Here's the original from 1987's Rogue Trader:

""It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the vast Imperium of Man for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die."

Definitely a Jesus figure. And a pretty subtly done one.

And you look at their "God" and its literally a dead guy on a cross.

You might not be too impressed.

Why would atheists be offended?

I mean, that's exactly what a "slur" is. They are not coined with the recipient's comfort in mind, and saying them can sometimes provoke exactly the sort of fight you imagine.

But yes, violent consequences ought to be particularly unsurprising to an American, since the US is, by Western standards, an exceptionally violent country. [1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9535176/ (table 2)

I think the burden of proof goes the other way? Obviously there were christians in England. But the British Empire really just was not a "Christian Empire" in any way that works in fiction. All the archetypes are secular! Tweedy bemonacled professors, Victorian romantics sharing cucumber sandwiches with their love triangles, gritty-but-cultured naval officers sipping tea and exploiting natives, Sherlock Holmes, for Christ's sake! (pun intended).

Like, this is a very deep well of narrative source material and like none of it is explicitly religious in even the most minimal way. Like, where outside of 40k is anyone trying to construct an explicitly "British" cult warrior along the lines of a Space Marine[1]? I just don't see it. And if this is the only example, maybe it's just a bad example.

Basically: the idea that 40k is based around British ennui about its imperial history is mostly a meme. It just fails as analysis in my eyes. 40k is about drunk nerds laughing too hard about weird stuff, and the analysis was a retcon picked up by atheists like us to flog our own particular culture wars.

[1] And to the extent you can find better analogs, they're to American grunts in the 20th century and certainly not redcoats!

In "The Adventure of the Empty House": He attributes his survival over Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls to "the blessing of God."

Finally, in "His Last Bow," "There's an east wind coming," he tells Watson. "Such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

"Basically everyone (except you, I guess) views Holmes as an almost perfect expression of the Victorian secular rennaisance man archetype. I mean, duh."

Like I posted above, Sherlock Holmes is a Christian in the books. Have you read them? He just doesn't belong to a denomination.

"Holmes using christian-derived rhetorical idioms is, needless to say, not evidence that Conan Doyle was describing a religious cult!"

I didn't say it was, I was pointing out to you that all your supposedly irreligious Victorian archetypes were explicitly religious. Your tweedy professors from Oxford were the ones leading the charge against secularization, irl.

Not to mention that you left out a ton of Victorian archetypes that are all directly related to religious professions, probably cause you didn't know they existed. You seem to have a very shallow pop culture view of the actual character archetypes that came out of the British Empire.

" But that said, if your argument for the British Empire being a christian totalitarian cult hangs on the fact that the infantry and marines wore different uniforms..."

This is just stupid. Obviously my point was that British Marines wore blue, just like the original Marines in Rogue Trader did. Im sure thats just a coincidence coming from a UK game maker.

I also never said the British Empire was totalitarian. I said it was a Christian Empire under a Christian God, unfriendly to other religions. That is fact. 40k is a satire, which means they embellish certain aspects in order to show their ridiculous nature. That's what satire is! You obviously don't understand it.

You have no idea what you're talking about. American soldiers did not fight under an Empire that modelled itself after the Roman one. British soldiers did.

You really think British Marines were eating cucumber sandwiches and talking the finer points of philosophy? What on earth makes you think US marines are closer than the British Imperial ones were.