Shadowrun is actually a less lethal game than many games. The reason being that, while a character can die very easily, PCs all have Edge which can essentially be extra lives. In D&D, a dead character is dead, and the magic to bring him back is expensive and high level. In SR, there's no revival magic (at least, not that works the way anyone wants it to) but even a freshly made character can take otherwise lethal wounds several times depending on their Edge score.
That said, in most games I play, characters getting geeked isn't common anyways.
Edge is situationally very useful, but burning Edge to not die, doesn't mean that the char gets away, etc. If you're facing a HTR, and the team's making their getaway, you'd only be burning Edge to spend the rest of that char's life in prison . . . or worse.
Yes, I think SR is very lethal, but it's that way on its own without a GM pulling out all the stops or bringing a -- in my opinion -- flawed world and game view into the mix.
Now, off the rails:
We're the colonists evil when they invaded north america and killed the indigenous population?
Yes.
As for Shedim, just because something is acting in accordance with its nature doesn't mean that it's not evil. It's very nature could be evil. "Nature" is not evil or good. It simply is, true, but the big difference, in SR, between a Shedim and an earthquake is that the Shedim has the Sapience characteristic.
The problem with the latter part of this conversation is that we're dealing with competing moral philosophies that are at odds. Does Utilitarianism have some problems? Certainly, you can justify slavery, harvesting organs from healthy people, and a whole other host of problematic actions because it's for the greater good. Kant's Categorical Imperative is likewise problematic because someone hiding Jews in Germany in WWII would be immoral by lying to the authorities about the presence of said Jews when they came knocking. But might is right, or, who holds the gun is, in my opinion, the least defensible position of them all, and really
nobody -- read very few people -- actually believes it. If you hold that position then you are ok with female genital mutilation, child pornography, gas bombings of civilians, rape, theft, murder, etc. simply because one
can.
