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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6699192" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Actually, I'm fairly sure it would be called negligent homicide rather than murder--and as it is a lesser offense (lower even than second-degree murder), it would carry a lesser but still fairly serious punishment. "Killing" is an active thing; "allowing to die" is still absolutely a morally reprehensible thing, but it is completely within the purview of "one who does not kill." Hence why Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics begin with, "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"--and the second clause is meaningfully different from the first clause (while still being essential, in the US Robots setting, to avoiding pathological behavior from the robots, e.g. the plot of Little Lost Robot).They're meant to be three distinct, separate "solutions." Your preference for point 2 is rather unusual, in my experience. Most people find it extremely distasteful to accept the idea that a fallible mind (for surely, if the gods are not completely eternal, they are also not absolutely perfect of mental faculties?) can outright define the foundational philosophical and logical principles of a world. That is, a finite mind can very easily claim two things which are in truth mutually contradictory, but fail to realize it for whatever reason--and, thus, you could have a fiat-declared "Good" which is outright impossible to meet, yet still the standard that is applied.You also run into issues like what happens if the "god of mathematics" starts doing things like declaring that a shape with exactly three angles must always have exactly two sides, that pi is exactly 4, or that A = B does not imply that B = A. In other words, in order for the gods to work as you are describing, they must be above absolutely everything, including logic and empirical observation, which makes dealing with them rather an exercise in futility. They can literally just declare that you're wrong, because they don't have to obey logic. Even when you're 100% right, they can just declare you're wrong, and it's true, because they can create truth.Most people, when deciding how the deities of their world work, choose option 1 because it allows for fallible but still interesting deities. I have not yet seen a...clearly-articulated polytheistic or henotheistic example of option 3, though as I noted, 13th Age appears to use something along those lines (the Priestess, one of the default Icons, reveres all the Gods of Light, so there's some implicit idea that all of them are 'good' in one way or another).</blockquote>

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