In The Hound of the Baskervilles: When he shoots the hound just in time to save Sir Henry, Watson notes that Holmes "breathed a prayer of gratitude."
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.