If the borg were a religion

Sign me up. Free healthcare and housing for a body I cram cookies into sounds like a deal but what is their stance on aborgtions?

They're pro-choice and pro-contraception.

They understand that abstinence is futile.
- pro-contraption
Yeah, but no privacy. Even when you go to the little Borg's room.

No thanks I'm already a member of Unity

Ass immolation?

Is that like a lava enema?

This is the end of Season 2 of Picard!! Borg Queen only assimilates those you want to be assimilated.

"Hugh bet I do!"

In my head cannon, that's more or less how the borg started. I can see it starting off as a much more basic networked community that started off legitimately respecting people's wishes to join/not to join. But over time it grew and changed, and become so invasive to the point they snowballed into the borg we know and love today.

And if we REALLY want to speculate, their first act of violence/force may have been against some entity that sought to attack them for being new and different. And whatever war or conflict that turned into ended up shifting the values of the borg such that forced assimilation was then seen as morally acceptable. And once that's condoned, why stop?

maybe they just assimilated hostile species, but I think they've always been kind of invasive.

I imagine the borg started as a peacefull cybernetic species who radicalised them self or their ai made some mistakes maybe. Or they started as an ai that became evil and assimilated biological life on it's quest to perfection
- I could see that too. Either way, it's a fun thought experiment to question how such an entity comes into being. Because surely the starting point looked a lot different given that they've assimilated (and therefore been changed by) thousands of species.
I've had a fan fic on the back of my head where the Borg start out as a small group exploring networked community like that, but some of the members are more radical than others. One believes that people need to be brought under collective influence in order to solve their social problems and sees individuality as a problem. However, when the more virulent form of the collective gets going, she becomes a hypocrite who refuses to subsume her own individuality to the collective while inflicting the same on everyone else.

That's why the Borg Queen seems so contradictory. She actually is.
- I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who's had thoughts about the borg origins.

“Soul soliciting pig fuckers!”

Reminds me of that time the Hegemonising Swarm was converted to the Proselytising swarm

Yeah but the Borg would be breaking into houses to force convert folk.

Then again those xtian door knocking religions are often very fond of 'mission trips' to forcibly convert folk for the cost of the 'humanitarian aid' they provide, which isn't unlike the Borg at all.

If they went the voluntary route, like most religions, people would have much fewer problems. It's the kidnapping and forcible assimilation that gets people upset (understandably).

"Let us tell you the advantages of adding your uniqueness to our own. Have you thought of what will happen if you don't join the collective before you die?"