Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
My personal take is that undead are inherently evil, and animated by residual negative emotions of the living such as fear, pain and hatred. Being made out of these, they inevitably both experience and spread them, so creating undead inherently makes the world a worse place.
I have a slightly different take on things. I don't consider undead to be intrinsically evil, whatever the likes of D&D says. The act of *raising* the dead is what's evil. I mean, I don't personally care what happens to my body once I'm dead and no longer using it--you can feed it to the dogs for all I care. However, the same may well not be true for my loved ones, who might very well care what happens to my body and would be upset if they learned it was wandering around carrying out the orders of some complete stranger. The act of necromancy is perforce ignoring those concerns, which is at the very least highly self-centred and at worst sociopathic.

If we start talking about sciomancy (actually talking to the spirits of the dead) then that's quite possibly even worse, because you're explicitly pulling the person's eternal soul from wherever it's hanging out and forcing it to answer your questions.

Of course, this is my own take on it and it probably doesn't match the majority opinion.