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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 492311" data-attributes="member: 3146">Re: Absolute vs relative alignment...While you're correct about the evil of the child and the evil of the demon being of the same kind, I think that your conclusion that smiting them both is the same act is a caricature of the core D&D understanding of Good and Evil.Let's start with the detect evil spell. The demon will register more strongly than the child on the spell. This indicates that D&D recognized differences of degrees of evil. In fact, demons in general register more strongly than humans in general. This indicates an inherent difference of degree in evilness.Moving on to the Monster Manual, this is reinforced. The human child would come under "Often Neutral." (if humans were in the monster manual). This recognizes that the human is able to change his/her alignment and that neutral is the most common alignment. Demons, on the other hand are listed as Always chaotic evil. This means that, while there may be some demons who are of different alignment for some campaign specific reason, on the whole, they admit no variation in alignment. In general, they are probably not capable of changing alignments.So, D&D recognizes that there's a difference between a bullying child and the Prince of Lies. If there's a difference between them, there's also a difference between smiting one and smiting the other.Even if you were right about that though, the Inquisition would have nothing to do with it. The Inquisition was not about destroying evil but rather, at least according to the Inquisitors, about rooting out those who would undermine the Catholic society. A butcher who sold rotten meat or who beat his wife would have been considered evil but would not have been handed over to the Inquisition. Thus, it is actually a rather poor example of a historical situation where evil=Evil.</blockquote>

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