“God created the world from which humans arose with neither good nor evil in it. Now, standing between Heaven and Hell, it is your duty to break the balance for good.”
Mana, February 4
Conviction is intended to have a darker tone than most recent society games, but that does not mean it is intended to feel hopeless or entirely pessimistic. One of the main themes is the ways people can respond to tyrrany. When a force much greater than yourself is working to keep control and keep you in your place, what do you do to have a positive impact on the world anyway?
The religion of this setting is very much intended to have aspects worth criticising, but at the same time, we want there to be a variety of views that are reasonable for player characters to take, including devotion and trust in God/Heaven, and not. Also, the IC religion is not intended as an analogue for a specific OC religion. It very much draws inspiration most heavily from the Abrahamic religions, because that is what we are most familiar with, both directly and from other fiction, but much of it is its own distinct thing. In this way, we hope that the criticisms of the IC religion that are a significant theme in the game are not perceived as overly hostile to OC religions or religion in general.
As government control of information is part of the way in which totalitarian regimes retain control of the population, and the difficulty in sorting the true will of Heaven from human interpretation is one of the themes of the game, we the GMs intend to be unreliable narrators. The contents of the wiki, especially the IC pages, may reflect what your characters will have been led to believe rather than what we intend to actually be true about the setting. Of course, this only applies to information about the setting, not OC things like the CAT or privacy policies.