Intergalactic Summit

As with all old Empires throughout history, ours is indeed in decline at current, in terms of pure power and authority. There could be no other outcome once the Jove launched the Age of the Capsuleers, an inherently liberal and liberating event of unfathomable social consequence.

Now in this new era, mere men, immortal and wealthy beyond imagining, could rival the very Empires in their power and ability to wage war, and more, to affect the economic and sociological realities of massive areas of human populations. Literally, millions of men and women live and die at our whim every day, for what we would view as a meaningless pittance of cost to us.

Such a monumental sea change was bound to change the paradigm of Empire/Republic/State and Men in ways and to degrees never before seen in human history.

As such, there is no surprise the four Empires have, to a large degree, all lost some of their power and authority. If not for the at-times-mystifying military might of CONCORD protecting the Empires core regions, and each Empires cadre of loyalist capsuleers, the four Empires themselves could be at risk of invasion, assault and a further weakening of their power at the hands of the capsuleers.

These are all predictable and logical outcomes of the dawn of the Capsuleer era, and effect not just the Amarrian Empire and its Religious Dogma, but all the four Empires and their vassal states and State-backed ideologies. For perhaps the first time in history, there are individual men no State can truly control or threaten, and those men have, in many cases, organized into Empires themselves, to rival their original homelands.

While it's convenient to use this change as propaganda against the enemy of one's choosing, the reality is that all four main players in our cluster must adapt to this new reality. For the Amarr, an unstoppable dilution of fundamentalist religiosity is unavoidable, as the factors involved are all "liberal/liberating" to the people, capsuleer and planetary citizen both. The Empire, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, faces what many Empires before it has, an inability to keep out influences of liberalization and progressive/libertarian thought.

Where the Empress, and Empire, will go from here is hard to predict. Throughout human history, Empires in this position have often chosen to lash out with its one remaining unquestionable power, that of the Military, to grasp as much as it can for as long as it can. That may occur with the Amarr Empire.

Or, as we've have seen in some small ways already, the Empress herself may be a force for some aspects of societal liberalization and modernization. As she sees that the change cannot be stopped, further reductions of the domination of Faith, and the loss of basic human rights in the name of it, may continue.

In either case, the future of the Amarr Empire is likely one of increased freedom and liberty, and of reduced influence of slavery and slavers.

I myself am a "Liberal" Amarrian, loyal to my homeland, but as a capsuleer free to believe that there are better ways to convert and promote the faith, and a better balance between the faith and the freedoms of the individuals to choose their own beliefs.

The same way you seem to find enough hours on the day to make commentary on Captain Farel's posts as well as attending to duties of your own.

Let me put it like that (careful, it's a play on words):

The pain in the ass depends on the ass being there. If the ass ceases to exist, so does the pain.
The ass on the other hand does not depend on the pain. If the pain ceases to be, the ass still remains.

Anyway, in the End it doesn't matter much who's the pain and who's the ass. It'll matter who made an effort to be neither.