Equestrian Religion

I am a sucker for world-building, and often think about the wider setting of pretty much every bit of fiction I watch, read, or play.

When I finally buckled under and started following FIM and it's fandom, the idea of 'Celestia as a god' started one of the most bizarre trains of thought I've ever had. It influenced a chapter in one of my fanfics, but I never got around to expounding on the idea as much as I've wanted to.

It makes you wonder what effect a god-figure, like Celestia potentially is, has on her subjects. The oldest ponies alive today grew up hearing stories of Celestia that were told by the then-oldest ponies alive. And this has been going on for uncounted generations. Even the unbroken rule of the longest-running dynasties in human history can't provide a perfect comparison to what effect a being like Celestia would have on a society and the psychology of its individual subjects.

You'd never see questions like this in a show rated for kids, but what exactly are the tenets of the Church of Celestia?

What kind of splinter cults and fringe groups result when those ideas are twisted?

And just how do the citizens of Ponyville react when one of them says, with all seriousness, that she has a tea-date with the Goddess?

There's a goodly number of fics in that, if I could just get around to writing them...