I did a (mostly)pacifist playthrough, but it was, naturally, incredibly hard. It is possible to run away from most offensive situations but there were a couple of times I was forced to fight....or die. Then again, if given more thought, I imagine it is entirely possible.

If you know your Liberalism, you would know that by the 3 basic rules of liberalism, clearly quite that every individial has the right on his own

*life
*freedom
*property

If any of these 3 are attacked by somebody else, that is called THE INNIATIATION OF VIOLENCE and that would always result in

*murder
*slavery
*theft

Life * Freedom = Property
stealing (or taxing) property, for that end is to that end not only theft, it is slavery and murder as well (since you spend part of your life and freedom to gain property, any theft of thee fruits also hindres the other 2.

property : life = freedom
Any limits on freedom, are slavery, and that will also result in theft, and murder (as clearly when enslaved, your private productivity drops, and your life expensincy as well)

Property : freedom = life
any limits on life, are murder, and that will also result in slavery and theft (as clearly with less years to live you will have less property to make, and less freedom to express)

In liberty it IS allowed to use violence to protect yourseld against theft, slavery or murder against others who wish to take it.

However if you are a pacifist as well : not only the INNIATIATION of violence if forbidden (as is the case in liberalism) but ANY violence, including defensive violence.

As you already quoted in paccifism :
the belief that any violence, including war, is unjustifiable under any circumstances, and that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means.
? the refusal to participate in war or military service because of such a belief.

Hence you are not only not allowed to steal, but ALSO not allowed to get it back after it is stolen from you.

You can't be liberalism. You can be liberal or a liberalist, though. Just sayin'.

the theory behind it is called liberalism.

I know. But a person can't be liberalism. If a person believes in liberalism he/she is a liberalist, not liberalism. And you might want to learn the difference between your/you're before you continue pestering people in every topic about the most random off-topic nonsense.

Back on topic:

If you decide to be a pacifist, I think you should make your own rules. You'll be attacked plenty of times and especially when you level up there'll be stronger enemies who are harder to avoid. You'll have to find your way around them and turning animals on them doesn't seem aggressive to me. But that brings up another question; is conjuring/spawning creatures to fight for you aggressive or not? That's up to you to decide.

Back on topic, ok :

Well to give this topic a serious responce I have to start by being caption ovious :
Oblivion is an open end game, and you deciede how you want to play, if you just want to run around without ever doing a mission, and enjoy that, well thats fine
Though it is clear that thats not how the game originally is designed.

Now your First question : is it possible to play oblivion without killing anyone/anything?

This very question is reason enough for debate, as you the first possible called this "a pacifist character" others also called liberalist a faction and many varations come in between.

Let I start with answering your pure statement is it possible :
Well if we go by the first rule of the game "You deside" than : yes.
However if you ment "is it possible to do the main-questline and/or most of the missions without killing anyone or anything" than the answer must clearly be no.
The vast mayority of missions, including many in the mainstory-arc require you killing someone or something, simple fact.

You should therefore not ask is it possible but "is it possible for me", and the answer on that question falls or stands with how much you long to complete missions.

To go forth on that, your next question was "Is it possible to play as a pacifist character"

well since paccifism is a litteral theory it is NOT free to play style (true you would be free to play any style you want.. but if you don't apply by the rules it would -technically- not be paccifism - even if you'd like to call it that.

: the belief that any violence, including war, is unjustifiable under any circumstances, and that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means.
? the refusal to participate in war or military service because of such a belief.

A TRUE pacifist would not do any of these quests that would require killing anyone or anything by ANY means. It does not matter if you let others do the killing for you, manipulate them to do so, and as a pacifist you are against violence ITSELF, not only your violence. If you WOULD charm anyone it would to PREVENT them to attack or kill anything or anyone, not to enforce it. So more this clearly would give the same answers..

NO you cannot play oblivion as a pacifist, if you want to do missions.
Yes you can play oblivion if you wish to ignore most of the missions.

True, if we stick to pacifism only, theft aint forbidden by it, however as moral as true pacifism is (you would not even fight to defent your own daughter being [censored] and killed, nor even push the rapist away, as pushing would be violence, nor would you call the police, as that would require you to cause violence (as the police would not do that violence had you not call them) to this extend.. we must ask ourself is theft a form of violence?

We surely can state that theft is a crime?
lets see how a crime is stated :
"a crime is an act against the rules a group of people see as normative within their mids"

and when we look up violence
"violence is an act that enforces your will against the will of somebody elses"

Now with this in mind.. do the people that you steal from want you to TAKE the item? no they want not.. you inforce YOUR will (the wish to have the item) upon them, even if this is used without them knowing it.
as such theft is violence, and forbidden for a pacifist.
And without the allowance to TAKE items.. as well as causing anny killing, well almost all missions are impossible.
so unless you want to live as a NPC, oblivion would be not playable.

So NO it is not possible to play as a pacifist, case closed.

However you also asked "is it possible to play as a Jesus-like character"
well lets see, Jesus DID enect violence, he certainly was no liberal nor was he a
He knocked down peope out of HIS temple, he cursed a three and it was dead the next day, and he sure would not care to kick some deamon ass! Heck he is GENERAL of the most epic battle to come!
also he broke into the house of the devil, tied him to his own chair and robbed his place blind!
so YES! very much possible to play as a Jesus-character! in many ways.

Deadra and undead are clearly creations of evil.. so may be killed.. a Jesus style char would not be to good for killing.
However the killing of any human would be a big no-no even if they were evil. (for let God judge them, after life)
Also the killing of creatures would be no problem at all as they are given to US to use as we need them!
Jesus (By decree of Gods His Father) does also hold the rights to all property on earth and only ALLOWS people to use them.. as such He can take whatever he likes, and only chooces to follow the rules.
He does however abide by the law most of the time, as God granted the law that power.

Now to widen out (these last rules are speculative)
If you use the Aedra as Gods... all races are good, exept the orcs and dunmer, as they serve the deadra that in this game are deamons.
however all LIFE was created by them.. so you could see them just as sinners... (and only the deadra monsters that ARE created by them evil)
you could also NEVER use deadric weapons tools and such, as those are made by evil.

But when you are upto a more biblical way : God (the real one) created only MAN, that is imperial, nord, redguard and NO others.
(bretons are mixbred of elves (that would be creations of darkness) and man.. and like the tribe in ancient israel that was born of human womans and deamons.. they must be destroyed too!)
so instead of being pacifist you would be a true crusader... killing EVERYTHING that's born of evil and of the wrong race..)

whether you go rampage of not would be how you see "God" and "evil".
any "jesus" character would only kill creations of darkness.. (and no creations of the light, not even if they walk the path of darkness) it's up to you who are creations of darkness and who is not.

a jesus path would be after all a whole lot more paladin, than priest;))

Next the LIBERAL path (that would be in between those two)

Well stealing would be a nono for a liberal, killing well that depends... you may no INNIATE violence, so killing somebody in his sleep would be a big nono..
however fighting off you somebody that attacks you and if neccecary kill him, sure go ahead!
you have the right in liberalism to DEFEND!

keep in mind that if they attack you because you walked into THEIR house.. that does not count.. as you were entering THEIR property and they have a right to defend too!

some quests would not be doable.. must most would be... so a Liberal character, that would not steal, not break and enter and not inniate violence, would very much be possble.

Some would be moral dilemma's though
-killing a man because he may have [censored] and killed some woman? defence is one thing.. but revenge? (inniation of DB)
-casting a spell that would turn off some tortches of noble priests and would cause them to be butcherd (true they were invaders of the home of somebody else... but still?)

fine line, but could be fun;)

and finally if you want to only ask :
is it possible to play character that is not liberal, not jesus like, not paccifist, but just does not kill itself.
well yes sure.. theres many ways in the game you can let others do the killing for you.. command humanoid, command creature, charm, reflect damage.. placing poiseness items near them so they might eat it..
luring them into a city so the guards will attack them
many many ways.. both dark and light..

it would not suit any of the groups listed by you, but it would suit most of the desires you'd had and a perfectly fine playstyle could be made out of it.

You're not really on topic at all, TEStoegang. You're just pontificating on moral/ethical issues, and missing completely the spirit of the original question.

There are in-game statistics kept on creatures/humans "killed." It is possible to play large areas of the game keeping those statistics at zero.

It is possible to complete the tutorial without killing anything. I have done it. No moral issues there. Just run, dodge, sneak, and block when attacked by the assassins.

It is possible, through the use of Illusion skills and a lot of running and dodging, to complete several sub-quests of the Main Quest. It's possible to do all of the Mages Guild Recommendations without anyone being killed, with the exception of the Skingrad Recommendation; Skingrad requires that all of the zombies be killed, but...
It's possible to loot dungeons, buy houses, close Oblivion Gates, brew potions, ride horses, and do a large number of small quests, without ever killing anybody. I'd call that "playing the game."

Can you do everything in the game that way? No. But you can certainly play the game.

You say you can close Oblivion Gates without killing anyone. How'd you suppose he'd do that? Just run through the Oblivion plane? That just doesn't like right to me.

My Paxelle character has closed 8 gates without killing anyone.

Sneak. Invisibility makes it easy. Cast Calm or Paralyze on somebody who's in your way (Paralyze if you need to get a key from them, for instance.) And yes, your character can run from enemies; your objective is to go grab the sigil stone, not to try to rid the Dead Lands of daedra!

Touché.

I just imagined it would look kind of silly when you grab the sigil stone with about 30 enemies chasing you down.

On the other hand, when you're running for your life, you're too busy to stop and count the guys behind you...

you can actually, you wouldnt really beable to do quests but you can freely roam around the world without killing anything. just use a COC console command to get out of the starting area. then you can use showclass and showbirthsign to make your character. Then you can use a command to make enemies not attack you.

Or, for a better roleplaying experience, SubRosa's http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=33463

I built my "Wild Elf" character around that mod.

Mm hmm there you go.

Does luring enemies to the guards count as not killing?

I say it does not count, because luring is more of a passive-aggressive behavior. In my opinion, it is not the same as killing the enemy myself.

The enemy (especially if it's supposed to be an enemy with intelligence) technically should have the option of turning around, thinking "gee, this is wrong, I should leave that fleeing humanoid alone" or whatever, and leaving us alone. In vanilla Oblivion, enemies never do this on their own, not without some sort of rare glitch involved, but this does not mean that us luring an enemy to its death is the same as doing the killing ourselves.

I'm betting there's a mod that makes some enemies (especially NPCs) do a double-take when they see a posse of guards they'll have to face after we lure them, am I right modders?

Well.... that touches on the issue at hand here. Technically, as far as the game goes, it doesn't count as killing - that is, the game doesn't credit you with a death and add it to your statistics. So in a straightforward, metagaming sense, that's not killing.

More philosophically - for instance, to Jeff, my Breton pacifist - yes, that would count as killing. To him, anything that he might do that he has reason to believe will lead to harm to someone else is wrong. That's one of the reasons he's still stuck in the IC - he knows that if someone starts chasing him out in the wilderness, there's pretty much nothing he can do other than to hope to get away. He can't run to the guards, because he knows the guards will attack whoever's chasing him, and he can't in good conscience allow that to happen.

It would certainly be possible though to play a character who only seeks to not be personally responsible for a death - who sees whatever a pursuer might suffer at the hands of a guard to be a matter between the pursuer and the guard, and ultimately more the pursuer's responsibility than anyone else's, since the guard is simply doing his job, as expected. I don't have a character specifically like that, but many do, and I see no particular issue with it.

Heh, is it even possible to kill Daedra? If so, it seems yanking a sigil stone is a mighty fine way to instantly kill loads of them (as in every living one still inside the gate in question).
On the other hand, it is not possible to kill Daedra. It is believed one can only banish them to return again. If so, you could slice and dice them without killing them?

Questions, questions, questions. I suspect the fundamental question boils down to a choice one makes after reviewing the OP's original question: 'Is it possible to play Oblivion without killing anyone/anything?'

1. If by this we mean without directly killing something oneself, the answer is clearly yes, to include a great many quests (thanks to illusion and conjuration). Note that OP never used the work 'pacifist'.
2. If by this we mean without indirectly causing the death of something, the answer is that it becomes much more difficult.

Hmmm... I visualize the closing of a gate as the removal of what's holding open the portal between Oblivion and Mundus, not the destruction of that "world." This is supported by the fact that one can go just down the road, enter another gate, and be right back in the same world again.

The gate is obviously opened from the Oblivion side, by erecting the sigil tower and powering up a sigil stone. That suggests that there was a persistent world there before the stone was put into place, and there's no reason to believe that that world would cease just because the gate's supporting stone was removed. The lore we find in SI seems to suggest that the various Oblivion realms are actually extensions or reflections of their respective Daedric Princes, and not truly separate from those princes at all.

On the other hand, they're only getting what they deserve, anyway!

I think what Acadian is getting at though, is that is there a big boom after you yank out the stone, that lays waste to the sigil tower? Assuming the stone is some sort of focal point of infernal energy (which is my guess, as there is that big fountain of fire rising up to it), then once it is gone, might not that energy go someplace else? Perhaps in a most destructive manner (this being the Prince of Destruction's energy after all).

Sure.

No. Not really. I guess you could wander around the Imperial City and talk to people for hundreds of hours. But that would seem rather boring. You can travel and try to avoid enemies with invisibility or speed, but that may also not be feasible. Maybe you can also sneak into some parts of some dungeons with the same, but again not very feasible.

The game really is all about killing NPCs and Creatures.

Somewhat unfortunate. But there are very few quests that don't require killing something.

This is all true. I'm probably gonna see if I can make a character like this in Skyrim. We shall see...