First, you should know that alignment objectively exists; people are either Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic - or if you want to be pretentious about it, Nomian, Anomian, and Counternomian. They are so from birth and this cannot change except for your Helm of Alignment Change and so on; notably, behavior cannot in any way affect alignment.
Secondly, the basic personality and motivational structure of people is completely orthogonal to alignment: people in each have your normal spread of selflessness, selfishness, Dunbar's number dynamics, that kind of thing.
Thirdly, if you were born with a Lawful soul (about 5-20% of the population), you'll go to heaven if you acted benevolently in life and hell if you acted malevolently in life, and you Know this, but not where the threshold is. If you were born with a Chaotic soul (about 1-5% of the population), you Know just the opposite - that some indeterminate about of badness will damn you up to heaven and goodness will bless you straight to hell. If you're Neutral you don't Know shit.
a fool sees not the same tree
If you're Lawful or Chaotic, you can speak an alignment language. Alignment languages contain concepts that cannot be grasped in other languages, but speaking them doesn't feel any different from speaking your other languages.
Moreover, hearing an alignment language, if you speak it, just sounds normal. If you don't speak an alignment language, it tends to sound like vague mystical patter, or people describing ineffable mystic concepts, which in fact they are - ineffable to you, anyway; they can be perfectly well effed by native speakers.
(What are these concepts? Unfortunately, I have a Neutral soul and can't tell you. But there are probably some spells and such you need them to grok.)
nor seeks to know / the law by which it prospers so
Lawful and Chaotic characters Know about their afterlife fates and Know their languages; they don't Know that alignment is a thing, or who has what, or that they're doing something unusual when they use Alignment languages, or that when people treat their alignment-talk as mystical nonsense or vague moralizing (n.b. many people like either or both of those things!) they're being anything other than just a bit dumb or lazy. People have to figure this out, and what they piece together is probably wrong.
Note that due to some perhaps obvious dynamics people of all alignments mostly grow up in societies where it's accepted that there's heaven for the good and hell for the bad, or one of the standard corruptions of this idea (living on in people's memories, heaven for the people who do the right rituals and hell for everyone else, rebirth into an infinite layer of heavens and hells around which this world is somewhere in the middle, whatever.) Chaotic souls Know this is incorrect but have a number of incentives not to say it out loud. Lawful souls Know it's true. Neutral souls hear everyone saying it and so, aside from a few village atheists, don't have a good reason to doubt consensus.
Magic that interacts with Alignment doesn't necessarily clear things up either. If you start using alignment detection spells, you'll get some interesting correlations, sure. You might even start burning people at the stake and feel good about it: the Universe is backing you up! There are scientific studies! But those correlations are going to miss out on a lot, and some of those Chaotic victims burnt at the stake are going to be, from any objective measure, good people who have passed the greatest of moral tests.
Cults of Chaos!
Chaotic souls often lead lives of quiet desperation and confusion, but they're especially likely to join weird cults. This has two basic reasons: one, they Know the dominant religious outlook is incorrect (the Chaotic outlook can almost never become the dominant one, outside of weird brief situations where a cult captures the state on some weird Chaos project), and two, they need one way or another to assuage their fears about the afterlife.
Remember, mind you, that Chaotic souls don't have inverted moral intuitions. They don't intuit that kicking puppies is good, they intuit that it's awful, just like you. But they also just intuit it's the kind of thing that gets them sent to Counternomian Heaven.
Accordingly, Chaos Cults often really play up the aesthetics of evil, because it's the kind of thing that "feels" like it would damn you without inspiring actual guilt. Many Chaos Cults are just play-acting in this sense: they're made up of decent people who don't have what it takes for real-deal evil. Just shit on some holy symbols, gurgle the names of some demons, and call it a night: that should be enough, right? Right?
Then you've got cults that are actually, efficiently trying to do as much evil in as short a span as possible. They've done the math. But note that in some way's they're often just as reluctant to descend into snuff-film stuff as the cosplayers: it's unpleasant, after all, and there are more efficient and less risky ways to make the world a worse place.
Sadistic jerks exist, of course. Neutral or Chaotic sadistic jerks often end up as the leaders of Chaos Cults for the same reason sadistic jerks end up as the leaders of cults generally. Base rates mean there are many more Neutral ones, so you’ll frequently have a Chaos Cult led by a jerk whose attempts to give religious explanations are pure gibberish. The speakers of the Chaos language will have to do some work kludging it into something workable.
Then there are the really ambitious ones. Some Chaos Cults, reasoning that everyone is like them, work to corrupt the rest of the world into permanent immorality to save as many souls as possible. Others form gnostic cells to overthrow an obviously unfair universe.
All of these can and are combined.
feywild and shadowfell
If you like these, they might, potentially, work as Counternomian Heaven and Counternomian Hell, respectively.
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