NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 1742527" data-attributes="member: 19675">If I sacrifice one innocent to save the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people of the Sudan from genocide, I'm pretty sure I could live with that (assuming, of course, that was my ONLY option), especially if the alternative was that EVERYONE in the village dies.  Hopefully, someone among that group would volunteer to be the sacrifice.If I had to shut a bulkhead door in the face of my best freind in order to keep a ship from sinking, I'm pretty sure I could do that too.Now, I may feel that I need to do penance, I might not.  I don't know- I haven't been put in either situation, and I haven't discussed this with my priest.It seems to me though, that the Paladin being asked by his god to become undead cannot be considered an evil act, especially since this is presumbably a good diety.  To think otherwise is to argue that a diety worthy of worship by a Paladin would consider asking that Paladin to perform evil in his name- serious doublethink there.  And that even if it were an evil act, the volunteering to do his god's expressed will would be an instant attonement in the eyes of his diety, restoring him to Paladin status.  Voila- undead Paladin. Of course, this example, while illustrative, assumes the diety has no other way of meeting his/her/its goal of having an intelligent guardian of X for eternity.  Granting eternal life might also be an option, but this too, is a necromantic power.Still, the granting of some kind of immortality-either undeath or actual immortality- to a mortal is a repeated theme in our own legends.  Gilgamesh, King Arthur, Brunhilde, even certain Christian saints and so many others, and almost all of these immortals are HEROES, not villains.Similarly, there are the legends of ghosts (or whatever you want to call them) who are merely so attatched to this mortal coil that they cannot leave.  Evil?  No- preoccupied with grief, love, the desire to protect someone or something, and perhaps even revenge- but not NECCESSARILY evil.So, it seems to me that it isn't that undeath is inherently an evil state, nor is raising the dead.  It is entering the state of undeath to do evil that is evil, the INVOLUNTARY raising of the dead that is an evil act.</blockquote>

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