Does your (or Iomedae's (or Pharasma's as they sound like they might be different?)) moral system care about someone's intentions and methods or the total amount of good they do?

There's some arguments on earth that rather than do things like personally volunteer with the homeless, or rescue cats out of trees, or whatever, people should instead work at whatever job pays them the best and donate some percentage of the money to charities that most effectively do good for them. (E.g. Endbringer crisis relief, or smallpox vaccination in poor countries). 

This is an excellent question! I'm going to answer it now, but it's also definitely going in an upcoming mailbag post so it doesn't get lost in the pile of comments.

Pharasma and the alignment system care about both intentions and results. Trying to do good and failing is better than not trying but worse than trying and succeeding. Trying to do harm but accidentally helping people is less Evil than successfully doing harm, but still Evil.

Iomedae, more than any other god, emphasizes doing the greatest total amount of Good with your available resources. Someone who stops one building from burning down is doing Good; someone who organizes a fire department to stop many buildings burning down is doing Good more effectively. (Note that Iomedae does not judge the dead. This distinction only comes up in terms of who She chooses as paladins or clerics and what She wants Her followers to do more generally.) For a lot of people, doing Good as effectively as possible does involve working at something they're skilled at and donating money. The church of Iomedae on Golarion gets a lot of donations and uses them as efficiently as they can against the world's greatest threats (mainly the Worldwound, see my earlier post about Golarion). Sometimes the Golarion equivalent of villains donate money in an attempt to buy their way into the Neutral afterlives, and this is better (for their souls and everyone else) than using the money on further villainy, but not as good as, you know, not being villains.

This often gets brought up particularly for Parahumans since on one end you have Scion, who while obviously doing a lot of good doesn't seem to understand prioritizing some things over others (he famously was seen rescuing a cat from a tree during an Endbringer attack on another country).

My next post is going to be a long one on Iomedaean theology, and if anyone has Scion's email address they should send it to him! Hahaha.

Or you get supervillains who people will claim are net good for the world, even though most of what they do is organized crime that sells drugs, runs illegal gambling, prostitution, extracting "protection money" etc. but people argue that they keep the peace and prevent worse villains moving in, or the kind of conflict you'd get in a power vacuum. And they help with Endbringers and other big threats. What do you think of those? 

"If I wasn't here hurting people, someone else would be hurting people even more" is not Good. Just keep the peace without doing that stuff! I guess if the only thing someone did was demand money from everyone in an area in exchange for keeping other villains out, that would be sort of like being a police force, but at that point why not just join the Protectorate and skip all the extra steps?

If a supervillain saves 10,000 people by fighting the Endbringers, but is only doing it for the glory, or because they enjoy fighting, or because it's good for your reputation, does that still count? And cancel our having like, tortured and murdered 100 people.

It still counts, but less than if they did it because they wanted those people to live. Exactly how much of what kinds of Good cancels out exactly how much of what kinds of Evil is the sort of thing that outsiders argue about at soul trials, and they might have some kind of mathematical rules about it, but if they do I don't know them.

When Jews come before God's judgement, however they got there, they're judged - like everyone else who isn't a Christian - on the balance of their sins and virtues and good deeds. But the sad fact is that practically everyone commits enough sins, to say nothing of inherited original sin, to be damned. It's not an absolute, because God can have mercy even on non-Christians, and because some (very rare) people lead incredibly virtuous lives (this is not an automatic win condition but it makes God more inclined to be merciful and extend His grace); but it's the usual outcome. 

Okay, I know I said I was going to do my research and put together an organized Christianity mailbag before wading into the Christianity stuff, but claiming the vast majority of people are damned is just wrong and very dangerously so! More people go to the Neutral afterlives than either the Good or Evil ones, and plenty go to the Good ones. I have Scried them. I am sure.

Paradise is attainable and worth striving for. If you take one thing away from this post, it should be that.

Assuming you really are from another planet (I presume Armsmaster and Dragon know their stuff, but this situation is really weird) with active entities that are best translated as Gods I think there may be some aspects of Earth culture you are not quite grasping…. Basically religious beliefs on Earth aren’t responsive to evidence.  I know some people will want to label me an angry internet atheist (I’m more agnostic/ignostic but whatever), but I stand by this claim.  Religious claims get treated as a special social category where you smile and nod along and only argue or intervene if someone is going to act on them in a particularly obviously bad way.  So even if you can literally show someone a crystal ball of the various afterlives (or bring people back from afterlives!!) most people may take a bit to process it as “an actual factual claim about reality”.  It’s just kind of the way things developed with no “gods” taking clear actions and no consistently verifiable evidence.

In some cases, maybe even most cases this is kind of harmless, they’ve got a nice story to believe about their dead Grandpa being in a better place.  (Although according to you if Grandpa did a lot of harm maybe he isn’t in a nice place and he should have considered his actions more carefully while living, so maybe even the harmless feel good story versions of religions is actually harmful.  Again, premised on your explanations being true.)

In the case of Christians, particularly the evangelical fundamentalist variety (but also fundamentalists of other religions) the situation is even worse than this.  They have a lot of really strong, really important (if true) claims about reality that everyone else has gotten used to smiling at and politely ignoring.  They won’t just fail to parse your factual claims, they will think you are actively deceiving them (if not merely badly deluded yourself).  They don’t have a way to update on external evidence, and there starting point is a book (well collection of books from various cultures and times with a unifying interpretation read into them) that hadn’t been revised for over a thousand years (well except for Martin Luthor cutting some stuff he didn’t like and couldn’t reinterpret).  So yeah, not sure how to tell you to deal with this.  

In my younger days (okay only like 5 years ago) I would go on angry rants in the internet while smiling and ignoring them in real life, but you seem like you have a bigger mission than that and factual claims that they will see as direct challenges. 

I'm confused about what you're trying to say here.

If Christ had died for the sins of people on Golarion and they don't know it yet then it's imperative to let them know - just as if we had discovered an uncontacted tribe in a remote jungle. Conversely, if He hadn't, then we must not mislead them about it!

Now, if Samora is right that very many of them make Heaven by good deeds alone, without faith in Christ, it's pretty clear that they're not in the same situation of grace (or lack of it) as we are here on Earth. On the other hand, we were definitely told that 'no one comes to the Father except through me'. Those are the two things that we must reconcile.

One possible and indeed likely answer is that Christ died for all humans, and Samora isn't - in the relevant theological sense - human. In which case it's likely she's also biologically not human, and since we can check that, we should.

Another possibility is that, among people who had had no opportunity yet to hear and accept the Good News of the gospels, God is more lenient; that in His grace He allows them to achieve Heaven as Samora describes. For all we know, this was always the case among unevangelized people here on Earth - it's not as if we could check who actually made it to Heaven! If so, this is absolutely essential for us to find out as soon as possible. Having told Samora about Christianity, do we have an urgent moral duty to convert her to it? Or would we be misleading her about even the possibility of salvation through Jesus Christ for her and her kind?

Which leads me to another important matter:

More people go to the Neutral afterlives than either the Good or Evil ones, and plenty go to the Good ones. I have Scried them. I am sure.

Samora, I am very happy for you and your people that this is so. (Assuming you're right and were not deceived by Iomedae, but I have no way of checking that, so I shall not mention that again.) I don't have the faculty with words necessary to express how happy I am to hear that many people, on an entire planet that has never heard of Our Lord and Saviour, nevertheless can and do attain Heaven and not Hell. Please believe me when I say that.

I think you should 'scry' dead people on Earth, as many as possible, to determine whether they too reached Heaven. Specifically, those who died on Earth before they or their people had first heard of Christianity. The virtuous ancient pagans and Hebrews, or the more recent dead of people whose remote tribes were first contacted in living memory. (I think some Amazonian tribes were first reached in the early or middle 20th century?) Not in order to resolve some theological debates, although I am sad to say that we humans have in the past created far too much animosity over these very questions. But to know how to address the urgent question of first contact with a planetful of souls possibly in need of salvation.

claiming the vast majority of people are damned is just wrong and very dangerously so!

It may be wrong on Golarion; I hope that it is. But it is true on Earth, or it was before the spread of Christianity. That is the core Christian message: the Good News (gospel) of salvation comes with the less fortunate news that we are in need of it.

Please check for yourself. And then let us know.

A few more replies to other comments.

 What is "truly universal" about a salvation that you only get if you happen to have heard about a particular religion and believed it

What's universal is that it does apply to everyone once they've heard about it! In other words, that there is no people (of humans on Earth) who cannot be saved, and moreover that this salvation is personal: there is no person whom Jesus Christ would reject.

This is a brief digression on history, so please skip it if you're not interested, but:

It speaks to the success of Christianity as a universal, world-embracing religion that it isn't obvious to you what being universal even is! Before Christ's time, most religions and their false gods each belonged to a people. If you were born, say, an ancient Greek, you couldn't just choose to worship an Egyptian god and hope to go to the 'Egyptian afterlife', no matter how convinced you were by the Egyptian priests' theology or apparent miracles. The Jews (Hebrews), like all other peoples, had (as they still have) very strict laws about admitting foreigners to their faith; it hardly ever happened. Worship was associated with a city, a tribe, a family, a 'people'. Missionaries going out to convert people in another country - on an individual basis, without settling or conquering that country as a group - not only didn't happen; the very concept didn't make much sense to most people! 

But even if you're alone in your family or your entire city; even if you're the lowliest slave despised by all around you and have no church or bishop to support you; even if you're persecuted for your faith and kept from the sacraments - you can still believe in Jesus Christ in your heart, and pray, and be saved. Everyone in the entire world can do this. That's what being universal means.

(An important implication is that when, in the past, Christian Europeans conquered and enslaved other peoples and did not acknowledge them as fellow Christians, those people were theologically wrong and sinning, in addition to the obvious moral wrongs committed. The Catholic Church's enthusiastic historical support for slavery and in particular for keeping Native American and African slaves from the teachings of the gospels and the sacraments is, to my mind, perhaps the greatest crime against the faith ever committed by the bishops of Rome and the strongest reason to reject their spiritual authority.)

Digression over!

Now, it's possible to imagine an even more universal faith. What if everyone on Earth had received a personal revelation, or at least an angel in human guise knocking on their door, the day of the Resurrection, telling them the Good News? Wouldn't that be more universal, and just overall better for everyone? Obviously we shouldn't get into the subject of theodicy here (because we'll never be done! it takes years just to familiarize yourself with all the existing arguments!) - but yes, that hypothetical Christianity would be more 'universal'. Perhaps that's what you imagined when I said the word. But we have to take the world as it is.

Obviously (conditional on Samora not being delusional or a Satanic plot), we need to get the word of Christ to her planet.

Yes! I'm glad you also see the most important implication of Samora's story. But, I caution (see my previous comment), it's important to first be sure that we would be telling them the truth about their relationship (or lack of it) with Christ.

if aliens or elves or whatever have sin, God surely has a plan to save them.

I hope and pray that you are right. But I feel I must caution you that the mind of God cannot be so easily comprehended or predicted by mortals. If you had lived in the world before Christ, and known the truth about humanity's state of sin, would you have said as confidently that God surely has a plan to save us? It's tempting to answer 'yes', because God is Good, but that style of reasoning will lead you to assert salvation will surely come tomorrow even if you are in fact alive in the year 1,000 BC. Whereas what you ought to do in that case is endeavour to live as Good and blameless a life as you can, and pray to God for mercy, and not count on an 'easier' method of salvation coming in your lifetime.

One should not, of course, conclude that God simply isn't Good, but I think it's abundantly clear from history and the state the world is in that the ways of God are, in fact, mysterious. At the very least, we shouldn't rest on our laurels thinking we're saved and, well, surely God has some plan to help those other people. We should actively strive to find out the truth, today, and then help them if we can. 

Also "practically everyone commits enough sins to be damned" and "leading incredibly virtuous lives is not an automatic win but makes God more inclined to be merciful" is, again, a horrifying view of how anything works, and I would absolutely take Samora's religion over yours if I was inclined to look for one.

You must not choose a religion, or any belief, because it is more palatable. You must face the world as it is. If you're unsure of the truth of Christianity, you should check them - Samora can help with that!

Religion isn't to be chosen like food at a restaurant. Religion is a factual claim about reality, the most important claim anyone encounters in their lifetime. If the world isn't as you would wish it, you owe it to yourself to face that fact. 

And if you wish to do Good, you should go out and change the world to be a better place.

They don’t have a way to update on external evidence

People like that certainly exist. I'm sorry that you encountered them. All I can do is assure you that I and many others do not ignore new evidence, and to assure Samora that religious people don't do so (at any rate, no more than nonreligious or non-Christian people do).

If I were to ignore new evidence or refuse to believe it, I wouldn't believe that Samora healed the sick and raised the dead without doing so in the name of Jesus Christ. I wouldn't believe that there exists a whole another planet, which is not an Earth like Aleph, which never had a Jesus in its history, and has various nonhuman sapient species whose theological status is unclear. I would simply not engage with this blog. 

Go with God, all of you.

Okay bear with me it's been a long time since Sunday School but -- doesn't the Harrowing of Hell imply that Jesus, at least once, took everyone in Hell who would go with him out? That seems like it would probably do really weird things to the numbers if Samora was scrying historical figures from before that.

If they're recent, though -- I'm not a theologian so I might be completely off base, but what I'm thinking is, it might mean that the crucial thing is something like cooperating with Jesus when you die, which having the concept of Nirvana might encourage people from her world to even without Christianity? Which would be really cool!

doesn't the Harrowing of Hell imply that Jesus, at least once, took everyone in Hell who would go with him out?

That is possible! We are not explicitly told whether He took out of Hell everyone who would go or only the deserving, or even just everyone period.

However, that was two thousand years ago, so if Samora has been scrying more recently dead people it shouldn't affect things.

cooperating with Jesus when you die

NO! Once you die it is too late. You must 'cooperate' with Jesus, as you put it, while you are still alive - this is crucial. Although it's purely to your benefit and you're not paying a cost for it, except perhaps the cost of admitting some painful truths, so instead of 'cooperation' I would call it 'accepting a gift'. 

Samora, in case you don't know it yet, people on Earth - both alive and dead - also pray to God the Judge to have mercy on the souls of the newly dead. It's said that He listens sometimes to the prayers of particularly righteous people, those who become saints in Heaven. Nirvana sounds a lot like that.

Try to help people and not hurt people. Surround yourself with Good people who will help you deal with the temptations you struggle with. Find the kinds of Good that come most naturally to you and do them more and enjoy it as much as you can so you're more motivated to do Good next time.

From one angle that should all be obvious, but it's still quite helpful to explicitly hear, thank you!

If you want more personalized advice, I can offer confidential spiritual counseling.

I am quite tempted to take you up on that, but it would be a matter of pure curiosity and ?indulgence? on my part, I wouldn't need personalised advice and dedicated counselling, and so you should save your energy for doing that for people more in need of it ... and I'd be lying if I said that my decision to not accept that offer wasn't influenced by the fact that to get fully counselled I'd need to go into way more detail then I'd be comfortable mentioning to someone who works for a government about my sex life and the numerous victimless-ish crimes I  would commit if I wasn't totally a law abiding citizen. (Relatedly you should do a post at some point on how you think Pharasma would judge acts of digital piracy and intellectual property rights violations.)  

Or study ethics and stop being Evil!  It really seems easier.  Not to mention a much more pleasant outcome.

Idk "just stop being Evil" sounds way harder than becoming a lich, given that capes and magic are a thing, the latter would just be an engineering problem, whereas the former would require becoming a completely different person. <- is just my gut reaction tbc, and wouldn't be correct for common-sensical definitions of evil, my brain just uses a definition of evil where if you would do horrible things if your incentives pointed that way, then you're evil even if you're lucky enough to have never been put in a situation that pushed you towards committing murder/rape/etc and instead lived a life that incentivised you to be nice to and help other people. (Luckily it sounds like Pharasma disagrees and you can get out of being damned by acting and doing enough good even if you're internally evil.) 

(The OP of this question sounds like they already knew this and were asking for advice on how, which Samora already gave them so I will not repeat.

Yeah!

  I just wanted to specifically call out this incredibly misguided "you're stuck being unchangeably Evil so you might as well lean into it" advice. 

:100:

 You are NOT stuck being unchangeably Evil.

Because part of me would instinctively disagree with that, my preferred framing is "Sure you might be innately evil, but you can just be nice to people and do good things and try not to hurt people and reap all the same benefits actually good people get."

You must 'cooperate' with Jesus, as you put it, while you are still alive - this is crucial.

I mean, yeah, no one should rely on this! (Although 'the instant before you die' and 'the instant after you die' are not actually that far apart! Would 'when you are dying' be less confusing?) But yeah this is barely-informed speculation, I'd want more information and actual theologians before anyone should be taking this seriously as more than that.

Dunno, it also never really made sense to me that after people died is too late, it seems like Jesus would take people who turn to him whenever? Just that -- we don't know that he does, so it's stupid to take that risk.

All I can do is assure you that I and many others do not ignore new evidence, and to assure Samora that religious people don't do so (at any rate, no more than nonreligious or non-Christian people do).

 

Obviously we shouldn't get into the subject of theodicy here

Please get better at hiding your inconsistencies, or stop having them. Samora is willing to say that any god that wants to put people (Evil or otherwise) in Hell isn't Good, what's your excuse?

Sure you might be innately evil, but you can just be nice to people and do good things and try not to hurt people and reap all the same benefits actually good people get

I have some bad news for you, buddy: you absolutely cannot do all those things and still be innately evil. Pharasma simply won't let you.

You must not choose a religion, or any belief, because it is more palatable. You must face the world as it is. If you're unsure of the truth of Christianity, you should check them - Samora can help with that!
Religion isn't to be chosen like food at a restaurant. Religion is a factual claim about reality, the most important claim anyone encounters in their lifetime. If the world isn't as you would wish it, you owe it to yourself to face that fact.
And if you wish to do Good, you should go out and change the world to be a better place.

That's very true. However, that doesn't apply to moral arguments, as they are inherently subjective. When people say "I would better believe god is X" what they often (though not always) mean is "if god is Y rather than X, then he is not Good, and I reject his moral authority, so if god is truly Good then by definition the god of Y is not the true god".

Worship was associated with a city, a tribe, a family, a 'people'. Missionaries going out to convert people in another country - on an individual basis, without settling or conquering that country as a group - not only didn't happen; the very concept didn't make much sense to most people! 

I have bad news for you about various religions, such as Buddhism.

Samora is willing to say that any god that wants to put people (Evil or otherwise) in Hell isn't Good, what's your excuse?

People have argued and disagreed (and bled and died) over this question for thousands of years. We're not going to resolve it here and now. I'm sure you feel very righteous about declaring that a God who sends anyone at all to Hell is not Good, and that you feel very very certain that I and other Christians are wrong on the subject. Just as all those other people felt on the subject, regardless of their actual position. Just as I am convinced that I am right.

Which is to say: does it matter? For us, here and now, what would change if one of us convinced the other? That God is really and wholly Good, or conversely that God is 'neutral' and Jesus Christ is the Good part of Him? I think neither of us would actually do anything differently. So it's better to put that aside, and work together - if you're willing - on helping people not go to Hell, instead of debating what to call a God Who in fact sometimes sends some people to Hell.

(I assume you're not taking the other logically consistent position, that God is Good and therefore He never sends anyone to Hell and there's nothing to worry about. That isn't compatible with Christianity either, and is I think a dangerous delusion for some people. Perhaps Samora can help convince them.)

However, that doesn't apply to moral arguments, as they are inherently subjective. 

Morality is objective. However, this is another of those things people tend to argue about forever without resolving the matter, so let's just agree for now that by 'objective morality' I mean 'the Good that God, and Jesus Christ, say is the Good'. Humans can in fact be wrong about what is Good-according-to-God, and this looks to them the same as thinking God is wrong about what is Good, if they think God can be wrong.

As for why you should care what God thinks is Good, the answer is obvious. No matter your beliefs, you don't want to go to Hell. I don't know you and I still, very sincerely and emphatically, do not want you to go to Hell. And the relevant beliefs about what Good is, if you want to clal them that, are those of God the Judge.

I have bad news for you about various religions, such as Buddhism.

I do not know as much about the history of the ancient world outside of the Mediterranean and I am happy to be corrected. In any case I was explaining the meaning of the term 'universal religion' as it applied in the Levant and later the Roman Empire.

People have argued and disagreed (and bled and died) over this question for thousands of years. We're not going to resolve it here and now. I'm sure you feel very righteous about declaring that a God who sends anyone at all to Hell is not Good, and that you feel very very certain that I and other Christians are wrong on the subject. Just as all those other people felt on the subject, regardless of their actual position. Just as I am convinced that I am right.

I don't believe in the Christian God at all, he doesn't have people who prayed to him and got cool powers. There's no particular reason to think Christianity is anything more than an unusually effective meme some Jewish carpenter made up one day. Insofar as Hell exists, it's a place 'Pharasma', who's more or less a random cape, with no particular monopoly on ethics, made, because she gets off on torturing people who do Evil things, without giving them a safeword like a normal person.

Another possibility is that, among people who had had no opportunity yet to hear and accept the Good News of the gospels, God is more lenient; that in His grace He allows them to achieve Heaven as Samora describes. For all we know, this was always the case among unevangelized people here on Earth - it's not as if we could check who actually made it to Heaven! If so, this is absolutely essential for us to find out as soon as possible. Having told Samora about Christianity, do we have an urgent moral duty to convert her to it? Or would we be misleading her about even the possibility of salvation through Jesus Christ for her and her kind?

In the words of Terry Pratchett, this is why it's important to shoot missionaries on sight.

As for why you should care what God thinks is Good, the answer is obvious. No matter your beliefs, you don't want to go to Hell. I don't know you and I still, very sincerely and emphatically, do not want you to go to Hell. And the relevant beliefs about what Good is, if you want to clal them that, are those of God the Judge.

Yes, that is why god's opinion is important, if god is real. That doesn't mean god is good in the sense people understand that word, compared to the specific criteria of salvation and moral behavior according to Pharasma, if real and a distinct entity, or any other conception of god. It's important to not break the law if you don't want to be in jail, but that is not because the law is always necessarily good. Gravity is (you know, probably) real, so it's important to now how it works if you don't want to fall down, but that has nothing to do with morality. Which is the difference between "a thing is objectively good" and "someone (be it god or anyone else) objectively believes a thing to be good".

I try to be as virtuous as I can, reject anyone moral authority; no one can tell me that they can decide for me what is good. They might have information that changes which specific actions lead to which results, which would change what how I act to achieve good goals (if I want to save someone's life I should take the actions that save their life, and many people smarter than me would know what actyions those are), but they could not convince that my values and goals themselves are less important than their own. Not even any sort of god, if they exist.
And you could again say "bad things will happen to you if you act in ways that god thinks are bad", but that has nothing to do with whether god is "right", bad things will happen to me if I act in ways that some dictator who has power in a country I live in and thinks are bad. Neither would have any moral authority. (And there could be cases when the fact of separation from god itself causes me harm, which could be a problem in terms of my values and behavior, but would not be caused by god as a choice, and so is not relevant to what god does or doesn't think is good.)

 

As for why you should care what God thinks is Good, the answer is obvious. No matter your beliefs, you don't want to go to Hell. I don't know you and I still, very sincerely and emphatically, do not want you to go to Hell.

I mean, it sounds like if Samora's right, all you need to do to not go to Hell is... not be a supervillain? Or a non-super-villain. Sure, if you do a lot of shit that hurts people you need help, or to cut it out yourself and start doing good for people instead, but we already knew that. Even most Christians I've talked to don't think most people go to Hell until you get into The Gays.

Pharasma is a powerful eldritch horror

Oh, you sweet summer child. You're clearly not familiar with how typical D&D settings are built or with eldritch horrors.

Narrative arc 1: fight the rulers of Hell, who torture people

Narrative arc 2: it turns out Hell innately tortures people who are sent there! New plan: fight the overgod who sends people to Hell

Narrative arc 3: it turns out the overgod was protecting our little sheltered pocket of reality from an ancient enemy / eldritch horror / beings from beyond / sealed evil in a can! New plan: overcome through the power of friendship put a new overgod in place, same as the old one with a new coat of paint, because D&D isn't about fixing the setting, it's about playing in it.

Since we're doing Christian metaphors, this is like trying to put out the lakes of brimstone with a fire extinguisher only to find at its bottom C S Lewis who tells you the evil was in you all along and Hell is you turning away from God or something, so just repent already instead of organizing a better fire brigade.

Even most Christians I've talked to don't think most people go to Hell

A clarification, because it's crucial to be correct about these things even if it's painful.

Many Christians don't think most Christians go to Hell.

That non-Christians, who had the opportunity to embrace Our Lord and didn't, go to Hell (universally or almost so) is clear in scripture. 'He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned' (Mark 16:16). 

And - the majority of people on Earth today are not (publicly professing) Christians.

Should we actually send missionaries to Golarion, if we could?

Some theologists (not all) say it was possible, before Christ came to earth, to go to Heaven without hearing His word. Samora tells us this happens on Golarion — about one person in three goes to Heaven, and none of them have heard the Word of God. This grace is generally understood not to apply to people who have been offered the chance to convert and consciously rejected it. With that in mind, let's make every favorable assumption we reasonably can for the effectiveness of a mission. (I'm assuming Samora is telling the truth as she understands it here. She could be lying but it's worth running the numbers if she's not.)

First, we know God is good, so spreading Christianity on Earth was good. Christ came to save our souls: spreading Christianity on Earth must have saved souls. If we assume Earth but not Golarion is subject to original sin (pushing souls who would otherwise have gone to Heaven elsewhere), this is disproportionately effective on Earth, so spreading off-planet is a worse idea; to be favorable to the missionary plan, let's therefore assume Golarionites are equally affected. How many people were going to Heaven before Christ? Traditionally there is much disagreement on this count, but Samora provides us a base rate: assuming Golarion is in a generally similar position to Earth, about one soul in three would have gone to Heaven. There is value in having the promise of Heaven offered directly for those who seek it; maybe Christ would intervene even if it did not increase the number of souls saved. Surely He would not have come to decrease the rate of entry to Heaven, though.

On Earth, approximately one third of the current population identifies as Christian. About half of these are Catholic; the rest are split between assorted other groups which still identify as Christian overall. If Christ's coming to Earth did not hurt the number of humans, imperfect as we are, who go to Heaven, approximately every one of these Christians must be saved. Perhaps there are requirements beyond identifying Him as your savior, but none of the schisms in the history of the Church can have lost more than a few percentage points of the population. If we think missions have any chance to succeed, this implies the sect sending the mission is irrelevant — if conversion on Golarion is efficient it must work for any Christians.

But how much can we expect Christainity to spread on Golarion? Surely we cannot expect more than about a third of the population. Earth, where Christ Himself intervened to start His church, has a third. Another planet will not have that advantage. Worse, this particular other planet already has capes ('clerics') who believe they get their powers from what they call gods. On Earth, no more than a tenth of capes make these sorts of claims, and the population near them does tend to be more strongly religious. (This may be due to capes who trigger in those areas tending to be more religious, but there's likely some causal effect: the better studies look at the effects of specific capes moving and that seems to have an impact, even when it's prompted by an external shock like an Endbringer attack.) The Bible knows this full well! Conversion, it tells us, is easier when your priests and their priests line up and pray for fire, and your logs catch and theirs do not. On Golarion a Christian mission is on the wrong side of this dynamic. Unless exorcisms can banish the power of clerics, missionaries will have only capes to put up against a competing cleric.

We can't be sure how much these matter, but we don't need exact numbers. Assume Christ's personal presence only increased the spread of Christianity by 10%, and competing clerics would only reduce conversions by 10%. Further ignore the time required for Christianity to spread; four or five centuries is irrelevant in the long run. This leaves about (1/3)(4/5) ~= 27% of the Golarionite population stably Christian.

Some of these numbers are probably over-generous to a mission. There are also all the practical issues: travel is hard, communications are so far only possible through an existing church, and so on. Even if the practicalities could all be ignored, spreading the word of Christ to Golarion would damn approximately one soul in twenty, on net.

Samora, have you gone through an exorcism? If so I propose that the proper Christian thing to do, the way to save the most souls overall, is to make sure nobody on Golarion hears any whisper of Christianity's existence. We do not know how much is needed to lose God's mercy. It is vital that nothing we do crosses that threshold.

(Although these assumptions do imply there might be a simpler form of Christianity which is sufficient. If approximately every Christian on Earth is saved, anything done by no more than 80% of Christians must be unnecessary. Is there a comparative theologist who can tell what that excludes? If we can determine what is actually necessary, maybe we can produce something that will spread on Golarion even with the constraints, and that could change the numbers.)

@souls-count I'm not a thelogist but I am a Darwinist. No way can you convince literally everyone not to evangelize on Golarion. What's worse, doing it yourself or seeing a muslim or gasp a papist get there first? Everyone will think that, so it's inevitable. Better conquer convert them for their own good before the wrong guys do it!

You're absolutely right about needing miracles though. That's how your apostles and saints converted pagans, right? I guess the Protectorate had better start organizing a team of evangelist capes - Legend definitely won't get to lead this one! 

Or they can fight a hundred-sided war between capes from different churches who were just reminded that they're supposed to be religious actually, that would be fun too.

The more I think about it the more I like this idea. Have Eidolon ordain Armsmaster as a bishop and off you go! (Just keep Myrddin away, his pride couldn't take it.) 

P.S. don't tell me Eidolon can't ordain bishops, the guy can have literally any power he wants!