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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1085859" data-attributes="member: 3146">Actually, at least in our current culture, the sacrifice or murder--even of willing individuals--is generally viewed as evil. When people remember Jonestown, it's generally with horror that all of Jim Jones's followers were convinced to poison themselves. Similarly, the Heaven's Gate incident is remembered for the horror of the mass-suicide. While there are significant portions of the public willing to endorse assisted suicide, most want very strict controls on it--to limit it to incurably ill individuals or those who are in horrific, irremediable pain. To assist an individual who is merely depressed in committing suicide is generally seen as evil/wrong.From most religious points of view, human sacrifice--willing or not--would be wrong as well. Especially from points of view that take the claim of the sacrificial ritual to impart spiritual power seriously but dispute the source of the power.The rest of the discussion of relativistic "morality" (a different notion from cultural relativism--just because people disagree on a question doesn't mean that they're all wrong; it certainly doesn't mean that they're all correct. Either of those positions requires a whole lot more philosophical justification than simply "people have disagreed on this"), it's one of the things that doesn't really matter for this discussion. The original poster and his players are not people from three centuries in the future or from five centuries in the past and they will judge things by their standards or they won't judge things at all--however the latter isn't really an option since one has to act and action implies a better/worse judgement. (And, for all we know, the people of the future could decide that murder is OK as long as you kill Jews, slavery is OK as long as the slaves are from a particular racial group, that denying that Mohammed is God's prophet is a crime worthy of death, and/or that rape isn't a serious crime--it's folly to think that the future will be morally or physically better just because it hasn't happened yet. In 1921, German Jews or Russian Kulaks might have thought so but they would have been wrong (at least in the short term)).</blockquote>

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