The Promised Land?
At Big Horn's words, something stirred in Pan Long's mind.
That wasn't a term people used lightly. It had a famous story behind it.
He had once watched a popular educational video about this "Promised Land."
According to legend, an ancestor of the Jews had been so devout that God promised him his descendants would possess a land flowing with milk and honey. The Jews called that place the "Promised Land"—the land God had promised them.
Of course, there was no God in reality, and there could be no "Promised Land." It was merely a justification the Jews had found for invasion. People had done much the same throughout history and across the world. There was nothing remarkable about it.
But the problem was that the three great religions that began with Judaism had all inherited this mythology about God. The so-called "Promised Land" had taken on extraordinary religious significance. For more than two thousand years, the Abrahamic Religions had fought until heads broke and blood flowed over Canaan, which they regarded as the "Promised Land." The bones of those killed in battle could probably have covered it several layers deep.
And that wasn't the only problem. In Western culture, whenever people found a desirable place they wanted to seize, they often trotted out the same fallacy and called it the "Promised Land."
In short, by their logic, any good place worth fighting over was somewhere God had promised them long ago. Even stories about interstellar adventures often called an alien planet with a pleasant environment and abundant resources a "Promised Land."
...God sure had his fingers in a lot of pies.
Big Horn had called Zion the "Promised Land." He surely hadn't said that off the top of his head. Barring some surprise, it was probably