Bundil's page

DeltaPangaea wrote:

People aren't saying it's 'cool' for bigotry to be a flaw for someone to have, but that HAVING said flaw doesn't intrinsically make them Evil.

It doesn't have to be accepted in-world as a good thing, it just needs to be accepted that people aren't perfect, and morality isn't black and white.

And I am saying, leave such grayness for people, not gods (and beings made of goodness or evil). Though, when I said cool I meant like, acceptable or attractive or something. Like, it's not right to have a double standard, make good gods not actively do and promote bad things. Because by doing so, and labeling that god as good, you are saying those bad things are good things. Or at least are accepted as such within the setting. Because gods aren't mortals, they are the measure by which alignment is defined. They are the cornerstones of the setting.

If a 'good' god thinks women should stay in the kitchen, and men should be the breadwinners, that makes this a 'good' stance, that people trying to be 'good' will persue.

So don't allow those stances in your good gods. Leave them for your gray gods and your evil gods.

If a person, even through inaction, allows oppression and injustice to thrive or persist, they aren't being very good. They're being neutral. A god actively holding and spreading beliefs that promote or preserve oppression and injustice, such as those from bigotry, is actively spreading evil. Not making a little mistake, not having a tiny character flaw, but inherently and intrinsically pushing ungood agendas. If you are the embodiment of an aspect of goodness, this is not an acceptable state.

The problem with letting creatures who are technically defined by their alignment not have any flaws or traits that go against that alignment by any standard whatsoever, is that it makes the paragons to which people ascribe literally impossible to reach. Which is, in fact, unfriendly to the setting itself (example: Irori).

In fact, why do deities have alignments at all? By your perspective, deities must be written to such a degree that anything in their profile must adhere strictly to their alignment, which makes for exceedingly boring gods.

If the deities have no flavor, no interest, no mystery to their being, why would there be entire cults devoted to interpreting their intents and worship? It would just be a laundry list of "These things are good because this deity does them, these things are bad because that deity does them", and suddenly all of the complexity of Good and Evil falls out from under it, leaving only Law and Chaos to add any flavor to the realm. And those are already weakly stated thanks to an utter lack of writing/interest.

After reading the aforementioned Deity articles on Erastil I see nothing implying a hatred of women whatsoever.

The claims of misogyney are grossly overstated.

To be fair, misogyny has been grossly misappropriated to mean anything even remotely suggestive of women having different roles in life than men, despite, you know, the biological implications there.

I'm not a fan of some of the Torag bigotry myself and wouldn't have a paladin code like that. Having said that however, bigotry against fantasy races is pretty different from bigotry against something that really exists. I can feel more comfortable saying that a race that doesn't exist shouldn't exist, than I would be in saying that about something which is actually real. Maybe orcs are objectively things that deserve to die, I've never met one so couldn't say... (though in my Golarion they aren't automatically...)

Your rather agreeable point aside, I'd like to mention that you are misusing the term bigot. What you are describing is racism, which is specifically regarding the species or race that is subject to prejudice/hatred/extermination/etc.

Bigotry isn't even a specific thing, it's general distaste for things that don't agree with your own opinion or creed. "Things" here referring more to intangibles like ideas or religions rather than substantials like race or gender.

Asmodeus, on the other hand, is specifically concerned with hierarchies, and you need look no further than the hells to understand how he organizes things. The reason he's misogynistic isn't because he's doing it for no reason, but because he's placing males above females in the pecking order due to an inherent limitation women have in the course of procreation; they have to actually carry, grow, and tend the infant before it's capable of being on its own. Additionally, men are much more likely and biologically suited to developing the relevant muscle mass for hard work, giving them power, and to Asmodeus that means they're higher up in the hierarchy. It's not a matter of him hating women for it's own sake, it's because he's stuck in his worldview from a time before modern equality became a reasonable thing. It's also why he respects powerful women just...

This is actually not bad.

The only flaw is that humans are basically the only species in real life who have to tend to their infants for longer than a week or two. Most animals in the natural world are capable of walking within days of birth, if not hours.

This, of course, is irrelevant if humanoids in Golarion were around before animals, but I somehow doubt that's the case.
But basically, how could Asmodeus have developed that opinion if the creatures who are subject to it were not the first ones to present the problems that spawned the opinion in the first place?