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 Runicmadhamster wrote:

He was quoting me. And i was referring to demonic followers not human followers. And why cant a god be evil? Was it somehow not nurgles fault that he created deadly and toxic plauges that have wiped out billions? These plagues were not naturally occurring nurgle made them. You may say " Nurgle cant stop making plagues, its in his nature", well that doesn't make him any less evil.

Then a sickness is evil? An earthquake? Nurgle is made of emotions. He has no free will.

The word "evil" implies that there is a choice. You can do "good things" and "evil things", and you freely choose to do evil. Nurgle is the plague god. It has no choice.

And what about Khorne? He is the personification of violence. Is violence evil?

Well he was quoting me and i hate the imperium so its probably not imperial propaganda. I wasn't trying to make the emperor out to be "good god", i think happen to think he is useless nearly dead guy who people get sacrificed too. And your point about nurgle loving everything thing is wrong, he makes plagues that wipe out billions og lives, he can he reconcile his work killing untold billions with his love for everything? And hope is part of Tzeentch's work? I would like to see some evidence of that.

It is imperial propaganda. You think Chaos are "the bad guys" and are quoting the imperial version of the story to prove it. Playing Chaos does not change the fact.

Tzeentch is change, hope, ambition, the possibility of success. And Nurgle loves everything. It is the god of life. Get a copy of the Codex: Chaos Daemons or, even better, a copy of Realm of Chaos. He lives in a garden where everything lives and prosper forever. It only gets angry whem someone hurts its followers or its creations.

In the chaos space marine codex there is a tale of a space marine chapter that was driven to insanity by Tzeenetch when he gave them the ability to hear every lie ever spoken at once. Let me ask you is this the action of a good entity?

They were its enemies. Attacking your enemies is the action of an evil entity then?
That makes everyone evil.

 Psienesis wrote:

First things first: I don´t see the Emperor condemning the countless atrocities made in his name (as a "good god" would).

Because there is no proof to suggest that the Emperor is even aware of what's going on in the real world. He may, truly, just be a corpse on a chair. He is not, definitively, doing *anything* in the setting of 40K. Lots of people (both fans and people in-universe) like to *believe* that he is, but there is no proof to that, just lots of coincidences.

I was answering to this: the Chaos gods are evil because they do not condemn what their followers do, as a good god would.
Also, this is off-topic, and clearly deserves another thread. I do believe the Emperor does a lot of things in the setting: the Acts of Faith or the living saints, to begin with. And he has a presence in the warp: the Light of the Astronomicon. He is also considered a god, or at least an extremely powerful entity by the Chaos Daemons.

Khorne will not reward you if you kill for fun or for personal gain. Or if you kill an unworthy prey. True soldiers do not kill for fun or because personal gain, and despise those who do. That´s Slaanesh thing, and Khorne hates Slaanesh.

"Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows."

This sentence is overused. There are many sources depicting Khorne with a sense of martial honor, even in 6th edition. See Chaos Daemons, the feud between Slaanesh and Khorne or the Skulltaker entry. Khorne cares a lot for who was the owner of the skull given to it.

Nurgle loves his followers whatever they do, and the rest of the gods ignore most of their followers. They have near zero interest in what humans do. They only care (a little) about their Champions.

So long as "whatever they do" is spread plagues and pestilence, yes. If not? It is very possible to earn Nurgle's disfavor, and maybe he turns your blood into an assload of flies or makes you grotesquely fat or gives you a flaming skull head while you're at work at mid-Hive 338B-12. Kind of hard to explain that to your friends.

From the perspective of Nurgle, it is an act of love. Evil is when you do bad things to others on purpose. Not when you try to help someone and this person does not appreciate your efforts. Nurgle believes he is doing good, and this, by itself, makes it a "good" entity... if good and evil can be applied to creatures like it, something I do not believe. Nurgle is the concept of pestilence, decay and rebirth. It has no free will.

carlos13th wrote:
Khorne was more interesting when there was more emphasis on the Martial honour and pride aspect. Now it seems Khorne is way to blood and guts above all else.

When was this? Khorne has always been the "bloody-handed god of carnage and slaughter" (Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness).

What?
I cannot do it now, but give me time and I will give you some quotes. Some of them from Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Runicmadhamster wrote:


He is the God of Obsession, the Master of Excess in All Things, from gluttony to lust to megalomania. So right there you can already see a bad trend beginning, being the master of excess in all things isnt good and Obsession usually doesn't end well. And i dont view Slannesh as evil because of christian morality/sin, thats irrelevant in my view, its the fact that slanneshi followers will torture in the name of their god and instead of intervening and stopping it (like a normal moral person would) slannesh encourages his followers on. Thats not a good act, its a evil one.

Slaanesh is the concept of excess. You keep comparing it to a "normal moral person". It is not a person. Morality does not apply.

Think of the Christian God. His followers do terrible things every single day. Does He intervene and stops them? I don´t know your religion, but this applies to any god ever. Do a god intervene and stop their followers?

Also, Slaanesh includes the concept of lust. Do you think lust is evil? The emotion? Slaanesh is made of emotions.

A naturally occurring sickness isn't evil, just like naturally occurring earthquake isn't. But a sickness/earthquake made by a entity that kills billions, and was done with the intention to kill billions, is evil. And just stating the Tzeentch is hope is not evidence.

And while violence isnt evil Khorne is, the guy is a butcher, a god who values life as little is Khorne as does is a repugnant tyrant. And its not imperial propaganda just because this also happens to be the imperial line. I came to these conclusions myself after examining the facts and evidence at hand.

Each of the chaos gods is responsible for the deaths of untold billions and encourages their followers (demonic, human ot other) to kill and main in their names and reward them or it. Tyrants do that sort of thing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slaanesh is the concept of excess. You keep comparing it to a "normal moral person". It is not a person. Morality does not apply.

Think of the Christian God. His followers do terrible things every single day. Does He intervene and stops them? I don´t know your religion, but this applies to any god ever. Do a god intervene and stop their followers?

Also, Slaanesh includes the concept of lust. Do you think lust is evil? The emotion? Slaanesh is made of emotions.

I am a atheist i dont have a religion, so lets not derail this thread with what i think about the Christian God.

And no i dont think lust is evil, but i think too much lust can lead to evil and thats what Slannesh promotes, too much of everything. And the reason i keep coming back to a normal moral perosn is because thats the only baseline of morality i have to compare these actions to.

@Howard A Treesong
Just a little thing here that I need to say: in my humble opinion, Jack Vance is the best writer ever.

 Runicmadhamster wrote:
A naturally occurring sickness isn't evil, just like naturally occurring earthquake isn't. But a sickness/earthquake made by a entity that kills billions, and was done with the intention to kill billions, is evil. And just stating the Tzeentch is hope is not evidence.

And while violence isnt evil Khorne is, the guy is a butcher, a god who values life as little is Khorne as does is a repugnant tyrant. And its not imperial propaganda just because this also happens to be the imperial line. I came to these conclusions myself after examining the facts and evidence at hand.

Each of the chaos gods is responsible for the deaths of untold billions and encourages their followers (demonic, human ot other) to kill and main in their names and reward them or it. Tyrants do that sort of thing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slaanesh is the concept of excess. You keep comparing it to a "normal moral person". It is not a person. Morality does not apply.

Think of the Christian God. His followers do terrible things every single day. Does He intervene and stops them? I don´t know your religion, but this applies to any god ever. Do a god intervene and stop their followers?

Also, Slaanesh includes the concept of lust. Do you think lust is evil? The emotion? Slaanesh is made of emotions.

I am a atheist i dont have a religion, so lets not derail this thread with what i think about the Christian God.

And no i dont think lust is evil, but i think too much lust can lead to evil and thats what Slannesh promotes, too much of everything. And the reason i keep coming back to a normal moral perosn is because thats the only baseline of morality i have to compare these actions to.

But chaos gods are made of emotions. Khorne is the personification of violence. Slaanesh includes lust and gluttony, and excess in at its forms.

You talk about the gods as if they were humans or some kind of xeno breed. They are emotions, concepts, ideas, metaphors, dreams, legends... they do not have a body, they do not exist in the real world. Morality does not apply.

And you have another baseline of morality to compare actions to: the lack of morality. Warp entities are many times described as predators: is an eagle evil? A wolf? A chicken eating a worm? A virus? You know lots of things that lack a sense of morality: they are what they are. Something cannot be evil if it has no choice. Khorne cannot stop being violent because violence defines it because He is Violence incarnate, the raw emotion. Saying "Khorne is evil" means "violence is evil".

I was answering to this: the Chaos gods are evil because they do not condemn what their followers do, as a good god would.
Also, this is off-topic, and clearly deserves another thread. I do believe the Emperor does a lot of things in the setting: the Acts of Faith or the living saints, to begin with. And he has a presence in the warp: the Light of the Astronomicon. He is also considered a god, or at least an extremely powerful entity by the Chaos Daemons.

The Astronomican predates his internment into the Golden Throne. It is not a sign that he is a god.

Acts of Faith, Saints, etc. are all coincidences. None of them are proof that the Emperor is a god. Acts of Faith, specifically, "appear miraculous to the untrained". This is not proof of a true miracle, simply a suggestion that people are prone to believe.

Daemons lie, often seemingly in contradiction to themselves, to mislead and beguile the unwary.

This sentence is overused. There are many sources depicting Khorne with a sense of martial honor, even in 6th edition. See Chaos Daemons, the feud between Slaanesh and Khorne or the Skulltaker entry. Khorne cares a lot for who was the owner of the skull given to it.

Not at all overused, just useful in indicating that Khorne is not solely a god of soldiers, but also of wanton butchers, murderers and others who shed blood. While he is more-favorable to those who take the lives of other killers, he is as likely to award the patient hunter of men (or other sentients) or the blood-soaked butcher who slaughters entire populations. The World Eaters would be a great example... do you think they differentiated between civilian and military populations?

Khorne has the "martial pride" thing as one of his aspects, but this is a reference to the way in which some groups worship him, not an exclusive part of his portfolio, and not one which is exemplified to the exclusion of him being the Blood God. He is the patron of many warrior-cults on a broad variety of worlds, but is, in the overarching sense, the god of warfare, carnage, bloodshed and slaughter. He is a god of war in all of its forms.

TiamatRoar wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
But it's not explicitly evil unless you're getting hung up about christian morality/sin.

Implying that Christian morality/sin isn't valid in an argument about something being evil is pretty silly, don't you think? There's no point in arguing whether or not something is "good" or "evil" if you don't have a standard of exactly WHAT good and evil are in the first place. If you wish to argue that morality, Christian or otherwise, has no meaning, then the title of the thread should be changed from "Chaos not as evil as you thought?" to "Chaos isn't evil because there's no such thing as evil." One cannot logically argue "not as evil as you thought?" if there's no such thing as "evil" in the first place.

As an aside, "Chaos isn't evil because there's no such thing as evil" is one of the primary religious tenants of most Chaos cults. But again, that's irrelevant to the thread with its current title.

Biblical morality tends to frown upon lust, sex, things that involve self gratification. But these aren't actually 'evil' things in themselves IMO. Promiscuity is wrong according to the bible, but in a more rational light it's not 'wrong' or 'evil'. How you approach such behaviour is dependent on the individual.

I just don't think that chaos=evil unless you have a rather puritanical view of certain motives. Slaanesh is about pleasure, beauty and experience. They can drive people to carry out evil acts but they aren't immoral in themselves. Chaos gods themselves are probably amoral, because they value certain things like pleasure to the expense of all else. It doesn't make them evil, it means their followers can commit evil acts and they don't care, but that's not quite the same thing.

 Psienesis wrote:

I was answering to this: the Chaos gods are evil because they do not condemn what their followers do, as a good god would.
Also, this is off-topic, and clearly deserves another thread. I do believe the Emperor does a lot of things in the setting: the Acts of Faith or the living saints, to begin with. And he has a presence in the warp: the Light of the Astronomicon. He is also considered a god, or at least an extremely powerful entity by the Chaos Daemons.

The Astronomican predates his internment into the Golden Throne. It is not a sign that he is a god.

Acts of Faith, Saints, etc. are all coincidences. None of them are proof that the Emperor is a god. Acts of Faith, specifically, "appear miraculous to the untrained". This is not proof of a true miracle, simply a suggestion that people are prone to believe.

Daemons lie, often seemingly in contradiction to themselves, to mislead and beguile the unwary.

That´s a really interesting topic that deserves its own thread. It will derail this one.

This sentence is overused. There are many sources depicting Khorne with a sense of martial honor, even in 6th edition. See Chaos Daemons, the feud between Slaanesh and Khorne or the Skulltaker entry. Khorne cares a lot for who was the owner of the skull given to it.

Not at all overused, just useful in indicating that Khorne is not solely a god of soldiers, but also of wanton butchers, murderers and others who shed blood. While he is more-favorable to those who take the lives of other killers, he is as likely to award the patient hunter of men (or other sentients) or the blood-soaked butcher who slaughters entire populations. The World Eaters would be a great example... do you think they differentiated between civilian and military populations?

Khorne has the "martial pride" thing as one of his aspects, but this is a reference to the way in which some groups worship him, not an exclusive part of his portfolio, and not one which is exemplified to the exclusion of him being the Blood God. He is the patron of many warrior-cults on a broad variety of worlds, but is, in the overarching sense, the god of warfare, carnage, bloodshed and slaughter. He is a god of war in all of its forms.

But that´s the problem: people see Khorne as the god of carnage and miss the martial/soldier/honour part. This is the reason I am giving emphasis to the "honourable side". I am yet to find someone who sees Khorne as "solely a god of soldiers".

I have not access to the Realm of Chaos books right now, but this is from Rogue Trader: Ork Freebooters. Pag 14, Khorne Stormboyz: "Worship of the Chaos Powers is not tolerated amongst sane and sensible Orks, but the Cult is rampant amongst Freebooter Stormboyz. The Blood God epitomizes the martial virtues which they hold dear, including a harsh disciplinary code, binding rules governing their conduct as honourable warriors and, of course, a life of almost continous blood-letting".

I am pretty sure there is something similar in the old Realm of Chaos. And in the previous codex we had a quote (Harkan Ironfist) in the Berserker entry about Khorne and honour.

Also from Liber Chaotica (Warriors of Khorne entry): “he is the God of war and blood and violence, and all that fight in some way subscribes to his religion”;
[About all Champions of Chaos] “It is a common belief among them that they must first gain glory and honour for their gods”;
“Others, especially the Blood God´s chosen (…) intentionally seek out the hardest modes of life and the most fearsome opponents to do battle with”

 da001 wrote:

Khorne will not reward you if you kill for fun or for personal gain. Or if you kill an unworthy prey. True soldiers do not kill for fun or because personal gain, and despise those who do. That´s Slaanesh thing, and Khorne hates Slaanesh.

"Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows."

This sentence is overused. There are many sources depicting Khorne with a sense of martial honor, even in 6th edition. See Chaos Daemons, the feud between Slaanesh and Khorne or the Skulltaker entry. Khorne cares a lot for who was the owner of the skull given to it.

You mean like how if the being Skulltaker wants to challenge doesn't want to fight, he'll cut them down?

I have not access to the Realm of Chaos books right now, but this is from Rogue Trader: Ork Freebooters. Pag 14, Khorne Stormboyz: "Worship of the Chaos Powers is not tolerated amongst sane and sensible Orks, but the Cult is rampant amongst Freebooter Stormboyz. The Blood God epitomizes the martial virtues which they hold dear, including a harsh disciplinary code, binding rules governing their conduct as honourable warriors and, of course, a life of almost continous blood-letting".

I am pretty sure there is something similar in the old Realm of Chaos. And in the previous codex we had a quote (Harkan Ironfist) in the Berserker entry about Khorne and honour.

Also from Liber Chaotica (Warriors of Khorne entry): “he is the God of war and blood and violence, and all that fight in some way subscribes to his religion”;
[About all Champions of Chaos] “It is a common belief among them that they must first gain glory and honour for their gods”;
“Others, especially the Blood God´s chosen (…) intentionally seek out the hardest modes of life and the most fearsome opponents to do battle with”

What this is doing, though, as I tried to point out, is taking one form in which Khorne is worshiped and trying to make it a universal constant, cutting out all the other ways in which the veneration of the Blood God is expressed, in order to make Khorne less evil. It's a selective reading of the fluff of the god in order to force Chaos to fit into a constraint that is not supported by the fluff or themes of 40K. While 40K doesn't really have any "good guys", there are certainly those that are a whole lot less-evil than others. Moorcock did this much better, of course, in presenting the duality of Chaos, but that is not really present in 40K.

So, while a specific Kult of Orks might worship Khorne in that way, not all who worship Khorne do so. There are tribes of feral barbarians on lost worlds, Chaos-held worlds, Feral Worlds, whatever, that venerate Khorne through wanton slaughter and carnage, living out the Conan axiom to its fullest.

The Warp and The Imperium will always be a two edged sword in the decision of who is the "evil" one because both are as bad as each other, but both have their intentions.

The Imperium's intentions are to preserve humanity and to keep the human race from going to extinction, However the method makes them seem very much oppressive and Xenophobic as well as having the odd fanatic in power, add in some witch hunters with weapon's beyond the scale of current nuclear weapons and give the whole race a devotion to a rotting carcass with added blasphemy of AI, and you have one really messed up society.

On the other side of the Argument we have the Chaos Gods, and the what the gods represent can actually be perceived as something quite light:
Khorne: The god of martial honour and order
Tzeench: God of change and change can be quite good
Nurgle: God of life
Slannesh: God of pleasure and happiness

What makes them seem so bad is that their method of going about things with makes them seem barbaric and so dehumanised that its practically alien to us, as whilst Khorne Is the god of martial honour, his method is usually to cleave skulls and throw blood everywhere, Tzeench uses Change for scheming against his brothers... and everyone else for the matter.. Nurgle is god of life, however he must destroy and decay other life to create his own and Slannesh, whilst god of pleasure is one of perverse pleasure and... well... everyone gets Slannesh's mojo by now...

The point is both are as good as each other but by the method they go about it, they are both barbaric and totally alien to us. The reason why a lot of people see Chaos being so the "evil" one is because a lot of we read is being perceived through the eyes of the Imperium, we only have a few novels through the eyes of Chaos compared to the amount of novels with the Imperium in them imo.

Also this piece by ADB is a great read about the misconceptions of Chaos: http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/271640-misconceptions-about-csm/page-4#entry3316051

Hope this helps

ADB's post there doesn't make it sound like Chaos is any less-evil than is otherwise presented. In fact, it makes it seem like it's the infighting and politicking of the Imperium turned up way past 11, because at least in the Imperium, there is always the Inquisition to step in if things seem to be getting out of hand between the Ecclesiarchy and the Administratum or the Space Marines and the Munitorum or the Ecclesiarchy and the Arbites and so forth and so on.

Chaos, as presented there, is (of course) a selfish and self-centered society where the weak suffer and the strong rule. It's a dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed (at best) lifestyle where you can, ultimately, trust no one, not even yourself, as the Ruinous Powers themselves, and the proto-sentience of the Warp in general, can cause even your own body and mind to rebel against you.

 Psienesis wrote:
ADB's post there doesn't make it sound like Chaos is any less-evil than is otherwise presented. In fact, it makes it seem like it's the infighting and politicking of the Imperium turned up way past 11, because at least in the Imperium, there is always the Inquisition to step in if things seem to be getting out of hand between the Ecclesiarchy and the Administratum or the Space Marines and the Munitorum or the Ecclesiarchy and the Arbites and so forth and so on.

Chaos, as presented there, is (of course) a selfish and self-centered society where the weak suffer and the strong rule. It's a dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed (at best) lifestyle where you can, ultimately, trust no one, not even yourself, as the Ruinous Powers themselves, and the proto-sentience of the Warp in general, can cause even your own body and mind to rebel against you.

Sound's like high school
It also sounds like they're all Inquisitors. No one to answer to but your allies, no need to explain to your underlings. You can say with a straight face "My god said so" and have that be perfect justification. You can raze worlds, steal from other factions, even have dissidents publicly shot for any (or no) reason at all.

Heh, "Radical Inquisitors: A CSM codex supplement"

 Wilytank wrote:

 da001 wrote:

"Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows."

This sentence is overused. There are many sources depicting Khorne with a sense of martial honor, even in 6th edition. See Chaos Daemons, the feud between Slaanesh and Khorne or the Skulltaker entry. Khorne cares a lot for who was the owner of the skull given to it.

You mean like how if the being Skulltaker wants to challenge doesn't want to fight, he'll cut them down?

Because their skulls are no longer worthy, of course.
However, I was referring to Codex Chaos Daemons, page 34.The Skulltaker searches the most powerful warriors, and ignore anyone else. And of those collected, Khorne takes only a handful, the worthy. Khorne cares a lot about who was the owner of the skull, just as I said.

 Psienesis wrote:

What this is doing, though, as I tried to point out, is taking one form in which Khorne is worshiped and trying to make it a universal constant, cutting out all the other ways in which the veneration of the Blood God is expressed, in order to make Khorne less evil. It's a selective reading of the fluff of the god in order to force Chaos to fit into a constraint that is not supported by the fluff or themes of 40K. While 40K doesn't really have any "good guys", there are certainly those that are a whole lot less-evil than others. Moorcock did this much better, of course, in presenting the duality of Chaos, but that is not really present in 40K.

So, while a specific Kult of Orks might worship Khorne in that way, not all who worship Khorne do so. There are tribes of feral barbarians on lost worlds, Chaos-held worlds, Feral Worlds, whatever, that venerate Khorne through wanton slaughter and carnage, living out the Conan axiom to its fullest.

But isn´t it the other way around? People tend to say that Khorne is just about violence. My point was that it is quite a complex entity.

Moorcock did it better, but w40k fits well enough. The Great Crusade was a Force of Order trying to unbalance the fight. As a result, the Forces of Chaos reacted violently. They are in a fierce struggle right now, so both sides have gone brutal. But in the year 30k (before the crusade) both the Emperor and the worshippers of the gods were far less violent.

However, the question stands: it is Chaos evil? This setting is a copy-paste of Moorcock´s multiverse in some regards. So the answer is no. To quote the Culexus assassin Syncella in 'Seventh Retribution' (a book from 2013):
"But you and I, Lysander, know the war we fight is not a matter of right or wrong. It is a clash between two different flavors of amorality..."
This sounds 100% Moorcock to me. Both sides (Chaos and Order) are amoral. Words like "good" or "evil" only make sense applied to humans or sentient xenos.

Indeed. Which makes Chaos Evil, because it is utterly anathema to humanity. It is, as was the case with Moorcock and continues to be the case in 40K, utterly and completely corrupting of anything we could consider human, physically, mentally and spiritually.

Its most-telling symptom of this corruption is the increasingly-inhumane things one must do to gain recognition in the eyes of one's patron power.

Moral Relativism has absolutely no place in the setting of 40K. All of the factions are some brand of evil, because the setting is a Nietzschian axiom gone well past the edge and very far out into the darkness. All factions of the setting have, for so very long, battled monsters that they have become monsters themselves. While the Imperium is definitely not "good" by any stretch of the imagination, there is definitely nothing "good" about Chaos. Those, in-universe and out, claiming such things are closing their eyes to some very real horrors that Chaos is responsible for.

 Psienesis wrote:
ADB's post there doesn't make it sound like Chaos is any less-evil than is otherwise presented. In fact, it makes it seem like it's the infighting and politicking of the Imperium turned up way past 11, because at least in the Imperium, there is always the Inquisition to step in if things seem to be getting out of hand between the Ecclesiarchy and the Administratum or the Space Marines and the Munitorum or the Ecclesiarchy and the Arbites and so forth and so on.

Chaos, as presented there, is (of course) a selfish and self-centered society where the weak suffer and the strong rule. It's a dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed (at best) lifestyle where you can, ultimately, trust no one, not even yourself, as the Ruinous Powers themselves, and the proto-sentience of the Warp in general, can cause even your own body and mind to rebel against you.

Yes... but keep in mind that he is talking about Chaos Space Marines. Killing machines. And Marines are exceedingly rare: we are told that most people do not see a single one in their life.

It doesn´t apply to chaos civilizations as a whole, and we have some examples in the background of chaos civilizations that lasted thousands of years: the enemies of the Imperium in the Sabbat Worlds, the main characters of Pawn of Chaos, the people from Daemonworld. So they have children, and love each other, and they have teachers, and education, and someone who plants potatoes and sells them in the city, and everything a society needs to keep going. Is it harsh? Probably. Worse than the Imperium? I doubt it.

What if you have been born with a mutation? Would you prefer to be "gifted by the gods" or "an abomination and an insult to the pure human form"?

 Psienesis wrote:
Indeed. Which makes Chaos Evil, because it is utterly anathema to humanity. It is, as was the case with Moorcock and continues to be the case in 40K, utterly and completely corrupting of anything we could consider human, physically, mentally and spiritually.

Its most-telling symptom of this corruption is the increasingly-inhumane things one must do to gain recognition in the eyes of one's patron power.

Moral Relativism has absolutely no place in the setting of 40K. All of the factions are some brand of evil, because the setting is a Nietzschian axiom gone well past the edge and very far out into the darkness. All factions of the setting have, for so very long, battled monsters that they have become monsters themselves. While the Imperium is definitely not "good" by any stretch of the imagination, there is definitely nothing "good" about Chaos. Those, in-universe and out, claiming such things are closing their eyes to some very real horrors that Chaos is responsible for.

If we are talking about Chaos itself, then being utterly anathema to humanity is not being evil. Order in its purest form, or Tyranids, are also extremely hostile to humanity. Actually, the Tyranids are the closest thing to Chaos predators: they feed on humanity, souls instead of flesh. Are Tyranids evil?

By the way, I found my Realms of Chaos: Slaves of Darkness copy. You were right, Khorne is described as a "bloody-handed god of carnage and slaughter" in that book. Nothing about being honourable that I can find. My mistake, I was mixing sources. There is a line in Codex: CSM that goes "Khorne's followers may feel they can justify their life of slaughter in any number of ways through honour, bravery or martial pride", but then says that this is wrong, and Khorne cares nothing about this.

 da001 wrote:
Champions of Chaos, Chaos Space Marines and the like are toys for the gods. But this does not apply to the average person living there.

Right. THEY are just toys of the champions.

To the servants of Chaos, the common person is little more than a victim waiting to happen, regardless of if they're faithful or not. The common person is a torture toy waiting to happen. A lamb waiting to be sacrificed. Worthless trash.


Even the Imperium has a higher opinion of the common citizen than Chaos does.

 da001 wrote:

I have not access to the Realm of Chaos books right now, but this is from Rogue Trader: Ork Freebooters. Pag 14, Khorne Stormboyz: "Worship of the Chaos Powers is not tolerated amongst sane and sensible Orks, but the Cult is rampant amongst Freebooter Stormboyz. The Blood God epitomizes the martial virtues which they hold dear, including a harsh disciplinary code, binding rules governing their conduct as honourable warriors and, of course, a life of almost continous blood-letting".

Sane and sensible orks??? Rogue Trader was weird.


On topic, I don't believe that the Chaos Gods are the daemons can be evil, because they are just emotions given a physical form. The Chaos Space Marines and other Chaos worshipers can be all over the place, from insane and therefore not really responsible for their actions (The Cleaved), to having a good cause, to being completely evil. With everything in between.

OK for clarification purposes i am going to say it clearly: I dont care about the IOM, i think they are the most useless sci fi human empire ever invented and i will often join in condemning them for their many failings.

Now onto the important part, there was a segment of fluff in the old WH40k demon book the described what happened to a planet invaded by demons of chaos. In short the nurgle demons tried out new plagues on captured humans, the slannesh demons tortured them and the khorne demons hunted them (cant remember what the Tzeencth demons did). Now these demons were acting on behalf of their gods, who encouraged their demonic followers to further such acts. The things i listed are evil acts, no sentient being who claims to be good or neutral would do these things, only evil beings would do these acts and only vile evil monsters would do these acts whit such a degree of excitement described in the book.

As for the chaos gods themselves i dont buy the "they are emotions" argument. The chaos gods have exhibited a degree of free will before and they clearly like spreading death and ruin to the other races of the galaxy, which in my mind puts them down as evil. These things aren't forces of nature like a earthquake they are sentient beings who willing order the deaths of billions on a daily basis. They are monsters and tyrants.

 Runicmadhamster wrote:

Now onto the important part, there was a segment of fluff in the old WH40k demon book the described what happened to a planet invaded by demons of chaos. In short the nurgle demons tried out new plagues on captured humans, the slannesh demons tortured them and the khorne demons hunted them (cant remember what the Tzeencth demons did). Now these demons were acting on behalf of their gods, who encouraged their demonic followers to further such acts. The things i listed are evil acts, no sentient being who claims to be good or neutral would do these things, only evil beings would do these acts and only vile evil monsters would do these acts whit such a degree of excitement described in the book.

As for the chaos gods themselves i dont buy the "they are emotions" argument. The chaos gods have exhibited a degree of free will before and they clearly like spreading death and ruin to the other races of the galaxy, which in my mind puts them down as evil. These things aren't forces of nature like a earthquake they are sentient beings who willing order the deaths of billions on a daily basis. They are monsters and tyrants.

This is the core of our disagreement. You see chaos gods as monsters, physical creatures. But the warp is made of raw emotion, we are told so. It is described as a spiritual dimension. Which means that the Chaos gods are forces of nature of the spiritual kind. A tyrant is someone who can be good, neutral or evil. An entity made out of anger and violence cannot be good or evil. It is by definition neutral.

About their free will: we are told about the chaos gods through stories and legends. In this regard, they are like pagan gods. It is actually quite easy to draw a parallel between Ares, Mars, Morrigan and countless others Gods of War and Khorne. This is a dark setting and Khorne is actively fighting the people writing the stories, but it is the same. This is the reason the Chaos gods "make decisions" in the setting. But tell me, do you really think Khorne had the option of not being violent in any of the stories involving it?

"Only evil beings would do these acts" -> tyranids, a virus, any sort of predator to their preys, a robot programmed to do so... And any true neutral entity who feed on humans one way or another.

 Melissia wrote:

 da001 wrote:
Champions of Chaos, Chaos Space Marines and the like are toys for the gods. But this does not apply to the average person living there.

Right. THEY are just toys of the champions.

To the servants of Chaos, the common person is little more than a victim waiting to happen, regardless of if they're faithful or not. The common person is a torture toy waiting to happen. A lamb waiting to be sacrificed. Worthless trash.


Even the Imperium has a higher opinion of the common citizen than Chaos does.

This is imperial propaganda.

There are few references to chaos civilizations, but there are some. The books Pawns of Chaos, Blood Gorgons and Daemonblood depict civilizations that have been worshipping the gods for thousand of years. The civilization the Imperium is fighting in the Sabbat Worlds actively worship Chaos and has been doing so since before the Heresy. They have kids and raise them, they have engineers to build tanks, they cannot be worthless trash. These civilizations are described in a way quite similar to the way the romans described the barbarians. It is a tough society, but... worse that living in a hive or in a Forgeworld? Don´t think so.

The Imperium has a higher opinion of the common citizen? They are but numbers, if they are pure, if they never deviate from the Imperial doctrine. Independent thought will see you burned or turned into a lobotomized servitor, or food for someone else if you live in a Forgeworld. Also, what if you were born a mutant? Mutation is ripe amongst humanity. What about them?

VensersRevenge wrote:

 da001 wrote:

I have not access to the Realm of Chaos books right now, but this is from Rogue Trader: Ork Freebooters. Pag 14, Khorne Stormboyz: "Worship of the Chaos Powers is not tolerated amongst sane and sensible Orks, but the Cult is rampant amongst Freebooter Stormboyz. The Blood God epitomizes the martial virtues which they hold dear, including a harsh disciplinary code, binding rules governing their conduct as honourable warriors and, of course, a life of almost continous blood-letting".

Sane and sensible orks??? Rogue Trader was weird.


On topic, I don't believe that the Chaos Gods are the daemons can be evil, because they are just emotions given a physical form. The Chaos Space Marines and other Chaos worshipers can be all over the place, from insane and therefore not really responsible for their actions (The Cleaved), to having a good cause, to being completely evil. With everything in between.

^This. Nice to see someone else with the same opinion.

And about the sane and sensible orks.... it made me laugh again. Orks have been in charge of the "comical relief" section since the beginning.

 da001 wrote:
This is imperial propaganda.

No. This is GW canon.

"Let no good deed go unpunished; Let no evil deed go unrewarded." is the ethos of Chaos.

At its very core, Chaos revels in harming others and forcing others to submit to their will. Some misguided people of Chaos think that this means freedom, but what it really means is just tyranny of the strong.

At its very core, the Imperium wishes that humans are safe and happy, populous and productive. It goes to extremes to try to achieve this... and oftentimes fails. But it tries, and that is an important distinction.

Chaos doesn't try. It doesn't care. It sees a mother protecting her child and thinks "she should be raping the child instead", or "she should be feeding the child feces so that it becomes a nest for disease", or "she should be sacrificing that child and piling its skull with the others", and so on and so forth. It does not care what the mother desires. It doesn't care what the child needs.

The Imperium, for all its flaws... does care for both. It wants the mother to live a productive life. It wants the child to grow up healthy and strong, so that they can live a productive life. And this is why, in spite of the flaws of the Imperium, it can be "the good guys" where Chaos cannot. The average person can empathize with a flawed antihero, or even an antivillain. They find it much harder to empathize with a sociopath who cares for no one but himself.

A canon that is made of lies, legends and propaganda.

The Imperium is described as the most brutal and bloodthirsty regime ever to exist. A specific individual may care, but as a whole the Imperium regularly brutalizes its citizens. This is a key concept in the setting: the Imperium is brutal and uncaring to the extreme.

And this is if you are pure and do not express any word of dissent. If you are a mutant, you are doomed since birth.

Now on Chaos:
1: the gods. The warp is made of raw emotion. Khorne is nothing but a spiritual being made of violence and anger. It is Violence. It is highly hostile to everything but it is not "evil" in itself. Claiming that Khorne is evil is like claiming that Violence, in all its forms, is evil. The Sisters of Battle uses violence, and thus feed Khorne. It is a force of nature, it has no true free will. It cannot stop being violent, and thus it is not evil. You need to be able to do choices to be evil. Same go for daemons.
2: Chaos Champions and CSM: it depends. They are the closest Chaos get to being evil, that´s true.
3: chaos worshippers. It is rare to get information from their point of view, but I mentioned you some. For instance: "The civilization the Imperium is fighting in the Sabbat Worlds actively worship Chaos and has been doing so since before the Heresy. They have kids and raise them, they have engineers to build tanks, they cannot be worthless trash. These civilizations are described in a way quite similar to the way the romans described the barbarians. It is a tough society, but... worse that living in a hive or in a Forgeworld? "

For me, asking if Chaos is evil is asking if human emotions are evil.

 Melissia wrote:

Chaos doesn't try. It doesn't care. It sees a mother protecting her child and thinks "she should be raping the child instead", or "she should be feeding the child feces so that it becomes a nest for disease", or "she should be sacrificing that child and piling its skull with the others", and so on and so forth. It does not care what the mother desires. It doesn't care what the child needs.

How can such a civilization last for thousands of years without destroying itself? Doesn´t make sense. A chaos worshipper sees a mother protecting her child and she may be his wife. And he was a child once, who was protected by his kin.

It is just propaganda: the enemy is branded evil to avoid people changing sides.

Moral Relativism, again, has no place. Good and Evil are not nebulous concepts in 40K, not matters of perspective. When one does something, something in the Warp may react to that thing, whether it's an action or a thought, and that thing is usually evil. The Gods of Chaos are evil because the emotions and actions that created them were evil.

How can such a civilization last for thousands of years without destroying itself? Doesn´t make sense. A chaos worshipper sees a mother protecting her child and she may be his wife. And he was a child once, who was protected by his kin.

Forced slave-breeding. Just ask the people of Gereon. Or they live on worlds that are held by a faction of the Word Bearers or another faction of Chaos Undivided. So these people go about their lives venerating the Dark Gods... and only some of them are taken to be sacrificed on bloodstained altars, to be tortured to render their pain down into a drug for Slaaneshi priests, to be infected with virulent plagues and used as living bombs, to be shaped and reshaped into new and pleasing forms to the Architect of Fate, to be turned into slave-warriors for Khornate warbands. This is not so different from the Imperium.... excepting that the Imperium doesn't practice human sacrifice to the God-Emperor.

Saying that the chaos gods are exempt from judgement because they are just raw emotions does not take into account what sentience IS, and Chaos IS sentient. In multiple times in the fluff, the chaos gods have clearly shown they ARE capable of restraining their natures or making CHOICES as needed in order to fulfill their needs. Granted, they are still very chaotic and fickle personalities prone to mood swings, but on way more than enough occassions they've shown they can THINK and make decisions as needed, be it their various pacts and alliances with each other, their plans and betrayals of each other, and their granting of visions to their followers. Furthermore, daemon fluff has always depicted them as quite more than abstract concepts, describing things like Nurgle laying back in his rocking chair at the end of a long work day so he can have one of his greatest joys of tallying up his diseases (this is from the actual website so it's studio fluff) or the Changeling cutting Slaanesh's hair or giving Khorne a nurgling whoopee cushion leading to war. Or Slaanesh getting pissed off at the Masque's dance thinking it was mocking him (raw emotion would not have the judgement capability to determine if it was being mocked or not by a dance that was in fact 100% SINCERE).

Despite this sentience, they CHOOSE to do all those evil things and ENJOY it anyways. Therefore they are evil.

There's even a short story of an Iron Warrior forced by an oath he made long ago to keep on hunting down the descendants of an Imperial Fist over and over again. All four gods together gave him immortality just so they could LAUGH at how he's constantly forced to do that over and over and it's making him miserable (he actually had a vision of the gods laughing at him if I recall correctly).

Raw forces of nature DO NOT DO THAT. Chaos is sentient, thus it IS allowed to be judged by moral standards if you have them, and pretty much every moral standard in existence besides Chaos' own moral standards (and mostly because their moral standard is often "There is no such thing as a moral standard") would judge them to be evil.

(although as an aside, even a non-sentient thing can be evil. For example, a being made out of evil would be evil regardless of whether it had a choice in the matter by definition. Perhaps even more so since a sentient being made out of evil but choosing not to do evil somehow could be considered not evil. It's arguable that the Chaos gods are made out of evil as their daemons are vulnerable to the blood of GOOD men and the warp is so hellish because of evil emotions overcoming the positive ones, but they have free will too and choose to do evil of their own free will because they find it entertaining so they get the best of both evil worlds)

 da001 wrote:

 Runicmadhamster wrote:

Now onto the important part, there was a segment of fluff in the old WH40k demon book the described what happened to a planet invaded by demons of chaos. In short the nurgle demons tried out new plagues on captured humans, the slannesh demons tortured them and the khorne demons hunted them (cant remember what the Tzeencth demons did). Now these demons were acting on behalf of their gods, who encouraged their demonic followers to further such acts. The things i listed are evil acts, no sentient being who claims to be good or neutral would do these things, only evil beings would do these acts and only vile evil monsters would do these acts whit such a degree of excitement described in the book.

As for the chaos gods themselves i dont buy the "they are emotions" argument. The chaos gods have exhibited a degree of free will before and they clearly like spreading death and ruin to the other races of the galaxy, which in my mind puts them down as evil. These things aren't forces of nature like a earthquake they are sentient beings who willing order the deaths of billions on a daily basis. They are monsters and tyrants.

This is the core of our disagreement. You see chaos gods as monsters, physical creatures. But the warp is made of raw emotion, we are told so. It is described as a spiritual dimension. Which means that the Chaos gods are forces of nature of the spiritual kind. A tyrant is someone who can be good, neutral or evil. An entity made out of anger and violence cannot be good or evil. It is by definition neutral.

I am sorry but that is such a cop out, the chaos gods are raw emotions therefore they are a force of nature and cannot be neither good nor evil? Thats false middle ground, and also speculation as we (as humans) have never encountered such beings and so cannot make any strong assertive or certain statements on what such beings would be like or capable of. Also anger and violence doesn't often lead to hunting down captured civilians in the ruins of a city. These things do acts of unspeakable evil every day, how can beings that do such acts ever hope to be able to be called neutral.

About their free will: we are told about the chaos gods through stories and legends. In this regard, they are like pagan gods. It is actually quite easy to draw a parallel between Ares, Mars, Morrigan and countless others Gods of War and Khorne. This is a dark setting and Khorne is actively fighting the people writing the stories, but it is the same. This is the reason the Chaos gods "make decisions" in the setting. But tell me, do you really think Khorne had the option of not being violent in any of the stories involving it?

"Only evil beings would do these acts" -> tyranids, a virus, any sort of predator to their preys, a robot programmed to do so... And any true neutral entity who feed on humans one way or another.

LIke i said, limited free will. Khorne cannot choose to not be violent but he can clearly choose when, where and who to be violent too. This is clearly demonstrated in the WH40k demon codex fluff section that has Khorne making choices/ SO while the chaos goods dont have human levels of free will they arent at the tyranids/virus level of lacking free will either. The chaos gods have limited free will, this is what the fluff in the WH40k demon codex is making out is the case.

 Psienesis wrote:
The Gods of Chaos are evil because the emotions and actions that created them were evil.

Emotions are not evil. How can fear, anger, love or lust be evil?

Forced slave-breeding. Just ask the people of Gereon. Or they live on worlds that are held by a faction of the Word Bearers or another faction of Chaos Undivided. So these people go about their lives venerating the Dark Gods... and only some of them are taken to be sacrificed on bloodstained altars, to be tortured to render their pain down into a drug for Slaaneshi priests, to be infected with virulent plagues and used as living bombs, to be shaped and reshaped into new and pleasing forms to the Architect of Fate, to be turned into slave-warriors for Khornate warbands. This is not so different from the Imperium.... excepting that the Imperium doesn't practice human sacrifice to the God-Emperor.

Multiple issues here:
1) Some planets under control of Chaos Space Marines are hellholes (like some imperial worlds) but others are not. The tribes in the Blood Gorgons novel, the people from Pawns of Chaos or Daemonworld, or the chaos followers in the Warhammer Fantasy to say some. Gereon is not the average chaos planet just like Krieg (another hellhole) is not your average imperial planet. There is no such thing as an average planet in the setting.
2) I am struggling to remember but... was not Gereon a planet recently conquered by Chaos and in open rebellion?
3) The Imperium does practice human sacrifice to the God-Emperor, or at least some planets do. The Ecclesiarchy is fine with anything as long as the Emperor is acknowledged as a god. Actually, countless thousands of persons die daily because the Emperor eats people. Oh, and the blood of the innocents is used as a weapon against Chaos. The Aegis is (at least in part) made of human blood.

TiamatRoar wrote:
Saying that the chaos gods are exempt from judgement because they are just raw emotions does not take into account what sentience IS, and Chaos IS sentient. In multiple times in the fluff, the chaos gods have clearly shown they ARE capable of restraining their natures or making CHOICES as needed in order to fulfill their needs. Granted, they are still very chaotic and fickle personalities prone to mood swings, but on way more than enough occassions they've shown they can THINK and make decisions as needed, be it their various pacts and alliances with each other, their plans and betrayals of each other, and their granting of visions to their followers. Furthermore, daemon fluff has always depicted them as quite more than abstract concepts, describing things like Nurgle laying back in his rocking chair at the end of a long work day so he can have one of his greatest joys of tallying up his diseases (this is from the actual website so it's studio fluff) or the Changeling cutting Slaanesh's hair or giving Khorne a nurgling whoopee cushion leading to war. Or Slaanesh getting pissed off at the Masque's dance thinking it was mocking him (raw emotion would not have the judgement capability to determine if it was being mocked or not by a dance that was in fact 100% SINCERE).

This is exactly the way the pagan gods are described: tales, legends, allegories. Metaphors.

The studio fluff also states that the warp is made of raw emotion. This completely contradicts what you are saying (which is also studio fluff). I think this is intentional, allowing the player to make his own mind. I do believe that the lake of blood of Khorne, the rocking chair of Nurgle and that cushion are allegories, tales, legends... I find the other option (taking these stories literally) preposterous.

A matter of opinion, no doubt. I wonder how many people think that the throne of skulls is a physical thing, and can be destroyed with a bomb or something.

(although as an aside, even a non-sentient thing can be evil. For example, a being made out of evil would be evil regardless of whether it had a choice in the matter by definition. Perhaps even more so since a sentient being made out of evil but choosing not to do evil somehow could be considered not evil. It's arguable that the Chaos gods are made out of evil as their daemons are vulnerable to the blood of GOOD men and the warp is so hellish because of evil emotions overcoming the positive ones, but they have free will too and choose to do evil of their own free will because they find it entertaining so they get the best of both evil worlds)

Imagine a non-sentient thing made of evil. Would it be evil? Wow, this is getting weird. My answer is still NO. If it has no free will, it cannot be evil. To do evil you have to voluntarily do it. An act (any act) does not make you evil if you are forced to do it, tricked to do it, or created to do it.

Now about the "the blood of "good men" is a weapon against the daemons" . Which are these "good men"?. As long as I know there are two types of persons that are murdered this way:
1) Sisters of Battle. One single case that I know of. Are they innocents? Are they good women?
2) Psykers that still have hope. In this case they are specifically branded as "innocents".

At least in the second the suffering and the sense of betrayal is key to the effectiveness of the sacrifice. But this sounds quite similar to Chaos sacrifices: the suffering is important, because it generates emotion, which is what the gods feed upon.

You just mentioned another thing that draws a parallel between the Emperor and a Chaos god.

 Runicmadhamster wrote:

I am sorry but that is such a cop out, the chaos gods are raw emotions therefore they are a force of nature and cannot be neither good nor evil? Thats false middle ground, and also speculation as we (as humans) have never encountered such beings and so cannot make any strong assertive or certain statements on what such beings would be like or capable of.

Quite the contrary, we have encountered such beings since the beginning. Every single human society has developed a sense of spiritualism, and has reached the conclusion that something must be out there. The God of War, the Plague God, and the God of Excess have walked at the side of mankind since we got a soul and started dreaming. They just keep changing their names.

Thousands of books have been written on the issue. Is Ares evil? Is violence in itself a bad thing?

Also anger and violence doesn't often lead to hunting down captured civilians in the ruins of a city. These things do acts of unspeakable evil every day, how can beings that do such acts ever hope to be able to be called neutral.

The chaos gods cannot enter a physical world. Anger and Violence (aka Khorne) is unable to do that.
The gods send daemons to feed on human emotions. These daemons are predators, like tyranids if you want.

 Runicmadhamster wrote:
The chaos gods have limited free will, this is what the fluff in the WH40k demon codex is making out is the case.

Good. Does this mean that they have "limited evilness"? Then we have an agreement. To answer the OP: "Chaos is not as evil as you thought?" If Chaos is the Chaos gods, no. They are not 100% evil because they have limited free will. Even if they can make choices, they cannot make the kind of choices that would turn them into "good" entities.

Sounds fine to me.

Or, to translate:

"It's okay when Chaos does horrible things because they're Chaos. But how dare the Imperium do them, no matter what the reason!"

Im seeing a lot of Imperial Propaganda here...

The Imperium is just as "Evil" as Chaos, you have corruption within the power which is just as bad as the barbarism that Chaos has, for example how is declaring Exterminatus on a whole planet full of innocent people because a very small group know about the existence of daemons or a little bit more of information about Chaos that that they may have stumbled among? how is that "worse" than a bloodtide of Khorne things coming from the Warp? to me they seem both as bad as eachother just one looks cleaner than the other.

Similarly whilst Chaos may not care about their citizens, so does the Imperium, that Inquisitor may just have that mother burned alive with its baby just because her hair looks heretical and the baby must be warp spawn?

Both are as bad as eachother just in their own way

Imperium: Corruption within power
Chaos: Barbaric

And to be honest that's one of the reasons why I like 40k because No one is the bad guy because they are all evil and as bad as eachother.. just in their own way

 Melissia wrote:
Or, to translate:

"It's okay when Chaos does horrible things because they're Chaos. But how dare the Imperium do them, no matter what the reason!"

Exactly what im thinking haha, it seems most of his points drift away from chaos and go more into the imperium. The topic is chaos evil. Its a simple yes or no question. The intentions, needs, actions and wants of chaos (even when the defence describes them) are evil. All that da001 is trying to do is excuse that evil based on weird trains of thought. Emotions in themselves are not evil but how we act on them can be and those evil actions based on those emotions is what chaos is (if that makes any sense). You can be evil or do an act of evil without choosing to be or do it. Its still evil at the end of the day. There is a reason people who are forced to commit acts of evil feel strong remorse and guilt, its because they have commited an act of evil.

It doesnt matter what reason, what their nature is and what they are made of evil is evil. What they do and how they do it goes against our basic morals of good and evil and trying to justify it really shows a lot about your character. If you dont beleive chaos is evil.... then what else to you isnt evil that blatantly should be evil...

In short chaos is evil even if it cant choose not to be. Because what it is doing is still evil.


http://www.thefreedictionary.com/evil
Sound like chaos to you...

A matter of opinion, no doubt. I wonder how many people think that the throne of skulls is a physical thing, and can be destroyed with a bomb or something.

It is not a physical thing, because it exists in the Warp, but it is a literal thing. Meaning, if you had the capability to, you could enter the Warp, travel to Khorne's Realm, and find the Blood God sitting on his Brass Throne atop a mountainous pile of blood-spattered skulls. This is a thing that you can do, as Skulltaker is described as entering this chamber to deposit the skulls he has taken at Khorne's feet.

Blow it up with a bomb? No. Not permanently, anyway. Khorne's power is not diminished. If you had a super-massive bomb, you might destroy it for a few minutes, maybe even a few days (but what is a minute, a day, a million years in a dimension where time does not exist?) but you have not actually done anything to Khorne.

This is why Draigo's fluff about him tearing down the Garden of Nurgle is meant to be a tragic tale. Nothing Draigo is doing in the Warp is having any effect, any effect at all, on Chaos. He is a Sisyphusian character, and his one-man crusade in the Warp is him rolling that boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down by morning.

3) The Imperium does practice human sacrifice to the God-Emperor, or at least some planets do. The Ecclesiarchy is fine with anything as long as the Emperor is acknowledged as a god. Actually, countless thousands of persons die daily because the Emperor eats people. Oh, and the blood of the innocents is used as a weapon against Chaos. The Aegis is (at least in part) made of human blood.

While the Ecclesiarchy is fairly open in what "local customs" it will adopt, the Space-Catholicism vibe that is presented in studio material doesn't seem to support direct human sacrifice. It's possible, sure... but, on the other hand, I'm not making the argument that the Imperium is "good" in the way you seem to be trying to say that I am. I'm only saying that the Imperium is "less-evil" than Chaos.

And for the thousand souls a day fed to the Emperor? They were weak. They could never serve the God-Emperor in life, let them do so in their deaths. Men must die so that Man can endure.

The chaos gods cannot enter a physical world. Anger and Violence (aka Khorne) is unable to do that.
The gods send daemons to feed on human emotions. These daemons are predators, like tyranids if you want.

This is what the Emperor is believed to be preventing. A total Chaos victory would sunder the veil between the Warp and Reality, allowing the Chaos Gods to enter real-space at will, in effect turning Reality into The Warp.

Is violence in itself a bad thing?

Yes.

1) Sisters of Battle. One single case that I know of. Are they innocents? Are they good women?

Yes.

Imagine a non-sentient thing made of evil. Would it be evil? Wow, this is getting weird. My answer is still NO. If it has no free will, it cannot be evil. To do evil you have to voluntarily do it. An act (any act) does not make you evil if you are forced to do it, tricked to do it, or created to do it.

Is it the act that makes it evil, or the intent behind the act?

 happygolucky wrote:
Im seeing a lot of Imperial Propaganda here...

The Imperium is just as "Evil" as Chaos, you have corruption within the power which is just as bad as the barbarism that Chaos has, for example how is declaring Exterminatus on a whole planet full of innocent people because a very small group know about the existence of daemons or a little bit more of information about Chaos that that they may have stumbled among? how is that "worse" than a bloodtide of Khorne things coming from the Warp? to me they seem both as bad as eachother just one looks cleaner than the other.

The difference is that for the Imperium, some people actually felt BAD about that whole Exterminatus on Armegeddon thing, and one faction of the Imperium actively opposed it while others (if Black Library is taken in your canon) were plotting to stop it.

Chaos meanwhile never feels guilty about anything.

Also, ironically for someone who says it's propaganda, your twisting the context a bit. They aren't exterminating the innocent people JUST because they know about the existence of daemons. They're exterminating them because that knowledge as well as any possible taint could cause a further avalanche into corruption and descent. This was a factor that even some people (Grey Knights) who saw the point of view that exterminating innocents were bad also felt was valid. It's one thing to exterminate innocents just because they know too much. However, when you're exterminating them because their knowledge might cause a TRUCKTON OF OTHER INNOCENT PEOPLE TO DIE in the future, that's another thing entirely.

Chaos, meanwhile, would never even BEGIN to consider such a thing. Chaos doesn't ever bother to consider the morality in the first place (again, a core tenet of most Chaos religions is there is no such thing as morality). The Imperium will at least ask "Is it worth it to save other people later?" before doing things (Exterminatus, for example, if done without a valid cause is actually heresy and reason to be excommunicated, as shown by Kryptman and the protagonist of the Inquisition novel series. The former is studio fluff and led to much debate about the thing in-universe because he DID have a reason. Just a questionable one). Chaos meanwhile would just say "lol death murder bwahaha DIE DIE DIE".

Really, we've had enough fluff and narrative from a Chaos protagonist perspective and an Imperial protagonist perspective to make it pretty obvious which faction has the majority of individuals that at least have some semblance of a conscience, even if one that's still far removed from real life morality. Narratives that are actually done in first person perspective sometime and show the train of thought of the individuals involved, again for both Chaos and Imperial individuals.

Hell, I don't even deny that the Imperium is evil.

It is. The Imperium is evil.

But it's a sympathetic evil. An evil driven by necessity. They are paranoid not for the sake of it, but because they HAVE to be. Chaos really does want to tear the Imperium down and bathe its worlds in blood, murdering everyone. The Imperium, for all of its evil, is not exaggerating at all when it describes the evils of Chaos.

Hell, even in regards to religious freedom... the Imperium is STILL better than Chaos. The Imperial Faith is a HUGELY diverse organization, having anywhere from animism to ancestor worship to monotheism to even polytheism within its boundry. All of them are accepted within the Imperium, with only minor alterations to ensure that they pay homage to the Emperor (oftentimes, they do this simply by planting the image of the Emperor in the place of the highest god in their pantheon-- the more subtle the change, the more likely the Imperium will be accepted, after all), and don't worship Chaos.

Chaos? They'll kill you if you worship the wrong god. Or if their god is feeling fickle. Or if the day is wednesday and you're wearing a blue coat.