My sister Carmen was killed by a drunk driver two nights ago. Carmen worked as a nurse and volunteered every month at the food bank. She left behind two children, both very young, and her husband passed away while she was pregnant with her second child. Will you please resurrect her? I will tell everyone I know to worship Iomedae!

[Image: a smiling Hispanic woman, around thirty years of age, posing for a photograph by a playground. She is accompanied by two children, a preschool-aged boy and a baby wearing a Mouse Protector onesie.]

I've been looking at D&D rulebooks and I'm pretty sure you need a Resurrection for that, unless the body was much more intact than I'd expect, which Samora can't do given how she hasn't gotten Hero back already.

If she wasn't Christian, given how she definitely seems like she'd qualify as Good, maybe Samora should scry (or Sending, those books have all sorts of cool stuff) her to confirm that she's in Heaven. It won't make the idiots here stop, because if they were the sorts of people who respond to evidence they would have done it already, but it might help with something?

Things like "truth of Christianity" (as aspiring_christian put it) are a conflation of "there exists an entity that does things", "the entity is truly divine", and "the entity's morality is truly good".

It's not a conflation; it's a deliberate conjunction. Christianity makes strong claims! However, see below on what we mean when we say God's morality is truly Good.

How do we logically define that, so we can see facts that confirm or deny that? 

God is, one, the Creator of everything; two, the specific actor described in the Bible, Who has said and done and promised various things; three, He may also be Jesus Christ, in a way which (it's simplest to say) we don't fully understand, or He may be Christ's Father in a different way we do not fully understand either. This isn't hard to define, or to confirm against other facts.

The Bible, and Christianity, do not in fact claim as an artifact of faith that 'God is Good' by reference to some separate standard of what Good is. Various authors use 'Good' to refers to God, and this can be confusing, but it's distinct from the kind of 'Good' that is the morality we humans share.

The problem with humans is that we disagree on what Good is, kind of a lot. We are clearly influenced by each other (and by the teachings of Christ!) and not only has our understanding of morality changed a great deal over history, we even change our individual minds about it sometimes. Today you might say God is not fully Good because He sends (or at least allows some people to go to) Hell; a thousand years ago it was common Catholic wisdom that the saints in Heaven rejoice to see the suffering of the sinners in Hell! St. Augustine might have rejected the project of not letting even unrepentant sinners go to Hell as not a Good project. Now, I in fact think he was wrong about this! But the very fact that we often disagree with each other about what is the Good means that we should be very wary of judging God.

Although in practice people already get confused by me identifying Agnostic (“so you’re an Atheist”, “so you’re afraid of committing”, “so you just don’t want to admit God is real”) so I don’t even try to identify as Ignostic most of the time.

I consider ignosticism to be just the version of agnosticism that had a bit more time to get straight the definitions (or lack thereof). It's not different from agnosticism. Agnosticism means you don't know, ignostcism is the reason you don't know.
(And there's always the old "I think the true nature of reality or higher powers is unknowable, but that just like I don't know it, you can't know it either, so all religions are wrong". I call it "militant agnosticism" but don't remember if it has a more specific name.)

The Bible, and Christianity, do not in fact claim as an artifact of faith that 'God is Good' by reference to some separate standard of what Good is. Various authors use 'Good' to refers to God, and this can be confusing, but it's distinct from the kind of 'Good' that is the morality we humans share.

That's what I meant by "whether circumstantially or by definition". I think there are two levels by which "god is definitionally good" seems like a bad definition (one: if it's a self-referential definition, then it's not semantically what the word "good" means. Two: there is no objective fact we can observe about an entity to prove or disprove it being good, and therefore help us prove whether it is really god or not), but it's exactly the kind of argument (semantics and objectivity of morality) that can't really lead anywhere productive, merely repeating arguments and going "no, actually it's you who is wrong about what things are" (though we can, in theory, if we put enough effort into it, arrive at perfect understanding of each other's position and what exactly we disagree on (something not currently true, I think). But it's effort that is probably not worth it).

"Ignostic"... it figures a bunch of Atheists would proudly call themselves the ignorant ignoramuses that they are!

And it is pointless to talk about Goodness without GOD!  Goodness comes from God, and without it, mankind pursues all sorts of sins and delusions!

I would make the case with a bit more nuance than @ItSaysWhatItSays, but basically, yes, without the absolute reference point of God morality is fundamentally subjective.  You can derive all sorts of "is" statements about reality with just science and logic, but to get a proper "ought" statement you need a starting point beyond any material fact.  In practice, Atheists are capable of trying to be ethical and moral (by mankind's flawed standards at least), but in fact the entire Western notion of ethic and morality ultimately is, historically speaking, derived from Christianity.

As to @ClearThinker's changing the topic... I don't think parahuman science will be able to learn much from Samora that generalizes to other Parahumans if her power source really is something fundamentally different?

I don't see how God helps you derive 'ought' from 'is', unless you mean "God exists and has X values (this is false but at least it's an 'is' statement) and therefore if you don't conform to them He'll smite you", but, uh, that's also an 'is' statement, about what happens if you don't conform. There isn't a mechanism you have for how God gets around Hume's distinction, and if there was I could make a version where Pharasma, a not-God entity, had that mechanism too.

lol what? They confirmed her planet exists, for all we know some cape there was like Haywire this is just, like the other capes who think they were empowered by some deity or other.

Yeah, I realized I kind of jumped the gun on reading too much into what Samora said.  It would be nice if Dragon could release what exactly they tested and figured out?  “Other planes exist” is really broad and could mean a lot of different things!

The point is that Armsmaster and Dragon are pretty sure that she's not a parahuman, you moronic hamster.

That isn’t actually what Samora said.  Also, parahuman, with a trigger event (whether positive or negative) and stable standard power isn’t the universal definition of parahuman.  Many laws on the books count getting empowered by teacher or cybernetic implants from a tinker or whatever as meaning you are a parahuman for legal purposes.  Parahuman in that case just means empowered beyond the means of an ordinary human, whatever the source, and thus would include Samora regardless.

Edit: her exact quote

Fortunately Armsmaster and Dragon thought of it first and we did some tests that established that other planes really exist.

Sighs. Okay, let me explain in very very simple words. Samora not that kind of guy that do big stuff. Samora other kind, that work different way. The big part here is that her kind might have all kinds of cool things to use. What it tells us about the old type is boring, does not matter. There, was that simple enough?

What it tells us about the old type is boring, does not matter.

That is almost exactly what I was saying, in contrast to @ClearThinker.

Small words failed, giving up. Okay, the point that ClearThinker made, that I basically agree with, is that while Samora might or might not be able to tell us things about the old kind of person-with-powers, it has new kinds, which might have exciting new options. Wizardry, as described by the books, can be done by anyone with more than 10 Int, so, like, not you, but a lot of people could do it. Magic item creation might or might not be cheap, depending on if XP costs can be circumvented and on how the hell they work. We want spellbooks, info on how the old types work sounds interesting for the rest of you to work on while we're flying around, for a minute per caster level of course.

personally i'm here to report that i killed a whole lot of mice in grad school and it sure doesn't seem to have made me better at taking a hit

No sane DM would actually let you grind XP that way, so I'm not sure that means very much

why not? it's not like there's a dm of reality deciding whether mice are close enough to my cr

No sane DM would actually let you grind XP that way, so I'm not sure that means very much

Where did you get the idea that Pharasma is sane?

how similar is Goodness to normal common-sense ethical behavior? it sounds like there are definitely a few differences, like Goodness apparently being opposed to freedom of religion or the Hitler thing that came up earlier, but is the situation closer to "Goodness and common-sense ethical behavior are usually the same, and if you just behave by common-sense ethics you're unlikely to be tortured, but there are a few edge cases to watch out for" or more like "Goodness is totally sideways from normal ethics, but occasionally there's enough overlap that the name isn't completely misleading"?

Do you really think you're going to get a useful answer? Obviously she's going to say that Goodness is basically the same as ethics, but that doesn't make it true.

or the Hitler thing that came up earlier

Ah, it's the "I like torture and I focus on the outgroup so people don't get mad at me about it" people again! If you want to torture people, find someone who's into it.

Ah, it's the "I like torture and I focus on the outgroup so people don't get mad at me about it" people again! If you want to torture people, find someone who's into it.

...you think not wanting Hitler to spend eternity living a happy existence full of sunshine and rainbows and fluffy bunnies in d&d world-heaven makes someone some kind of sadist who wants to torture random people for fun? 

...you think not wanting Hitler to spend eternity living a happy existence full of sunshine and rainbows and fluffy bunnies in d&d world-heaven makes someone some kind of sadist who wants to torture random people for fun?

Of course not! It makes you the kind of sadist who wants to torture nonrandom people for fun! Even Hitler wasn't the kind that truly doesn't care who they're torturing!

just to check, do you actually think it would be good to make Hitler immortal and spend eternity giving him nice things like the Good afterlives have, or are you just being edgy on the internet?

Yes. Good things are good. Deserving things is fake, there is only (preference, second order) utilitarianism.

When Christ told us to love others as we love ourselves, it was not meant to be an easy commandment to follow, but it is the most important one.