It's a reasonably firm sci-fi game, about exploring the stars, in which Weird Barely Explicable Things Do Happen, but the presence of extremely modern Earth-style religions does not feel right at all. Especially when the three immediate examples are given in three completely turn-off-ish examples of "Holier Than Thou", "You're Allowed To Be Wrong", and "Charity For Religion's Sake", all of which can get fuuuuuucked.
WHY are there only two major religions, and why are, initially, solely focused on getting others to believe their shit? Fucking player on-boarding. Immediate red flags if it were an IRL 'religion'. Where are the PERSONAL religions? Where are the xeno-focused religions? None of it feels true to the game world, but it feels like it's trying so hard to convince my character that it's real, which rings every alarm bell and raises every red flag for 'CON! IT'S A CON! IT'S JUST TWO HALVES OF MODERN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY!'
Why are the two major religions seemingly theologically diametric? Why is the game asking ME to give them my belief when I've been given nothing to encourage that - not been raised as them, not been shown anything that could suggest it's true, etc. Aliens exist in this world - God's gonna have to do a LOT more than 'visions' and gravity powers when possibly psychic aliens exist.
I've not made it far enough in the game to know if the Enlightenment has some shitty stuff behind it, the """community""" focused one, but it's exceedingly jarring for me to see Fantasy-level belief like "oh of course the gods are real" in a world where... They're not confirmed to be real. At all. And FAR more likely, real-world sources exist for all of the supposed elements. It's Earth-Future, and they're not even the same 'god' as from Earth (I think).
It's simultaneously super fucking jarring and in your face, and everyone treats it - including their claims that it's ALL REAL - with equal seriousness to the one that is literally (AFAIK) just about community.
Like. Bethesda said they consulted with real world theologists and shit for this, but what it 100% feels like is that Bethesda consulted with Christians. I want sci-fi future weird cool religion. This is just fuckin' Space Christianity: Choose Your Flavour, and I'm more wearied and turned off by it than literally anything else in the game. I don't dislike religion - I dislike belief in something completely unconfirmable. Personal religion, belief, source of personal comfort and strength, etc - all good stuff. Genuinely believed claims that a thing exists that you cannot prove? That a thing can do things that cannot be reliably replicated? Literally zero proof? That's subjectivity, and belief without proof and replication is called Bad Science and that Gets People Killed.
It's just weird and not fun to me, because it's asking me to do all the theological belief and faith parts of religion, with none of the proof parts (which they basically leave on the table as 'you could choose to believe this is why this is happening', which is both meaningless to me, and a waste of my time in a game where you could have LITERALLY MADE IT REAL), and dampens the rest of the game by asking my character to make-believe, which is not the person in the situation that is supposed to make believe - that'd be me. Too many layers, not enough irony.
