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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3439264" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is really not the place to go into this at any depth, but first, if you'll reread what you said you'll realize that the outlook of it puts the primacy of religion and religious feeling on individual choice and that perforce not everyone who is religious would agree with the statement.  In D&D terms, what you just said was 'chaotic' (and you've implicitly insulted anyone that disagrees as being thoughtless).  And secondly, don't you think that S'mon has demonstrated enough understanding of theology and philosophy that he's has probably thought about the implications of what he said.  I think it would behoove you to not dismiss anyone that sounds like they might have studied the subject at hand.I think that's a very reasonable goal, but its interesting that you'd bring up a figure like Joan, who most decidely would not feel that her religious beliefs and experiences were not something she had chosen.  She would most decidedly feel that she had been chosen, and that her beliefs and feelings had been chosen for her and all she really could do was choose to accept or reject what had been chosen for her.  This is I think you will see a decidedly  more 'lawful' view of the world, because it reduces the primacy of the self, and is I think closer to how a Paladin would feel about things.  It is also I would note a decidely less current, less modern, way of looking at the world, which was I think S'mon's point.If the judeo-Christian ethics and theology that are necessarily on the border of any discussion of Paladins is a hang up, I suggest reading a books like Bujold's 'The Curse of Chalion' and 'The Paladin of Souls' in which Bujold somewhat successfully weds a 'new age' outlook with more traditional theology for her 'Five Gods' cosmology.  (As an aside, I find Bujold's ethics extremely interesting even when I don't agree with them because they strike me as far more well thought out and far less merely reflexively following the crowd (any crowd whether tradional or new age post-modernist, left or right, or anything else) than so many people.)  The Paladins and Saints of her cosmology don't live in a monotheistic universe and have some beliefs which would be decidely at odds with the beliefs a historical 'Paladin' defended, but nonetheless they very much have the perspective that they primacy does not lie with thier own priorities or sense of correctness and ultimately that they do not choose what they believe, or feel, or do.Which is a very un-ancient way of looking at things, which might be reasonable for a very un-ancient feeling setting.</blockquote>

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