Intergalactic Summit

No I'm arguing that I can't understand what its like to be in your shoes because I'm not in your shoes.

It is sadly amusing, Kahar, to watch a people so beaten that the best they can do is justify their defeat--down to your theoretical last man--by rabidly using the very God they have failed as a shield against reality. Either a) your reclaiming has already accomplished God's intended purpose, b) God's plans have changed, c) your people have failed God so utterly that God must look elsewhere for divine instruments, or d) you've lost your way and come to severely misinterpret your divine imperative. No matter how many capsuleers return to active duty, no matter how much the tide of the proxy wars may turn in your direction before they inevitably ebb the other way, and no matter how much noise you make about staying the course--you are going to have to admit, sooner or later, in this life or in the one beyond, that you have been wrong.

When human and divine wills flow in the same direction, they are an unstopabble whirlwind. The best Athra can offer at the moment--as this discussion demonstrates entirely too painfully--is a moderately foul-smelling fart. The mandate of heaven, good sir, is not with you.

You can't reasonably expect me to accept that line of reasoning, can you? That you are incapable of theorizing, because the situation is outside of your experience? You've done nothing but dodge my question this whole time, which is more than a little irritating.

If you can't answer, that's fine -- but if you won't answer, be honest about it, and stop insulting my intelligence with all this verbal sidestepping.

Or F, the only reasonable and logical explanation - God simply doesn't exist, and the Amarr will, slowly, ever-so-slowly but inexorably come to the horrifying realisation that they have murdered and abused billions of people in the name of a fictional entity.

That is most certainly a possibility, as are the others already mentioned earlier.

Allow me to preface this next bit with a statement in the hopes of people not misunderstanding what I'm about to say. I'm not attempting to convince, convert, or coerce anyone. I'm not trying to justify anything, I'm simple presenting my thoughts.

It is abundantly clear to me that there are people in this world who do commit horrible crimes and try to justify them as part of God's will. By people I mean both the individuals and the larger entities of various levels of social constructs. There is no point in trying to pretend this hasn't occurred or that it doesn't continue to occur.

It is just as perfectly clear that there are also people who do great works of good in the name of God, and again these people exist on both the individual levels as well as there being organizations, charities, businesses, and communities that do humanitarian work because of their beliefs.

Personally I've met people who do one, the other, both, or neither, and obviously my own personal experiences can only be considered the tiniest fraction of any sort of statistical sampling, borderline anecdotal when you take into account the sheer numbers of people in the world. However, if there were no God, then one of two things would happen. Either all the evils as well as all the good done in the name of God stops, or people simply keep doing exactly as they would have done and merely attach a different reason.

Now, from what little I know of the world, and what I've learned from the oh so few people I've met, I can honestly say I have never met anyone who has done anything with the sole reason being "because God wishes me to do so." There are always other reasons. So really, in the grand scheme of things I'm not convinced the existence of God truly matters when a person is faced with a choice. The options will be weighed by whatever set of scales that person uses, and the evil man will do evil, and the good man will do good. Feel free to attribute the decision to do good or evil to anything you wish. A sense of justice, respect, morality, duty, greed, lust, hatred, lack of impulse control, whatever reason you like. God is, I believe, in the scope of decision making, but a speck of sand in a desert.

The spiritual religion is not in cause. The doctrine is.

I also believe that God as interpreted by the Orthodox Amarr does not exist, for that it just makes little sense added to a unsignifcantly low probability for this version of Him to exist either, though of course, one can not state it does not exist or it would be like stating that one knows for example that there is nothing smaller than quarks in existence, which has yet to be proved. It would be even more foolish to state that He exists without any logical proof to back this up, considering as I said above, the ridiculously low probability for this specific Amarrian interpretation of God to exist. I guess this reasoning is what we call agnosticism.

It is obvious that I prefer my own interpretation of course.

The burden of proof (at least in terms of God's existence) is on you. We are not making spurious claims of an invisible, intangible, all-powerful entity guiding our lives.

I apologize. I meant to say that I am not making such claims.

Still, the burden of proof, one way or another, is on the one making the claim.

Well, there's the endless parade of abused slaves, for one thing. There's also what used to be Starkmanir Prime, if you care to visit, but most Amarrians don't have the stomach for it - for some strange reason, it tends to make your kind uncomfortable.

Correct.