Intergalactic Summit

So much to get to! I should start with Confliktus, who asked about the Scriptures and their origins.

I think most people make the mistake of assuming the Scriptures are like other religious texts. That they are written or compiled at some time and then set in stone. That they are a sort of cypher by which to view everything in life. I think that has been almost universally true. The Scriptures are a bit more than that. It is, by definition, a living document made up of uncounted pieces.

Essentially, "The Scriptures" is the trademarked name for all the pieces of our history that pertain to God and his plan for the universe. That's quite a range of things, you might imagine. The Scriptures fill vast libraries and are not simply texts, but even more. The Scriptures include everything from stories of our origins, moral tales, early technical manuals, ancient pieces of pottery and architecture, early ship design, you name it. We've got it somewhere. Sometimes, a Theologian's library looks more like a museum or a junkyard.

These things are important, though. God very rarely interacts with the universe directly, and only slightly more commonly does He send members of His host. We were obviously blessed early on though, and chosen to carry His message through the cosmos. Very often, people wonder how, for such a "backwards" people we managed to get to most of the important space exploration and communication sciences first. The simple answer is that those are the most important ones. Those are the ones we needed to travel and spread the Word. So even early drafts of our first warp drives have tales that relate to the Scriptures. How our engine technology was derived from being able to harness the very essence of God's creation.

It can be anything from scrawlings on a engineer's napkin that reveals the nature of the universe or a carving on ancient architecture that tells a piece of a story about the reign of an emperor, but mostly, it is text. Billions, if not trillions of pages of text. Even digitized, it takes up multiple stories of server space. It is the complete work of our history over thousands of years, and every day we piece more of it together. It is a labor of love for our people. We look back on those first people who were not as blessed as we are with modern convenience and read about how the Lord gave them the answers to problems we still face today.

Really, that is the common thread throughout everything. Most cultures care only about their predecessors in a very narrow and disjointed way, but it is only by looking at the big picture that you can really see the works of God. The way He shaped our people and provided us with the answers to questions we would not need to ask for millenia. There are pieces of Scripture in the first Books that seem logical to us now, but that the ancients who were around at the time would have made no sense of. As we expand, everyone doing his part to read and understand his piece of the puzzle, we bring the bigger picture into focus.

That sounds brilliant, but in reality, it really is hard work for all involved. The truth is that the Scriptures are something one person could never learn. You can't see enough of the whole thing, from one person's perspective, to understand the nature of our Empire and the nature of God's wisdom. It's simply too big for anything but an entire Empire to understand. Some people read basic Scripture as part of their daily lessons, looking over them and re-reading them in their original context to see if there is something the millions who read it before missed. Some Amarrian theologians dedicate their entire lives to them and will do nothing but find and read Scripture their whole lives, knowing they will never understand the entire work alone.

In the end, that is the point. Everyone has their pieces of the puzzle that begin locking into place. We see Scriptures that refer to things in one place, and then will hunt for years to find where in that vast volume of works that its reference is. By making these connections, we learn more about the time and the place that these works were described in. We can piece together whole books by realizing that we have five overlapping copies of one book, none of which are complete alone. Some books are literally pieced together from hundreds of different pieces of text, art, and architecture assembled from fragments of our forgotten history.

It continues to this day, as well. The idea of what is "ancient" is creeping forward, and we are beginning to understand how God's work never ended. He still shapes the world and universe, guiding us towards a day when we will stand beside him looking down on his creation, having graduated, as a species, from the great test of life. He will call us brothers that day, and we will all walk beside him into the Kingdom of Heaven. Together, as one people, for all eternity.

That day may not come for millenia, but come it will. In the meantime, who is to say that our works now will not someday be called Scripture. Two thousand years from now, some work we may think is insignificant may come to bring understanding to some problem being worked on by our predecessors.

It is a humbling thought, that God is writing the Scriptures of two thousand years from now at this moment. His instruments are us, and his papyrus is the cosmos.

Thank you Fred, for essentially making the problem clear. I would say I disagree that the reason the Matari are angry with us is not because of how we met and conquered them. There are plenty of conquered people who are now Amarrians in the proper sense. Rather, I think our issues were based on how we handled the aftermath. Slave collars were not necessary for most slaves, so I've always only approved of their use in dire situations, when slaves are actually violent towards each other or potentially dangerous in other ways. I would not say that they would be necessary in the majority of cases. Plenty of people are willing to work daily if they know their basic needs will be fulfilled. As you mentioned above, this is a dream for many of the poor and downtrodden. You should not need a constant source of pain to teach if you yourself are an example of good teaching.

But really, the worst sin of ours, one that I strongly oppose and continue to oppose to this day, is Vitoc. That hideous method of control is wrong on every level. First of all, it inserts ANOTHER basic need you have to fulfill daily. It is horrific around the cluster to infect people with diseases regardless. But worst of all, Vitoc is a drug that dulls the mind and the senses. Dulled senses do not understand Scripture. Dulled senses do not learn. Dulled senses never come closer to being Amarr.

That this terrible failing is not gone yet is a matter of shame, and its banning should be a matter of time. It is antithetical to everything we are trying to teach, and those who are using it are teaching the worst trait of all. Addiction.

On the mention of our government, though, we revivalists who are truly looking to remake the Empire into a better leader in the cluster, the people the Scriptures mean us to be, is sitting in the top seat. Change is slow in Amarr, as I have previously recounted, but change is coming. Not change to something radically new, but simply to look back at the Scriptures and to realize their wisdom. Sometimes, we think we know better. That we can take it all as read that we know everything.

I think Jamyl is truly a religious empress, more than others. She has read the Scriptures and seen where we have abused our position of authority. She understands where we failed. The Emancipation is the first step in a New Reclaiming, a Reclaiming of ourselves and the entire cluster. It will be harder. We are working from below the ground to build a great temple to God; few trust us to build the Empire that spans the cosmos. But she understands that everything we work for will take centuries or millenia. The long, slow, hard way where growth is inevitable and assured is always preferable to the short, fast, easy way where growth is only dependent on the size of your fist.

What she must do is strengthen the interior of the Empire, to leave no crack in our armor, and then to spread the Word throughout the cluster. As you've said, people will see the wisdom and come to us. I don't think it will be in ignorance, though. I think people will evaluate their lives where they are, weigh what they gain from what they have compared to what they gain with us.

In the end, I don't think democracy is living up to its promise. It is a fundamental difference between our people that you see free choice in all things as good, whereas we view it with suspicion. Where you see great decisions making great people, we see when bad decisions ruin lives. In your space, it is acceptable for someone to really fall into a pit of drugs and hopelessness as long as it was their choice and mistake. In our Empire, that simply shouldn't be acceptable. It may mean they do not have as many choices in life. But with us, they will learn that life is full of distractions. Sometimes, the best way to clear you mind is to learn to live simply, without your conveniences.

In a way, I think that is precisely what is happening to those Holders who abused their positions. They treated slaves as conveniences. The Empress will see they learn to do without.

I see much within the borders of the Empire that needs to be addressed. If you only paid attention to this and kept your noses out of the territory of others, perhaps you wouldn't have the image problem that now besets you.

It is not going to happen. The minute that you move on either the Federation or the Republic and look like you're halfway to winning, the rest of the cluster will turn on you and shred you. Self-preservation demands it.

To be fair, Pieter, it hasn't been us invading the territory of others for a while now. What I have said before is that it shouldn't even be necessary. I've seen the domestic state of the rest of the cluster. There are millions and billions of souls for whom the democratic experiment has descended into class warfare. We wouldn't have to preach hard to convert them.

Once the poor underclasses of other societies have overcome their prejudices and flocked to the relative security and regularity of the Empire, it isn't going to be a problem we need to solve with invasion. Invasion would be counterproductive. Once people see the success of the system, how it answers the problems they thought incurable in society, they will more than happily join the example of the Khanid.

Honestly, in the long run, I think evangelism and ministry will be faster than military means. The Word of God spreads like wildfire and has a range farther than any other tool God has given to us. It also doesn't take nearly as many resources. It is all there, right now, waiting for use.

All it will take is for us to show how great we truly are. To have discipline and to follow the doctrines of the Scriptures. It's simply a matter of time after that.

An actual question, it seems. In fact, yes.

I went over this a while ago, actually, in the very first post of the thread. Anyone who studies the Word does know that actually quoting the Scripture is a very poor way to teach its methods. Quotes from the Scripture are too divorced from their original meaning and context when spoken aloud. To explain why any passage means what it means might take all day, if you have the background knowledge in the subject to know. Anyone who knows our Scriptures to any degree will agree that it is like describing a planet with a handful of sand.

I enumerated this point before, so I would urge you to go back and re-read that.

More to, I think, the point of the question, you may be wondering why I say to teach the Word without really quoting the Scripture. Imagine if a child asks why he should not steal a pen from his friend. The first thing to do is not to break out the legal code and read aloud from the section about theft. Not only will the child probably not understand it, not only will it take too long and impart too little information, but the child will only learn that it is illegal to steal. He will not necessarily, from that text, know why it is wrong.

Hence the point of ministry. Essentially, it is the function of a theologian to parse and research Scripture, to decipher and understand its meanings given the context of time, place, and events in which they were written. It is the function of a priest to absorb the raw data and be able to translate it into something that anyone, including a non-believer who has never heard of the Scripture in his life, will understand. No one knows what snakes refer to in any line of Scripture, especially since the meaning changed for a period of a few hundred years in which snakes were seen as animals to be admired and emulated. You don't want to spend two weeks discussing finance in the twelfth century of the Empire to explain that wealth in body is not worth the wealth of the soul. If you read the stories that speak to that though, you would need to. Otherwise, you wouldn't know why God would need a footstool, why we couldn't build one anyway, and what the Amarr needed limestone for.

In essence, quoting Scripture can confuse plenty of Amarr who don't know that particular part of historical context. It will especially seem bizarre if you are not raised learning it. For us Amarr who started reading Scripture the moment we were learning to read, it sometimes eludes us that people outside the Empire don't know the Riddle of the Bridge, so they have no idea what exactly is with all these people stopping at bridges and asking the Lord for guidance. It's too much information, not enough information, and none of the information they really need to understand us, God, and the faith all at the same time.

It's important to break the stories down into moralistic tales. If you ask a Gallente what is important about democracy, you can be sure they will not begin quoting their legal statutes on political taxation. They give you a synopsis and tell you what is good about the system. If they are responsible, they also tell you what is bad about it. Ministry and evangelism is precisely the same thing. You need to tell people what God wants, what God provides, and what God requires we give up. You need to boil Scripture down to the simple truths that God needs us to know.

In the end, when we have begun taking on students, they can learn Scripture. They will understand the basic metaphors and similes. Then, I think, quoting Scripture has quite a bit more meaning.

Until then, most of traveling ministry is about learning other cultures. Learning how to talk to them and describe our system in a way they will understand it. If everyone out there can simply say we are slavers and to live under us is to live under the whip, they have completely misrepresented what it means to be part of the laboring class of our Empire. But they are speaking the language of their people.

Simply, the Word is not literally words. The Word is a compendium of wisdom that has been given to us. Timeless wisdom of God that resounds as true throughout the ages. When we stumble, we look back and see where we have deviated. We recognize that we have been wrong and we react accordingly. We return to the rock of the Word. It isn't a set of bombastic slogans the way democratic political parties chant. It is a long, complex set of ideas that are meant to show us the path to becoming the greatest people in the universe. It also tells us how to spread those ideas to other people.

Once you translate everything into a language people understand, you would be amazed how many people love and understand it. Even better, it helps you to understand it as well.

I have, indeed. Actually, more to the point, the Theology Council has. I was appointed as a spiritual ambassador by a bloc of accardinated bishops as prescribed by the Council's decrees. I would not be out here doing what I do without permission. It was agreed that I be one of the spiritual representatives as an exploratory gesture. My ministry beyond the borders of the Empire has recorded incredible results. We are converting, for the first time in recent history, deep in non-Amarrian space. The Word is being preached in colonies of ours that cannot be destroyed.

One of the reasons I was accorded this great position was because I have a great deal of experience in ministry. The methods I use are not only approved, it is the way we all preach the Word. There have been quite a few Amarrians beyond our space, military and researchers alike. However, the discipline of ministry is somewhat arcane to those of us who have forgotten what it was like to learn the Word.

I could, if I wanted, teach parts of Scripture every single day on this board as if it were lessons. It would, however, be counterproductive in most cases. One thing you quickly learn in my profession is that even if you could memorize the whole of the Scriptures back to front, that does not necessarily mean you would understand them. Of the two, memorization and understanding, the latter is by far the most important. Rampant quoting of certain pieces of Scripture have led to people completely misunderstanding the entire point of our culture.

Even the EVE University organization only has a handful of passages. Maybe 50 quotes, mostly taken from our ships invocations. It is by those words that most people in the cluster know us.

That is what I was sent to rectify. I was sent to minister to the stars the same way I ministered to my diocese on Amarr Prime. It is important that we have our say in the conversation, so that others who dislike us cannot paint us with the same brushstroke as their hate.

My results are beginning to show. Not only do we have dozens of small, stable colonies in other empires' space, we are preparing a new trial program. An education program that is voluntary. With my growing cadre of priests, we have fanned out to seek out those that other empires left behind. People who are aimless and wandering, seeking purpose and direction in life. People who want to escape their life of cyclical sin.

Imagine a voluntary conversion program. Something no other empire has the moral authority to stop. Imagine our Empire swelling with believers who will finally escape the torment of their misdirected lives and learn discipline through work. More people who will come to read Scripture and finally understand these bits we are all quoting.

All without firing a single shot or losing a single life from our Navy. It isn't just a possibility. It's becoming a reality. We are beginning to prepare a list of names, people who are ready, right now, to emigrate and begin the program. All that is required is for the Theology Council to examine our request and green-light a trial program. We need the infrastructure to handle these people, because the lack of infrastructure and stability is precisely why they are coming.

How many millions are living in cycles of drugs, debt, and poverty that we can forge into contented, educated, productive citizens? We must be prepared to teach when they come. Not if. When.

Even if you do not understand or disapprove of my ministry, I am a professional. This is what I have been trained to do, nearly from birth, and I am very good at it. I was performing sacraments at six years old. I wrote my first theological thesis at ten. I performed my first sermon at twelve. I was hearing confessions at fourteen. I was leading a diocese as a bishop at twenty-six. I even taught a private lesson to the Royal Congregation, at the Imperial Adviser's request.

Even if you don't trust me or my credentials, trust the Theology Council has evaluated me. They agreed to fund this ministry of mine for a reason.

I know what I am doing.

I'll answer those questions largely in order, Bella, but I feel I may need to move around a bit. If anything isn't made clear, do let me know and I will try to clarify.

I think your first point about recruitment somewhat answers a question you made later. Think about those two points together. What happens if you don't convert? Why are we recruiting the down-and-out who feel that their societies abandoned them? Essentially, the point is that your society isn't any more fair or humane than ours, the government tends to use words like "choices" to absolve themselves of responsibility. You have the choice to go to whatever school you want. Even if that were true, what it actually means is that the government does not need to provide you your education. You have the choice to work wherever you want. That means the government is not responsible for your employment or your income. You have the choice to live wherever you please. That also means the government is not responsible for keeping you out of the rain in a shipping crate. People will be informed of what they are giving up, the right to live, work, and learn whatever it is they want. In fact, I have vigorously questioned whether they are truly prepared for doing so. In return, I am saying that we will take responsibility. We will house, employ, and teach them.

I think you perhaps value choice a bit more than the man the station employs to recharge your capacitor. In fact, I am willing to bet that he is largely worried about money more than he values it. He wonders how his children will get an education if he can't afford it. How does he get them out of the cycle of gang warfare if he can't limit their choices of what they are doing? It is those people who look up at people who could afford the tools they needed to make it far in your society and resents it. It is to him we come and say that there is another way. That free choice in all aspects of your life isn't always worth what you pay for it. Would you like to be trained to do something, go out every day and do it, and come back to a place of shelter that you never have to worry about affording? Those promises can't be made by free societies, who can't even save their people from rampant domestic drug and crime problems. Yet these are the people all societies depend on, at their core. Even yours.

If your working class disappears for our space, you will self-regulate. People who used to do more attractive labor will become the new bottom of society. They will look for simpler and more sure ways to live. They will look for purpose.

I might be wrong, but I highly doubt it. I've seen some sorry states of slavery, but I've never seen anything as bad as a Gallente halfway-house or a Minmatar ghetto slum. It's obvious that nobody is thinking about them and nobody wants them.

We do. We tell them point-blank they will have their choices stripped away. They will not be able to pick what we train them to do or what they do. They will need to trust in us. I thought it would take decades to build the trust in our Empire outside of our borders to make it work. I've found there are a few million people who already dislike their home empires more than they fear us. They already are slaves. They just aren't often very well-paid or well-maintained slaves where they are.

In the end, you seem to want to raise the specter of our Navy or your traditional enemies. I think, in the end, I am a soldier in the New Reclaiming. While you spend your time and assets fighting our soldiers, you've neglected your own people. I will take them away from their poverty and reclaim them for the Empire. Better than that, I will do it without ever firing a shot. Best of all, if they come with me willingly, there isn't a single thing anyone can do about it. If you could band together to save a people you don't value, I wouldn't be able to sign a few hundred names at every homeless community. You would have taken care of it already.

The only way you would be able to stop me is if you turned inward and created a better life for all of your people. I highly doubt you can do that. You're too afraid of our Navy to spend anything less than exorbitant amounts of money trying to fight us.

In the end, your own worst enemy is you. To give every single person access to the basic necessities we can promise slaves, you would need to become us.

In the end, I think you will.

My, I suppose I will need another post to answer the doctrinal question.

"The Amarr people came into the world and the world came into being.
Our illustrious ancestors freed their souls from the evils of the old.
world and created a new one.
The great Amarr Empire was founded to cultivate the spirit of man.
To do so the enemies of the outside had to be defeated and the enemies of the inside controlled."
- The Scriptures, Book I 1:14

The free will of Man does not get to overpower the Will of God. The efforts against Kuvakei would not have been possible without the accord of the Amarr Empire, the Gallente, the Minmatar, and the Caldari shall never stop distrusting each other enough to stand united against us, and everyday we gather our strength.

Young pilot Constantin underestimates the power of the living Word of God and places all of his form of "faith" in the power of his own words to seduce the lost and the losers of New Eden into voluntary conversion, for the tiny amount of people that this approach has even the slightest possibility of success with perhaps the results will yield a few more loyal but confused hunting animals like Eran. For the time being, he is being tolerated, as long as he keeps such words far from the borders of the Amarr Empire. Nonetheless he has been officially notified herein the path he treads may well lead him to excommunication and his name being struck from the "Book Of Records", and as such I urge him to repent and avoid this calamity.

But heed my words the True Amarr and the Amarr Empire will not abandon scripture to seduce those God gave us dominion over.

"I give to you the destiny of Faith,
And you will bring its message to every planet of every star in the heavens:
Go forth, conquer in my Name, and reclaim that which I have given."
- The Scriptures, Book of Reclaiming 22:13

God's will shall always propel the Amarr Empire to secure what is meant to be, and the Word of God as given to us in "Scripture" shall always guide and compel the Amarr Empire to continue as God meant for us, his chosen to be. I am supremely confident the sweet sonnets of young pilot Constantin will not persuade the Amarr Empire to abandon God's will and word to follow him and the band of dregs he enlists in his fools errand.

We are the chosen, Amarr shall never abandon it's true faith and destiny.

As a matter of fact, we have. Or at least, I've proven the method works on the Amarr themselves.

You see, I am the evangelistic wing of this experiment, but a much larger portion operates in our own space. This whole process started some years ago, when my archbishop (and grandmother) decided to look into the policies we had developed and how they had affected the Empire. Some called her a radical at the time, but inevitably they saw the wisdom of the endeavor.

Our travels into the space of others has netted some interesting information, but none more so than a Caldari theorist who called for wiping out wages and introducing a very rigid work/study/leisure schedule. Most Caldari thought that was a little high-minded and theoretical, that they would never be able to phase out the wage system. However, we did not have that problem. We intended to use that schedule: ten hours of work, four hours of study, two hours leisure, to sort of standardize servants' lives and get them used to regularity. We included a day with eight hours of study and no work in order to give people a chance to process the Scriptures.

However, we could not try this first on foreigners. They have no concept of God or often how work can improve their outlook on life, at least the sorts of people who would be interested in our rehabilitation program. We also had a problem that our list of interested parties during the ministry was expanding. In full swing, this program could easily draw thousands of people a day. We needed to make sure it worked first. So we tried it a few years ago on the impoverished from our own Empire. We offered to forgive all of their debts and enrolled them into the program. We gave them everything they needed as far as medicine and mental health, then sent them into the fields (this project was a wheat field).

It's amazing how antisocial behavior and mental illness can be mended simply by giving people a sense of purpose in life. The results were astounding, and the project has expanded since then.

It was this that has given us the backing we needed to put together the first work program for foreigners. I just received word that we have the green light for the foreign recruitment project, this one a production facility for fittings. As soon as the facilities and manufacturing centers are built, probably within a few months to a year, we will pick up our first batch of volunteers.

We're very excited to see how this works. If God's love can penetrate even these hearts, how much could it do for the rest of the cluster? We've especially been receiving word from former slaves who will enter the program so long as we can institute some kind of standards of behavior on the part of the Holders they may end up serving.

Honestly, I couldn't agree more. That could take more wrangling. In the meantime, at least I know the family that will be hosting the foreign project has an excellent reputation in re-education and assimilation, with a low rate of recidivism.

These are just the early stages, but it barely needs funding right now. The wheat field is now paying for itself AND our next domestic re-education project.

I suppose this is something of a dissonance between us and the rest of the empires. If I see people languishing in poverty and suffering, I don't think it is suddenly not my business to help simply because they do not share my parentage. There are parts of our society, in fact much larger factions, who are handling the domestic issues. My job is to travel and minister to the rest of the cluster (hence why you see and hear from me).

Our programs cannot simply be made to fix our problems and then ignore the problem in the rest of the cluster. Essentially, the process in other areas is to allow people to manage their own lives even if they do not have the tools or skills to do so. Instead of enforcing education of the skills and providing the basic tools, it seems the easiest thing to do is to keep them locked in a cycle of debt until they cannot pay, then repossess everything they have. If someone tries to go outside of the system and breaks the law, they are sent to prison.

We Amarrians are not factionalist. I know how this almost universally is received as some sort of hostile invasion every time we do something outside of our systems, but I do not think of people as "your poor" as distinct from "my poor". There is only a system of poverty which I believe we have a cure for. There is no reason why we should only provide this opportunity to our citizens alone. While I do understand that being distinct from us is very important to others at present and that hostile invasions are not going to help that matter, I certainly cannot abide, as a God-believing man, that the impoverished and drug-addicted people who are pleading to me for some kind of help are someone else's problem.

Nobody else seems to be doing anything seriously to help them. They are only being lumped together in places where they can be out of sight and not do any harm. This is my new diocese, and I will not leave them in the cold to die if I can get them into our program.