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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3291552" data-attributes="member: 4937">There are times when it doesn't pay to entertain thoughts which seem absurd.  I frequently have cause to think that the state of philosophy today would be far better if more people had followed Descartes sound observation in his mediatation that proceeding from the beginning that we can learn nothing from our sense would be profitless.However, just as often I find that there is a good deal of profit in reexaming thoughts which are first instincts are to dismiss as absurd.  For example, for the last two or three pages there have been a seemingly endless parade of posters posting variations on the theme of:Like so many alignment threads, we have been dangerously skirting religion and please lets not go there any more than we have to, but let me say that I find a certain ammount of hubris involved in such a blanket dismissal of the idea that everyone is in one (limited) fashion or the other responcible for all the evil that occurs in the world.  Such a blanket dismissal dismissing the orthodox traditions of the majority of people in world history, from Judeo-Christians to Hindu to Buddists.  All of them approach the problem in slightly different ways, but all of them agree on the fact that mortal man is universally or almost universally guilty and incapable of actually being good on his own.  And one of the reasons that such diverse traditions agree on that is exactly this argument which is being dismissed as absurd.  For much of those traditions there is widespread agreement that the nature of the universe is such that mortal man cannot escape from the evil of it in his current condition or in the current condition of the universe.  The Hindu has the cycle of reincarnation, the Buddist enlightenment, and the Christian salvation by grace and while I have no desire to here go into the details of that the point is that much of humanities great intellectual traditions on the subject of ethics agree to the very thing which is here so readily being dismissed as absurd.Now, you can believe whatever you like.  It could well be that all those traditions are completely wrong, and I've no desire to discuss that here either.  All I'm saying is that if so many of the worlds great ethical thinkers have thought 'absurd' things, and so many of the worlds peoples have believed 'absurd' things, and if such a view was pretty much the default way of looking at the world by almost everyone in the cultures which supposedly in part inspire your average fantasy setting, then humility ought to suggest that there is at least a possibility that it is not everyone else that is being absurd.All of this is as much to say that if I choose to believe that in a universe of my creating 'good' people largely believe that most everything that they do has some unfortunate evil component, and that they must atone for these unwitting sins that they committed even though they didn't intend to, I think I'm on pretty solid philosophical ground and I know I'm on pretty solid ground from a stand point of recreating a less modern less anachronistic perspective.Ok, but I suppose that's skirting the line.  But, to show why its so hard to avoid mentioning the 'r' word when good and evil are under discussion, even if we speak of a non-extant religion which appears in quite a few people's campaign worlds including the published settings of WotC, namely ancient Egyptian paganism, it was the belief of 'good' people of ancient Egypt that they would be forbidden from entering paradise and given over to the devourer if the weight of thier crimes was heavier than even a feather.   We could easily ask, "Which of us here has not done a feather's worth of evil?"   I wouldn't stand up for that.  I'd slink into the corner.  And while that sounds like a harsh standard, the belief systems that drove that one to extinction believed very much the same thing only you weren't allowed the feather.</blockquote>

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