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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 3458119" data-attributes="member: 41584">To me the difference between 'evil' and the Far Realms beasties is the difference between a genocidal maniac and my clearing brush in the backyard.That tree is blocking my view or whatever, and I go hack it down, with no regard whatsoever for the millions of tiny creatures who live in, on or because of that tree.  It's just not my problem.  Tough luck for them.A Far Realms beastie thinks the same of us.  Tough luck that when they finish clearing out our natural ecosystem, violating our laws of nature and slopping their corrosive toxic spew around to make the world 'cozy' for themselves, we are all going to be extinct.  I don't see them *maliciously* destroying material plane life, as being fundementally incompatible with it.  For them to expand into this reality, all of us have to die.  To build a housing complex, we have to cut down dozens, sometimes hundreds of trees, tear up the ground, destroy nests and burrows, etc.To an anaerobic bacteria, a farmer plowing under his fields for the next harvest is a genocidal massacre beyond comprehension.  And he's not doing evil, he's just feeding his family and making a living.  The Far Realms beastie that comes into our world and begins exuding it's taint, breaking down our reality and creating 'cysts' of Far Realm space is doing the same thing, and the vast majority of Far Realms critters regard us as no more important than we regard those bacteria...*Some* Far Realms beasties are evil, being aware of the sentience of the lives they are destroying.  Others don't seem to communicate at all with material plane life, and might not have the slightest clue that the 'stuff' infesting the material plane is capable of holding a conversation.  Is this willful ignorance 'evil?'  Most people, including me, happily ignore the fact that trees can communicate with each other and can feel pain.  Is it evil to cut them down?Is it evil when lions kill baby hyenas and baby cheetahs to eliminate the competition?Is it evil when my cat plays with a half-dead mouse for an hour and a half, before getting bored and wandering off, leaving it to die of shock?I think the whole argument boils down to one problem;'Alignments' are an artificial game construct, and increasingly useless for any sort of meaningful discussion of ethics or morality.</blockquote>

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