Why is poison use "evil"?

[Acanous]

Yeah the best way to approach this is that the D&D cosmology is independent of our own. They have a deist universe where the gods are physically present and human-like for the most part. Those gods hold a monopoly on the afterlife and basically split into “teams” who decide what sort of people they want in their afterlife bubble.

In recent years, and by that I mean the last two decades, Wizards has avoided current political trends and real-world parallels as much as possible. They’re experimenting with adding some left-friendly stuff to published adventures and MTG now, and that’s getting heavy push back.
(Not weighing in on one side or the other here, merely stating what has occurred, plz no banhammer)
On that same note, they have grandfathered in alignment systems first coined by the old Cheeto-stained grognards with antisocial tendencies that first brought D&D to life from the bones of Chainmail.

Much is left to the DM, including tweaking alignment, but as written, well, it’s a reflection on the outlook of social hermits from fourty years ago. With how much our society has shifted in morality since then, is it really any wonder we find the alignment system flawed and not representative of our current values?

Part of the fun of immersive role play in a world where gods walk around and witches actually do curse farmers is seeing the differences in outlook that those people would have.

Imagine how a lawful good god of fertility and the harvest would feel about homosexuality, birth control or abortion, or how a chaotic good god of luck would feel about socialized health care, government safety nets, or tiered taxation. Lawful Evil gods would be all for drone strikes, while L/G war gods would find such things dishonourable. The values these gods hold may conflict drastically with our own, match, or be somewhere in between, but they actually have the power to declare stuff objectively good or evil, (or lawful or chaotic, though that’s usually less cared about) and magic that interacts with objective good and evil then agrees with the decision.

Mortals can’t really argue, though they get some leeway to disagree (like the one-step off rule for clerics) without being punished for it in most cases. The closer to embodying your gods values you are, the more power can be made available to you, but the more rigidly you are held to that god’s personal dogma.

In the case of poisons vs ravages, for example, the entire thing is completely arbitrary and hypocritical, but that’s ok because the gods are flawed and probably got mad that team evil had all the poisons but couldn’t walk back that decision.