"Whoa, that felt so tense."
Once they left the room, Katie immediately voiced her feelings, speaking cautiously.
"For a moment there, I thought they were going to start fighting over a disagreement."
"So did I. A fight would've been more entertaining. Shame they didn't get into one."
Li Wei declared that watching women fight was his favorite pastime.
Especially when they pulled each other's hair and such.
Unfortunately, they were both civilized people, so a fight probably wasn't going to happen.
"Anyway, was the issue they were arguing about really that serious?"
"It certainly was."
At that, Li Wei nodded solemnly. This was actually a more serious question than whether the chicken or the egg came first. Accepting the Holy Lord Church's position meant handing humanity's moral values and future over to the church. Then every good deed would become the Holy Lord Church's achievement, while every bad deed would be a fall from grace caused by turning away from the Holy Lord.
That was what Elizabeth had said, and strictly speaking, she wasn't wrong. Every large organization had its bad apples. The Empire had plenty of criminals too, but you couldn't assume that everyone in the Empire was a criminal just because some of them were.
Still, there was one difference between the two.
The Empire knew it wasn't perfect. The Queen was constantly introducing reforms to keep up with the times, allowing it to move forward. Without reform, it would be finished, and the Queen understood that perfectly well.
Religion didn't work that way. Its logic was that if you believed in it and did everything it told you to, you were perfect and needed to do nothing else. Anyone who did bad things was someone who didn't believe. So when someone committed a crime, the problem wasn't