And I am listening. I believe you, too.
I simply also believe that if the Amarr believe I’m wrong, but won’t speak up to set things straight, that’s their problem.
Edit: And, for the record, I have no idea what Aria’s said. Like I told her: whatever game she thinks is going on, it’s in her head, and I’m done enabling her need to feel put upon.
Uh. … K.
And so it goes.
Given how bored we all are by now about the repeating roles we take in this little saga play of capsuleers, imagine how bored we’ll be when it’s not twenty years but two hundred?
Well, I’ll be long dead, and I wouldn’t want to speculate how whatever iteration of ‘me’ (if any) exists then might feel. 
This, right here, is kind of THE reason I don’t quite understand the Amarrian enthusiasm for eternal life. I get that Paradise is supposed to be some kind of transcendent state and maybe I wouldn’t be able to even get bored, but as a non-transcendent being it’s a little hard for me to imagine even wanting to live forever.
Especially if that meant being surrounded all the time with people who agreed with me and things I’d seen and done already. What would be left to explore or discuss? I suppose if God got super-creative about it (“Hey, let’s try adding some more visible, interactable dimensions onto the ones we have!”), but. . . .
It just makes more sense to me to spend the time I have as a fleeting presence in a labyrinth of wonders and then disappear, leaving the labyrinth for others to explore in turn.
I’ve had enough brushes with true death before I was a capsuleer that I’ll gladly look forwards to living a few hundred years. I’m an inventive girl, I’m sure I can find something to fill my time with. But then, I’m talking about capsuleer lifetimes, not some sort of afterlife.
I think I’ll be pretty happy if I make it to 200. Or maybe pretty miserable, I don’t know. The Amarr gerontocrats seem to manage pretty well.
Maybe you just take it one day at a time.
(I aspire to having acquired Lord Ibrahim Tash-Murkon’s sense of humor by the time I get to that point.)
Just … it seems like some of the timeframes people aspire to, leaning way-hard into the capsuleer “immortality” thing, can’t possibly be pleasant for a single consciousness to survive for.
And even that’s nothing near eternity.
I do prefer the variations of religion (Amarrian or otherwise) that stress this life over rewards in the next, yea, myself.
One thing to bear in mind is that the view from the IGS rarely holds much of the real picture in regards to interactions, both in terms of how, who and why. The interactions you see on this board should be judged in the context of this board, since I suspect that just like myself, it tells only a very narrow part of the story.
Were you aware that three of the four lovers I’ve taken in my career - that is counting the romantic entanglements rather than the mere… physical ones - were of variants of the Amarr faith? Without delving into the sordid details of my greatest failure and mistake, they were all professing and faithful to a different path of the Rite and to such a degree you have to turn the Rite into a bag term for what would essentially be very distinctly different religions in the first place.
I mention this because there’s something very important to bear in mind:
The discussions and arguments you interpret - or at least make out to be in this case - as trying to dismantle a narratively inconvenient opposing stance, or attempts to make a particular opposing viewpoint the ‘universally accepted as correct’, probably aren’t so at all.
They’re often rather distinct and specifically bounded little battles connected to the larger picture only tenuously and without intended or effective impact outside of those bounds.
We know and understand that there is no ‘universal’ opposing standpoint in the enemy we call the Rite. However, each individual bout in that context will fall into a specific narrative and viewpoint, and the discussion that engenders will be very specific and cause specific arguments and for the specific context at the time dismissal and disregard of other narratives and viewpoints out of simple necessity to maintain any kind of structure to it.
In short, there are - for some of us - interactions with all manner of viewpoints, narratives, perspectives and people across these borders of nations, faiths, ethnicities and principles. There’s understanding of how these are all limited in scope.
Interpreting the few interactions you see here on the IGS as representative of the overall understanding, intentions and motivations of the people behind them would thus be a very significant mistake to make.
That’s true! [Huh. There’s really no emoji that properly conveys a rueful smile, an acknowledgment of ‘yeah, you got me there, lol’. The smirk’s suggested, but that’d just come across as too… smug? Ah well.]
First off… that has the potential to be such a sick, cold burn. I dunno if you intended it that way, but damn. Even if it’s unintentional, that’s… impressive. Respect. 
Why shouldn’t it be? Human beings are full of contradictions. It’s one of the things that make us interesting.
I think that, in a lot of cases, ‘derision’ might be the wrong word there. It implies a level of animus, of malice… or at least scorn? that I’m not sure is actually there as often as you might think. Condescension might be better, though that, too, has elements that might not apply. Patronizing, maybe? That can certainly creep into conversations that start off as simply explaining, or trying to walk others through the process to see what you see.
There’s only one way to settle this. Mud Wrestling !
Snail Race!
Or we could discuss it like reasonable adults.
I like the idea of a snail race much better
Well that’d be a first for this place.
You’ll note I never claimed we are reasonable adults…
Snail race is a much better idea.
Snail race doesn’t come anywhere close to mud wrestling in capturing the spirit of a heated argument, and I am speaking independently of the context here.
As one philosopher of old once said, “the phrase ‘let’s discuss it’ is an act of terror.”
Which is why philosophers should be shot.