There are theologians? What…is the difference between a priest and a theologian?

Theologians are basically all priests, they're just priests with more of an - academic? - focus. They're usually not empowered themselves, and they do things like formulating communes and giving policy recommendations and stuff.

Iomedae is mildly surprised that they haven't asked to meet her. She sort of imagines that if you want to understand your god it'd be useful to have a version of her on hand even if it's a teenager who isn't sure she agrees with the god. You could at least pick out which were the persistent tendencies and which ones were situational. Raise a hundred Iomedae-clones in a hundred different families in Lastwall - she should suggest that, actually - no, the technology's way too distant - "I don't know. I'm trying to figure out if I should trust the Goddess. Is that a common problem?"

"It's not a very common problem, I think, and most people who have it are coming from a position of greater ignorance than you…"

"I actually don't know all that much formal theology. I read through the holy book but" now she's embarrassed with herself, "the week I got here, when my Taldane literacy was pretty shaky. I - maybe you should get a theologian who doesn't know who I am but would be very qualified to notice any ways in which I am a heretic, that would probably be very informative all by itself."

"Okay. I'll set something up."

"Young lady, I hear you had questions about the Goddess?"

Iomedae is not in her scifi jumpsuit or in uniform, in favor of looking like a wizard she saw in Absalom once. She isn't sure how to expect this to go but it probably goes differently if it is established she's already an empowered paladin. "I am trying to figure out if I agree with Her, and if I understand Her. The difficulty I'm having is that it seems hard to guess what She would want, if there weren't a country ruled by Hell and a rift to the Abyss, and if She'd finished her war with Tar-Baphon, and - I don't know. It's hard to evaluate a god who seems mostly busy barely not losing a lot of different wars. I think I want Her to win those but it's not the same thing as trusting Her. Do you trust Her?"

"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."