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Message: <blockquote data-quote="italianranma" data-source="post: 3436795" data-attributes="member: 15788">Thank you to everyone who’s responded so far.  We’ve got a pretty good consensus on the basics.  Now I’d like to answer some harder questions.  Let’s keep this discussion very civil because it’s all about opinions anyway.  Most people replied with a righteous warrior who is chosen by a deity, or champions the faith.  I guess the next question then is how is a righteous warrior defined?  What makes someone ‘good’ versus ‘evil’?  These concepts are very hard to define but everyone has a general sense about what is good and evil.  We can call that sense morality, and probably agree that something that conforms to our standards of acceptable behavior is morally good, and something in odds with it is morally wrong or evil.  Now I believe that morality is a learned concept, and so it defers depending on your own experiences.  Do you agree with this, or do you believe that there is one set moral code that all people abide by?If you can accept that moral codes are different depending on cultures and environments, then is it different for paladins?Now conceder this morally ambiguous question:  Assume that there is a valley with enough resources to support one culture.  A village of humans lives there, and a tribe of orcs wants to move in.  This valley can only support one, so naturally there is war.  The orcs are fighting for survival.  Does a human paladin fight the orcs?  Would it make a difference if instead of orcs the tribe was of humans?On a related topic;- Papastebu, thanks for your input.  As far as paladins in exalted, are you talking about the exalted in general?  There’s no paladin class that I know of in there.  As far as Ghandi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King being paladins, I’m not sold on that because they were all pacifists.  I believe that a paladin is more narrowly defined as a holy warrior, fighting is implied.  I’ve seen a lot of discussion on this in these forums:  Everyone is happy with a paladin fighting against demons, and undead and the like, but what about bandits?  What about mind controlled guards?  What about people who are misguided and in the paladin’s way?  I know these kinds of issues cause a lot of heartache for some people.  Discussions get bogged down in the what-if’s all the time, but it’s important when we really define paladin to know these answers. p.s. I typed this up without reading the last few posts, so please excuse me.  I'm reading that article right now.</blockquote>

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