> But the myths are not solely about "moral behavior". They also
> inform how its culture thinks, acts and does magic.
Except becuase of both personal and cultural relativism, you simply cannot take a mythic truth and project it into the real world.
> The actual injunction is far closer to "you shall not murder"
> which is still a forbidden practice in virtually all post-
> christian states and it does not preclude the "just war", the
> existence of which can be deduced from other portions of the
> bible. And yes, practice of the "just war" was something that
> exercised legal minds in the middle ages.
Exactly so - its the process of reification and relativism that makes it so difficult to go from the mythically ideal to the actually implemented. So describe a post-mediaeval state, I would need to know much more than merely the content of its dominant myth - I need to know what it actually does on the ground. Frex, even beyond just war western states use the death sentence, which many would argue remains a violation of the injunction against murder quite apart from any opportunist rationalisation of the just war.
> So? The set of moral ideals is still useful for knowing
> how people are expected to act and they also illustrate
> examples of behaviour that would be considered bad.
> Kinstrife in Orlanthi mythology is an example of this.
Yes, and I have made it quite clear that I DO regard the material as a valuable description of Orlanthi psychology, and furthermore I laud the effort to make such a psychological description. But I will not accept that this psychology information substitutes for actual information about the lives of Orlanthi.
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