| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
@{The posts about being in favor of most souls losing their memories}: Never could relate to people being okay with losing memories, even if such loss would relieve suffering. Some kinds of bliss are worse torture than any amount of suffering.
If I were making a world setting, using the Pathfinder Campaign setting as an inspiration (since I like a great deal about it, or I wouldn't be here in the first place, but find a tiny fraction of things within it really irritating) :
* Since having most souls undergo memory loss after death seems to be logistically required for the outer planes and Outsiders to work as we know them, I would still have it in the setting, but it would be more a problem (equivalent to the dementia that often occurs before death of the mortal body) that almost nobody has figured out a reliable solution to -- Hell may have made significant progress in that department (since they not only want to make damned souls suffer for their history, but also rub their noses in it), but they aren't talking;
* The current deity in Pharasma's position would be not all-powerful, but struggling hard to stay there and keep things mostly working right;
* The previous deity in Pharasma's position would be still around, but having quit that job and gotten a new one, and apparently much happier in the new one;
* Psychopomps actually would not be supposed to ensure the death of anyone for a certain passage of time or turn of fate, and not supposed to discriminate against atheists/misotheists as long as said targets weren't hurting anyone else . . . but unfortunately a fairly large fraction of them don't get (and/or don't want to get) the message;
* Outsiders deciding to be of an alignment different from that assigned to them would be merely rare, not all-but-absent; the hard part would be surviving after making such a decision.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Alright, got a moment to type something longish out . . .
So, let's presuppose that there is an ambient field of potential where anything anyone desires can become a reality. There are no rules and no laws and no limits and no consequences unless they are introduced, and then it only goes so far as to contain to itself. The kind of sentience and existence that we have - and thus everything we care about - is meaningless in such context. Morality doesn't exist, and nothing matters, because all is permitted. What's more, sentience is irrelevant - why would sentience arise? Mostly just random chance that something with a will (if it could exist at all, it would arise by random chance - that "no rules" part) happened upon the idea of creating sentience in the manner that we recognize it, but, in doing so, it would have to create consequences... otherwise our sentience itself is a form of madness with no bearing on reality. This is the ultimate expression of the "gravity should be optional" clause...
This ultimate expression sort of reminds me of this comic. To quote it:
"So then what is the solution? Every system, when led to it's extreme, ends up with horrible results."
"I don't know. Perhaps to not base our morality on absurd thought experiments?"
Voltaire's Candid has been a favorite book of mine, since I first read it in . . . middle school? Being able to read it in it's original French was my motivation for taking the language in high school (along with classics like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo). Alas, my frenching skillz are, frankly, inadequate. But, tangent aside; Candid does a great job at pointing out several ways the world could have been built better. Earthquakes not happening is one, ships not capsizing is another, armies and inquisitors and pirates not being able to affect evil on others is one that is hammered home again, and again, and again.
A simple proposition that I'd make to you, were you an omnipotent being planning on creating a universe, would be to, were you dead-set on organizing things through gravity, make humans hardy enough to survive long falls. It would, I maintain, take an utter monster to design a universe in such a fashion that people can be hurt by things outside their control, when there are so many ways of designing a universe where they cannot be.
But for now: if an entity is incapable of making moral choices, they are judged in an amoral manner.
I suppose this is where our worldviews diverge so drastically that I saw you as being deeply inconsistent.
I don't think anyone is capable of making moral choices, or, indeed, choices at all. Whenever I have a "decision" to make, I do what seems like a good idea at the time. But who do I determine what's a good idea at the time? I, the fleshy lump of gray matter behind "my" eyes that never directly interacts with the world, am nothing more than a product of my genes and circumstances. Molded by the things that happened to me. And if different things had happened to me, I'd be a wildly different person. When faced with a "decision", say, when faced with a dilemma: either help myself or help someone else - I have no free will to decide. I'll do what seems like the best thing to do, and what I think is the best thing to do is decided by how my neurons connect to each other.
And so how can I blame anyone else for "deciding" otherwise? There, but for the grace of RNGesus, go I.
The idea of "judging" people strikes me as so viscerally wrong that I find it hard to understand anyone who sees the world differently. Particularly when they make exception for one person but not for another - "he was a product of his time," I've been told about Columbus, by someone who turned right around to demonize Saddam Hussein. (Not that he wasn't a demon, mind, it's just . . . how can I blame him? Anymore than I can blame the rain for being wet, or Pharasma can blame a bear for eating someone.)
Does Pharasma's handing them over to a torturer make her complicit? To an extent. But she only places them within a lawful evil realm, because that is what they are as a result of their own actions. And, again, Pharasma isn't a good entity. She is a neutral entity.
This is not really cosmic horror. This is utilitarianism (with a potential does of nihilism if you find such as system as lacking in any real meaning).
You're right about the evil gods wanting souls, and it being most convenient to send people (that I don't find culpable, mind) to be tortured in hell. I admit I hadn't thought too much about the say Asmodeus and co. have in the system. (Though the problem of why Sarenrae and co. helped build the universe with gravity and hitpoints and swords is still very much a problem.)
You're also right that the Pathfinder cosmology isn't all that much more horrifying than the real world. But . . . real life sets a low bar. Seriously. It's a bar so low an aphid could step over it.
In real life, there aren't any gods to blame, to point at and say "this being is not, on balance, good for the universe." In Pathfinder, there are.
On the thread's topic: I think, on balance, most of the good gods aren't good for Golarion.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
{. . .}
You're also right that the Pathfinder cosmology isn't all that much more horrifying than the real world. But . . . real life sets a low bar. Seriously. It's a bar so low an aphid could step over it.
^Win.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
In the beginning of this thread, someone mentioned Acvana as the most good god. Taking direct action to try and save their followers, is definitely something I'd consider in the running for the 'most good god'.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
* The current deity in Pharasma's position would be not all-powerful, but struggling hard to stay there and keep things mostly working right;
* The previous deity in Pharasma's position would be still around, but having quit that job and gotten a new one, and apparently much happier in the new one;
That's a neat route to take, and one the Realms embraced back in the day with Myrkul or Kelemvore as the current 'God of Death,' and Jergal as the possibly-retired-previous god of death, sitting by their side in a sort of advisory role.
I found that pretty neat, particularly when it was suggested that Jergal was a pre-human (insectoid?) god of death, originally worshipped by a race that was extinct, so that he 'no longer had skin in the game' so to speak.
A more Golarion-esque tweak might be to make the previous god of death a serpentfolk, once part of a Serpentfolk pantheon of five or so gods, mostly dead and forgotten in the current age.
A more mythic version would be a draconic death god, like Nithogg, winding around the base of Pharasma's spire (which would be a sort of metaphorical world tree, in this variant), and devouring souls of those Pharasma judges fit only to be wyrm-food... It might be a two-header, like a linnorm (the first linnorm?), with one head always eating (or gnawing at the spire, when it's not stuffing souls in its gob, which is why Pharasma keeps it fed...) and the other free to talk, etc.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A simple proposition that I'd make to you, were you an omnipotent being planning on creating a universe, would be to, were you dead-set on organizing things through gravity, make humans hardy enough to survive long falls. It would, I maintain, take an utter monster to design a universe in such a fashion that people can be hurt by things outside their control, when there are so many ways of designing a universe where they cannot be.
Two problems. None of the beings in the PF universe are omnipotent or omniscient, and thus this argument is irrelevant.
Secondly, a universe where you are only influenced by things that you yourself can control is either so entirely alien that I cannot visualize it enough to have any significant desire for it, or consists of just you and literally nothing else, which is boring even for an introvert such as myself.
I really highly doubt that designing a consistent universe which completely disallows being hurt by outside forces is something that is so simply done (emphasis on consistent).
The idea of "judging" people strikes me as so viscerally wrong that I find it hard to understand anyone who sees the world differently. Particularly when they make exception for one person but not for another - "he was a product of his time," I've been told about Columbus, by someone who turned right around to demonize Saddam Hussein. (Not that he wasn't a demon, mind, it's just . . . how can I blame him? Anymore than I can blame the rain for being wet, or Pharasma can blame a bear for eating someone.)
Do you also have problems with measurement devices? As best I can tell, you have a significant emotional reaction with the words judge and blame. Substitute them with measure and classify. It seems like that would solve a significant portion of your distaste towards the system (assuming that you agree that this is genuinely what Pharasma is doing, and that she is doing it with an acceptably high degree of accuracy). Just pretend Pharasma is a highly advanced spectrophotometer, and souls are just marbles of varying colors. All she does is put the marbles in the basket that most closely matches their color.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
In the beginning of this thread, someone mentioned Acvana as the most good god. Taking direct action to try and save their followers, is definitely something I'd consider in the running for the 'most good god'.
Her followers... and everyone else.
Two problems. None of the beings in the PF universe are omnipotent or omniscient, and thus this argument is irrelevant.
The gods of Golarion created the First World as a trial run for Golarion. In parts of the First World, the time of day never changes. The sun doesn't move in the sky.
That's a simple enough thing to say, and perhaps ancient humans would find it an easy enough thing to imagine, but what with our knowledge that the sun is a star of tremendous mass that the First World should by all rights orbit, rather than a coin sized bright patch in the sky, the idea of the sun remaining stationary relative to certain parts of the First World but not others is mind bending. As the fey realms should be.
But it's pretty obvious that, even if there were inherent physical laws that Golarion's universe would abide by without being made to, the gods can tell physics to bugger off whenever they please.
Secondly, a universe where you are only influenced by things that you yourself can control is either so entirely alien that I cannot visualize it enough to have any significant desire for it, or consists of just you and literally nothing else, which is boring even for an introvert such as myself.
I really highly doubt that designing a consistent universe which completely disallows being hurt by outside forces is something that is so simply done (emphasis on consistent).
Two problems. Golarion isn't anything close to internally consistent, which begs the question, why should it be? Any universe with an active arbitrator or arbitrators doesn't have to be.
Second. A universe where you are only harmed by things you can control is as simple as replacing all of the humans with kryptonians. That's pretty conceivable, I'd think.
It would, I maintain, take an utter monster to design a universe in such a fashion that people can be hurt by things outside their control, when there are so many ways of designing a universe where they cannot be.
Do you also have problems with measurement devices? As best I can tell, you have a significant emotional reaction with the words judge and blame.
*blinks*
I don't have emotional reactions towards words, really, just what they represent. So no, replacing 'judge' with a synonym does not change how I view the hypothetical scenario.
So you have emotional reactions to souls being measured and sorted?Humans are emotional creatures. Any disagreement is an emotional reaction, if not necessarily a very strong one. It's not something I'm worked up about.
But if the . . . the deservingness of a soul is to measured, and then souls are sorted into "get tortured" and "doesn't get tortured" buckets, than that's a system I'm opposed to, no matter how it's said or phrased.
<3
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
So you have emotional reactions to souls being measured and sorted?
Humans are emotional creatures. Any disagreement is an emotional reaction, if not necessarily a very strong one. It's not something I'm worked up about.
But if the . . . the deservingness of a soul is to measured, and then souls are sorted into "get tortured" and "doesn't get tortured" buckets, than that's a system I'm opposed to, no matter how it's said or phrased.
<3So you have emotional reactions to souls being measured and sorted?Humans are emotional creatures. Any disagreement is an emotional reaction, if not necessarily a very strong one. It's not something I'm worked up about.
But if the . . . the deservingness of a soul is to measured, and then souls are sorted into "get tortured" and "doesn't get tortured" buckets, than that's a system I'm opposed to, no matter how it's said or phrased.
How'd my post wind up under yours? Am I the only one seeing this?
And if it's not deservingness but matching colors, do you feel the same when some colors go to buckets where torturers reside and others go to buckets without torturers?
That any souls are going to the torture buckets bespeaks a very flawed system. That said, I don't see any particular reason to prioritize souls of a given color over souls of a different color, except, perhaps, as a deterrent - which would bespeak a knowingly and deliberately flawed system.
Sometimes the site hiccups a bit. It usually gets fixed soon enough.
Two problems. None of the beings in the PF universe are omnipotent or omniscient, and thus this argument is irrelevant.The gods of Golarion created the First World as a trial run for Golarion. In parts of the First World, the time of day never changes. The sun doesn't move in the sky.
That's a simple enough thing to say, and perhaps ancient humans would find it an easy enough thing to imagine, but what with our knowledge that the sun is a star of tremendous mass that the First World should by all rights orbit, rather than a coin sized bright patch in the sky, the idea of the sun remaining stationary relative to certain parts of the First World but not others is mind bending. As the fey realms should be.
But it's pretty obvious that, even if there were inherent physical laws that Golarion's universe would abide by without being made to, the gods can tell physics to bugger off whenever they please.
Secondly, a universe where you are only influenced by things that you yourself can control is either so entirely alien that I cannot visualize it enough to have any significant desire for it, or consists of just you and literally nothing else, which is boring even for an introvert such as myself.
I really highly doubt that designing a consistent universe which completely disallows being hurt by outside forces is something that is so simply done (emphasis on consistent).
Two problems. Golarion isn't anything close to internally consistent, which begs the question, why should it be? Any universe with an active arbitrator or arbitrators doesn't have to be.
Second. A universe where you are only harmed by things you can control is as simple as replacing all of the humans with kryptonians. That's pretty conceivable, I'd think.
It would, I maintain, take an utter monster to design a universe in such a fashion that people can be hurt by things outside their control, when there are so many ways of designing a...
I don’t understand... to the best of my knowledge Kryptonians can be harmed. Superman was literally beat to death. It’s not the physics that are going to be problematic, it’s the inhabitants.
I’m not sure how you’d have a universe where it is impossible to be hurt outside your own choice without it being consistent. Not being able to be hurt outside your own choice is itself a consistency, even if you somehow managed to devise a system where it was the only consistency.
You can’t have arbitration without judging, which you said you didn’t want.
I mean, I get not liking the cycle of souls. I don’t like it that much myself. But I don’t think it’s an inherently flawed or evil system.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
And if it's not deservingness but matching colors, do you feel the same when some colors go to buckets where torturers reside and others go to buckets without torturers?
Can colors be tortured?
I feel like this metaphor has gone way into the weeds, and that's not even counting that my own 'color' changes depending one at what time of life it got judged, and who I was with at the time, and my mood, among other things...
Is there a 'bucket' for 'wishy-washy' or 'foods that pick up / enhance the flavor of what they are served with, but don't have a strong flavor of their own?'
Or does Pharasma just throw her bony hands out and feed me to Groetus?
In which case, annihilating people's immortal souls because your job isn't always color-coded for your convenience sounds, if not evil, then 'less good.' Or the metaphor is bad. Could be six of one, half-dozen of the other. :)
I don’t understand... to the best of my knowledge Kryptonians can be harmed. Superman was literally beat to death.Good sir or madam, if you deign to be willfully obtuse, I will condescend to your level.
Oh, my lord, it appears you are correct!!1
Well, in that case, I take back everything I ever said, ever, about everything. Your incredibly salient point is the final nail in the coffin; obviously creating a world where people can't be hurt by each other (perhaps by being incorporeal, or regenerating like liches upon death and only feeling pain when they want to, or by having Kryptonian invulnerability without Kryptonian strength) is conceptually impossible.
I’m not sure how you’d have a universe where it is impossible to be hurt outside your own choice without it being consistent. Not being able to be hurt outside your own choice is itself a consistency, even if you somehow managed to devise a system where it was the only consistency.This is semantics.
I do love me some semantic arguments, but I'm afraid I don't have the patience for one at this very moment. Seeing, though, that we are both intelligent enough to recognize this for the pointless semantic argument that it is, I don't see any reason why we can't put this unfortunate public display of fatuousness behind us.
You can’t have arbitration without judging, which you said you didn’t want.Either I am spectacularly poor at getting my points across, or you're deliberately misconstruing my argument. (To what end, I can't imagine. Perhaps I really am that bad at getting my points across?)
There is a world of a difference between making rules patches so that people can't be hurt by each other if and when loopholes are found, and judging someone deserving of being tortured. That these two very different things can be expressed with the same word, "arbitration", is merely a fluke of language.
I mean,...
I’m not strictly saying it’s impossible, I’m just sayin that a universe like that is so alien I cannot conceive of what it would be like to exist therein.
I also have the strong intuition that there would be unforseen/unforeseeable consequences that would make it undesirable for you, but I can’t really call that a strong argument.
An entity that is constantly modifying the rules of reality solely in an attempt to thwart you from hurting someone could be construed as a form of torture.
For much the same reason I don’t particularly like our reality, it involves a lot of effort for little to no long term reward. The absolute best case scenario (from my perspective) is I live a good, moral life, and manage to get immediately transformed into an outsider on a good plane with my identity intact. But that is specifically called out as being exceedingly rare, and I really cannot imagine I would be one of those lucky few, nor is there any known way for me to influence that outcome.
What would be more likely is that one of the previously detailed possibilities would occur, which are things that I am at best ambivalent about.
That being said, I do not conflate me not liking it with it being evil or flawed. The cycles purpose is not to be good. The cycles purpose is literally to be a neutral method of deciding where the souls go. Remember that the cycle was designed by many gods of (presumably) all alignments. It is literally a cosmic compromise. And in that regard it fulfills it’s purpose. The deities have (mostly) agreed to not interfere in the cycle, and so all souls get sorted according to a consistent and (in my opinion) reasonable algorithm.
I’m reasonably confident that if the good gods had their way that they would attempt to make it so no souls were harmed and only experienced good things, but (presumably) that is well beyond their power, and (also presumably) this system is the best system they could get given the circumstances.
It is of course possible that one or more of my premises is wrong, but to the best of my knowledge that is how the system works, and that seems reasonable and acceptable to me, even if it’s not what I would personally desire, and even if it’s not what I would create myself if I had the power.
Just my thoughts: while I find the idea of turning into a different creature and losing all your memory of your former life is scary. However, as someone else mentioned, staying the same FOREVER and stagnating is possibly even worse. Frankly the whole idea of living FOREVER terrifies me.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Just my thoughts: while I find the idea of turning into a different creature and losing all your memory of your former life is scary. However, as someone else mentioned, staying the same FOREVER and stagnating is possibly even worse. Frankly the whole idea of living FOREVER terrifies me.
Why not . . . not stagnate?
I mean, frankly, the whole idea of living for a single year or month terrifies me - if we're assuming that I'm not unable to learn new things, have new experiences, or change my opinions. Fortunately, that's not the way living works.
When I'm eighty years old, I don't anticipate looking at myself in the mirror one day and thinking, welp, I've done everything I've ever wanted to do, and I can't think of anything else I'd like to do. I haven't seen them yet, but I'm sure that all the new video games that'll come out in the future will be garbage, and I've no interest in seeing what other planets look like. Time to kick the bucket.
Living forever is the same as living for any other length of time - you just live one day, and then another, and then another. You set goals and try to achieve them. You grow as a person.
There's something I heard once, can't remember where, but to paraphrase an unknown source: There's no such thing as a happy ending. Life has it's ups and it's downs, and whether or not something a story ends on a high note or a low one depends soley on where you stop telling the tale. But every single book that's ever been written, every single movie you've ever watched, has an implied unhappy ending - every member of the cast either dies a sudden death with no time to prepare for it, or else they rot away until nonexistence is preferable to going on.
And, my hope is that whoever it is I'm paraphrasing is wrong. My hope is that humanity will solve the problems of aging and death, like we solved the problems of smallpox and polio. And then stories won't have unhappy endings. They won't have happy endings either, tragedies and comedies will still be determined by where the audience stops following the characters, but there won't be that implication that after the cameras stop rolling everyone rots to death.
And, I'd really like to live to see that day. But even if I don't, it makes my view of the world just a little happier to think that someday, someone will.
I'm happy for them.
I just can't imagine the afterlife, no matter how great was, would never get boring, and once you got bored with it you'd be bored forever.
I just can't imagine the afterlife, no matter how great was, would never get boring, and once you got bored with it you'd be bored forever.
What if, rather than being great, the afterlife was exciting?
What if there were people to argue with, and skills to perfect, and causes to fight for, and weird sh*t to eat, and alien cultures to struggle to understand, new alien cultures forming every generation, and what if, rather than having the "perfect game", the afterlife came out with a better game every time you finished the last one, and what if in the afterlife you could replace your eyes with robot eyes that the government can spy on you through, and if all of that got boring, the afterlife was infinite and even if hopping from star to star sounds like there'd be too much downtime, by the time you finished exploring the afterlife's solar system the whole thing would have changed on you and you could start all over.
That's an afterlife that I don't think would bore me.
Could be. I always thought tho if there is life after death reincarnation would be more interesting than heaven or whatever since you would get to experience things from a new perspective, and be a lot of different "characters"
Could be. I always thought tho if there is life after death reincarnation would be more interesting than heaven or whatever since you would get to experience things from a new perspective, and be a lot of different "characters"
Be neat if that was possible, yeah.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I just can't imagine the afterlife, no matter how great was, would never get boring, and once you got bored with it you'd be bored forever.
Eh. Every day at work I see people pair off with their friends and jabber away all night, and then go home, and come back to work *and jabber to the same person for another shift.*
I'm all like, "Don't you people sleep when you get home? How could enough new stuff have happened since the last time you spoke to each other to be fodder for another night of conversation?"
But that would mean the afterlife is like working at the post office, so definitely hell, then.
Still, mindwipes as a cure for boredom? Ugh. I worked too hard learning all this stuff. I'd rather be bored. Save the factory resets for machines.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Could be. I always thought tho if there is life after death reincarnation would be more interesting than heaven or whatever since you would get to experience things from a new perspective, and be a lot of different "characters"Be neat if that was possible, yeah.
Wait... You mean that players are souls for all these reincarnated vessels?
Whoo! Meta
I'd say Sarenrae. In having read a lot of the gods' descriptions, according to Paizo neutral good seems to be their bias as the 'most good overall.' In reading about her, I'd say she wins the 'most good overall' prize.
J
Sarenrae seems obvious, but the Cult of the Dawnflower is still kicking so clearly she doesn't mind too much about radicals murdering their way across the countryside.
Cayden Cailean is my bet since Iomedae is canonically kind of a jerk.
As for the cosmological stuff, I would say if the average person knew their memories would be wiped and their soul most likely ground out into planestuff, they would not be very happy about the system.
I do like the idea of a big villain trying to tear down the Boneyard system as an adventure idea however.
|
The afterlife doesn’t seem any worse to me than the Lifestream from Final Fantasy VII, except you get to spend as long as you like in a paradise or punishment befitting your morality first.
Just as your body feeds the earth and ecosystem, so too does your soul, eventually your soul stuff becomes a part of someone else’s metaphysical make up (or many someone elses’). The time scale on this process is measured in countless eons, scales so large that mortal minds probably could never comprehend them.
If you really want to spend eternity as a petitioner there’s nothing stopping you, but I think a billion years in perfect heaven might test even the most enlightened mind.