Comments thread for "The Laws of Magic: Part 2 of 8"

[ballplayer72]

You know these arguments are virtually the same ones that come up with the "thou shall not kill" Commandment in the Bible.  How many thousands of years has that discussion been going on?  It seems likely that the WC would have come to the same conclusions that society has in general - the grey areas are covered under things like negligent homicide and manslaughter with gradational punishments going on up to premeditated murder and the death penalty.  A vote of the WC or SC is substituted for a jury and/or judge.  The final decision will be based on human instinct and probably, some politics.

I do believe the original translation is closer to "Thou shalt not murder" quite different than kill

[hollow49]

I do believe the original translation is closer to "Thou shalt not murder" quite different than kill

Yes, and in fact many contemporaneous parts of the bible in fact encourage killing of heathens in battle, those guilty of various crimes, etc. The sample chapters of White Night have Harry explaining the issues involved in assuming the King James version of the Old Testament rules are accurate - in fact even at the time, it was established that the translation sacrificed some subtleties and nuances in favour of poetic speech.

Issues of exegesis are always tricky, which is perhaps relevant to the discussion here - as the Laws of Magic are concerned with the spirit rather than the letter, they are relatively free from such issues, but the Unseelie Accords probably require a trained lawyer and linguist to untangle the loopholes. What language are these written in anyway? I expect the Laws are officially written in Latin, being enforced by the White Council, but what about the Accords? Estruscan, Latin, Sumerian, some Faerie language, or are there official translations into each major group's language of choice? If the latter, does this leave loopholes in one version that aren't there in another, or is the legalese sufficiently complex to bypass such matters, by specifying the definition of almost every term used? (I suspect the overly abstuse legalese to be correct, given what we've heard of the Accords.)

[taralon]

Ok,

I'm gonna stir this, because I had a potential player ask me about this.

Harry killed himself in blood rites in order to have the power to take on the ghost that was going around and causing all the bad juju with the barbed wire stuff.  So... what would happen if a PC offed himself/herself on say halloween with the intention of creating a ghost (having themselves revived by another PC) which would cross over from the never never (maybe with help from the PC) in order to kill say the badguy with magic.

Would this be a violation of the first rule?  After all, you mean to kill them, but then again you never use magic to directly or, really indirectly kill them. 

[Aluroon]

I do believe the original translation is closer to "Thou shalt not murder" quite different than kill

Actually the original translation going back as far as you can in the old testament is "Thou shalt not murder believers". The rest of you godless heathens are fair game.