Christianity literally said “love thy neighbor, do unto others, love thy enemy”, and still its followers have fought wars and murdered people. I seem to remember that the Quran says “if you kill one person you kill the whole world”. That passage apparently is not as prioritized as others. I could go on.

God / The ancient israelites knew that telling people doesn’t quite do it. Ref the 10 commandments. People only seem to learn from lived experience, and in some cases, the lived experience of people they respect. Hence the story is Isaac is actually a lot smarter than we give it credit for.

That’s my take at least

God wants to make sure that the Hebrews will never commit human sacrifice. Cruel to Abraham and Isac, pretty neat for all the people who avoided being sacrificed as a result. Or maybe just the Hebrews want to avoid human sacrifice and they tell that story to sink the point home: their own ancestor could have been killed, let’s not do that to anyone.

Dang, if those agencies ever see my Civilization 4 save games, I’ll be so royally embarrassed that I spent so much time on it that they could blackmail me to anything.

It’s a matter of world building. Orcs can be noble savages, or violent monsters. The main problem is humanizing these creatures. If you instead imagine a separate evolutionary path, then the race can be inherently “evil”.

If orcs have evolved for conflict and violence far beyond human levels, then by our standards they would be evil. At least by the philosophy of a middle ages like world. Catholics and Protestants considered each other evil for a few hundred years. A violent species that destroys humans on sight due to their violent instincts would easily be evil. Exceptions could exist, but the mass of individuals would be “evil”.

Relevant?

You made me think stubeef had died. Bad meme! Bad!