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This is a follow up to this question:

Why would a priesthood of a world religion worship a different god from their followers?

This organization is the only official religious order in this setting. Although It has no official power within governments, it is widely revered as the voice of the main god and is deeply entrenched in civilized society. it operates as a priesthood, it also has many other functions. One branch operates as a police force, investigating crimes related to the supernatural. Another operates as a military order, defending the world from large outside invasions. Still another is an humanitarian organization, running shelters, hospitals, and the like or focuses on keeping the peace between countries.

This organization only accepts young children into its ranks. These are taken from their families at a young age normally after they are born, and raised by the org. itself to become members. This is a mandatory requirement for all nations. Then they are placed to whatever order needs their services. There are many capable adults and experienced professionals around the world who are willing to assist the org in its goals due to them being widely influential in all walks of life. However, it refuses their services and forbids new members over a specific age group. This tradition has been the rule since its inception.

Why would this order, at their own expense, only take in kids as new members?

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    $\begingroup$ "These are taken from their families at a young age normally after they are born..." - what do you mean by "normally after they are born"? Do they sometimes take the mother pre-birth? There are practical difficulties if they separate child and mother before the infant is weaned... $\endgroup$
    – KerrAvon2055
    Sep 29, 2018 at 23:01
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    $\begingroup$ One word: janissaries. Ah, and... When you say that it doesn't have "official" power it does not mean that it doesn't have power in general. "Governments" are a rather modern (post-Renaissance) phenomenon; before the modern age states did not have "governments", they had rulers, and rulers had courts, possibly even an apparatus: but there was no "government". "Nations" in the way we understand them today are also a modern phenomenon; before 1600 or so nations were purely geographical entities, with no political dimension whatsoever. $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Sep 29, 2018 at 23:15
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    $\begingroup$ The trope of only accepting children is quite old. The Wizards of Earthsea only accepted young teenage boys. The Jedi Knights only accepted children. $\endgroup$
    – RonJohn
    Sep 30, 2018 at 2:34

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For most people, their primary loyalty is to their family. If you want maximum control over people in your organization, you need to be their family. So you adopt them as children so small they can't remember their birth families (age 3 will suffice and allow the children to be breastfed and have constant physical contact and be raised with love, which will help them be strong and healthy (physically and emotionally) for life).

Now you are the children's parents and the children are each other's siblings. If, when these children grow up, they're allowed to marry, their spouses will be other clergy. If they are allowed to breed, then their children will automatically be part of the order. As these clergy become the adults who run things, they will take in young children from the outside world and become their parents.

Pure and total loyalty built in to the system (though obviously there will always be exceptions).

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  • $\begingroup$ "The Priesthood is Mother, the Priesthood is Father." It works for religion just as well as for telepathy. $\endgroup$
    – Codes with Hammer
    Jun 7, 2021 at 19:46
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Education and training.

The form and rituals involved with the religious cult, together with the mental attitude requested to its priests, demand intensive and extensive training, lasting years to properly shape the brains of the priests.

No grown up can be molded and biased to the level of a fresh and clean child mind, therefore putting effort into educating an adult is just a waste of time and resources.

Yes, adults might get some partial training to understand the exterior form of the rites, but getting to the core requires starting as a child.

Therefore children are taken into the religious order as soon as possible.

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  • $\begingroup$ My old workplace basically tried to do this too. No experience about the workplace = they can treat you however they want. They would claim otherwise though. $\endgroup$
    – DKNguyen
    Dec 13, 2019 at 14:44
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  1. Charity. Orphans and unwanted children need a place to live and be raised.

  2. Purity. Those raised in the church are uncontaminated by outside influences.

  3. Influence. Younger sons of nobility, who would otherwise be disinherited and potentially cause trouble and rebellions now have a position of influence which gives their countries a sense of influence in the church while giving the church influence in national affairs. ( Common practice in the old empires, read the Book of Daniel )

  4. Loyalty. "Give us a child until he is 7, and he is ours for life." A proverb attributed to Catholic monks, who coincidentally took in orphans and unwanted children.

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They want to be save from infiltration.

Any adult who is asking to join the priest order might have ulterior motives. They might want to spy on the secret internal affairs of the org, abuse the influence of the org for their own benefit or attempt to change or destroy the org from the inside.

This is why they only recruit infants. It is impossible for an infant to already have a secret agenda.

If someone wants to plant a mole in the organization, they need to turn someone who is already in it. But that might be difficult because they were indoctrinated from birth to be loyal to the organization.

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Because their religion commands them

I'm aware this sounds a bit like a cop-out, but why does a religious order do anything really? Why do they congregate on Friday/Saturday/Sunday? Why don't they eat beef, or pork, or shellfish? Why do they preach what they preach? The answer is always going to be: It's part of their religion.

Even if their real motivation is not their religious beliefs but something more practical, their religion must (be made to) support their actions, or at the very least not forbid them.

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The context you provided suggests an answer: because anyone that has worshipped any other god is "unclean" and not worthy to worship the priesthood's god. Ergo, for someone to belong to the priesthood, they must be steeped in that, and only that, from a very young age.

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The priesthood has a specialized sacred language that they use for ritual and internal communication, distinct from the mundane languages of their world. Incorrect pronunciation during a ritual would be sacrilege. Lack of complete fluency would limit a priest's ability to participate in meetings etc.

Unlike medieval Latin, the sacred language is so sacred it is not taught or used outside the priesthood.

The ability to learn a language to full native speaker fluency, with no accent, ends relatively early in childhood. The infant recruits will be placed in an environment in which the sacred language is the main language, so that will be their native language. One or more mundane languages are also taught for communication with non-priests, but those are secondary to the sacred language.

Adult recruits, no matter how talented in e.g. police work, would not be able to learn the language properly.

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Completely hypothetical and not based on anything in our world at all: to shag them?

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  • $\begingroup$ While this might explain an occasional incident, it would be very unlikely for the entire priesthood of a world religion to be pediphiles. If they spent their whole childhood in relations with older people it was either mostly consensual, in which case they would grow up being into older people, not younger ones, or it was non-consensual and they would find the practice abhorrent which would lead to a schism in the church within a single generation. $\endgroup$
    – Nosajimiki
    Dec 13, 2019 at 16:02
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indoctrination, children are inherently liable to trust those they see as parents/caretakers, meaning its easier to indoctrinate beliefs into them, making them more loyal, and less likely to question the priesthood.

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There are rituals that need children.

In ancient China there was a ritual that used a child as a channel to the ancestral spirits of a family, so that the spirit would possess the body and act as oracle. If it wasn't a child it wouldn't work. You could use something like that. Spirits are very picky about the requirements of the rituals.

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