Well despite your pompous and self important tone, I will attempt
to counter your arguements in a purely unbiased phrasing.

Allow me now then to address what you refer to as inherent conflicts
beween the Priest Skillsets and the Dark/Evil Philosophies.

First let us speak of Healing...you make a horrible assumption that
a priest draws his ablities for healing from within himself. This is
not true...priests draw their healing powers from the five elemental
realms. Therefore the priests do not give of their own energy but
of the energy of other realms. Also you seem to have prejudiced and
unclear views of the "Darker" gods and their teachings. So allow
me to fill you in a little...

First of all, allow me to list those gods who I feel Achaea considers
"Darker" gods...Sartan, Twilight, Vastar and Aegis. Of these four
gods, I know that three (Twilight, Vastar and Aegis) do not teach
selfishness, there is a selflessness to those of their orders insomuch
as they give to others of their order. So even IF the priests drew
their healing powers from within...those (in these three orders) would
indeed give of their own energies to heal others of their belief.

As for Spirituality and Devotion in which you made no true argument in
your post other than to say they would need to be change allow me to
make arguements for both skillsets. Spirituality is based around (as we
all know two main things...Guardian Angels and Spiritual Maces. The
Angels are meerly powerful creatures created by the gods and imbued
with a portion of godlike power...there may be angels of death or of
war...not meerly the angels of light and/or justice which we are now
familiar with. And there is no need to give them any other powers
since their primary purpose in being given to priests is to protect the
priest. And Devotion is based upon two statistics, alignment and
devotion. I admit the alignment abilities would have to be reversed,
but devotion to a god is devotion to a god no matter who one's god is.

Your next point against me is to say that my arguement to explain the
lack of a movement torwards dark priests doesn't hold water. You then
attempt to throw the fact that occultists need to be citizens of hashan,
or that we serpents don't allow other serpents to sell certain venoms
at me. Well I will explain to you two things. First off, I was
refering to new players...having to be a citizen of Ashtan does not
limit new players from becoming Occultists, and neither does not being
able to sell certain venoms. But saying that you like death or seek
to follow Dark Gods does prevent new players from joining the Priests.
In fact, due to what is written in the help files, players so inclined
won't even attempt to join the priesthood.
Secondly yes I do have the "gall" to make these points. You see,
even though most of Achaea doesn't realize it...there ARE "dark" serps
and "light" serps...the serpentlords being the "light" serpents and
the shadowsnakes having split from our guild, being the "dark" serpents.
I know...Shallam is quick to forget that we threw our support to them
During the great war...oooh in 218 AF. Oh...and about hunting those
who sell illegals to death...we do that because widespread illegals
destroy our only effective means of attack (afflictions) but having
dark priests to help protect shrines would in fact strengthen the
priests means of defense and attack.

Thank you for your time in answering my note...but please if you
are going to attempt to belittle me for my words, which it sounded
like (but I may be wrong) make points which I would have to concede
to. Don't just trash my own.

-Dream

Penned by my hand on the 21st of Daedalan, in the year 250 AF.