
Tapu |
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I'm not a fan of the bias toward Law over Chaos I (perhaps mistakenly) see much of the setting orient itself toward. Lawful Neutral deities, such as Abadar, are often portrayed as more or less benevolent, if strict, beings whose ultimate goal of perfect order often improves mortal lives or, at the least, helps preserve the multiverse. For example, Abadar, whose church literally forbids its clergy from helping the needy without charging them, promotes Paladin orders and is rarely shown to exhibit the logical negative conclusion of his Lawful philosophy - never does Abadar advocate for obliterating or completely subordinating nature to the whims of planners in order to produce a world of absolute Order, but there is little reservation with regard to portraying CN gods as amoral and often cruel (Calistria, goddess of vengeance, immediately comes to mind).
Compare the portfolios of the Lawful gods to the Chaotic gods, too; in the Lawful corner, you have Irori and Abadar, who, in the case of the former, is a strict but benevolent deity who genuinely seeks to help every individual achieve inner piece, and, in the case of the latter, has a number of positive qualities as described above; among the primary Chaotic gods are Calistria, Gorum, and Besmara: that is, the gods of vengeance, war, and piracy, respectively. Those are hardly parallel alignments, and rarely does a book go out of its way to positively portray Besmara or Gorum, at least not as often as it does the two Lawful gods listed above; indeed, while Irori and Abadar enable champions of Good (Paladins), the Chaotic gods not only choose to produce such beacons of benevolence, but are forbidden to do so. Even more jarring, Chaotic Neutral gods are capable of producing the ludicrously evil Antipaladins as adherents.
Further, when it comes to the representatives of Law and Chaos, there hardly seems to be much equivalency between the Proteans and the Axiomites. Proteans not only seek to completely destroy the world as we know it, but also have a complete disregard for mortal lives and are even said to attack refugees at the edge of Abaddon for no other reason than to show the primacy of Chaos, whatever that means. Axiomites, on the other hand, have very few such truly egregious acts of villainy, and although it can be assumed that many of them are neutral with regard to evils such as slavery, the books rarely care to mention that sort of moral shortsightedness.
Finally, you only need to look at the absolutely grotesque teachings Torag can promote while remaining Good to see how much s$+~ a Lawful deity can get away with while the Paizo staff do everything in their power to portray them positively. How is it that the intrinsic evil in Torag's notorious Paladin Code, which explicitly forbids his Paladins from showing mercy to "[their] people's enemies" and can easily be interpreted as commanding genocide, can be overlooked with the justification that his ways are as Lawful as Good? Clearly there is a conflict there, but it is not really addressed. Miliani is certainly a zealous god who commands zeal on the part of her followers, but she never makes any justification for the relentless slaughter of her enemies.
There's a clear double-standard here.