After reading so much scripture quoting in another thread about the "reclaiming" fairy tale in which the Amarrian God supposedly exhorts "his people" to go out and do his dirty work, a thought occurred to me; if this God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent why does he need frail, flawed, ignorant and very limited humans? Why doesn't he just snap his fingers and make his will happen?

I know this will be looked at as a blasphemous joke by the hardcore faithful but, I'm quite serious here. You claim to follow an all-powerful supreme being who created the entirety of existence, who is capable of doing anything, yet he needs the Amarr Empire to carry out his commands? Sounds a little incongruous to me. Highly irrational. What's the story Amarrians? "Enlighten" me, please.

From a purely logical perspective, the Amarr Empire make utterly terrible servants to their god. They've spawned at least three major heresies that threaten the foundations of their faith (the Sani Sabik, the Equilibrium of Man and Sansha's Nation) and their abhorent behaviour has utterly and forever lost them even the slightest chance of spreading their faith to either the Minmatar or the various peoples of the Federation. The State, their only major ally - and even then only through the mediation of a schismatic pseudoheretical satellite state - does not accept their faith either, allying with them only out of convenience. In the last half-millenium, they've lost nearly a third of their territory to the Minmatar and the Khanid, and risked losing more to the Blood Raiders.

Their current Empress is an affront to the very laws this deity laid down about cloning royal flesh.

For a race that's become basically a byword for religion, the Amarr are awful divine servants.

So let me get this straight, right.

God - a supposedly perfect, infinitely powerful, all-knowing, entirely benevolent immortal being, mark me - created mortal humans who were by their very nature imperfect. Having thus created an imperfect being (let's not even go into the impossibility of a perfect being creating imperfection, I don't want to strain your limited cognitive capabilities), it was ultimately God's fault that they committed the supposed Original Sin. It, a benevolent being, thusly decided to create a punishment for this Sin - a Sin for which it was ultimately responsible - and inflict it upon all those who did not choose - because it had given its creations free will for no apparent reason - to go to the trouble of saying "I'm really very sorry" in a needlessly specific and ritualistic manner.

Yet at no point did this supposedly infinitely benevolent and infinitely patient being think to shrug its divine shoulders and say "Oh, right, well, they were imperfect, so this was bound to happen. Fair cop I suppose. All is forgiven!" as any truly infinitely benevolent and infinitely patient being would do?

Seriously, the holes in the logic of your religion are so large I could fit half the Domain fleet in them and still have room enough for Vaari's ego.

Wrong. If you can't provide logical proofs for your arguments, they are by definition invalid.

Interesting. So you blindly follow the supposed will of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-encompassing being that you can't prove exists and can't understand why it bids you to perform certain acts (as interpreted by a group of fallible mortal men who can't be questioned or held to account), even though common sense and logic would say that those acts are harmful? I see. So let's say Blake that you had a vision in which this being spoke to you and told you that it considered your entire family evil and that it wants you to kill them all before killing yourself. Would you do it?

Of course you wouldn't. You'd reason that this was simply some demented nightmare caused by indigestion or some other physical or psychological ailment and ignore it.

Why is the "reclaiming" any different then? Just because it's written down (by the hand of a man, by the way, not your god) in a dusty book?

Then if God is unknowable, all claims by Amarrians to have any conception of its plan or have had any contact with it are utterly fraudulent.

But your officers in the military are not unknowable, ineffable cosmic higher powers. I know the legendary unwarranted self-importance endemic to Amarrians tends to convince them otherwise, but this is the truth. Either you concede that your God is an illogical being who doesn't exist, or you concede that all claims of contact or understanding related to it are fraudulent. There is no third way, there is no middle ground.

Communication with a by-definition unknowable being is impossible because it's unknowable. I know Amarrians have very serious problems with logic but this really is primary-school stuff.

How convenient. So the answer always ends up: this deity of yours defies any attempts on our part to understand it yet, we're to blindly accept whatever it bids us to do. Anything good or bad that happens we accept because the deity wills it and it can't be questioned because we're incapable of understanding the deity's motivations or plans.

That's a pretty nice setup. Seems like you can justify damn near anything.

I'd really appreciate it if any of you who follow the Amarrian religion would answer Captain Rella's question regarding how you'd respond if this deity of yours demanded something of that sort would you obey?

This.

Nitpicking spelling doesn't free yourself from the argument, Mr. Ixiris. To a perfect being there is no such thing as "inability". If this perfect being has a limitation then it was never perfect to begin with. However a perfect being can create imperfection but still remain perfect because it was the being's intent to do so.

This all sounds like so much "handwavium" to try and explain and justify a bad plot predicament that you can't logically write yourselves out of. No matter what, the final answer is always, "Our god is perfect, we can't understand what he wants because we're imperfect but, we do what he says anyway because we're his chosen faithful servants and whatever we say and do in his name is justified".

You also failed to answer Captain Rella's question Blake. What is your god commanded you to murder your entire family and then commit suicide? Would you do it?