The wait in unbearable.  I literally just read the same two reviews every day.  -_-

Thanks for the review.

Bakker loves to invert common tropes or present them with such realism and complication that it seems a a gross caricature to the reader.  Kellhus is the prophesied chosen one that will save humanity from damnation.  I have no doubt he's still that basic archetypical trope.  Salvation in this instance might be completely inverted too though and I doubt this will be a traditional happy ending.

Count me as a Zauduyani.

The humans never gained any initiative because they were not allowed to.  They were constantly under attack by the No-God.  It's worth noting that the No-God was kept back from the front lines until Megedda because the enemy was so strong at Megedda that the No-God had to put in an appearance.  Offence was the correct strategy.  Break the human nations one by one, before they unify.  At Megedda the combined remnants of the North and South was strong enough to compel the No-God to take the field.  To allow them to combine while the North was full of Nosirai and not ruins would have resulted in absolute disaster.

Humanity was well past the point of no return when the Battle of Mengedda occurred.  I forget where this was mentioned but in the Dreams the only victory they could hope to attain was to take as many of their foe with them before they all died.  It was, for all intents and purposes a last Stand and everyone knew it.  ,Even with an unlikely victory at Mengedda, humanity is still in the same bad position.  They'd have still lost all its most powerful nations and it would just be a few months to replenish the Sranc.  If humanity couldn't gain any ground against the Consult with all its great nations intact, then a stalemate is the best they could hope for and even that would be a long shot.  IIRC the great legends of the Apocalypse seem to be of fortresses standing or halting the Consult advance even temporarily.  Taking the No-God out for that last glorious battle honestly made no sense.

I think there's one more big reveal for how the Consult is trying shut out the world.  If all they wanted to do was kill everyone then they could have just waited inside the Ark and let the No-God let humanity die of old age and stillborn babies.

By the God, his fury felt so empty, so frail against the eart!  He reached out with his bare left hand and grabbed another hand-cold, heavily callused, leathery fingers and glass nails.  A dead hand.  He looked up across the matted grasses and stared at the dead man's face.  An Inrithi.  The features were flattened against the ground and partly sheathed in blood.  The man had lost his helm, and sandy-blond hair jutted from his mail hood.  The coid had fallen aside, pressed against his bottom lip.  He seemed so heavy, so stationary-like more ground.

A nightmarish moment of recognition, too surreal to be terrifying.

It was his face!  His own hand he held!

He tried to scream.

Nothing.

And he knew the way all the Dead knew, with the certainty of timeless recollection.

Hell... rising on a bubbling rush.  Agony and wickedness chattering with famished glee...

Demons, come to pull his outside through his inside, to invert, to invert and expose, to bare his every tenderness to fire and gnashing teeth...

Damnation... in spite of everything.

There was no describing the horror.

He tried to clutch with dead fingers... to hold on...

Don't!  he tried to call across the space of a dead man's reach.  But his ribs were a breathless cage, his lips cold and soil.  Don't let go...

Please!  he screaned at his younger self, trying to communicate the whole of his life with sightless eyes... Fool!  Ingrate!

Don't trust Hi--

First of all let me say that I totally missed this on my first read.  I only caught it when I went back rereading the first trilogy.  Second, it's pretty much one of the best moments in the novel for me now.  We already suspect this happens ever since Kellhus states that Serwe is burning in hell but that POV of actually seeing Saubon transition into hell after his death was just a great moment.  I really love how I always thought that excerpt of Saubon seeing himself in the second book was just a way to add creepiness into the battle in a very general way but Bakker had it all planned out to bring it full circle three books later.

I have no idea what to think of this so far.  From the top of my head it's weird because it always seemed like only the gods could affect the past but here a random soul is literally reaching out to his past self.  I know Mengedda is a special place as a Topos but it still seems odd that random souls have that power.  I also like how the very highwater moment that Saubon's faith in Kellhus is cemented is looped inextricably linked to the moment when he loses his faith completely.

As a Zauduyani myself I don't think this shakes my belief in Kellhus at all.  He's still the messiah figure of the story.  He uses people as tools and doesn't care if they end up in hell.  He'll still save humanity IMO.

So being a women makes you less than what a man is, that's subjective? The path to that is subjective? Right and wrong is written in to the "rules" of Earwa, there is no path to it.

ETA: what I'm saying is being born a woman isn't a choice and yet they are morally inferior to men.

To continue that analogy Women and Men start off with different paths available to them.  Women can travel paths that lead to palaces of salvation.  Men can travel paths that lead to BIG ASS palaces of salvation.  I don't think gender not being a choice has to be a factor at all.

These are not my opinions. Bakker has said that he wanted to create a world were morality is objective. The beliefs of men do not matter. He literally says this in answering my question. Then he gives us a plot device which literally shows the morality of things. And this plot device tells us the women are lesser souls than men. The JE is his vehicle to show us the morality of individual things on Earwa, it's why I believe it. Now, can this change? Sure. I hope it does. Maybe something that Kellhus or Mimara does will change this, I don't know.

This is really why I believe this is all a semantic argument.  In our world, morality is defined as an issue of right and wrong.  That's by definition also subjective.  Bakker defines morality as an objective truth and uses the Judging Eye as a plot device to elaborate with the issue.  So since these two definitions of morality conflict we have to use analysis to see what the differences are.  As you said, the Judging Eye is the plot device that elaborates Earwa's objective morality.  Here are the relevant facts as I know them:
• The Judging Eye sees from the vantage of the gods
• The Judging Eye identifies evil as damned and righteousness as glory
• damnation/salvation can apparently be closed or conditioned otherwise

As a modern person talking to other modern people I'd like to be able to use the modern definition of morality in this discussion.  However since Bakker did make an alternate definition, we shouldn't ignore it just make the differentiation.  So having said that, in my own analysis, the only objective difference between the two seems to be the objective role of damnation and salvation.  I believe that on Earwa that's what morality means and it makes sense.  Attaining salvation is moral.  Attaining Damnation is immoral.  For us modern folk, who stand outside those beliefs, we can still judge those actions based on our own sense of morality.  I find it more than moral, righteous even, to be a Mandate Schoolman, and suffer eternal damnation just to save the world. 

So it's not that Bakker is wrong or I want to dismiss his definition.  I just want to make the distinction because Earwa's definition of the word and ours so use damnation/salvation to refer to the two sides of the coin that is morality in Earwa.  This frees up the word itself for its modern definition.

Damnation is objective but malleable.  Morality is subjective.  The JE equates the two but there is a difference.  Inrau is undeniably damned for example but he morally, at least for most of our standards, hasn't done anything wrong.  The Judging Eye is described as the ability to see from the God's vantage.  Seeing from a single vantage more than implies the existence of other vantage points.  That's proof morality is subjective.  By contrast, Akka's soul will be feasted on by Demons.  That's an objective truth.

So Damnation is objectively defined but not necessarily immutable.  The gods are just big Ciphrang.  Ciphrang are just hunger manifest.  Normal humans can become ciphrang and even the goods walked the planet.  Presumably if Kellhus ever becomes strong enough to get these gods to toe the company line, then damnation will be defined differently too.

I'd also like to add that the gods don't see time linearly.  I suspect that this infuses the Judging  Eye's perspective.  It sees Akka is dambed because from the gods' perspective, they're already munching on his soul.  The JE views the objective fact that he's damned and, right this moment, Akka's soul is being eaten by Demons.