remedial goodness for Chelish archdukes
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"I have a question about the second story."

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"Shouldn't you kill some babies, if the King tells you to?"

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"Great question! If the King personally and directly tells you to kill some babies, then you need someone more senior than me for advice. But if you are in the position of the people in the story - who are hired by some other men, who tell them 'the King said to kill these babies' - you should absolutely not do it. Killing babies is a crime. It's murder. It is not a defense to say that you did it because someone told you the King said so. In Lastwall, it actually is not even a defense if the ruler really did say so."

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"So what should you do if someone powerful orders you to kill some babies?"

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"Well, that depends on what your realistic options are, but it is Good to warn someone who can hide the babies, as they did in the story, and Good to refuse even if you'll be killed, and Good to tell some other more powerful person who'll intervene." 

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"And if hypothetically you did kill some babies, are you going to go to Hell now?"

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"You might. Killing babies is Evil. But we can repent of all our evils, and Andoran reports that it is not as difficult as many people presume, to put Evil behind them and change course and be recognized by the Judge as having done so."

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The obvious follow-up is "is it still wrong if they're orcs", but she can't imagine anyone being dumb enough to ask that.

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No, one further than that. She glances at where the nobles are, but of course Narikopolus, who has ordered hundreds of infants killed, never betrays anything on his face. Guim is thinking about something, not looking up. Queralt is trying to catch her eye, for some reason, gesturing with her head towards the Iomedans. If she has a question, why not ask it herself? It's not like Margarida can read her mind to ask it for her -

Oh. If Margarida asks a question, it's neither foolish nor wise, not just for nobles and not just for serfs.

 

"Is it evil to kill someone who will kill you, if they live?"

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"Good question. You are always permitted to use force to defend yourself, but no more force than necessary. So - say that a man attacks you with a knife. You can kill him; you are right to do so, because we cannot have civilization at all if murderers are not stopped. But say that you happen to be a great warrior, and you can see that the man is drunk out of his mind and not even holding the knife right; then you can probably take it from him without killing him, and that is better. A court will judge later if he is a threat to the community or if he just needs to be told to stay sober. 

You can kill to defend yourself, if there was no way to defend yourself without killing. But you should check first if there is. That is one of the messages of the first story - everyone in it believed that their fighting was necessary, that their enemies could not be reasoned with, and really their enemies were much like them, and the fighting was not really necessary, and so it was Evil."

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Kind of sounds like the king did need to escalate to murder here? Although he was admittedly completely incompetent at it, so it didn't help anyway.

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She feels like she's supposed to ask 'shouldn't you tell the truth to the king's guards', since that's copying their question form, but if she's wrong about how this works it could be very bad.

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Okay, come on, people. Do you want to look like you want to learn, or not?

She wants to ask about Bente, but she can almost see the shape of the answer, and if there isn't actually any more there then she will look very stupid. So -

"Why isn't the man in the second story afraid to die, after they don't find the babies? He still tried to have them all killed."

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"If you sincerely and completely repent of an evil you have done it will not damn you at judgment. It is not easy to sincerely and completely repent, it is not as simple as wishing you had done something different. You must try to set it right, if you can, and become someone who would do differently in the future. By going out into the night to try to warn the woman, and by telling the soldiers there were no babies in the woods after all, he had repented properly. He would be all right, at judgment, or at least not have this on his account."

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- oh.

 

"Does that go for anything?"

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"Some things are a life's work to try to set right and some people have a very hard time changing in their hearts such that they'd do something different in the future. But - in principle, yes. If, when you die, you are a person who would from that moment have lived a Lawful Good life, and who tried truly and completely to correct the things they did before they turned from Evil, Heaven will welcome you."

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 "- though Axis is also a paradise and Iomedae does not require that everyone aspire to Heaven."

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"Yes. All of the afterlives that are not Evil are good for the people who go to them."

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Queralt glances over at the other pews, full of other people not asking questions. She doesn't very much care what happens to them, really. But the Iomedans do, and she wants the Iomedans to succeed. She takes a breath, and tries to be loud enough that at least some of them can hear.

"Isn't it true, then," aaaaa that's so loud, so much louder than she's supposed to be, but if she's quiet then only the people right around her will hear, "that if anyone did have a question about the stories, or about how to be good, or about how to set something right, then - Iomedae would want that person to ask it, like Bente asked a lot of questions when she was trying to understand the feud between the Axelsens and the Holms? And that even if the question sounded stupid, or made people upset, like Asmund was upset at first with Bente, it could still be part of repenting and setting something right, if it meant you knew what to do going forward?"

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He smiles at her. "Yes, absolutely. And in particular - asking questions is so important that we will stay when the sermon is over, and you can come and ask questions individually, and you can ask them with your face concealed if you would like, or ask us to promise not to repeat your questions or anything we guessed from those questions to anybody. Because we cannot teach you if we do not understand what you are confused about."

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"What if someone has done something that can never be set right?"

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"Sometimes they can prevent the next thing like it from happening, which is almost as good, or help people like the people they harmed. And everyone can always change so they are no longer the sort of person who would have done it. We know more about the spell atonement than the ordinary act of it, because with the spell you can tell at once if it worked, but it is possible though harder to atone of evils you can't fix, though usually not without taking some serious steps in the place of fixing it."

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"Shouldn't you tell the truth to the king's men?" They don't actually have a king so technically this is a hypothetical.

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"If you have a good and just government, yes, you should always tell them the truth. Iomedae values honesty very highly, and her priests and paladins almost always swear never to lie. I think - that story is about a kingdom that has done an enormous evil to its people. It has taken two real and important virtues - the virtue of cooperation with a government, and the virtue of protecting the innocent - and put them at odds with each other. A lawful good King will never order the killing of babies for this reason. In a lawful good kingdom, like you now live in, if anyone says to you that they are killing babies on the order of the Queen you can be pretty sure they are lying, and entirely sure that they are not acting on behalf of the law, which prohibits killing babies without any exceptions.

And if they are not acting on behalf of the law then you do not owe them the obedience you owe the law. If a bandit says 'I am here to lawfully take all your money' you are not obliged to start obeying him just because he mentioned the law; that only applies if he serves it."

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