explains why all those subjugated people instantly sided with a gang of bandit foreigners, they were just so overwhelmed by the burden of the honor that they warred against their conquerors and slaughtered them by the score.
That was not all the aztec sacrifices even by half. They would hold lotteries for which lucky man got to be Tezcatlipoca this year, and he would live a life of royalty, hedonism and bliss, and then be sacrificed and eaten at the end of it, whereupon the next Tezcatlipoca is picked. They would host sports games where the victorious team was sacrificed all together. It was, in fact, a high honor. These people worshiped sacrifice, it was core to their religion.
Again; yes, a lot of it was a veil for the brutal suppression of their neighbors and sacrificing their able-bodied men to prevent possible uprisings, allowing the Aztecs to continue bullying them and harvesting their resources. That is the truth of the flower wars. But that does not mean it was ALL sacrificial rituals were to the Aztecs. They had a hundred years of history before the Spaniards came.
So they're evil AND insane, gotcha.
You can only imagine what ran through the minds of the strongly christian, god-fearing spaniards when they came across this culture that viewed blood sacrifice as the height of aspiration. It was surely gruesome.
But they simply did not view death as an end, but that the entire world was an endless cycle. Tezcatlipoca was their highest god, and he is chiefly a god of war, chaos, and suffering. Tezcatlipoca, also named Titlacahuan (He Whose Slaves We Are) grants mankind blessed short lives. To die young after living life to its fullest was the acme of Aztec chic. To be challenged, whether overcoming the challenge or succumbing to it and dying, was worth a thousand times more than to live an easy life. For that is how your teotl stirs, how the rivers drink your blood, how the earth eats your corpse, and how you give back to the gods who gave you life.
Aztec myth is just plain radical to me.
>teotl mention
ah, you actually know your shit, nice.
which was ironic cause it made the surrounding tribes hate them, and consequently made them eager to join the spaniards side
It's possibly related to ancient Egyptian military campaigns against (likely Semitic) tribes around Sinai which were either subjugated or displaced into nomadic lifestyles around 3000BC.
I think there's evidence of pre-yaweh proto-jews having been labourers in northern egyptian territories, which could have ended in a bad way. But nothing about the bullshit about slaves building the pyramids, of course.
It's like if the Arthurian mythos had become parth of the Anglican church.
the myth says the slaves helped build a burial city not the pyramids.
Frick sake even the movie shows you that.
What do you think the pyramids are?
>Outside of israeli myth, though, no one considered Ra evil.
In fact, Ra was explicitly one of the few definitively good guys of the cosmos.
StarGlowie and ///Tok'Ra/// propaganda.
Likely ties to periods of being vassals to Egypt.
>I wonder where the israelites ever got the false notion they'd been slaves in Egypt.
because it's not fake, it really happened.
I think Palestine was at one point under Egyptian rule though. But yes they were never in Egypt proper let alone the millions that the Bible says there were.
Well thats not really relevant to the question at hand, the op just asked how to make their sun god evil so taking the israeli lore and make it canon to his setting would accomplish that. To stay on topic, I'd say make them transactional dicks who demand all kind of twisted sacrifices to ensure that the sun rises the next morning, there was also a blurb about pelor in the 4e phb stating he's the keeper of time(makes sense as the source of light in the world) so if the solar deity has a time aspect that would also make him the cause of all death and the bringer of the end of the world, which I think is pretty sinister as well.
Probably because that's where they as a people were created, the followers of Akhetaten enslaved for their continuing heresies and belief in a single god, and in their enslavement their belief warped and they were turned into the first israeli people .
>Be in new kingdom, do not integrate socially, some do shifty things, new crowned king uses those shifty people as escape goat for whatever suits him better, be expulsed with them, tell oh woe is me tales to future generations, some shifty people engrandize tales over the years
Rinse and repeat.
Not to be a prick but it’s ‘scape goat’ and ‘aggrandise’.
All the plagues were based on the idea of overpowering a different Egyptian god's domain. It's wasn't limited to just Ra.
the sun illuminates and banishes shadows. so all secrets are unveiled and nothing challenges the order of society. police state included. you will be a small cog in the machine, you will lay bare all your most inner and private thoughts to society and you will be happy or get burned.
Read about the Solar Anus.
Thats literally the Catholic church, every "Sun"day
Listening to a guy say the same 5 sentences 10 times each before he gives you a cracker isn't sinister, just boring. Sinister is
, where a god holds sunlight hostage to mass human sacrifices, or
, where you could end up in a terrifying divine police state.
the catholic church being a pagan sun cult while claiming they arent is pretty sinister
You are not a true Christian, heretic.
Ok, listen, I'm not gonna insult you directly but I will do it in a roundabout way. What's the name for sunday in greek? What meaning does it have in greek? Enjoy the realization. Now then, when did the association of sun god started in Europe? When it reached Rome. Why did it happen? Social osmosis like plenty of other roman and non-roman celebrations Christianity has. Why does it happens? Control.
karaoke, aka the day you sing your little heart out in church
Imagine global warming doomsayers cranked up to 11.
the sun is a deadly lazer
aztecs
>preventing sky demons from destroying the world
>while thinning out inferior, illiterate savage tribes
>>>"sinister"
That is the claim, but any religion which demands mass murder on a nonending basis is, by its nature, sinister. Apparently the actual people from the actual historical cultures the Triple Alliance subjugated and terrorized agreed, since they jumped on the first opportunity to throw off their conquerors and slaughter their priests and people in the streets.
It becomes less sinister if you CAN take their claims at face value in a fictional setting, but that's still a pretty grimdark setting, one where human souls are fuel in an endless war against entropy. Kinda Dark Souls adjacent, but way more hardcore.
>That is the claim, but any religion which demands mass murder on a nonending basis is, by its nature, sinister.
The aztecs for most of their history were nothing like that, though. Traditionally, human sacrifice was reserved for special festivals every 3 decades (the aztecs believed that history was broken up into 30 year chunks, and there was a fire refreshing ritual they did to divine where the world could end in the next 30 years or no. Most of the time they answer was 'no' so they were chill, if the answer was 'yes' you got a big sacrifice to stave it off). The exceptions being special individuals, because much like the norse the aztecs had different aterlives based on how you dies. For lack of a better term, 'aztec vahalla' had 3 ways to get in: die in battle, die in childbirth, or be sacrificed. So honored people in old age would get a respectful sacrifice to free pass them into the best afterlife.
The mass human sacrifice thing was highly unusual, and the spanish had reports of it because the Aztec empire was already imploding. A combination of plague and drought was absolutely fricking their shit up, and as order broke down the religious fundamentalist doomsday cultists took over and said "everythings fricked, and the only way the gods are going to un-frick this is if we pay them in blood until things get better". The sort of religious hysteria thats happened in Europe plenty of times across half a dozen different religions. People get desperate enough, thy start doing insane shit in the name of god.
Remembering that as the sum total of the Aztec empire is a lot like if the only thing the Romans were ever known for was murdering each other so much their empire collapsed, and no one ever mentioned the many accomplishments of rome or its centuries of history.
>Remembering that as the sum total of the Aztec empire is a lot like if the only thing the Romans were ever known for was murdering each other so much their empire collapsed, and no one ever mentioned the many accomplishments of rome or its centuries of history.
Because Rome improved their conquests such that their infrastructure is quite literally in use over a thousand years later. Meanwhile, anthropological record concedes that conquest by the Triple Alliance noticeably decreased technology and living standard in subjugated people.
That's because Rome needed slaves, which requires oversight from the masterlands and military bases to maintain, and Nahua needed vassals, which requires an obsessive amount of tax bookkeeping and projection of soft power. The former means you build up satellites, and the latter means you kneecap rivals.
The Triple Alliance was the cultural equivalent of a tumor is more the point, and if anything not enough of their people/culture was destroyed.
>Aztec sacrifice is literally witchhunting bro
Because the Vatican spent 20 years building a massive pyramid just to burn witches on
I don't think you appreciate how brief the Aztec empire was. The whole thing from the founding of the Triple Alliance to the Spanish conquest was under a century.
Within that context, yeah, the amount of time they spend doing human sacrifices was a pretty significant percentage.
And the mayans, too:
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/maya-nobility-performed-bloodletting-sacrifices-to-strengthen-a-dying-sun-god-during-solar-eclipses
also early bronze age Euros, if Stonehenge / Pömmelte / etc. were all solar temples
I came up with an awesome religion based on the idea, but you wouldn't get it so I won't bother.
>I have nothing but want to yap anyway
I dunno man let me cut some hearts out while I think about it.
The sun burns
Shouldn't be hard to extrapolate on that
the suns rays cause testicular cancer
I'm not good at prose so I deleted a shit role play of a sun cultist I did, but here are the core tenets I came up with
>life is a parasite leeching off of the power of the Sun
>we must help the world get closer to the Sun so that its cleansing rays can scour clean the filth of life
>His holy radiance will burn away the sins of this world and leave nothing left
>we will all be one in the embrace of the radiance
Essentially make them crazy about bringing the sun closer or intensifying it somehow to the point that it will kill everything so the cultists can reach their promised next world made of light. Have them meditate in the desert until they dehydrate themselves to the point of collapse.
that's similar to the frenzied flame from elden ring
Could have it so that the sun god isn't worshipped because it gives but because it threatens to take away. It's worshippers aren't worshipping because they like the sun god, they fear it taking the sun away. Perhaps it wasn't the original sun god but rather took the position, either by being the god of a conquering people who was enforced upon the population or if you're going fantasy it was some butthole adventurer who stabbed the sun god in the face.
All rituals and worship is made out of fear with constant threats of what will happen if the worshippers stop. Sacrifices are common and its clergy is made up by a favored people, either a ruling outsider group or if we're going the fantasy route the gods surviving descendants, who expolits the populace.
I don't think it even needs to be that complicated. If the sun is "alive" then it it's not a stretch to assume it would have a elder god attitude, either uncaring or casually malicious. and with the ability to destroy the earth effortlessly.
and then maybe the sun cult isn't so much worshipping the sun as working to make sure it doesn't notice us.
I remember some novel having the Sun as a sinister eldritch being where "Solar Flares" were actually moments when the Sun decided to DESERVED to be seen and venerated. Anyone caught outside during a flare would be compelled to stare up into the star without protection, beholding it with awe that gradually turned into maddened fanaticism as their eyes burned out.
The Sun is a controlling, manipulative presence that fought for control of the world in the past and their victory was so complete that we cannot even imagine a world where The Sun did not have absolute power over us.
There is a reason why every pantheon of gods gives special reverence to the sun. There is a reason why the earth revolves the sun, why life is dependent on the light of the sun to survive. It is not because this is how things always were, it is not because this state of being is NATURAL. There was a time before the sun, and then the sun came and broke the world. Bent us to its will. Cast aside its competitors and reforged the rules of creation such that our only choices were to bow and scrape before the sun or perish. Night only exists on a constant reminder of how much you need the sun, how easily you could lose everything without its... 'mercy'.
For a man to worship the sun is the same as a slave thanking its master for the shackles. But this status quo has been around so long, the victory of the sun so complete, that we cannot imagine any other way to be. The sun had made sure that we have forgotten all it has taken from us.
>The Comet Star is a star whichs pretend to be the sun. It has caged the sun and steals its power. That's why it shines brighter than other stars.
>Mitra is warm for those which follow the tenets of moderation. If you perform wicked acts, He gazes upon you. And His attention burns brighter than the glassmaker's furnace. The lands of Gog and Magog were as green and plentiful as Nodia, until they shunned the light and performed forbidden rituals under the land. Mitra stared at them until the hidden sites were laid bare, boiling the rivers and melting the stones. Only stone trees and glass corpses remain, to remind us of the consequences of having too little or too much of anything.
Just make the sun evil?
just make it about everything bad the sun does. easy.
>drought
>Skincancer
>desertification
>aztec blood screfice
Go the full cleansing fire route, cliches exist because they work. Burn things down at the first mention of heresy. Extremely isolationist and ignorant.
They want to make the world like Arizona during summer permanently like Dark Sun.
Christianity is a pretty fricked up solar death, especially the Catholic aspect of it
For the last time, it's the "Son", not the "Sun" you philistine.
There's a Megami Tensei game about this, but the introduction of the idea is a radical enough departure from what came before it that it probably constitutes a spoiler.
make some setting similar to Dark Sun, with a sun slowly turning into Red Giant, that will eventually result with turning entire world into scorched, inhabitable desert and here you go -you have sinister sun worshiping doom cult
the big thing I can come up with is making it harsh and judgmental.
give the sun church an inquisition and crusades and make them as eager to crack heretic skulls and burn the leftovers as the Sisters of Battle
Imagine you live in the desert, then ask that question again.
Don't fall into the trap of making the sun god evil, but instead make them neutral. Make it uncaring of what mortals want, as it brings both life and suffering in equal amounts. So most in the setting may worship the sun for bountiful harvests, the ever important light and warmth of the dawn, and shining truth over the shadow of lies.
Then, have a sun worshipper see how it starts fires, creates thirst, can blind those who stare at its brilliance for too long, and brings all beings to dust in the end. Have it be the giver of life and death, and have that sun worshipper believe that the Sun's blessings of pain have been forgotten by the mortals for too long.
TRANSMIT - initiate the ka signal - RECEIVE - initiate the Book of the Dead - FOR HE WOULD ARISE A WALKING DISEASE, A PLAGUE UPON MANKIND - illumine the Cult of Aten - WITNESS - The Mummy.
Frick off, slopspammer.
You could always play into the fact that the Sun has ionizing radiation, so overexposure to the holy light the priests use can cause cancers if someone isn't properly protected.
The Morning Light from The Secret World. All of their worship focuses on light, looking upwards towards the sun and shit like that.
Their gods eat stars. They're worshiping the banquet their deities are about to feast on.
What if they don't worship THE sun, but A sun?
The cult could be working to make your one sun planet part of a binary system or eliminate a rival sun.
The sun might not even be that bad a god but the church of the sun might have beef with a country or different church that could make the sunny bois the "bad guys".
>What if they don't worship THE sun, but A sun?
Les Invisibles would like to know your location and make you an offer to join the Blue Öyster Cult.
The desert people who follow this cult should be sinisterly involved in pulling strings financially and politically behind the scenes through corruption to push worldwide domination because they believes themselves to be special and superior, all others being fit only to serve them.
Anyone who lifts the curtain though finds they are a cannibal cult that sacrifices children to their "divine" entity, that sufficient digging will show is actually just a powerful demon and the cultists themselves are commonly afflicted with mutations, schizophrenia, psychotic delusions, etc...
Yahweh isn't a sun god He's a storm god
Dark Souls did a pretty good job of making sun worship sinister, from the self-immolation of undead schmucks to keep the age of fire going and the gods in power, to Solaire hollowing and succumbing to the sunlight maggot.
Go full Mayan-Aztec. Make the Sun leader of the natural calendar. Then make its primary gimmick be apocalypses - not just empire-scale ones, but normal, personal ones. The day Uncle Ben dies is prophesied. The first time Tom Marvolo Riddle crafts a Horcrux is predicted. The death of the last of the First Men is accounted for.
If every horrible thing in history is known in advance, at least in theory, it follows that the Sun's most devout servants are people who don't mind horrible things. They're natural events, like bad weather or reading dry historical documents full of random, fake-sounding names. Who knows how fricked up the schemes people like that come up with are?
Just have the sun be evil duh?
Maybe don't use AI slop to begin with, gaymunch.
There's the dark side and the light side.
There are two wolves in you.
The light side tells you the dark side is evil and you need to feed the light side wolf inside of you.
The big goody good guy wants you to break out of an illusionary world you didn't know you were trapped in before he and his agents of enlightenment told you.
The light side leads the dark side.
Set it up like this:
>bronze age world populated by local demigods, like gods for major rivers, gods for lunar phases, etc
>each god is pretty minor in power but very much a real entity. some are darker than others.
>sun worship starts when some dinky little rural tribe makes an agricultural breakthrough
>their form of "worship" is more scientific reasoning than ritual and they quickly forget about their local demigod
>advanced agriculture turns them into the dominant faction in this setting, a more modern and imperial power than the others
*story begins here*
>a violent sect of the sun people starts killing all the other demigods
>players have to find out their goals and affiliations
>it seems they take their symbolic religion literally and cannot accept other gods
>lean into the catholic church cliche here
>player campaign starts looking like a quest to discredit this sect and return peace to the empire
>but they uncover the truth near the end: this radical murderous sect is actually right
>the sun is a slumbering elder god
>their promise of a 24-hour day is a real possibility and threatens ecological disaster
>mission: avert this very real apocalypse by putting the sun back to sleep
Take a deep enough dive into the most ancient religions and you'll find in most cases (not all, notably Egyptian) the principle deity worshipped was a storm god, specifically because of its relationship with the sun. The sun is amoral, neither good nor evil, necessary but capable of great harm, and omni-present during the day. The storm god filled the important role of mediating how much the sun bore down on the earth, offering shade with clouds, and necessary relief from drought via the rains. From that simple relationship, the storm god became associated with agriculture and protection, and from them both fertility and war, and with all those aspects they were the most common tutelary gods.
So to make an evil sun cult you just take what the storm god is protecting from and centre around it. The sun brings drought, blindness, oppressive heat, exposure of secrets. Very easy things to call upon when you want to curse an enemy. What better way to slight a rival city-state than to call upon the sun to bring drought to their crops?
The sun blinds you. Its light burns your skin, bakes the earth, dries grass and crops to kindling for brushfires. You can't hide from the sun. You can't stop it from rising every, single day. It's a giant ball of cancer-giving flames, an enormous eye in the sky - you really can't make that seem sinister?
Worshiping the sun makes it bigger and brighter until the righteous are raptured and the rest are dusted or so they believe. Maybe summon a flare to scour the world. Sun staring as a divine process that blinds you to this world but allows you to see the true face wherever you go
Team Flare could probably be retooled into Sun-Worshippers.
Here's how to make an evil religion or dystopic society
>make a benevolent, comfortable, awesome culture
>over generations, turn its values ("the sun is the source of life") into dogmas ("sunlight destroys evil")
>take dogmas to their grim, inflexible conclusions (The sun must shine on all corners of society - metaphorically and literally - to keep it clean)
and so
>low castes are not permitted to have roofs; church militias walk along elevated paths above their homes and are permitted to spy on everything
>criminals are punished by Sun Trials, execution by exposure
>the consumption is forbidden of anything that grows under the ground
>casting shade upon someone is impolite; casting shade upon a noble is a crime
Team Magma but less land more sun
In FFXIV there are creatures known as Sineaters who are brought about due to an excess of Light energy.
The picture show just two of them, but there are plenty more.
dense FF14 lore/narrative/cosmology spoilers for shadowbringers and endwalker, imma spoilerblock basically all of this.
Yes, but those shadowbringers spoiler monsters are light-aspected mana, not SUN. The sun is actually entirely fricking unimportant in FF14, "light" and "dark" are the two "polarities" of mana. FF14's setting has both "elemental aspect" which can be neutral or towards one of the elements, unless you're sufficiently advanced in black magic to "embody multiple elements at once" in the spell Paradox. Unrelated to the elements is Light/Passive/Umbral and Dark/Active/Astral polarity, and as you get closer to 100% Light/Dark polarity you're more looking at the behaviour of the mana rather than the elemental association. Sin-Eaters are what happens when the Light/Passive/Umbral mana that makes up the person's soul is sufficiently high that the soul itself goes from "neutral" to "light-tainted" in a runaway, self-reinforcing manner.[spoiler]
tl;dr FF14's Light and Dark are nothing to do with the sun. FF14 actually doesn't really give a frick about heavenly bodies, as (endwalker spoilers) it turns out BOTH moons of the world are artificial, one created by technologically-advanced buttholes some few thousand years ago at most, I forget when Allag was, and the "natural" older moon looks natural because it was created with ancient creation-magic by Hydaelyn when she was first summoned, to imprison Zodiark. Neither moon is real. The two most powerful being in the game are a Light and a Dark summon, but they are unrelated to the sun or moon except 1 being trapped on the moon. The only people who care about the sun or moon(s) outside of folklore are Astrologians, and we're not sure how they're meant to work since their lore seems to have been tweaked to take into account the removal of diurnal sect from gameplay. Generally, any use of the word "star" is limited to "upon this star" which is in-setting lingo for "on this planet"[/spoiler]
>Yes, but those shadowbringers spoiler monsters are light-aspected mana, not SUN.
Considering that the Sin-eaters primary colour scheme is mostly marble white, with golden highlights, and several of them have twisted angelic forms. Things that are usually associated with the Sun.
Not only that, but the presence of the highest ranks of Sin-eaters (Light-wardens) causes the land to be in a perpetual daytime, so much that the removal of one of them causes the night to once again grace that land indicates that the Light and the Sun are pretty close tied together in this instance.
I agree with the permanent daytime thing, but I disagree at the angelic = sun argument. There is some amount of overlap between sun iconography and some bits of catholicism, the classic Monstrance is very much "we didn't steal any sun-god traditions, honest", but in general principle and especially when it comes to japanese interpretations of christianity, I don't think they naturally link angels to the sun or daylight as much as "the sky and the heavens".
but we're probably just gonna have to agree to disagree here, I don't see it and you do and that's A-OK, that's what symbolism and interpretation are about.
I felt like in shadowbringers overall the day/night thing was a bit underplayed, the people clearly want the night back and the night's blessed are a cool group, but they sort of take a back seat to the sin eater threat, eulmore/vauthry, and then of course the best final-act villain in a final fantasy game period.
I think the most important bit though is we don't really have much detail about how the frick the sun WORKS in ff14. Is it a main phase star like ours? Is it smaller? How far away is it? Who made it and put it there?
All the focus on the moons in various bits of plot has taken away from getting much explanation of it, but honestly I don't think the setting needs detailed explanations of the sun to be good, because it's never really mattered.
Why is /tg/ obsessed with this topic? I've already seen this thread several times.
Anti-Christian thought already likes to present the idea of God as an insufferably obsessive busybody who watches and judges everything you do. Take the idea of that kind of god and apply it to a natural force that is ALWAYS reaching you as long as you're out in the open, and staying in its direct attention is painful, draining, and often deadly.
The Sun is a tyrant watching over you and to be watched is to suffer.
Focus more on the blinding light, droughts and burning aspects.
have them sacrifice people by tying them up and frying them in the sun, for example.
The Sun is evil
The Sun as a source of overwhelming light that forces you to convert to its influence could be an angle. In a similar vein there's When Dawn Breaks from SCP.
Focusing lenses to make lasers.
Play up the notion of the Sun as a god/goddess of destruction or holy judgement, complete with a doomsday cult.
-The world becomes a pile of crap because people are bad/sinful/naughty
-The Powers of Good need to reboot the world with seals/scrolls/The Final Battle/lots and lots of fire (especially Fire for the Sun Lads (TM))
-Better World of Happiness is just one World-shaped bonfire away.
Get some inquisitors, some witch-finders, lots of scalded penitents/flagellants with flaming whips. Have a crazy sun cleric with a crown of molten gold call down concentrated Solar Beams on "the wicked" like orbital lasers. Put your full back into it, and don't be afraid to go outside without sunscreen; The New Day is coming. With Justice and Vengance for All.
There's a Call of Cthulhu adventure named Sun Spots that deals with various sun cults. Could find some ideas worth taking from it
The sun is a giant ball of poisonous fire. Its only by having a shield from the planet herself that we are spared painful death from its gaze. And even the shield given by out world doens't protect completely, we still suffer burns if we remain in the sun too long. The sun scorches plants and flesh, tears gases from our atmosphere through bombarding us with a constant stream of its hateful breath.
Look at how the Aztecs did it with their Sun God, Huitzilopochtli: daily nourishment of human blood and hearts.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SternSunWorshippers
Veneration of the sun requires staring at it as much as possible, even through pain. Prayer and rituals banish the rain so more Sun can be seen at as many times of the day as possible. Expansion of the church by missionaries bleaches the countryside and desertifies as they end up forcing more sun exposure.
Raiment is as pure white as possible, or silvered, to reflect the light of the sun.
Activity in the night is considered taboo, because the Sun cannot see you and you it, therefore what you're doing must be sinful. No one in the church is allowed to commit to any activity last sundown or before sunup.
Bringing sunlight to dark areas is a holy act, the underdark is literal hell and conquering it in the name of the Sun, bringing into the daylight by any means, is the ultimate end-times goal. It is prophecised that the world will end when the earth caves in two and all lands are laid bare to meet the Sun.
Skin cancer is a sign of blessing, and the holiest vestment in the church.
Shoo AI slopper
dark souls