Ending generational slavery rather than emancipating everyone at once is one way to end the institution, but stealing away children from their families to deliver to the Republic is an absolutely vile proposition. That is absurd.
Any option that involves delivering to the Republic people whose faith is not yet solidified is in violation of the Reclaiming, yes. Children are still learning, and sending them away to a faithless nation before they’ve truly taken up the faith, without their parents to guide them, is essentially condemning their souls to damnation. Doriam II tried this on a small scale and it resulted in a tragedy after extremists destroyed the transports before they could arrive.
Yes, it can. This is what I have been saying. The methods used to carry it out can be adjusted. The actual belief cannot.
I’m interested in the actual belief is there a chance to find more information on it or recieve information from you on this topic per message, As it currently stands for me i have the picture in mind that amarr is connected or under the spell of an let’s say enchaining energy and mimic their state of being chained pushing it on others.
We agree on something at least. This idea is vile. It is not even close to a solution. It is no solution to abandon everyone else to the Amarr, and as you say, stealing away their children in the process. The hope for freedom lived on Minmatar hearts for over 700 years. Even if it’s 150 years later, it still lives on in billions, trillions of hearts under Amarr yoke.
I find it immensely distasteful how some consider all of these people a writeoff in the name of making very terrible one-sided deals with a force that has quite clearly stated its number one goal is to force everyone to think the way it does, or die.
See, this is the problem. A huge one. Even if you switch to “softer methods”, Amarr still want to turn people into their way of life, and as has been demonstrated, they will not take no for an answer because it is a religious mandate to convert everyone as “one nation under God” - by force if necessary AND there are many religious excuses why forceful conversion is even preferable, “because suffering is good for the soul” and similar ■■■■■■■■.
There is only one way to end the Amarr-Minmatar conflict once and for all, and that is that Amarr either cease the reclaiming or cease to exist. And it’s not just the Minmatar at stake here, Amarr want to convert and subjugate everyone, they’re as much as a threat to the Caldari and Gallente as they are to Minmatar. Maybe not an immediate threat, but a threat nonetheless, a powder keg waiting to explode sooner or later.
And yeah I don’t like sounding like Mizhara either, but here we are.
I don’t consider them a “writeoff” and I found Mr Tuulinen’s proposition cold. His proposition had the advantage of being different though. Based on what I’ve learned so far, I suspected that the Amarr might reject this proposal and I knew the Minmatar certainly would, I would’ve too if I were in the Minmatar’s shoes. It does make everyone’s position a bit more clear though. I don’t know if that was Mr Tuulinen’s intent or not.
What if we traded one slave of any kind for one Minmatar criminal? The tribals are just going to kill them anyways, or sentence them to crushing poverty and disease for things we merely enslave for. Killing humans is a terrible offense if they can be reclaimed, that is the purpose of the reclamation. You guys get your punishment, we get to have a soul to save.
They’d have healthcare and a better life than that disgusting fetid pit, Vo’shun.
I know which side of that fence I would want to be on if I was in that situation.
It’s pretty much as I suspected then. Is there any way that the children can be encultured without being slaves themselves, or does Reclaiming require generational slavery simply for not being born to believers?
This would probably be rejected by the Amarr too, but what if they secularized Reclaiming? They dropped not only war and slavery requirements, but the god-mandate, the requirement to believe and the proselytizing that goes with it, acceptance of other faiths or lack thereof, and instead focused on an actual peaceful unification of all humanity while respecting the innate differences and diversity found within it?
I’m of course going against millenia of tradition and religious practice here, but I’d like to see how this goes down.
Yes, of course they can be encultured without being slaves themselves. Any child raised in a free, faithful family is encultured without being a slave. Child rearing is part of the Reclaiming, regardless of social class. The Reclaiming does not require generational slavery.
spit-takes
Those two words together is an oxymoron.
No need. It’s not a suggestion that can even be approached for discussion.
It’s not like it’s entirely unreasonable to say it is secular in nature. The Amarr are as human as everyone else, and driven by the same core tyrannical genes. “Multiply thyself” is their commandment, which in turn cascades upwards into more and more complex systems and structures all serving that initial command. Their failures of ethics and morality are the same as everyone else’s, namely greed and hunger for power and so on, which is conveniently justified through their religion and so it’s rationalized in that fashion.
They’re no dumber than the rest of us either, so they are just as aware of how nonsensical the faith ultimately is (with the same exceptions we have exemplified in their zealots and true believers, similar to our own examples of “no, gravity is just our discworld accelerating upwards at just below ten meters per second” and other such creatures) and simply use it to promote their agenda of preserving and attaining ever more power and control.
This is not to say it’s necessarily for malicious intent. They may very well be utterly convinced it’s a worthwhile deception to maintain order, or that the deception is worthwhile because they think it still is the best moral framework, and so on… but let’s face it. The Reclaiming is in all likelihood a secular venture for them, hidden underneath a veneer of Deus Vult.
It’s rather amusing in a way. All this that we do, that we fight for, that we love and cherish, that we hate and even die for… all built from these tiny little biological processes cascading upwards into the cataclysmic conflicts of New Eden.
… and even knowing all this, it still doesn’t matter. We’ll still do it, because these illusions still do matter to us.
But children born to slaves are required to be slaves? Can they not be raised as free members of Amarrian society and still be Reclaimed as well? Why do they need to be slaves as well?
Clearly I think it would be better without slavery to begin with, but why practice generational slavery if it’s not required?
Hmm, alright. What from my proposal would you keep and what would you add?
Given some of the reactions around the forums when the words secular, atheist, or Minmatar are mentioned, I think I’ll keep them on. Thank you kindly.
When you get down to the root of it, yes. As a non theist and a materialist (I just realized that I seem to wear a plethora of hats) I have no problem accepting that. On a social level, after all the complexity that our minds have created has been laid on top, there is a religious versus a secular non religious view. So, even if there is no there there when it comes to the spiritual, there’s still the perception that there is for many people. This means, though I’m sure you know this, that I have to specify secular versus spiritual.
I’ve said it several times myself, that I don’t think that the spiritual or religious, specifically the Amarr, are stupid or idiots. People tend to personally identify with their strongly held beliefs though, don’t you think? I’m guilty of doing the same thing, even if the belief is justified sometimes I believe it for emotional or selfish reasons rather than rational reasons. So I think much of the same thing is occurring here except their beliefs aren’t justified, or at least not yet.
Don’t let your existential nihilism run away with you. Just because there’s no objective meaning to life, or there is no deity on high is telling us what the meaning of life is, doesn’t mean that we can’t create our own meaning. The meaning I create for my self has just as much validity as some god’s instruction, more because I can’t prove any god but I have to accept my own existence.
Sorry for the info dump. I’m sure you know all this and don’t need someone explaining it to you.
Yeah, I wouldn’t read quite so much into it. There’s no nihilism or such in play. There’s just acknowledgment of the illusory nature of what is nonetheless rather real to us all.
I should clarify. It is usually believed to be required, and that belief is enforced by the Holders as they hold all the power over whether or not to release a slave from service. It is believed to be necessary to weed out bad behavior and customs over generations. A single generation can pretend to be faithful and hide their native customs while quietly teaching them to their children, but over multiple generations the attempts to cling to ancient traditions purely by word of mouth fades away. It’s a kind of, cultural rote that sticks more and more as time passes.
It is also because failure (and success) is believed to pass down bloodlines (whether by some kind of property of blood, or because of bad/good habits being taught to children). And the biggest failure of all is the original apostasy. I’ve compared this before to the northern concept of sentencing someone to multiple life sentences. In your cultures, the sentence is essentially wiped out when they die. In Amarr, the additional sentences pass to your children. So it’s considered a punishment on the lineage, rather than the person, and each member works off a little more of it.
Mind, I personally don’t agree with these beliefs anymore. I’m just explaining the rationality behind them. For me, there’s too much evidence of people who should be blessed acting faithlessly or criminally and having their sins ignored because they were born highly, while the most righteous of slaves might be left in servitude all because of paying the price for the crimes of someone who died two thousand years ago. Cultural rote is the only thing that still makes some kind of logical sense, but in today’s highly connected society you’re never going to be able to completely eliminate external influences anyway.
I don’t know what you’re expecting. The mandate is a requirement, seeing how it’s given to us by God (and as the mandate is the Reclaiming, proselytizing is a requirement). The requirement to believe and to purge your spirit of sin is always going to stay, and I struggle to see how any society could think that the quest to better one’s self and attain spiritual enlightenment is a bad thing. Outright approval of other faiths wouldn’t happen, but we already know how to tolerate them enough to function around atheists and heathens in interstellar dealings; I don’t go throwing a chain around my non-Amarr friends just because they don’t believe, I work to try to convince them why they should convert. Unification of all of humanity and spreading our reach across the stars won’t go anywhere, but this is a common mindset among most societies, theocratic or secular, and especially one we share with the Gallente (probably why it was our nations that worked together to create CONCORD). So, that is hardly a problematic requirement to keep. Innate differences and diversity can be respected where they don’t act counter to God’s will. Slaves and free convertees are typically given less freedom to practice their customs because you’re trying to teach them not to fall back on them, just like you might impose restrictions on your children that you wouldn’t impose on adults, but many free people in Amarr practice some customs that are not strictly Amarrian but also don’t go against Amarrian beliefs. I can go to any bookstore in Amarr and buy an Ada’kul Manual, afterall. War and slavery aren’t requirements, just common methods, so those can go. They’re promoted in Scripture though, so eliminating them is very difficult (some Scripture can change, or be reinterpreted, but the powers that be are loathe to do that), but this is all theoretical anyway.
So, again… the belief isn’t going to go away. But the belief is not evil. You can decide how to go about carrying it out.
Is it not possible to do so without generational slavery? Our interstellar nations have been space faring for how many hundreds, if not thousands, of years now. It’s there not something the social sciences or humanities can teach us about how to achieve the same goals yet more humanely? Perhaps the same fields of studies may also have something to say on why one shouldn’t force a way of life and worldview onto another cultural group? What has been considered, accepted and rejected, and why?
It was found that passing the punishment, or even debt, to the descendents would always lead to institutionalized slavery. Some cultures did in fact practice slavery at some point in the past, even generational, including paying back society or the creditors. This was deemed unjust as the descendants played no part in the crimes in question and could not be held responsible. In time institutionalized slavery was abolished altogether.
So how does punishing the descendants rectify the crime committed by the perpetrator? This comes across as mere retribution and not rehabilitation.
I understand that you don’t agree with the above any more than I do, so I don’t expect you to answer this part. I’d like to leave it here anyhow for others to ponder. I hope that’s okay.
Well that’s the thing, isn’t it? Even if you you eliminated all outside influences people and society are always changing. Yet some cultures resist change, or at least try to. Life’s only constants are change and death, if you’re not changing or changing fast enough, you die. Those deft enough to adapt survive and pass on their genes, or in this case, ideals.
Even the Amarr Empire has changed, several times in fact if I’ve understood what little I’ve read thus far. It’s not the static monolith it often presents itself as. About the only thing keeping the Empire unified is FTL travel and communications allowing almost real time transmission of its faith and ideals from one side to the other. Given all that, is one planetary population the same as its closest neighbour, let alone one on the other side of the Empire?
So, in what way can the Amarr faith adapt to the inevitable pressures of change and become more humane?
Honest answers, and I think you’ve done that despite the lack of clarity on my part perhaps.
I realize that though I probably haven’t fully appreciated that until just now. Being a secularist I don’t deny your right to proselytize though I object to methods that force faith or religious belief onto others.
Nothing wrong with self improvement I just don’t believe in sin.
That’s common human decency so forgive me if I don’t pat you on the back for that.
That’s the rub. The mind of the all knowing is said to be unknowable, yet somehow we’re supposed to buy that some people know it well enough to tell others what God wants. I don’t mean to be cynical, but I hope you appreciate my consternation here.
This is a start, and I’m glad to hear it.
Is a belief worth keeping, even if it’s not evil or harmful in any way, if it’s not justifiable? How does clinging to unjustified beliefs affect our interaction with reality and others?