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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1954514" data-attributes="member: 7240">And now to the matter of terminological clarity:This paladin is most emphatically not a nihilist. Nihilists believe in nothing. This paladin believes in something; he just doesn't believe that he resides in an intrinsically moral universe. Existentialism is a philosophy created specifically to address this problem. While, for most of history, people have tended to believe that at some deep level, the universe shared their morality, with the advent of modern science, non-theistic individuals have had to construct belief systems in which they are moral and the universe is amoral. One might accuse the paladin of being an existentialist in that he does not believe that his moral agenda is shared by the universe in which he is situated but he is by no means a nihilist.Secondly, premodern people usually believed that fate and free will were powerful real forces. The nature vs. nurture debates of the recent past are simply the latest iteration of the fate vs. free will debates that causes astrologers to fall in and out of favour over the past 2000 years. Often people believed strongly both that many things were fated to take place and yet, at the same time, believed strongly in the Christian idea of free will. Some cultures leaned more heavily in the direction of fate over free will than others; the pre-Christian and early Christian Norse certainly believed very strongly in the power of fate compared to their belief in free will. And yet these cultures produced some of the greatest narratives of heroism in history. So I just don't buy that belief in the power of fate makes you a bad hero. I would argue that the paladin archetype is one that is premise on belief in a moral universe and the power of free will and that because of cultural referrents specific to the class, the paladin's demeanour and beliefs may be problematic but this is only because the class refers to specific cultural archetypes. A lawful good, code-bound class with different or no real world cultural referrents could absolutely think this way without causing any difficulties.</blockquote>

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