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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fireinthedust" data-source="post: 5618432" data-attributes="member: 51930">Paladins & Evil Clerics:  This makes no sense.  What I think you're failing to realize is that, unlike real-world religions, D&D isn't about evil as someone being good but overcome by temptation.  In D&D evil is not just someone's sins building up, or a series of choices.Evil is a side in a cosmic war, thus use of the term "alignment":  you are aligned/allied with cosmic evil, good, whatever.A Paladin's ability to sense evil is meant to detect creatures of evil and slay them.  Paladins are evil-killing machines.  To doubt a paladin, a real paladin who you can presumably test as a paladin (lay on hands, alignment spells of your own, get them to hold and use a Holy Avenger sword, etc.), isn't the same thing as doubting a polygraph.  You might as well doubt a magnet for finding iron!Eberron assumes the gods are removed from the affairs of humans, sure.  That doesn't stop humans from using their resources to stamp out evil.  Not just the Silver Flame, but other cleric religions as well (the LG red dragon deity, for example).Furthermore:  this ain't America, and those clerics don't have rights.  No one does.  This is a fantasy setting without a constitution mentioned anywhere.  Moreover, the church of the silver flame isn't concerned with the "rights" of a creature to not be detected by clerical magic so it can continue to wreck havoc; they want to find and stamp out evil.  That includes clerics.That's maybe another inconsistency:  why do we assume the legal system is anything like our modern one, based on rights?  It's not, it's based on power and position within social hierarchy, perhaps, or rights based on money; but not inalienable rights of man, like Rousseau or other thinkers came up with.Also:   Literacy allowed democracy to take off; also for communism in the USSR and elsewhere, what with pamphlets and all that.  I'm just saying that there can't be such disparity between rich and poor without some kind of social movement.  People want to be heard.  Now, post war, we should have the same kind of... loss of trust of old institutions that some form of major social change should want to happen.    Maybe not democracy automatically, but literacy is the way movements take off.  Even in nations of the real world we see web-based freedom movements out there.  Look at what happened in Egypt: lots of texting, marching, rallies, thanks to the internet.  In France and America it was pamplets.What would it be in Eberron?If you lived there, how would you lash out at the status quo?</blockquote>

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