Intergalactic Summit

It is not about control or racial supremacy. We wish to elevate others to our level, not keep them suppressed. If what you say is true then I should not be were I am today and should still be under a Holders yolk.

"I'm not saying it's about control and racial supremacy, but it's about control and racial supremacy."

heh, when you put it that way I suppose it is . Got myself in a word trap, darn. Never been one for wordplay, but the sentiment stands. We want to make the universe better place. Not just for true Amarrians, but for all people who follow the faith.

Excellent, you have a very impressive way to express and talk for yourself.

This must be the most accurate thing i have read today. When a religion gets the numbers it will eventually generate fundamentalists or "half" religious pricks. Some that might practice the religion straight through like you're supposed to, or they will become aggressive against anyone that aren't a part of the religion due to them being "unpure" bastards or "infidels". Basically paradise for all the people who follow the religion, and pure hell for anyone who doesn't.

Rin told me to take over from here for a bit (and to be mature about it ) as she has to deal with an emergency. I will have to follow soon so I will do my best to wrap things up.

Stitcher, True altruism is not attainable. Being human, even one who holds as close to the faith as they can, are still human. They will always succumb to one flesh driven desire or other. But to the point you were making about ours being conditional, well, yes it is. That is the meat and potatoes of it isn't it? And it will depend on who is holding the sword tip to your throat that will determine how long you have to repent and convert.




To you Andreus, that is a fantastic analysis of our culture. We do strive for something that in my opinion, though Rin does not agree with me, is completely unattainable, but hopefully in the pursuit of it, we can attain something close to it.

"The people it generates are so often in complete opposition to all the higher principles and virtues that their faith supposedly stands for" I truly hope that this statement is out of ignorance. If only I could have you experienced what I have, met the people I have in my travels, searching in myself as to why I would follow the Amarrian faith. Sadly that is a barrier that cannot be crossed as Words are a poor form of communication.

To be fair, Verin, you used to be Ishukone Watch SWAT, a career dedicated to using force to persuade people to do the right thing when arguments failed.

I, too, have been part of that line of work. I agree that force hardly ever persuades someones inner heart, but I also know that if you can make it so that a sociopath is always too afraid of retribution to kill, the net result for society is precisely the same as if you convinced him with psychiatric help.

Welcome to the crux of the Amarrian debate about religion, Andreus.

There is a purely philosophical question about whether we can ever attain the goals our religion calls for if people are inherently imperfect, or if imperfection is a state of being that can be altered through discipline and we're just not completely, 100% correct in how we practice the faith.

It's one of those reasons that I suppose I am much more forgiving of Gallentean democracy than my peers. There are plenty of reasons you can pluck up that show how democracy fails, sometimes spectacularly. But look at it at a distance, and it's really a bunch of people who've had an idea. If people worked in a perfect world, democracy would be an absolutely amazing political system because of the enormous amount of input it could process. The thing is, you can't hold imperfection against the system, so while I think the imperial system works better now, I do have high hope that the Gallentean experiment turns out to work. It's a noble goal, trying to make government accountable to the public.

In the same way, the goal of Amarrian religion is to create a perfect world through spirituality. It's meant to instill a sense of moral education, where moderation, charity, and integrity become more important than personal wants and excesses. However, there are plenty of examples of people who stumble and require correction. I think, rather than ignoring those cases, we need to point them out more publicly so that people, inside the faith and outside, know that we are just as strict with the highest Holder as with the lowest slave.

I think we forget that sometimes, that you don't need to defend a good idea by shielding those who've subverted it from criticism. That dissonance you see isn't something I would ever dissuade. I think we all, as upholders of the faith, need to stand or fall on those merits. If someone doesn't seem to be upholding the tenets of our faith, it should be asked whether we aren't.

If there's one thing I have learned in my ministry, it's that you don't have to be Amarrian, or even a member of the faith, to know bull**** when you see it. So when you see a Holder laying on a couch, using a troupe of slaves to handle his business for him instead of proving he deserves his position, you don't even need a Scriptural education to know that's not what that person is supposed to be doing.

So, criticize away. It's absolutely fair enough.

A: Please remember I was conceived and born the old fashioned way. No batch, no vocational profiling, no decanting.
B: I put myself on the corporate security track voluntarily, and from there was encouraged into the security/medicine subtrack. Prior to that point I was on the manufacturing track. It's a decision I have no regrets about.



Deception is a tool with a remarkably high success rate, and negotiators employ it very skillfully. You don't need to compromise, you only need to let the hostage-taker convince themselves that you intend to. It doesn't always work, but when it does...

You have that right. And one of MY beliefs is that you shouldn't form beliefs until you are able to justify them. Belief for the sake of belief is short-sighted and arrogant.

EDIT: besides, there are an infinite number of things that a given person has no particular belief in the existence or nonexistence of. Prior to my mentioning it, you will have been absent belief in things like.... oh, the dragon that is eating Point Genesis, or the tiny clown living in Rens who makes playing cards out of mice.

The number of things you actively believe is finite. The number of things you are absent belief in is infinite. So really, we have exactly as much lack of belief as machines do.

What defines a person is the handful of specific things they do believe, and it is important for them not to have a belief on a give subject until they are educated and informed about that subject.