[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Mumriken

to become the second morgoth would be the most loyal thing he could possible be doing towards morgoth.

In my opinion Sauron's masquerading as Morgoth more comes across as potentially "blasphemous" (although I realise we are talking about the bad guy here) than a show of loyalty. If he was so loyal to Morgoth would he be pretending to be Morgoth? Wouldn't he have just kept claiming to be his representative? I guess that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but it doesn't seem like Sauron did any of these things because he thought Morgoth would approve. That's what matters - what did Sauron think about what he was doing? Did he consider it a tribute to Morgoth or did he now only care about himself?
As we have already seen, Professor Tolkien considered Sauron encouraging the Númenoreans to worship Morgoth something he did out of convenience, not out of respect for his former master.

I think not, I think he would be pleased.

This doesn't matter. Sauron's loyalty is dependent upon Sauron's intentions alone, not whether or not Morgoth would be pleased. That's incidental. Was Sauron trying to please Morgoth? The evidence doesn't seem to suggest that Sauron cared. If he cared, he would be loyal, but it doesn't seem that he cared any more about Morgoth beyond as a phantom he could use to scare and manipulate people. That doesn't mean he's disloyal, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it means he was still trying to do what Morgoth wanted.

Spreading misinformation we are I think...

Sorry, I was kind of misrepresenting myself when I said that. Actually, I was cleaning up a lot of misinformation someone else was spreading, and replacing it with references to published material. The only editing I made on Wikipedia was to alter explicit statements that claimed as fact that Sauron faithfully propagated Morgoth's cult in places other than Númenor without providing any evidence from Professor Tolkien's writing to support it. The fact that we cannot agree on it suggests to me that stating it as cold hard fact would be misleading. I also took the opportunity to make Morgoth's legacy more explicit with annotations referring the reader to the same evidence from Morgoth's Ring and the Letters as has been used here. The article formerly made this claim:

Sauron always remained faithful in his allegiance to Melkor; as Sauron expanded his empire into new lands, with it he would also spread a cult devoted to Melkor-worship, promising that one day he would return from the Void. Temples dedicated to Melkor were built by Sauron's servants throughout Rhûn and Haradwaith, where human sacrifice was practiced.

Where does Professor Tolkien write anywhere that Sauron promised his subjects that Morgoth would return? Where does he even state that he established human sacrifice cults anywhere besides Númenor? Whoever wrote that hadn't provided any references and I certainly couldn't find anything to support it. That was what I objected to. I never wrote anything to say that Sauron became disloyal or that he rebelled against Morgoth or anything of that sort. There was also this:

even by the end of the Third Age, the Cult of Melkor was effectively the "state religion" of Mordor

As far as I can tell this is almost entirely invention on someone's part, and they completely contradict elements of Professor Tolkien's own writing. Consider this from "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age":

In the east and south well nigh all Men were under his dominion, and they grew strong in those days and built many towns and walls of stone, and they were numerous and fierce in war and armed with iron. To them Sauron was both king and god; and they feared him exceedingly, for he surrounded his abode with fire.

Sauron set himself up as god to the Easterlings and the Haradrim, not Morgoth; he wasn't in the weak position he'd been in with the Númenoreans and was an egotist and wanted to be worshipped. What I objected to was what appeared to be someone basically extrapolating Sauron's activities in Númenor to the whole of Middle-earth without evidence and despite evidence in direct contradiction of those claims; this can be the trouble with things like Wikipedia. The main ambiguity I can find is this issue of Sauron pretending to be Morgoth in the Third Age. That kind of muddles the issue of how Sauron was worshipped; perhaps he just conflated himself with Morgoth because the Men of Darkness didn't know the difference.