Oh, and in future I will be imposing "no resurrection magic" houserule anyway.
I use this house rule in my campaign and I have found that it actually makes the players less inclined to mess with corpses. Under normal D&D rules one kind of assumes that the soul is long gone off to wherever its supposed to go. In my home brew I left 'what happens to the dead?' completely in the dark - can't raise the dead and if the Gods know they are not telling so no one knows what happens to the dead - but every one knows that the living have souls ('cause you can trap them in crystals and such). End result has been that the players (those of good and neutral alignment anyway) stay away from animating the dead for fear of some how damaging the soul of the departed.
One point that needs to be noted here ... with these mindless undead the assumption is that they were animated after death against their will but what would the case be if the living people ASKED to be reanimated after death out of a sense of duty (to the state, church, clan, etc.) or some other purpose, most likely as a sentient undead but if they decided to as a mindless one?
Well, in my opinion (and already stated), you can ask for this and it may well be a noble deed, but you will become a twisted being of evil and hatred. That's what getting turned into an undead does to you, regardless of your intent, the intent of the creator of the undead, and the intent of the society in which the undead is created. Undeath = Evil (99% of time, which some ghosts being the only known exception).
Also I agree with Magdalena: if it has no intelligence it can't form the intent to be good, evil or any alignment other than neutral and if separated from its master would not automatically go out and begin killing people or animals.
Incorrect. Lemures are mindless and evil.
... but TETO and your opinions, if you don't, are perfectly valid as well.
Whole-hearted agreement. Again, one can portray and do anything you want with undead and the creation thereof in one's games; the above are just the standard assumptions of the game.
Edit: One other thing. Spells that use negative energy are often necromancy (school dealing with manipultion of the forces of life and death) but positive energy are conjuration? This is odd, since one set draws from the negative energy plane and the other from the positive energy plane and one would think the two sets should be the same school. Oh well, one of the mysteries of the game I guess.
Weren't healing spells lumped into necromancy in 2e? I agree that it's an odd state of affairs. In game, I believe the rationale is that Conjuration [healing] spells are restoring lost flesh and tissues, and are thus similar to Conjuration [creation] spells. In truth, I believe the designers simply desired to move all of necromancy to a darker thematic*, and having oh-so-nice-and-popular healing spells in the same school messed with that. It certainly would do to have priests of Pelor running around healing people and using the same school of magic as priests of Nerull, now would it? Well, that's what the creators of 3.x seemed to think, anyway.
*The only exception which comes to mind is mark of justice, which paladins get. Yet another oddity.