Athule Snanm

It is possible to argue that 'religion', as we Amarr think of it, functions as a synonym of ideology (for a more detailed discussion of this complex issue see Principles of Love and Lasers: pp.24-38). As a theoretical construct 'ideology' is notoriously hard to define. However, one of the most pervasive definitions of the term holds that it refers to the body of beliefs and representations that sustain and legitimate current power relationships. Ideology promotes the values and interests of dominant groups within society.

A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalising and universalising such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such 'mystification', as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions.

Thus we begin to see the interwoven threads of religion and state not simply as irrational and emotional, nor even scientific and objective but instead a third inexplicable dimension of political reality fashioned from the eternal certainty of belief. Each and every Amarrian, vessels of this Truth is cut from this cloth. Absolute loyalty, willingness to subject to Imperial Will without question, all these things bring us together in ways that lesser beings, subject to imperfections and corruptions of which we will not speak, can only dream of.