Intergalactic Summit

Well, to that end, I would indicate that it is not solely the Amarrians who have found cultural unification beneficial nor has cultural uniqueness necessarily proven itself to be a stabilizing or positive factor in any space I have visited. Certainly, if we were all one empire, the rather bizarrely commercialized factional warfare on our mutual borders might not be wasting so many valuable resources.

In reality, do you have basic human desires to be different than everyone? How is cultural cohesion maintained if the desire is to be separate? Even the Matari, for whom individualism is a focal point of education, are quite homogenized by tribe and Republic. In fact, I've seen quite a bit more variety out of the Gallente questions and comments. We strive to be welcomed and to fall in line with our elder's expectations for us. How many empires existed before current times, when we can only count perhaps five to ten? Homogenization, whether by conquest or by peaceful merger, is the order of the human race. Every empire has come together in that exact same way.

The Amarr empire is simply the only one whose recent history of conquest has been universally singled out. As opposed to others, say the Gallente, we are forthright in saying that we think our system is objectively the best at reducing the negatives towards zero and would like everyone, at the very least, to uphold those ideals. That's something nearly everyone says. It's something someone says when they free a slave without consent, call a referendum and begin an expensive election, or yes even invade an empire.

Amarrians have a tendency to wear that on their sleeves rather than couch it. Even I, whom my more feudal-minded hangers-on have accused of softness, come across to you as brash and paternalistic. I simply think that's an outgrowth of a clusteral reliance on angry rhetoric and guns to make points. Conversation is something that has a tendency to die a slow death out here, regardless of those of us who do think most of the cluster's issues can be ironed out through communication.

Hence why people here are probably having more fun arguing with the more bombastic business owners and solders and less with the more scholarly and theological priests and researchers. We're much harder to get into a name-calling match with. I seem to remember your rhetoric against me being quite a bit harsher than it is now.

But we can learn with cultural communication. You may think of this as a contest or that I am here to hit you with the hammer of our righteous ways, but I've found that, as you've noted, to be largely ineffective in ministry. In fact, it's often downright antithetical to our end oals. If we want you to learn that God's wisdom is everlastingly reasonable, a rational description of it will eventually convert the cluster. It's working wonders for me out there. Saying you're going to conquer another empire no matter the cost doesn't change anyone's mind, it simply gives them the added resistance of fearing for their lives. Most creatures of the universe will simply fight and disregard any intelligent rhetoric you can bring about. Which makes perfect sense. There isn't much time for pondering the wisdom of your enemy when you are focused on not dying.

My approach isn't necessarily new or revolutionary in our society. We don't tend to turn around and vaporize each other when we bring forward new and untested ideas, we simply gather into groups and decide whether it is worth pursuing and how best to proceed cautiously. My ministry is sanctioned by the Theology Council because, in the end, it is best for the church to approach with open arms even while less theological and more feudal business and political entities disagree. People are suffering and dying out there, and I've converted more people to the faith than conquest has over the last few years.

Merger is inevitable. It will likely not happen via warfare, especially with CONCORD around maintaining the status quo. However, if you think I am simply talking about a forcible invasion, I think you've somewhat misconstrued the object of my ministry. The Matari wouldn't allow me into their space to preach the Word if I was killing their hired capsuleers in factional contests. But to preach is truly necessary to begin the process. A conquered enemy who never learns the wisdom of God is just an enemy who works for you. An enemy who learns your wisdom and comes to use and value it is no longer an enemy or a slave, but a fellow citizen.

Slavery is Scripturally meant to be a temporary path to good citizenship.

Your bio indicates you should recognize the Caldari role in the Alliance between your "State" and the Capsule-Captain Empress, if you think otherwise I sincerely pity you, uncomfortable as it may seem I merely speak the truth.

Your first and only post was to jump up and tell Andreus that "Filth" had "beat the living crap" out of him, when it is clear that not a single other person in the thread thinks he's done so.

You both received your licenses within a few months of each other.

And to top it off, you're arguing in the same nonsensical fashion he does, and the only person leaping to his defense. He is not my 'peer' except so far as we are both capsuleers, and I have no respect for him because instead of doing something to earn it, he has, at every turn, done something to earn disrespect.

Why should I give a damn about what you think, when you defend someone who says **** like what he's said in the last few posts of his? You're not doing anything to suggest that the guess is false, so why should I retract it? It's not an unreasonable guess to make given the observable situation, and no, I won't be apologizing for it. Because, hey look - free speech.

Funny how that **** works, isn't it?

My main disappointment here is your continued suggestion of the importance of Vitoc. Please. That's so last century, if we're going with the mass exploitation of humanity theme, there's far more efficient technologies for that purpose these days...

I am aware that my hands, too, are red.
I don't abstain; I do my work instead.
The heart of change won't beat amongst the dead.

As a public service announcement I'll remind all pilots that underneath the license photo of everyone who posts on the IGS there appears a small triangle icon. Clicking this icon gives several options, one of which is to 'Hide Posts'. Doing so will free you from seeing the inflammatory garbage posts of terminally ignorant trolls such as... well, name your favorite troll.

Should you ever desire to read those posts again it's a simple matter to reverse the process by choosing the 'Show Posts' option.

Doing so will leave said trolls conversing only with themselves. After a time they'll get tired of not receiving the negative attention they so desperately crave and will return to the bridges from whence they came.

Idiots are at least amusing to watch as they bluster and blare their nonsense. It is like watching a large aggressive claustrophobic animal in an ornament shop. If nothing else, you are at least grateful it is someone else's best china being smashed. That being said this particular idiot besmirches the name of an Empire I have fought to defend with his every word.

Votixin and Vitoc are one of those shortcuts we took as a people that ended up being a mistake. Not a lot of people remember that the Vitoxin solution was initially a "humanitarian" gesture. It was intended to replace the slave collar by essentially forcing people into dependency. Plus, Vitoc made the slaves feel good. Perfect, right?

This idea was a bad one to start with, and I read some of the testimonials of my family predecessors correctly predicting that it would arrest the educational development of the slave population. One of my scions, Brovus Baracca, likened it to us becoming common drug peddlers, promising a miracle high built on an endless lifetime of poverty. By removing the opportunity to grow and replacing it with a daily bout of euphoria completely divorced from study and work, we essentially damned those generations of workers to their fate.

Which might have been the original intent. There was always resistance from the church, though the power of the Theology Council was marginalized in those days. The Empire grew addicted to easy money and I suppose that was the reason that the Holders were permitted to largely self-regulate themselves. Some are still preaching the benefits of Vitoc and Vitoxin even though they had so obviously failed as concepts.

What holds us together, as Amarr people, are not shared drug experiences. They are the values and experiences we learn through God. Working hard together brings us together. Those moments where you get to teach someone a valuable moral lesson and you can see the light in their eyes that it will never leave their mind. That is what should hold us together and guide the relationships between students and teachers.

The moment we became drug pushers, we became no better than anyone else in the cluster. It is not meant to be our way to sell temporary bouts of amnesia along a sea of unending hardship.

I daresay I was somewhat glad to hear they'd developed a cure for vitoxin. Amarrians are meant to persevere through difficult and to relish challenges. We should not be looking for shortcuts just so that we do not have to work quite so hard.

Oh, let's see. The Theology Council was at one point the central political force of the Empire. That was when the Theology Council was even more powerful than the feudal system. I think continued success slowly eroded the church's authority over Holders. Now we act as something more akin to a supreme court or a lawmaking body. There was a time though, not long ago compared to the long history of our empire, that we were the military, law enforcement, and governing body for the entire Empire. That was when the Theology Council's function was to regulate the Empire. To make sure we were sticking to the Word instead of using the Word to justify our own debased actions. It's all too easy to forget that slavery is not a privilege, but a responsibility.

Certainly within the last few hundred years, the Theology Council's power has waned considerably. More wealthy Holders did not see ecclesiastical humility as particularly fitting to their status and disliked being kept in check. The last two emperors certainly saw to a less centralized method of authority. That left the Heir families essentially in power of their own personal feifdoms, which then passed on down the line. Instead of managers, they became total administrators. It was a slow process, culminating over, I'd say, a few thousand years. It waxed and waned over the years, though, as the church was very often called upon to reign in problems when the regional lords went a bit too far on their leashes. It was a cycle, people always look to the church to make things right when things go wrong, then when things are going right again they seem to forget the hard work of their forefathers that got them to that point.

Speaking of forefathers, Brovus Baracca was an archbishop in Kor-Azor space at the time Vitoc began to really gain traction. He was present at the coronation of Heideran as Emperor and during that time wrote several significant treatises on how inter-clusteral ministry could bring wealth to the Empire in the short term and convert the rest of the cluster in the long term. His was one of our first attempts at a mass external ministry. In the end, it achieved some results, however we've later come to think that perhaps his focus on the well-to-do bringing their employees into the system as slaves was perhaps looking at the situation backwards. Still, he was very close to the Emperor during that time and did his best to help him in navigating the treacherous road of peace. He died during Heideran's reign and was succeeded by Vellia Baracca as scion of the family and House of Baracca.

During his ministry, Brovus was an outspoken critic of Vitoc and Vitoxin both, for the reasons I described above. He did correctly predict that one day we would pay for ignoring our responsibilities to the Matari people we had subjugated. He thought we had forgotten what the institution was for, as well, so he also saw the Vitoc issue as a symptom of a larger problem. We hadn't educated the people well enough or integrated them fully enough. When they realized they would always be slaves, no matter how much they believed or how hard they studied, they rightly called those Holders liars and rose up against them.

It was good the honorable Archbishop Brovus Baracca never lived to see that day. He fought his whole life for something to be done to expand the hours slaves spent in education and petitioned, during Heideran's lax period, for a system of educational standards to be put in place and enforced by the Theology Council. Perhaps if he had gotten that legislation, we could have averted disaster. Sadly, he was proven absolutely correct on all counts, right up to the Matari finally developing a resistance or cure and thus becoming bitter and uncontrollable upon finally being freed of the disease we inflicted on them.

I doubt he saw it coming the way it did, though. The one count of his treatise that he was not proven correct was that he thought the Minmatar would join their brothers in the Gallente Federation, not to become their own separate Republic.

Treatises such as those are open for public perusal, you might be interested to hear. However, as you said, they are not Scripture. Scripture is full of universal truths while our reports and papers are discussions and meditations thereupon. I wouldn't call anything I have written Scriptural; instead I tend to teach it at length. My own thesis on graduation before moving into deaconship discussed how issues of fiat currency might be heretical according to Scriptures' stance on money lending, as well as arguments against.

Not something I teach in practice. Most people I minister to are just beginning to learn about the Scriptures, so they need it broken down into the very first lessons, the one we in the Empire probably learn around the time we are five or six.

I do enjoy speaking about the Scriptures, especially with people who do not necessarily agree with me. It is fun sometimes to hear that you've made sense and swayed someone, but ministry isn't about winning or losing. My father, Praetus Baracca, liked to say that nobody wins an argument, there are just people that lose the least. The only way to really move forward, as a person, is to hear what people say. You may not like it, agree with it, or think it has any right to be said in the presence of a loving God, but strong Amarr will hear everything and choose wisely what to take away from it.

Believe me, if you think we don't agree on much, I had a Sani Sabik who had a hold on my mailing address who spent the better part of three weeks berating me before confessing and returning to the Empire to enter a labor program. I'm fairly sure God chose to send him to me simply because, after hearing some of the things he said, I think I've heard just about everything. We may not agree on issues of cultural assimilation, but you did not spend pages discussing a dream you had of flaying my skin from my body and then self-sodomizing with my remains. Ministry is just one of those professions, I suppose.

Still, I suppose that's why Theological treatises are not widely circulated. Nobody outside of involved theologians who need to know spend much time reading them. Perhaps I could call up a few for you? Not everyone has the chance to make it to the Imperial Library to call for a copy and, even in an age where I can order missiles on the other side of the cluster and have a contractor ship it to me, the Imperial Library insists you show up in person. And you read and work quietly on one of their terminals. In formal dress. And as an established clergyman, for me that means an actual dress. As much as we say our formal attire are 'robes' and follow thousands of years of tradition, there's no getting around the fact that formal attire for clergy is an expertly embroidered and tailored dress.

Ministry is one of those jobs. People think I fly around space summoning up followers from disparate peoples with a flute. I think they'd be very surprised to know that I am working on my annual thesis on the way political transition affects poverty from a Scriptural perspective.

I truly hope most people's jobs are less exciting than they sound. My pages and servants are always somewhat disappointed with the amount of literature I need to produce and the general banality of the job. I'm only too happy to talk to people who don't necessarily agree with me. The last man I tried to minister to today I ended up checking into a Gallente mental institution. I think the odds of successfully teaching the Word of God to a man who thinks he IS God might be low.