Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-24821739-20140604204305/@comment-6078851-20140617143813

@ zixis - i'm quite happy to agree to disagree but i think you misunderstood what i meant about the creation of life.

to be a genuine god (in my opinion) requires the ability to create life from inanimate (non-organic) matter, and emps can't do that. when it comes to saints and such what emps does is simply shepherd a soul through the warp into a new body, but emps doesn't actually imbue life into inanimate matter or create a living body for the soul to inhabit. in fact even the chaos gods can't create life in this way. what they're doing is simply sub-dividing their own being, and while daemons are sentient and self aware they're not actually created from inanimate matter.

i know about avatars but to me this is more proof that they aren't genuine gods but only god-like entities. but to the mortal races of the galaxy god-like entities are so far removed from mortal that they are considered (by the races of 40k) to be actual gods. another thing that i think makes the chaos gods not-gods is the fact that they can only exist if sentient races are emotionally-fueling the warp, and a true god doesn't require the emotions, or faith, of any race in order to exist, a true god simply exists.

i'm not arguing just, in my own humble opinion, making clear what i think separates true gods from god-like entities. as awesome, cool, deadly, terrifying, and awe-inspiring, many beings in 40k are, i've never thought of anything in 40k as being a genuine, omnisient, omnipotent, or omnipresent, deity. (incidentally i don't believe there's such a thing as a 'real' god, but i'm using the stereotypical image of god as the basis of my idea that there's no 'true' gods in 40k)

on topic though - i doubt the grey knights can do anything to halt the stagnation/degeneration of the imperium: they're far too few to make a difference. while they are totally kick-ass they're only really specialised in fighting daemons and daemonic influenced enemies. plus, as mentioned, they're monumentally arrogant and far too willing to do the inquisitions work. the inquisition are psychologically incapable of doing the right thing for the imperium (despite the fact that they might have good intentions and do, occasionally, do the right thing) - they're arrogance (which is unmatched by any faction of the imperium) coupled with the fact of their self-importance and the utter conviction that they're not just right, but self-rightously, right is only helping to exacerbate the imperium's problems ('if the emperor had a text to speech device' is a really good, and funny, example of how they would react if they got a message to disband the inquisition and it was signed 'the emperor of mankind' - the ended up labeling the custodes as heretics :P).