"I do. Is there something in particular that's causing you doubts?"

" - well not more than - I mean, do you trust all the gods?"

"Certainly not! But I assume you're not coming from a place of total ignorance - some people would trust Her just because she's Lawful Good. You're obviously not one of those people. What does it mean, for you, to trust someone?"

"...I guess I mostly mean, I don't have to be on my guard to not be wronged by them, and if I obey them then that'll go better than doing anything else, and I won't regret it later, and I won't end up wishing I'd done more research first."

"That's a very high standard of trustworthiness that you're looking for, though it's one Iomedae meets, at least in my view. Are you considering joining Her church?"

"My situation is kind of complicated. I think probably I mostly want to know the things that would be relevant to someone considering joining Her church….Iomedae can't possibly meet those standards in general, there are people who want, I don't know, some horrible thing, and it couldn't possibly go better for them to obey Her than to do anything else, unless by 'better' you mean 'more Lawfully Good' -"

“It is the case that if one is receiving orders directly from Iomedae - which is of course a pretty rare phenomenon - following those orders will go better by your values accounting for all the possible futures rather than just the one that happens. She of course cannot guarantee that as well as She could when prophecy obtained, but this mostly means that She has a higher standard for how sure she has to be that things will work out well in order to order them.”

“ - huh. People - have enough to -…I think I would’ve guessed that gods can’t do that for us for the same reason we can’t reliably do it for toddlers -”

“Well, as I said it was easier when there was prophecy. She does it infrequently now though that’s obviously not entirely the difficulty of knowing when Her orders will do right in total by the person She is giving them to.”

“Does She get around this by - saying things that technically aren’t orders, and not promising anything - say, if She just said ‘you could resurrect this person’ -”

“I think She does not do that, or rather not for those reasons. It is believed that it is often less expensive for Her to give people information that they would value having, rather than giving orders. But She applies the same standards to all communications She initiates with mortals, that collecting all the futures they are better for the mortals She is communicating with.”

“Do all the Lawful Good gods do that, or just Her?”

"There are no Lawful Good gods that we know to be deliberately deceptive, giving someone orders with the intent to make them act against their interests. There are Lawful Good gods much more alien than Iomedae, who would not be able to act at all if they held themselves to the comprehension of mortal priorities She has, and there's Shizuru, who ...doesn't make decisions very much, and we think when people get interventions from Her they’re effectively decisions made by a small and disconnected fragment of Her which came unmoored from the rest."

"...why do gods need followers? What does it do for them - I assume they wouldn’t go to all the trouble encouraging people to worship them if it didn’t do something -”

"Mostly, worshippers benefit a god by giving them more ability to influence the world. The gods hear our prayers, and helps them notice mortal concerns and be aware of what is happening in the world, and they have a somewhat greater ability to respond to prayers than to intervene unprompted. A god's followers will generally share many of the god's interests and priorities, and even without any divine intervention having dedicated followers will thus mean that a god's interests are more represented in the world and more fulfilled in the world. Think, for example, on how Abadar desires more trade and commerce in the world, and His bankers facilitate that by lending money to enable more ventures and by insuring ships and the like. And of course having more followers means that a god has more people aligned with their goals who can act as their priests, or people who they can otherwise act through if they respect mortal priorities the way Iomedae does."

"So by worshipping Iomedae we -  care about the things She cares about, and make it more cleanly true of us that She can use us if she needs to, and when we speak to her She hears us? …I feel like that should answer all my questions but it feels like I still have one, somehow.

…do you like Her? Does She feel like an - angry disapproving person with the authority of a parent even though you are a grownup -" What a stupid question. 

"...Was that a personal question? I like Her. She does not feel like that, to me. She is the god that wants the same things I want, She's the one who helped us build everything we've built here. She is the god who is backing us up, in Lastwall, when we fail."

"- does that come up much? Lastwall seems very - you have your mission from Her, and you do it."

"...Does what come up much? That She is backing us up when we fail? It comes up. More often than we'd like."

"Huh." She feels like she is rotating ideas in her mind, trying to get them to fit into place. "Does She get mad - no, She wouldn't, that'd be stupid - does She relate to us all as very stupid toddlers -" Aroden didn't, Aroden related to everybody as prospective gods. Made everyone into prospective gods, so that He could relate to them that way.

"The Goddess does not relate to us like we relate to toddlers. In part this is due to Her limited ability to intervene - even if She would otherwise relate to us like that, I imagine you would relate very differently to a young child in your care if you could watch them but only speak to them once a year - but in general She does not relate to us the same way that we relate to other mortals at all. In a sense, She is lacking certain capacities that you and I have. She chose on ascending to give up the ability to be frustrated with, or angry at, or disappointed in mortals the way we might feel frustrated or angry or disappointed towards each other. She cares for us, but not the way we care for each other, we think. She grieves for us, but not the way we grieve. It's not very useful to try to explain the way She relates to mortals with analogies to the way we relate to each other."

"Thank you."

Iomedae doesn't, she thinks, have theological reasons she doesn't trust the goddess Iomedae. She just has her foster-child personal issues around authority and she has the fact that the goddess Iomedae is a substitute for Aroden, who she loved and trusted and who is dead. There's no theology which will make that stop hurting.

And it really is good enough reason to plan on doing what she is told until the wars are won and the world's problems not best solved by winning them.

Iomedae is indeed assigned, as spring approaches, to running radio broadcasts once the war begins, daily rather than weekly. It's good for morale, and for recruitment, and as they conquer bits of Isger and Cheliax it'll be good for giving out instructions in conquered territory; they have spare radios and can sell them in towns they pass through. Someone on the weapons project's staff gets a permanent Telepathic Bond with someone in Cansellarion's staff, through which information for broadcast will be reported along with information relevant to weapons supply and manufacture, though they're almost always going to be broadcasting news on a delay of a week or so. 

Iomedae has read precisely one book about World War II but it gave her some ideas. "I think sometimes on Earth they'd read notes from a soldier's family, on his birthday, can we do that or is it too strongly suggestive I'm in Lastwall? Also news like a baby born at home. Does it cost Iomedae if we do interviews with dead soldiers called from Heaven? …and if so can we also call dead Chelish soldiers from Hell and have fairly awful interviews with them?"

"It costs Heaven a little - not very much, though. It's probably worth it, except that it'll be a couple weeks at least before any soldiers from this campaign are in Heaven. We'll call some when they are, though. I am not sure it would be good for morale to broadcast to our troops reminders of what it means that all the soldiers they are killing are damned, though."

Iomedae nods seriously. She can't really imagine forgetting, but she can imagine not wanting to think about it in very much detail. "I can't think of anything else I need from you." She had wanted to send them off with chocolate, that being the other thing she remembers about World War II, but it's not really a defensible research priority.