"It started with one nation attacking another. Armies fighting, according to the rules of war. We don't kill noncombatants except as unavoidable collateral damage, and we have to accept surrenders and not mistreat the prisoners, and I don't expect the people taking that bounty will do either. If some people from a group are attacking you, and you have a way to tell combatants from civilians, then you shouldn't target civilians. If you don't have a way to tell them apart, and the enemy is deliberately hiding among its civilians, you should still spare women and children and the elderly if you can. Assuming those are very rarely combatants, which may not hold here. And ideally there should be some long-term solution, other than exterminating the other group or randomly killing enough of them that the next fight will be a generation later. Armed force is a political instrument."

"Protecting one's own citizens is the highest responsibility of the state. I'm not proposing that they should do nothing because they can't tell gnoll combatants from civilians. Maybe killing random gnolls is the best that can be done, and so the appropriate response, but - I'd need to be convinced of that in each case, and I don't trust the locals about it. Or not yet. They have other people handling the bounties, there isn't an enormous massacre going on that I could stop. As far as I know, anyway."

"I guess organized nations up here that recognize each other might have rules of war. I've seen inklings that there's a treaty about the Worldwound. But I would not expect forest gnolls to be signatories and they would maybe have rules about children but not about women or the elderly who can cast spells if anyone can. I think... they do some things through the state but if you're interested in stuff that might reasonably be the common cause of a lot of countries and a lot of species, you might want to mostly go through churches. I'm getting along real well with the Nethysians but you might be too cagey to have fun with them. Though we're getting the Aura Sight come morning, not quite free but close enough, they want to see me do an Ancestral Regression."

It's not encouraging to hear that only the extraplanar invaders from the Abyss respect any rules of war on this planet! That just makes Tanya want to stay further away from the whole sorry business, not that she needs any convincing that war is bad.

"What kind of things are you thinking of that churches might be coordinating?" Churches are international organization, so it stands to reason they might be involved even if Tanya privately doubts how much they're improving things by their presence. The standard trick is to get you to compare them to a hypothetical absence of coordination instead of a hypothetical secular alternative. "And what's an Ancestral Regression?"

"If you need financing that seems to be all Abadarans all the time, for example. It sounds like Shelynites lean kind of pacifist - uh, relative to the surrounds, I don't know if you'll find them pacifist enough, I'm sort of confused about your position there even though it keeps coming up - so they'd be the ones to ask if you want to see what there is prior art wise about less gnoll hunting or whatever. Ancestral Regression is a spell that'll make me look like a surface elf all day. It's pretty widely available downstairs but nobody up here has ever seen it, which stands to reason since it only works on us, the Nethysians are just professionally curious."

An illusion that makes drow look like elves so they're treated better is obviously a good thing for the individual drow, but its widespread availability makes the human prejudice against (apparent) drow even more irrational! Tanya wonders if she can make an illusion decoy of 'surface elf Belmarniss' come out right before she sees what the spell produces.

"My position on pacifism is that violence is obviously bad but we haven't found a way to eliminate it entirely, and people who personally refuse to engage in violence only shift the burden to others. If you don't defend yourself it's because you rely on the police to defend you against private criminals and the military against other nations. That's fine if that's their job that you're paying them for, but not if you refuse to be conscripted because you find the necessary job personally distasteful. Violence is a crime and most wars of choice are very bad. We'd all be better off if there was less war but I don't see how pacifism can help with that, because we wouldn't be better off if we didn't defend ourselves."

"I do understand the appeal, though. Humans - and I suppose other species here as well - clearly have an instinct towards violence far beyond what is rational for private profit. If only everyone was a pacifist, there would be very few wars! It's a famous philosophical principle that you should practice what you preach, and that you should behave the way you would like everyone to behave. It's the first step towards coordination. But unopposed violence rewards the defectors too much, by giving them more resources and eventually more countries to rule over and people to enculture into being violent, for this to work with pure pacifism. At least that's how it seems to me."

"That does all sound like a fairly coherent philosophy but I bet the next time I try to guess how you feel about something related to it I will make some kind of mistake anyway," says Belmarniss equably.

Hmm. "It might be because I'm used to operating in a lawful society, and a fairly specific one that I know well. My philosophy isn't optimized for this world with its bounty-hunting adventurers. I might well be wrong about some things. It might be interesting to hear the local pacifists' perspective, if it can be divested from their religion."

"Why does it need to be divested from their religion, Shelyn sounds like a nice enough person."

"...is their religion centered on pacifism or does it focus on other things?"

Calling a god a 'nice enough person' is the best possible way of relating to (putative) deities if you have to believe they exist! (Assuming they are, in fact, nice.) Belmarniss is very sensible about religion!

"Oh, she's the goddess of love and art. Nethysians have libraries and in the same spirit apparently the nearest Shelynites have a concert hall."

A religion mandating Theologically Correct Love And Art sounds pretty terrible, if not as much as one managing banking.

"Those seem unrelated to pacifism. There's certainly art promoting wars, including music. So I guess that's what I meant by wanting to, uh, disentangle the concerns." 'Make Love Not War' is a famous slogan but, as far as Tanya is aware, making more love does not actually lead to making less war and only serves to replenish the next generation of young men.

"I have not gone and visited them to see if they have a religious prohibition on battle anthems."

"When I have a free hour I'll pay them a visit." The Abadarans and the Nethysians both turned out to be perfectly nice people. Being religious doesn't mean necessarily being unpleasant! Going to a church and asking for an explanation of one of their tenets might be asking for trouble, but if they have one that amounts to more than 'God said so' and if it's a locally respected tradition, then Tanya will probably benefit from being aware of it. Anyway, she can always just leave.

"Do you happen to have a summary on your opinion on religion like you did your opinion on pacifism all ready to go?"

Ah. Well. This was probably unavoidable. Tanya really hopes this doesn't make Belmarniss mad at her, but she doesn't want to lie to her either. 

"On Earth there are many religions, and there were many more in the past. They make entirely contradictory claims - about what gods exist and what they want, about magic and miracles and the afterlives, about the right way to live. Many past wars were religious ones, because some religions call to convert other people by force. And although most of them tell stories of past miracles, none of them are granted verifiable miracles today. In the modern era, improved technology has made people richer and safer, and some religions have lost the political power they once had. Many people now believe that all the religions are false; there's a common joke that religious people believe all the religions are false but one. In any case it is obvious that religious beliefs are not caused by being true, because everyone believes something different and which beliefs are more common mostly depends on which people conquered a place long ago."

"My opinion on religion, which is not unique to me, is that it's a complex social force which can do both great good and great harm. Unavoidably so, because it plays such a large part in people's lives and in society. Many specific religions do much more harm than good. Dogma, claims which can't be proven from observed reality but you're not allowed to contradict, are very harmful to rational thought. Churches, like all organizations, try to grow and gain more power and they don't pay society enough for the privilege, because the way they purport to pay society is by teaching religious law which is false. And they encourage antagonism towards countries with majority populations of other faiths. All the good things they sometimes do, like organizing charity and public works, could be done just as well by secular organizations in a society that had no religion."

"I do know that beings exist that can interfere in the world." For personal reasons which she has no particular reason to hide anymore, but which she'd rather not reveal because they're hard to believe and don't actually contribute anything to the conversation. "They are not to my knowledge the gods of any specific church, but I don't know much about them. The thing about religion is that it's built on falsehoods, even if people honestly believe them, and nothing good can come of that."

"...wow.

"Do you wanna real quick ask one of the Nethysians to create water before we go?"

"...why?" Is Belmarniss implying Tanya talked for too long, so long she must be thirsty?

"...that's a classic zeroth-level spell that clerics can do and arcane casters can't, is create water. So you can tell who's really getting spells from a god or at least a really jumped up outsider, and who's faking."

"I know churches have their own magic traditions with spells wizards don't know, but - are you saying you think their god is doing little miracles on demand for them?"

"Yes. Divine spells are completely different. I can't even use their scrolls or wands, even if it's a spell that has an otherwise identical arcane form."

"I don't mean to dismiss your expertise, but how sure are you that they don't just have a different magic tradition with no gods involved? There seem to be many kinds of magic on Golarion, used by people of different races. My own magic is another example."

"Druids exist, are also divine casters in the relevant technical sense, and can create water too, but they don't channel energy the same way. Also, druids have to learn how to do what they do, and clerics don't. Clerics can just be the right sort of person and get a full spell circle one morning - not like a sorcerer, sorcery comes in gradually."

So the spells you claimed a moment ago were impossible for wizards are in fact available to a different tradition which can be learned with no gods! This, this is what makes religion so insidious. It can twist the mind into knots and obscure the very obvious.

"So the only thing special about clerics is that they gain magic suddenly and unpredictably? Gods are a possible explanation for this, but gods are a possible explanation for many things because 'miracle' can be just another word for 'something we don't understand'. If that's the only reason to think gods are involved, I find myself a little skeptical. Maybe clerics are a kind of sudden-onset sorcerers for divine magic."

"Hey Learned, are sudden-onset divine sorcerers a thing?" Belmarniss calls to the nearest Nethysian.

"According to some sources, yes, they are! They're spontaneous casters, the ones I've heard of either which way cast from Splendor, and they tend to have peculiar curses, but can otherwise cast cleric spells and even channel, but they seldom, possibly never, get the ones that are restricted by or circled down for the followers of a specific god. If you come back tomorrow I can direct you to the right books?"

"No thanks - we can get out of your way, sorry for overstaying."

There are more things in Earth and, regrettably, Heaven that are dreamed of in your philosophy.

Tanya tactfully refrains from commenting out loud.