The Sansha feel the same way. They just have another name for their God.
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Their god is no god.
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Your conception of the Maker is one made by humankind with the solitary intent of keeping the populace meek and peaceful, the maker rewards strength but makes no distinction between any nation. Minmatar or Amarr. The Amarr aristocracy is a decrepit relic of the past, and it’s faith is the construct of man, not God.
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Neither is yours. Just an idea that needs to die.
The idea of faith exists in human society since its very beginning, and history studies show that most religious systems, even those starting from humble shamanic practices, tend - for some obscure reason - to eventually evolve towards monotheism.
You’ll need to turn us all into Sansha or Rogue drones to make that die.
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Actually, I had the exact same question as Arrendis when I originally read your essay several hours ago. And that doesn’t happen very often.
Your differentiating between “generational slavery” and “debt slaves” is nothing more than splitting hairs. Whether the newborn is carrying over the sins of their forefathers or merely the debt of the damage of those sins makes no difference. You are still enslaving people for something they did not do with their own hands. It reeks of nothing but an excuse to keep enslaving others. I’ll stop short of saying it’s Sanist, but it is reminiscent of someone: the same shoddy Holders that you railed against in your essay.
And by the way:
In your essay, you keep returning to this idea of what should happen “in properly managed Holdings” if Holders are doing their jobs right. As you admit yourself, this is not the case. All over the Empire, you have Holders who refuse to free their slaves because the free labor is too nice. You have Holders who physically, psychologically, and emotionally abuse their slaves. You have people who aren’t Holders at all who buy slaves on the SCC markets and use them for whatever delights their black little hearts. (Indeed, even just loading up haulers of them and exploding the ship.)
If these things are so wrong even in your view, then why do they still exist in the Empire? You, Chapter Master, are uniquely able to do something about it, with your visibility as well as the influence of your organization. Petition your Empress and Councils to provide greater oversight of Holders who have too many enslaved people who should be freed by now. Hold them accountable by auditing their authority over their slaves. Ask your Empress to pressure CONCORD to outlaw the sale of slaves on the SCC markets and crack down on people owning slaves when they aren’t Holders.
(…or, y’know, just free every single slave in the Empire. Genuinely, what percentage of existing slaves do you think have done something criminal themselves? Most of them are so far removed from Minmatar culture by now that, even if we accept your patently gross argument that different cultures are automatically evil because their forebears rejected your unforgiving God, most slaves don’t even know that culture. With few exceptions, Minmatar slaves don’t understand the Voluval, don’t know the old symbols and relics of their tribes, don’t even know Old Mother or their ancestral spirits. So what debt is it they’re still paying off?)
Yes, there are Holders who are kind to their slaves and teach them the ways of your religion and help them along the path to cultural erasure, sorry I mean becoming Amarr, and who regularly free these slaves when they’ve reached whatever the gold standard is. I’ve seen this myself. More often I’ve seen the effects of abusive Holders and “holders”. Not that you care, but your casual handwaving of this issue, by repeatedly saying “in a properly managed Holding” to shift the onus off of Amarr society onto these shifty theoretical individuals, belittles the entire cause of improving the lives of those slaves and holding those individuals accountable. It’s barely a footnote in your essay, when in truth it’s the root of it.
I have more to say on that topic—the root of where this idea of forgiveness was “invented”—but I’ll say it elsewhere.
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It makes all the difference in the world. The former would be damned and deserve nothing but scorn while the latter is a valuable part of Amarr society that needs to be cultivated to strengthen both the Holding and Amarr.
As for the rest, your attempt to shame me into stepping outside of my place in the divinely ordered structure of Amarr does little more than demonstrate how ill educated you are on what authority being a Holder and Chapter Master grants me.
To the full extent of the authority granted to me by the Excubitoris Chapter and the Lok’ri Holding, I will work ceaselessly to make Amarr and its people stronger. But I will not make Amarr’s challenges worse by stepping outside my mandate.
Of course, given what I have seen of you, I don’t expect you to understand the concept of staying in one’s proper place.
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Interestingly enough, this explanation of God’s Order is the closest one yet I have read to what my tradition’s legends teach about the Amarrian God; namely that He is the one with the Power to define who gets what, and that’s that, no negotiations and fiddling about it.
Only, we of course go on from there to “might does not make right” and end up with Renouncement… but that too fits into this story. Those who are shown Faith but refuse it, that’s pretty much me and mine. (Hi.)
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I imagine it does… in a properly managed holding.
It wasn’t an attempt to shame. It was a suggestion.
I don’t think you’re easily influenced by public opinion, so I wouldn’t waste my time trying to shame you.
I’m happy to be educated.
Quite right. I’ve gone quite out of my way to defy expectations. But my eyes and ears are open.
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As having been one of the biggest proponents of the salvific slavery model, having grown up under the guidance of the Salvation Church of Blessed Servitude, and directly named as such in this piece, I suppose I should respond.
I think, first and foremost, it is important to say that generational sin is hardly a new belief in Amarr. Generational sin, and generational virtue. True Amarrism is based on that belief, as much as the beliefs of slaves are. To be called True Amarr is a label that refers to one’s family having never lost the faith. That the other races are not True is inherently a declaration that our rejection of God damned us. That belief is wrong, in my opinion, but this phrasing of it as something recent (even just a few centuries recent) is flawed. In conventional Amarrian belief there is no point at which someone can rise to the same level of True Amarr. Our bloodlines are believed inherently damaged. We have dropped to a lower level of the hierarchy, as all things serve one higher, and can never ascend that, even if we ascend certain temporal social rankings.
But here is where Lord Lok’ri does not fully understand the beliefs taught among slaves. Whether or not God forgives is irrelevant in Blessed Servitude. We do not expect forgiveness. A good act does not negate the bad, and nor does a bad one negate a good one. What we do, is prove our worthiness in spite of that inherent flaw. It can’t be wiped away, but it can be mitigated. We may never reach the same heights in heaven that the True Amarr find, but we may still pass through the doors as long as we have proven ourselves good servants.
This is because the generational sin is not an equal sin to the original crime. It is, in Salvationist belief, carried down the line, but as we are not the ones who committed the original apostasy, we are not guilty of the same crimes. We are related to them, suspect because of that relation, but not guilty in the same way. Those who commit apostasy are, in most cases, doomed to eternal damnation, lest they recant and repent (and whether such a recanting will sway God can be known by no one but God, but may, as you said, receive mercy in this world at least). And yes, even if they are not punished in this world, they will suffer in the next. But those who are born to the apostate are not guilty of apostasy. They are guilty of being related to a person guilty of apostasy. They are suspect, for fear the sins carried down through blood will lead them down similar roads and into similar crimes. Just as the child of a Holder family is held high on the merits of that family, the child of an apostate is held low on the lack of merits of the apostate.
What we inherit is bad blood. The blood of sinners. Just as marriage into an ignoble family will be considered a taint on the blood of the child and the reputation of the house, so too does being descended from sinners damn you. That is generational. It is mitigateable, but not forgivable – excepting in one following the path of the Udorians and integrating so thoroughly into the True Amarrian bloodline that the old sinner’s blood is eradicated. For me and many other Salvationists, the Ni-Kunni and Udorian models were the ones to follow. Devotion, obedience, compliance, such that we prove ourselves worthy of not only freedom, but eventually, to be granted the grace of becoming wholly True Amarr in blood and soul. Rather than forgiveness of the original sin, it is the eradication of it, the slow excision of it carried out over generations, until the sinful bloodline is no more. That which is pure is kept, that which is false is cut away and discarded.
All this being said, I also do not think it is appropriate to say that God does not forgive. I do not believe it is appropriate to make such claims of Him. What happens to us at our Final Judgment is known to no one but us and God. He will judge the summation of our lives, the good and the bad, and deem us worthy of entry into heaven or not. We cannot say what God will do, we cannot say who is risen up and who is damned, we cannot promise anything but membership into the community of the faithful and a good word on our behalf to Him by the priests who intercede for us. What we can do, is dole our appropriate justice and mercy in the temporal world.
You talk about unfairness as if it’s just about God’s forgiveness, and salvation. You imply that, well, it’s okay if an emperor grants mercy, because God still won’t. But it’s not. It is no more fair, no more right, for the mercy of the emperor to be given to sinners than it would if it were the forgiveness of God. A person who commits a crime is no more forgivable by us mortals than it is by God! And when we grant mercy to some criminals, but not others, it remains just as evil as any promises of salvation. Even without generational slavery, some criminals were subjected to slavery, with their children and their children’s children having to pay off their debt, while others, some who committed far worse deeds, are not. That remains unfair and wrong no matter what you believe.
Your view, Lord Lok’ri, is also one that decries Amarr’s failings as much as I have. By your model, there is vast, systemic corruption going on in the Holder class. Because by your model, we should have so much fewer slaves that there would be no possibility of our economy operating on it. Any social debts, any issues of faith, are largely eradicated within 3 generations. The number of what you call Criminal Slaves is a vast minority, in the single digit percentile or lower. Virtually every slave beyond the first few generations is a faithful, dutiful, devoted Amarrian subject and worshiper of God. If such things warranted freedom, then we should see trillions of slaves released, and the end of an economy powered by slavery. So either your beliefs are flawed, or you are admitting that the system is so utterly corrupt as to essentially validate what I have spoken up about. Have you, then, come around to supporting me, your lordship? To acknowledging the systemic corruption plaguing the Holder class and the need for reform and change to fix it and restore Amarr to a purer state?
Of course, this also raises another area that you have largely ignored in your piece: that of slaves as a reward and labor force for the Holder. Indeed, possibly even moreso than punishment of the slave, slavery exists as a Scriptural right of the Holder class. All things must serve one higher, and the slave serves the Holder, whose supposed blessedness is such that he or she is given a right to own slaves. A great many conservative Holders would reject the idea that slavery is about the slave, and ask instead, “Since when are we obligated to manumit our slaves at all?” I am sure many of them would object to your declaration of their being Sanist individualists… and with what you have called out, it is a very large number that you are condemning, indeed.
Frankly, I am glad to see you coming around to my side of things and calling out generational slavery for the issues it raises. And such a system as you propose would be a great improvement of things. But I doubt you will get much more traction than I am, because your beliefs are no more widely shared among the conservative Holder class than mine.
It’s really not that obscure at all. It has to do with three factors: Power, power, and power. And yes, that’s three different factors.
In the first model, the power involved is the power of the ‘divine’ entity to create everything. We invent these systems, after all, in an attempt to personalize the power of the natural universe. We imagine spirits, and align them with plants, animals, objects, events… and eventually, someone gets the bright idea to ask ‘well, where’d all this existence come from?’ And that takes a really big spirit… but if that spirit’s so powerful, then it should be the thing you really want to appeal to in a lot of situations. After all, the spirit of a local apex predator might help you with your hunt… but what you’re really after is to make a good life for yourself and your kin. And which spirit made all the good life out there? Well… talk to that creator-spirit!
The next is the power of unity. A polytheistic people is more scattered, more divergent. They have different gods they pray to, different priests they hearken to, and different ways they practice. Sure, it might start off homogenized, but slowly, a port city comes to prioritize gods of trade or the ocean, a city in a strategic position that has faced many foes gives the primacy to the god of war, and so on. The larger society splinters, and internal divisions become externalizing the Other. No longer is a divergent group ‘our distant kin’, but ‘that other nation’. Increased tensions slowly cause more conflict, and eventually, the adherents of the religious system have fallen into internecine bloodshed and are probably about to get wiped out by some other culture.
The third power… is power. It’s the flip side of the unity issue: My god is bigger than your god. If the fighting between neighbors is bad enough, one sect’s adherents get wiped out, or suppressed, and their deity’s portfolio slowly get absorbed by that of the victor… until eventually, you wind up with a god of everything.
Chaos and accretion. That’s pretty much it.
Or, you know, atheists. We seem to have a lot less trouble with that whole ‘starting religious wars’ thing. But, you know… eternal optimist that I am, I’m confident people will eventually come to realize they don’t need gods or an eternal-paradise-after-death… just appreciate the awesome universe you were inevitably born into. It’s pretty damned amazing, what’s out there. The only real ugliness is the things we do to one another.
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First, I have to laud Lord Lok’ri for giving us this essay of his.
I’m staunchly on his side in opposing the very concept of Forgivable Generational Inherited Sin. This idea is indeed a recent idea and it is not the same - nor does it translate readily in either direction - as that of generational slavery.
I say that as someone coming from a background of generational slavery. As may be known, my family remained in debt slavery for generations after incurring substantial financial debt.
Neither sin nor virtue (and I want to point out here that virtue is not in a straightforwad way the antonym to sin) are inherited from parent to child. Lord Lok’ri pointed out rightly, that rather, growing up in a sinful environment, with sinful parents, will predispose one to be sinful, while growing up in a virtuous environment with virtuous parents will see those under their proper care probably inclined to be virtuous. It’s an effect of nurture, though, not of nature, nothing that is handed onto the next generation like eye colour. Nor is sin transferrable as monetary debt is. But to see why, we need to first understand what sin is! So, I will try to do that rather then slinging Quotes of well-known Scriptural snippets without applying reason towards their understanding:
I. What is Sin?
People tend to look at sin like it would be an offense like any other. Someone wronging another or going against some societal rule. Nothing could be further from the truth! Who would be the victim of such an offense? Clearly it would have to be God. As sin would be an offense either against God directly or His rules.
To understand that this can’t be the case, one must first grasp that God is not just like any other person. Strictly speaking, He is no person at all, even though He at times appears to us as if He would be a person - that is due to our limitations, though, not His! God is Perfect Being. Nothing can add to Him and nothing can take away from Him.
So, clearly God can’t be a victim of our transgressions! What kind of perfect being would he be, if we could properly describe Him as a victim, after all? If we imagine God like that, then we worship an idol, rather then the Transcendent, All-Good, Cause-of-All-Causes.
Sin, is then not taking away something from God, or hurting or otherwise damaging Him. The first sin of humankind is made clear by the signs of circle and broken circle. Mankind - all of us, indeed - broke away from God. This is not to be misunderstood as taking something away from God, though, we are still His, entirely. It is to be understood, rather, as us stopping to listen to him. The wronged party in Sin is not God, but the sinner! In our vain and useless effort to distance ourselves from God, we only hurt ourselves. Only by realigning ourselves again, can we mend, what we have broken - ourselves.
God, all the while, remains perfect, unpertubed, everlasting. He is there, we can’t make him go away. We can just decide to ignore that he is there all along. All sin consists in ignoring God in some regard.
And yes, even the Empire, even the Amarr - whether ‘true’ or else - are not in perfect communion with God. As is made clear by the sign of the Empire: The circle conjoined, albeit imperfectly.
II: Why God is Un-‘Unforgiving-Forgiving’
Forgiveness is the intentional and voluntary process by which a victim undergoes a change in feelings and attitude regarding an offense, lets go of negative emotions such as resentment and vengeance (however justified it might be), and with an increased ability to wish the offender well.
God, thus, can’t be a forgiving God, as it would imply Him being capable of being a victim. Of Harbouring negative emotions, because of some measly human. God, clearly, is transcending notions of forgiveness. Forgiveness is something imperfect beings - such as us humans - are capable of - and should make ample use of in my opinion. Yet, it is a sign of our imperfection. It would be a category mistake to apply an attribute of imperfect beings to a perfect being, though! Of course, unless we are talking in metaphor and analogy.
Similarly, though, to say God is an ‘unforgiving god’ - in any non-analogical or non-metaphorical way - would mean to make just the same, stupid mistake. To be unforgiving means to be in a position that allows one to show forgiveness but then to withold it. To say that God -literally- is unforgiving would then not only mean that he is imperfect as he can be a victim, he’d also be petty.
So, as the ‘forgiving’ would be properly misapplied to God in His perfection, so is ‘unforgiving’. God, again, transcends that dichotomy that only applies to less perfect beings.
III. Why there is Hope.
Scripture, though, speaks - especially in it’s oldest parts - about God as if He is unfurgiving or merciless. And also as if he is forgiving and merciful. This is easily understood once one realizes that that talk about God must be metaphorical or said in analogy - for the reasons I have been given above. But also it should be easy to see that a being that is All-Perfect can’t just be done full justice by our human words. That is why the cataphatic path towards knowing God always needs to be accompanied by the apophatic path, as the former is in dire need of the latter one as a corrective!
So, that said, I can only struggle to make more plain what Scripture is alluding to, when talking about God’s wrath being immense. His justice being swift and decisive. His tolerance being limited.
If sin consists in hurting oneself, by ignoring God, then, really, the damnation is not consequence of sinful action. Sinful action already is damnation brought onto us by ourseves. What could be more immense, what could be more swift and decisive? And if we go on this path of sin, then it will eventually our end. Tolerance is limited.
On the other hand, there is the Scriptural promise of Reclaiming and redemption. Similar to damation comes salvation. It’s not the reward for aligning yourself with God: Salvation consists in being aligned with God. Redemption, then, is re-alignment with God and it is always open, if even incrementally, as long as we can do just that.
IV. On the Utter and Total Stupidity of the Concept of ‘Forgivable Generational Inherited Sin’
As we have seen, to justify something as ‘forgivable generational inherited sin’, one would need to
- Assume that God is able to be victim and thus imperfect.
- That sin is either to be inherited like a genetic trait
- or can be passed on like monetary debt.
The third point can be declined as we have seen above in that sin is not a transactable thing. It’s not even a thing, it is rather a disalignment mainly of action. You can’t just hand it over like that. The second point can be dismissed for the same reason. And the first point is so abject in it’s ignorance that there is no further treatment of it needed.
I would love to participate in that endeavour, if you’d be willing to let me, Lord Lok’ri!
Conjoined in God,
N. Mithra
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It is ironic that you accuse holders of Sanist greed and individualism, yet your ‘god’ is the most representative of Sani Sabik amongst all the spirits.
It is a spiteful, jealous spirit, greedily hording its possessions, singling itself over all other spirits and demanding that it alone be worshiped, for its own sake, with an obsession over blood, both of its enemies and the ‘purity’ of its followers. That you and the rest of the Amarr are blind to this only speaks to the utter corruption of your people.
Slavery is not the only reason we fight you. We have a moral obligation to fight against such a malevolent force. May the Spirits and our Ancestors Grant us the strength to defeat you.
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Your words are clearly born out of ignorance. You confuse the idol you made up in your mind, ascribing it to us, with what is properly worshipped by the Amarr faithful.
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God created any other spirits that may exist. He is worshiped because everything that is is due to Him. He is our creator.
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This spirit created nothing, but chooses to corrupt.
It first tried with the Minmatar, but we rebuked its maligned influence so it fled with its host of evil spirits. in its failure it found the Amarr, and with this new people corrupted with its influence, it seeks to collect all under it, greedy and jealous.
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Okay.
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The universe is, indeed, beautiful, and I surely keep appreciating it with my every breath. Though its origins lie in a phenomenon the secular science still fails to fully explain. Even if they try to go one level higher and invent some kind of cosmic teapot of true vacuum / quantum foam / whatever in which innumerable bubbles of false vacuum - different universes - are born every moment in time, there’s still the problem of the origins of that unstable teapot.
…And there are, you know, humans.
Humans were created (as we the Amarr would say) or the millions and millions of years of evolution shaped them (as the gallentean science would say) so that they can’t really healthily function as atheists without going on a Sani Sabik-like spiral of self destruction. Human mind, even that of a child, fiercely rejects the idea that it’s nothing more than a transient meatbag full of genes to be passed to the next generation if the mating ritual succeeds, their life a brief flicker in the unfathomable endless dark. It craves purpose. True purpose. That’s where the seeds of Faith are born, and you can’t extinguish them, nor can anyone else.
So, if we just imagine for a second that you could just remove the Faith from this world, it’d reappear. Again and again, because it’s built into us. The Truth of God would sooner or later shine through, and the flame of the Faith will be lit again by new prophets. You can’t kill what we are; no one can.
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Which still exists when you attempt to shoehorn in the divine. ‘Oh, God created everything’. Well, clearly not, because God was there. So who or what created God? If God can simply have ‘always been’, why can’t a mechanistic universe, without awareness or will of its own, be given the same allowance?
This is patently untrue. Social systems exist independent of spirituality. Enlightened self-interest and devotion to the family group give rise to them. That devotion to the larger, usually closely related, social group is built into our genes. We see similar behaviors across Mammalia, and beyond. Life exists to propagate itself, and the most successful strategies for complex life in the long term include parental care. It’s only when we exceed the distance and direct relationship scaling that our still fairly primitive brains can manage that we need ‘society’. And while religion is one of the tools nascent societies use to ensure cohesion and unity against outside influences, it is not an inevitable one, nor even the most dominant.
That would be sex.
Edit: Just as an aside, we’re getting a bit far afield from Gaven’s topic. If you want to split this off into its own, or go to Off-Topic, I’m good w/that. Likely to move it there myself after your next response, since you’re replying right now.
I agree. We are indeed getting offtopic, and we should stop derailing this thread further.
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