By The Book: New Religions, Schisms and Bigotry

[pawsplay]

I don't see why not. Chaos and Good are ideas as surely as Law is. Meaninglessness and meaningfulness, existence and non-existence are ideas. If they are ideas, and if we presume a universe where ideas can be embodied, then its reasonable to presume that the embodiments will display personalities in line with the ideas that they incarnate.

A Chaotic deity would not be consistent, they would do as they wished. If deities did not behave in this fashion, Chaotic deity would become an oxymoron.

That is to say, a Chaotic deity is not going to take away your clerical spells for violating section 2.67.8 of your Clerical Handbook which clearly states that artistically representing the 102nd appearance of the avatar as an elk rather than a reindeer is strictly forbidden.

A Neutral Good god is not going to punish you, and let your flock suffer, over a technicality.

EDITEd due to lost text.

 

[pawsplay]

Or rather, I'm suggesting a dieties personality may rest on a set of cosmic principles. Assuming we accept dieties to begin with, that doesn't sound very far fetched. If a diety is made of love, that is a diety literally is Love (or even made of the stuff that love is made of), we expect the anthromorphic personification of that deity to express the personality we associate with people who are loving or who are expressing the sort of love that the diety represents/is.

Which is to say, their doctrine is Love, all that is Love, and all that Love is... and any minor issues of canon are immaterial. The details of certain rites, whether it is truly better to have loved and lost, and other matters of sacerdotal detail and theological debate would simply be outside the interest of a deity who was Love.

You could ask such a deity whether it was better to persuade your loved one not to go to war, or to encourage and praise them for doing so, and the answer would be, "You must love them."

 

[Celebrim]

A Chaotic deity would not be consistent, they would do as they wished.

No. A chaotic would be consistently 'inconsistent', therefore they could not do as they wished. Or whether, the could act according to thier whim, but their whims would consistantly not be 'consistent'.

Let me try to explain that a little more formally. Suppose we have a universe which is the set of all possible ethical philosophies. X is the proposition that the correct ethical philosophy is an exclusive one. Y is the proposition that correct ethical philosophies are inclusive ones. The set of philosophies listed in Y as 'correct' cannot contain philosophies which propose exclusivity in thier correctness, because not only would Y now on longer be the set of inclusive ethical philosophies, but the assertion 'X is correct' would contridict that any of the other philosophies was correct. So, despite an assertion of inclusiveness, that which we define as inclusive cannot encompass that which is explicitly exclusive.

In the same way, an assertion of chaoticness cannot include orderliness (although neither word perfectly captures the ideas involved in my opinion), no matter how chaotic it is. If it could, then it would really be a paradox - at least in a universe at least orderly enough that paradoxes aren't resolvable.

That is to say, a Chaotic deity is not going to take away your clerical spells for violating section 2.67.8 of your Clerical Handbook which clearly states that artistically representing the 102nd appearance of the avatar as an elk rather than a reindeer is strictly forbidden.

No, obviously the strawman doesn't hold (imagine that), but presumably a chaotic deity would take away your spells for adhering to (or even having) section 2.67.8 of the clerical handbook.

A Neutral Good god is not going to punish you, and let your flock suffer, over a technicality.

A technicality like, 'You are advocating evil'?

 

[Celebrim]

Which is to say, their doctrine is Love, all that is Love, and all that Love is... and any minor issues of canon are immaterial.

No. Those 'minor' issues of canon define what love is. Not following them means you aren't being loving, and teaching something other than that canon means you are teaching something other than love.

 

[pawsplay]

A technicality like, 'You are advocating evil'?

That was not the precise example I had in mind, no.

I was thinking more along the lines of, "You are not doing good in the approved fashion."

Your position presupposes there is a correct answer to any moral situation. I think, particularly when dealing with Chaotic deities, that is not always true.

 

[Celebrim]

That was not the precise example I had in mind, no.

Well, actually, it does seem to be the precise example you had in mind. Because, you continue with...

I was thinking more along the lines of, "You are not doing good in the approved fashion."

Which is the exact same example. If an incarnation of goodness has an approved fashion for doing goodness, then anything that isn't approvable is not good. If it was good, it would be approvable. Why must you assume that these reasons are arbitrarily chosen? Do you think that the deity is going to approve of clerics that act as if the deities standards are arbitrarily chosen?

Your position presupposes there is a correct answer to any moral situation. I think, particularly when dealing with Chaotic deities, that is not always true.

When dealing with Chaotic Good ones it is. If they are merely, Chaotic, then sure, they may believe that concepts like 'goodness' are arbitrary and foreign to thier nature, and they really won't care whether thier followers (if they care for them at all) have correct answers because they may think correctness is merely arbitrary. But even by this standard, there are modes of behavior which are 'incorrect', namely those arising from different (by that dieties standards) 'flawed' views of the world. The belief in arbitrariness isn't arbitrary if you are going to follow the teachings of an incarnation of arbitrariness. It's required.

The difference between LG and CG isn't that one thinks there is a correct answer to any moral situation, and the other doesn't. The difference is that CG thinks that there is a correct answer which is unique to each moral situation, and LG thinks there is the correct answer which can be deduced for every moral situation based off a finite set of guidelines. CG thinks that the later belief is ridiculous because the number of situations is infinite and each situation so unique, that the only way to do the right thing is rely as best you can on your own wisdom and make a personal judgement. LG thinks that is ridiculous since mortal wisdom is finite and prone to folly, and the only true guide is to rely on the wisdom imparted down to you from a being/institution/society/teacher far greater than yourself - even if in your own reason you can't understand why this course of action is for the best. But its not like either thinks that 'good' is relative in the sense of there being mutually exclusive outcomes which are equally good.

 

[pawsplay]

Well, actually, it does seem to be the precise example you had in mind. Because, you continue with...

Don't forget the hat. Strawmen like hats.

Which is the exact same example. If an incarnation of goodness has an approved fashion for doing goodness, then anything that isn't approvable is not good.

Would you care to elaborate on the proof for this? It seems to me you are begging the question... "There is only one good answer, because all other answers are not good."

If it was good, it would be approvable. Why must you assume that these reasons are arbitrarily chosen? Do you think that the deity is going to approve of clerics that act as if the deities standards are arbitrarily chosen?

Why do you assume every good deity devises the best answer to every moral question? And are mortals behold to practice the same goodness on a human plane, or to fulfill the wishes of a deity practicing goodness according to a divine plan? The latter frequently conflicts with the former.

The difference between LG and CG isn't that one thinks there is a correct answer to any moral situation, and the other doesn't. The difference is that CG thinks that there is a correct answer which is unique to each moral situation, and LG thinks there is the correct answer which can be deduced for every moral situation based off a finite set of guidelines.

I save to disbelieve!

 

[Celebrim]

Would you care to elaborate on the proof for this?

By definition.

It seems to me you are begging the question... "There is only one good answer, because all other answers are not good."

Round things are round by definition.

Why do you assume every good deity devises the best answer to every moral question?

Back to 'by definition'. I would say however, that where you seem to be confused with what I'm saying, is that if we don't assume dieties are incarnations of abstract concepts, then the proof by definition goes away. Of course, way back at the beginning I assumed this as a viable alternative assumption when I made the suggestion, 'What if you are ideas?'. I don't have to prove its the only possibility, just that its a viable one. You don't have to accept that assumption, but it is the sort of assumption most polytheistic religions eventually adopt as thier philosophy matures (Greek polytheism and Hindu polytheism both move in this direction) and IMO opinion it makes for a more intriguing cosmology to have things as alien as incarnated ideas.

At least, I agree with Socrates that it makes more sense than thinking gods are silly little twits. Of course, look where it got Socrates.

In any event, what I've been trying to prove is not that there is one way to do it, but in fact the opposite of that. (In fact, a really intriguing scenario is that mortals don't know which theory is true and bicker about it just like the Greeks did.) Of course, beyond that I'd like to suggest that my way is more interesting and gives you more to think about, but I'm not out to prove that.

And are mortals behold to practice the same goodness on a human plane, or to fulfill the wishes of a deity practicing goodness according to a divine plan?

If mortals are beholden to do good (that is, if there is a such thing as good) and if there is a divine plan of goodness, mortals are beholden to practice it according to the divine plan. Again, Plato-like, the mortals are not capable of even percieving clearly what good is (they can't define it), and so any knowledge of good that they have must be a divinely granted shadow of the real knowledge of good. So, if follows, that mortals are beholden to try to seek out and practice the divine knowledge of good as best as they can.

The latter frequently conflicts with the former.

I don't see how that follows from either philosophical stance.

I save to disbelieve!

It doesn't work if you don't have some idea of what reality should be.

 

[pawsplay]

Well, obviously my damaged sense of reality is not up to this argument. I don't normally like to depart from a discussion in this fashion, but I can think of no other response:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_definition

It doesn't seem to bother you to argue from definition, or that your conclusions don't follow from your premises, or that you are using some concepts in ways that are not how they are commonly defined, so I don't know what further to add.

 

[anton1066]

The way that I allow of schisms is to just limit the gods scope of interest. For example; Bob the TN god of fire can have followers of 5 different allignments. Each group might have its own ideas about the 'true way' to worship bob. the NGs and the NEs might even start a holy war against eachother. But bob does not care. He just wants people to worship fire. He is beyond good and evil. If two followers want to bash eachother over the head about it, let them. Bob has better things to worry about.