jareddm said:
I was talking with a friend of mine about this, and he came up with an interesting theory regarding the Tau. If the Tau are indeed ment to be the successor race of humanity and eldar, both of which having some form of godly backing, it would seem only logical that only a race with godly backing could raise to that mantle. Our theory is that the Tau do have this in the form of the Greater Good. If the warp is the physical manifestation of emotion, there should be nothing preventing a society that has wholly dedicated itself to altruism, to create a warp entity in the same strain as the Eldar accomplished and the Emperor is attempting. Clearly their numbers aren't enough to succeed at the moment, but perhaps this is the reason for their lack of warp pressence. The warp entity they created from the Greater Good can do only one thing, masking the Tau from the warp as much as possible to prevent drawing the ire of the other warp gods. Clearly this doesn't work when the Tau end up conquring planets controlled by chaos. Perhaps this is also why there are no psykers among the Tau, to prevent them from giving away their own existance to chaos, as dictated by the Greater Good.
I know it's certainly sketchy, Tau-fanboyish, and blown to smoke if the Emperor does end up embodying all emotion, but I had never heard it before so I thought I'd give it a shot.
I think the Tau aren't intended to have any kind of god, rather part of their purpose is to be 'god-killers'. Should they succeed in spreading through the galaxy, their own inherent weak warp signature combined with the secular ideology they will spread to the other races will weaken the chaos gods over time. Eventually they will find it harder and harder to manifest their entities in the real world, reducing their influence even more.