Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3565949" data-attributes="member: 4937">First of all, given that most stories about deities tend to portray them in relatively impersonal fashions and that the deities in those stories often seem to act in ways that seem arbitrary, I don't find either of those critiques particularly compelling.  I would say that if deities are inscrutable, then I'm being truer to the source material than if they were presented as the contrary.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.  That is a very good question.  It is unfortunately not one which most people these days are taught to ask, and if they were we'd have far less stupidity and maybe a great deal more empathy in this world.  Alas, few students manage to encounter Descartes or Aquinas even in college (or well, much of anything that would be useful to them), and I'm afraid Enworld's guidelines prevent me from delving into the possible answers to that question in much depth.  Suffice to say that neither the cosmic principle nor the diety need necessarily preexist the other one.I'm not sure I understand the question.  At least how you worded it, I don't see the logical mutual exclusion you seem to be arguing for.Again, I'm not sure I understand the question.I greatly beginning to feel that all arguments ought to be prefaced, 'In my specific campaign...'  I've been involved in alot of discussion lately where the underlying assumption was, 'This is the way things work normally'.  When you get to the level of cosmology, I'm not sure that there is any such thing as 'normal assumptions'.  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.  Assuming that these ideas and incarnations can exist quite comfortably independent of our belief in them, there is no reason to believe that any diety except possibly an incarnation of deception would encourage followers to believe except as the diety themself believes/exists/embodies merely to further what are in all likelihood (to the diety) wholly spurious physical goals.  Maybe they would, but I don't see how it can be taken for granted, especially since just off the top of my head, all the arguments for a diety encouraging/tolerating diversity of opinion boil down to 'the diety needs the worshipers for something'.</blockquote>

Verification