Have you considered that God is actually a passive neutral concept hat has nothing to do at all with Amarrians and the Scriptures except the fact that the scriptural pieces you refer to are instead testimony for a culture to do what they think is right, according to that concept of God ?

Or, more concretly, like Ms Mithra said : this is about the choice of a culture to follow a set of ideals that they think going in the same way than God, not God telling them to do so.

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.

Providing God Is God (which He is but roll with me here) He would be such a complex creature of immense majesty that can not be premised properly with human logic in the way you provided much less in the brief method you provided.

God doesn't have to make sense that's not a requirement for belief.

Sure you can argue that since God can not be logically argued then He is a logical impossibility. That very well sounds good on paper but paper is also used for cleaning my backside and only has as much value as it does at that moment and none later. Your witty argument is charming and I'm sure draws a crowd but doesn't solve the remaining burning questions about God and therefor is where the argument falls apart.

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.

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

OK.

If I accept this premise then the Amarr have no right to claim any kind of superiority over anyone else, nor can they claim that their god's will--his admonition to subjugate the rest of the universe on his authority--

Now if you could just get the TC and Jamyl to drop the silly reclaiming nonsense and agree to a negotiated timetable to release my kin then I think we can do business.

See, that wasn't so hard was it?

Careful though, you're liable to get your hand spanked pretty hard if you ever go back into Amarr space for daring to say what you did.

But ultimately, what it boils down to is this. God is perfect, and humans are imperfect. As such, it's impossible for humans to directly comprehend everything about God and his ineffable plans.

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?

No what you have done is taken a stance that since God is unknowable he is therefore a logical impossibility without erecting anything in its place.

Hence your point has no staying power because all you did was take away an answer, the question is still there.

My point is God can only be God because He is not knowable by our limited perspective of the universe and if someone could know Him He (being the entity in question) can't be God.

Which is something you are still not addressing.

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.

A person you don't understand and truly know can still give you instructions. I didn't have to know my officers of the military.

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.

Why is there no middle ground? That is what you are not proving to me. I don't have to understand the nature of God to obey Him.

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.

A butterfly that lives one year around a tree cannot comprehend anything truly about the tree as it doesn't have the experience or the time to witness it in its fullest being a limited creature. It doesn't change that the insect makes its home and benefits from the tree.

Granted the questions regarding God and Man are not that simple but it illustrates the point that we have a limited perception of God in a way you can see and relate to.

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?

"God is perfect therefore he can't create a imperfect being."

In theory, if you are perfect, you can obviously create anything, including unperfection

or your perfection is only half true and your inability to create unperfect things becomes actually unperfection.

I have absolutely no idea where you are getting this 'A perfect being could not create imperfection' thing from, Andreus. Please show your work.

I don't have anything to say to toasters.

But you can read what I've already written. Or maybe you can't. Maybe whatever they replaced your frontal lobe with doesn't have very good reading skills.

The fact I'm a nation pilot has little to nothing to do with the fact that the words coming out of your mouth do not make any sense.