[TrisakAminawn]

Right, I'm with Gawain. Ed doesn't hate 'God' particularly--if he did, he'd have had a tiff with Ishbalites about it at some point. When you really hate something, you continue to pay attention to it. You can't help it. In fact, he drops the issue pretty thoroughly after the 'false god Leto' arc in the beginning. There, he's attacking Leto because he thinks that particular religion is total crackpot. (And he happens to be right.) Mainly, though, he objects to people using anything outside themselves, untouchable superbeings as an example, as a crutch to lean on instead of solving their problems themselves. This is why he tells Roze at the end of the sequence to walk on her own legs.

The false assumption you're progressing from, Wolven-kun, is that 'God' is a significant presence in Edward's mind, because it is in yours. And it's not. Amestris, (Eastern lunatic-fringe types like Ishbal and Lior aside) is an extremely secular nation, so he doesn't assume God should or could have saved them. Scar is the most religious character in the story, being a former priest and a religion-motivated serial killer and all that, and even he doesn't talk God all the time. God's main jobs in the first part of Fullmetal Alchemist are to enable discussion of hubris and to , and then later it gets murkier but he never turns up in a very good light. Scar-before-he-was-Scar thinks of God largely as a set of rules rather than a person, you'll note, but a benevolent set of rules, which is at the same time sort of a person. Ishbal reads as the Jewish edition of Jehovah, I think.

Further, the Fuhrer discusses the God concept a bit in the 'Scars of Ishbal' flashback arc. Just not with reference to alchemy. Ah, here it is. Chapter 60, 'The Absence of God.' It's mostly about war, and killing people, and human nature, and the feeling of God not being there. It features an Ishbalan praying for the souls of the men he's about to blow up, too. Then Bradley mocks the idea of the wrath of God, because he's brutally exterminating their nation and getting away with it, calls God and idol, then Hughes says 'I'd pass on a religion that's been abandoned by its god.' And Bradley says that since God is created by humans as a thing to rely on, "what will bring down wrath upon us is not god, but probably 'humans.'" Of course, he's not human, which gives that a little extra twist.

This whole sequence is pretty sophisticated, because it doesn't deny that there's something extremely honorable in religious fervor, and accords it its beauty, and Bradley is certainly a monstrous being, and yet it still says what it does. As far as 'religion in Fullmetal Alchemist' goes, this sequence packs a lot more punch than Ed's adolescent authority-bucking in the beginning.

A 'god' turns up when they find the two parts of the array Homunculus used to consume Xerxes, too, because it contains the concept 'turn a man into a god.' Without the specific word turning up, that's what the villain of Fullmetal Alchemist thinks he is: a god. An existence far above humans; the worst kind of god, you'll agree, but there you have it. A major theme of the work is the 'powerlessness' of 'humans'--it's intolerable, how little strength we have. How little we can do. 'God' is therefore also used as the thing-with-strength, the idea of the opposite of weakness; just by its presence in the chapters near the discussion of human weakness gives that discussion depth, or at least impact. But God, in that world, saves nobody.

I don't know about the individual's search for God...I know the phenomenon you mean, but I think your name for it is rather limiting. Unless you think God can be anything, any heart to a person's being, but I don't get the impression you tend toward such a liberal definition. What people go out looking for is truth, and God is merely a place some people mark a solution. Ed seems to think these people are weak; I'm not as much of a jerk as he is, so I won't go that far. There is that quality of the quest for truth, and self, and all such things, in Ed's search for the Stone; there is also the quality of a search for redemption, but always Ed relies primarily, even excessively, on himself, rather than aspiring toward something to rely on. I mean, you wouldn't think of God as a tool you want to use to remedy your mistakes, would you? But that's what he wants in the Stone, and he's given up on that itself quite some time ago. If the Stone is God, then he's gotten past God; he says he won't use something that evil, they'll get their bodies back on their own.

Mm. I can talk even more than you. I'll leave the discussion of alchemy-as-science and the religious conotations of all that alone for now, although that'd be fun, too, and will anticipate your reply.