Miles

Doesn't it?

Not to mention the lack of children.

The basic principle behind the burning ritual seems to concern moral purity.

Perhaps there are other sources or even symbols of moral purity that could achieve the same or similar effects.

Even the ridiculous ones.

I'm not sure what kind of morality requires the burning of children to defeat evil.

I think you two may be getting ahead of yourselves.

While I'm certainly no scholar of Mephitaka, I've come to understand something of the beliefs that compose it.

Specifically...

The damned are damned through no fault of their own.

They're born as such.

I'm not sure that makes me feel any better.

I'm even less of an expert than you are, but as I recall, while there's plenty of discussion about hell, sin, and the indestructibility of the soul, there's very little said about the creator god itself.

Only that one is implied by the wording of the codex.

I recently read an essay...

suggesting that the idea of a benevolent creator-god may have emerged in opposition to a far bleaker, mephitic impossibility that existence consists only of Earth and Hell.

In this view, Earth embodies the intended form and order shaped by some distant, impersonal force, while Hell is nothing more than the repository of what was carved away, the chipped clay.

The pencil shavings, the discarded remnants left behind in the act of creation, kept only until the work is perfected, and then, perhaps, swept clean.

Reminds me of the biblical flood.

God creates man only to be disappointed with him, and then wipes him out to start all over again with Noah and his family.