#As I have bitched and moaned about before there's a tendency for fantasy atheists to be written as having like. identical worldviews

[serpentface]

What are Faiza’s thoughts/feelings on (presumably?) seeing human sacrifice performed, or in theory, irt her religious beliefs?

It's a little complicated, but less than might be assumed.

This IS something she's witnessed personally, and been involved in the process (not participating in the rites themselves, but in organizing them). But she has no sensitization to it- she's grown up seeing people executed, regular everyday animal sacrifices, and the yearly dry season human offering. It's something that is entirely separated from the concept of murder (which is regarded as abhorrent, as murder is in basically every culture (it's just that definitions of what types of killing is and is not murder varies)) and nothing disturbing or unusual in of itself.

It's a fairly small part of a much broader framework of religious practices that she ultimately does not believe in. Her reaction is more 'this doesn't actually have an intrinsic point, but it is what it is and has some practical benefits'. Her views on the Wardi faith are conflicted but overall positive. Even if she doesn't Believe in 90% of its core elements, she sees it as Beneficial- it's the Only thing that unifies the entire Imperial Wardi cultural sphere. This is important to her both on the level that Imperial Wardin is a tenuous union of city-states and tributaries and dozens of peoples and that its stability relies on its shared religion, and that it's a grand equalizer- its benefits cross class and ethnic lines within this rather broad cultural sphere.

So like, when it comes to humans being ritually killed, she doesn't think there's a still-extant God that enters their bodies or that their deaths materially enable the seasonal cycles to continue and bring the rains back. But she does think it has a Point, in the same capacity that she doesn't believe most of the core tenants of the faith have material reality, but the religion's role in society has material benefits. It has a point, and it's not murder, so she ultimately has little beef with the concept.

The instance where it crossed the line to 'this is fucked up' is in the context of the drought. With the drought intensifying, the usual one-off one-person annual dry season offering was extended to dozens of people (which Was officially condoned). In addition, as the years went on and civil unrest intensified, there were instances of civilian suicides and murders that were clearly attempted offerings (as well as suicides and murders that were at least loosely Framed as offerings but definitely weren't). In the fifth year, over a hundred Ephenni Galenii offered themselves up in an independent mass-offering (condoned by the priesthood but not by the Usoma). And yet the drought wore on.

THIS all was disturbing to her. This wasn't the faith functioning as intended, this was symptomatic of impending collapse. This was a waste of life that was TRULY for nothing. The officially condoned sacrifices were clear and desperate flailing by the Usoma and/or priesthoods to spiritually address the drought and famine (in addition to really, really poor attempts to practically address food and water insecurity and social unrest), and the civilian sacrificial murders and suicides were this unrest and mass despair crystalized into horrifically needless, pointless death and brutality. (These civilian killings were widely seen as horrifying by devout believers as well btw, just because human sacrifice exists in a culture doesn't mean people think religious killing and suicide is Okay And Normal In Every Situation)

The horror of All That was one of the motivating factors in her role in organizing the pilgrimage as a more controlled, intentional, and directed use of religious practice to reassure the public, that would also attempt to practically re-unify the divided priesthood/military/royal family. The seven-beast offering is a long established concept (rather than desperate flailing of 'add more people to the dry season offering' or 'get a hundred Galenii to drown themselves in a muddy riverbed'), the pilgrimage format is a public show of unity and requires significant internal diplomacy to function.

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I'm also going to just like take this opportunity to clarify her worldview:

She ascribes to a culturally specific form of atheism that posits that God fully, permanently died in the act of creation, Its death kicked off the cycles of the world as we know it but Its spirit no longer has any capacity to interact with the world. The existence of a creator god is reckoned as self-evident, but its continuing presence in the world is disputed. Therefore, the vast majority of religious practice (which is entirely built around interactions with God's continuously cycling spirit) has no intrinsic effect.

This stems from a niche branch of materialist Burri and Wardi philosophy. It's a very uncommon belief (and has its own subvariants- some extreme materialists dismiss the existence of the soul itself (God died and there is no soul so It's Gone) and some that characterize God as merely absent (God died and Its spirit is absent from the world, in the same capacity that the souls of the dead are absent from the world once they successfully move on) (Faiza falls into the latter camp). The heavy prioritization of orthopraxy over orthodoxy means that a person holding these beliefs in of itself is not often going to be a major cultural issue so long as they perform expected practices, but standards of orthodoxy are higher in the priesthoods and like. Her entire role is as a priestess. It's not something she can be open about. It's also not something she can talk about with any of her personal relations (she was introduced to the concept after maintaining contact with her childhood tutor and regularly discussing philosophy with him, but the guy was elderly and died when she was in her mid 20s.)

This translates to her being more open to questioning other elements of her cultural framework, but the rest of her worldview is fairly normative, there's nothing else she rejects as thoroughly as the continuing existence of God. She believes in the soul, ghosts, evil spirits, luck, curses, and spiritual pollution (though should be noted that the Ways she believes in them are influenced by a materialist philosophical lens, and as such her interpretations are non-standard). She also thinks there's some truth in the folk magic practices that attempt to influence luck and curses (these traditions rarely actually involve God in their framework), and the ones she rejects are on a more typical class-aligned basis of being 'Foolish Commoner Superstition', not in a 'magic is not real' capacity.

So like it's a mixed bag where she thinks the religion itself has material points and value, and she takes pride in being an Odonii. But she's still locked in a life of performing endless rites that have no internal meaning to her and give no sense of comfort beyond self-assurance that they're for a greater good, giving hollow reassurances to her religiously paranoid brother and not being able to fully connect to her extremely devout true believer sister. It's isolating, and it wears on her.