Concern For Animals in Jonah

The story of Jonah reluctantly traveling to Ninevah to warn its people of Yahweh's oncoming wrath is known more for the topic of mercy than it is for anything else.  The only clue as to the sins of the city is in Jonah 3:8, where the unnamed king of Ninevah calls on his people to give up their violence, the sins likely consisting of sadism, violent murders, and unbiblical forms of torture.  Turn away they did according to the story--so much that God withheld the destruction of the city to Jonah's frustration.  These are some of the more widely familiar parts of this rather short book of the Bible that many people who had any affiliation with church in their younger days have probably encountered.

One thing that is less emphasized is what God says when Jonah overreacts to the death of a plant he was using for shade as he waits to see what might befall Ninevah (in chapter four).  God mentions to Jonah that he is so concerned about the plant when though he had no role in growing it before asking if he (God) should not be concerned about the more than 120,000 people in Ninevah in addition to the animals.  It is this last detail that can be overlooked so easily.  Even amidst the talk of judgment on a city of wicked people, God mentions that Ninevah is home to many animals and refers to them as if their presence is something to take into consideration in destroying the city.

Animals do not carry God's image with or in them as humans do in Christian theology, yet this does not mean they are of no importance at all according to the Bible.  They are just secondary to humans as far as terrestrial life goes.  Even so, there was nothing about the impending possible judgment on Ninevah or concern for the moral standing and destruction of its inhabitants that excluded concern for the animals in the city.  God still cared about both the human and animal life that could have been affected if the city did not repent.  Moreover, humans are instructed to as well.

Offenses against humans need not be focused on in a way that totally ignores animal abuse or the general wellbeing of non-human animals.  In fact, as multiple places in Mosaic Law indicate, part of being a righteous person by Biblical standards is not mistreating animals.  For example, Exodus 23:5 commands people to help the ox or donkey of their enemies if they see it struggling alone.  Humans take priority over animals to the point that killing an animal needlessly is not morally equivalent to murdering a person (compare Exodus 21:12-14 to verses in Exodus 22 about losing an animal or letting it die due to negligence), but animals still have significance.

God cares enough about non-human animals--for people are also animals in the sense that humans are creatures with bodies like horses, fish, or birds--that he specifically mentions them when describing why life needs to not be trivialized even in judgment.  Animals are not forgotten or doomed to neglect under Christian ethics.  From the commands of Mosaic Law to verses like Jonah 4:11 where God mentions humans and animals alike as warranting concern, it is clear that the human hierarchy over animals does not entail the exploitation or neglect of animals whether the context is ordinary life or the literal annihilation of a city of injustice.

Evangelism Without Philosophical Apologetics

Unless you have previously discussed a philosophical matter with a person--and literally everything is philosophical--there is no point in just leaping into a conversation with someone about a grand idea without having started by discussing foundational matters.  If Christianity is true, evangelism, or discussing the gospel with others, is an act of grand significance.  Why then do so many Christians put no effort at all into even starting to evaluate the ideas they are putting forth and the ideas they might clash against on a level beyond two people just making random assertions out of prior beliefs they are just assuming?  At best, many Christians are oblivious or apathetic enough about what philosophical truths can be known to start evangelism or general philosophical conversations with a comment about Jesus instead of starting with self-verifying axioms and working up from there.

Contrary to what a typical evangelical apologist like William Lane Craig would suggest, there is no point or value in evangelism apart from an explicit context of rationalistic philosophy.  Evangelism is in this context just another random set of assertions by someone who is often unwilling or unable to think about deeper concepts without constant conversation.  If someone came up to you and said they have been visited by alien life, the only rational response at a mental level is to wonder about the epistemology of what they are saying, and some of the only conversational response that is not pointless involves broaching truths about logical possibility, epistemology, and the distinction between evidence and proof.  As a rationalist, I would recognize the story as logically possible if it did not involve any contradictions of itself or reason and refrain from belief while acknowledging any genuine evidence that comes to light.

Evangelism needs to be handled the same way as this or any other conversation where philosophy is more prominent: by both participants looking to reason in a purely rationalistic manner and not failing to see past mere words or personal persuasion one way or another.  How might a standard evangelical Christian respond to someone who tried to desperately bring them to the belief that there are extraterrestrial beings with a direct interest in our lives and did not even try to clarify anything about the epistemology or metaphysics of the situation beyond appealing to assumptions?  A rational person would respond to a Christian evangelizing apart from an already established context of rationalism in which a subcontext of apologetics has taken hold, not that either party needs the other to think about or reason out such things.

Anyone who tries to embrace any worldview at all outside of rationalism, meaning any irrationalistic or self-contradictory worldview is automatically false at the start, is a fool who cannot deserve to be listened to except for mockery and entertainment.  This true of someone who professes allegiance to Christianity or to any other compatible or incompatible worldview.  Only what is self-evident can serve as the foundation (logical axioms and one's own existence) and most evangelists try to avoid addressing the very core of epistemology and metaphysics except when pressed by others.  As James says about the body without the spirit (consciousness) and commitment without deeds, evangelism without apologetics--and apologetics in the constant shadow of rationalistic philosophy at that, a kind that does not pretend like what cannot be proven by pure reason is knowable--is dead.

Formal Debates

Debate, including formal debate between two people, is in no way a replacement for simply thinking in alignment with the laws of logic and letting all else fade away when it is not necessary or relevant to a given philosophical issue.  People in general look to conversations instead of reason (one can do both, but few seem to do this as well), so it is hardly surprising that formal debate, a prolonged conversation of sorts where two sides present claims, is more likely to be thought of as an intellectual necessity than rationalistic reflection that is needed to even understand the debate without making any assumptions--and that can be engaged in without bothering to listen, watch, or think about debate between other people at all.

Intentionally waiting to try to come to philosophical truths until one can hear or read the claims of others on a constant basis is a lazy, haphazard method of worldview development that ignores the universal accessibility of reason and the fact that not all logical truths and metaphysical concepts need any sort of social or sensory prompting.  Hanging on every word of some debater without personal reflection on one's own or without rationalistic evaluation of their claims is likewise an irrational response.  It prioritizes language and interactions with others or their written/spoken offerings instead of reason itself.  Anything short of the majority of and the most primary kind of attention being given to reason is philosophically incomplete or outright false.

Listening to or watching debates is an easy way for a pseudo-rational or pseudo-deep person to make themselves feel intellectually deep even if they are not attempting self-guided rationalistic thought at all, enamored by appeals to authority, and in the habit of divorcing core parts of their worldview from how they decide to live.  Since most debates feature irrationalists who are too stupid or inconsistent to even avoid basic fallacies and social interaction is unecessary to understand at least logical axioms and some of the metaphysical and epistemological truths that follow from them, no rationalistic person would truly think debates are vital or a necessity for personal worldview development anyway.

Unless those actually participating in a debate are presenting ideas that they already reasoned out (and since two contrary ideas cannot be true at once, at least one of them did not do a competent job of this by default) or would at least be thinking about whether or not they partake in debates, they, too, are guilty of the anti-rationalistic emphasis on linguistic presentation, social interaction, and appeals to authority.  Reason has no epistemological equal and there is nothing else that literally makes things true by necessity or disqualifies entire concepts from possibility whether or not anyone at all was to recognize this directly.

Someone who is correct on a point is not correct because of anything other than how aware they are of what does and does not logically follow from a concept or verifiable truth.  Truth itself, in fact, would not exist if logical axioms did not make it so.  That the laws of logic epistemologically and metaphysically prop up all things is what makes them accessible to everyone, and thus to look to others as the arbiters of truth is inherently stupid and misguided.  Formal debate often accomplishes little besides continuing a culture where someone's identity and background are mistaken as more foundational than their sheer rationality even though the former are ultimately irrelevant to truth in every sense.  Each individual could look to reason themselves apart from or in the midst of observed debates, and almost none will.

Entertainment Inspired By Revelation

Entertainment inspired by the Bible is not something to fear or shun even when it is created by non-Christians.  Rather than engage with and analyze such works of entertainment as intriguing products of artistic minds, plenty of Christians act like they are automatically uneasy at the thought of anyone changing part of a Biblical idea despite them not necessarily presenting it as a fully accurate depiction of Christian theology.  Of particular popular culture significance and controversy are works inspired by Revelation, especially video games.  In the controversy or focus on the games' artistic merits, it could be easy for some to overlook a potentially surprising detail about more than one title.

Recent video games loosely inspired by the book of Revelation tend to also feature imagery or references from Genesis as well, which is fitting and ironic given that Genesis is the first book of the Bible that starts with creation and Revelation is the last book that, regardless of how literal or figurative certain passages are, ultimately concludes with the final judgment of the unsaved to the second death and the eternal life of the saved in New Jerusalem.  There is a theological link between the beginning and end of the Biblical story beyond the fact that they are opposing sides of the same broad set of interconnected stories: things like the tree of life appear in both books.  Some video games intentionally or unintentionally reflect the overlap between the two.

Darksiders and Agony are two examples of creative games (even if the latter has plenty of artistic problems and misrepresents the Christian afterlife more than many other works of entertainment do) that draw predominantly from Revelation but also include elements of events or places found in Genesis.  In the Darksiders series, the playable Four Horseman are actually Nephilim, beings almost exclusively mentioned in Genesis and briefly mentioned later in Numbers 13:33, yet they are based on the four riders of Revelation 6 and tied to apocalyptic events that start when the seven seals are broken.  In Agony, players guide a damned soul through an unbiblical version of hell only to eventually learn that he is Nimrod from Genesis, a man associated with an empire that spanned Babylon and Ninevah.

It is in one sense not wholly unlikely that multiple developers of different eschatological games based on elements of Christian theology would draw from Genesis as well as from Revelation since the two books are somewhat connected beyond the fact that both are in the Bible.  It is nonetheless a noteworthy pattern that games as different as Darksiders and Agony would make somewhat obscure Biblical figures from Genesis the identities of the playable characters while putting them in an eschatological setting or in hell itself.  Plot-wise and conceptually, this is a great move for the sake of Biblical references, even if the Biblical Nephilim and hell are very much not what they are presented as in the games.

Beyond appreciation for the artistic style and risks of games like Darksiders or Agony, the fact that secular people in the entertainment world are interested in Biblical ideas, words, and imagery--no matter how rare it is for these aspects of the Bible to be appropriated into something that in other ways contradicts Christian theology--is not something thoughtful and intelligent Christians (aka, not evangelicals, fitheists, or those who cling to traditions for the sake of tradition) should be frightened or discouraged by.  If nothing else, entertainment like that inspired by Revelation and to a lesser extent Genesis can call attention to theological concepts in a culturally helpful way.

Life For Life

The phrase "life for life" is less used than the phrase "eye for eye," yet both are found in Mosaic Law.  The false extrapolation of "eye for eye" to actions that have nothing to do with Lex Talionis is one of the most severe misunderstandings of Biblical ethics that inevitably involves pure hypocrisy, with "life for life" almost never getting cited as supposed justification for, say, raping rapists or stealing from thieves in the misapplied way "eye for eye" is taken out of its strict context of nonsexual assault leading to permanent or extreme injury (contrast this with how Exodus 21:18-19 says to handle lesser assaults, even assaults with an object like a stone).

Life for life simply means murdering someone forfeits a person's right to not be killed--just as other Biblical capital offenses like kidnapping, adultery, or rape do.  It does not even mean that the execution must always take the same form as the method of murder, both because this is not part of the prescription and because some forms of killing like flogging someone to death with more than 40 lashes would violate separate commands and therefore disproves the idea that "life for life" means people must be tortured to death.  This is perhaps also because life for life is not even about murder having some special status that deserves death; after all, multiple other sins do as well according to Mosaic Law.

One way this could be true that might be obvious to people who actually think about the issue without assumptions is that capital punishment might be what all evils past a certain extent of depravity deserve, and murder happens to fall past that line along with certain other actions.  It is not necessarily about killing people who murder others in order to enforce Lex Talionis for its own sake.  Perhaps even if the Bible did not say that permanent injuries inflicted during assaults make someone deserve the same injuries as is the core of Lex Talionis, it would still prescribe execution for murder for this reason.

It is at least clear that someone's life is not taken for murder just because every unjust act towards a person deserves the same act in return.  In fact, the Bible very blatantly rejects this because Lex Talionis, while entirely literal, does not apply to actions like rape that can actually be far worse than mere murder.  Life for life cannot be soundly extrapolated to mean rape for rape, theft for theft, adultery for adultery, slander for slander, more than forty lashes for more than forty lashes, and so on, because Lex Talionis specifically does not apply in these cases according to the limited scope of verses like Exodus 21:23-24 and the fact that these other acts are individually prohibited or given different punishments.

All of these things are true at once about Biblical morality.  Mosaic Law teaches a literal Lex Talionis that is loosely associated with capital punishment for murder while plenty of extreme tortures (like flogging beyond 40 lashes) and acts of sexual assault are completely separate from "eye for eye" or "life for life" penalties (see Deuteronomy 22:25-27 and 25:11-12 for examples of the latter).  Most Christians just neither care enough about the moral issues of justice they claim to be invested in nor have personally developed the alignment with reason necessary to understand this kind of nuance.  The Bible says all it needs to for someone to put elements of Mosaic Law together and realize every single one of these things with the light of deductive reasoning free of assumptions.

Game Review--Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition (Switch)

"The day you raised your scythe against us, I was born.  And soon, I will be all.  The Tree of Life has fallen to my darkness, from withered root to fruitless limb - and even Death himself will not escape it!"

--Absalom, Darksiders II

The first Darksiders introduces one of the most unique pseudo-Christian stories in apocalyptic fiction, with its use of the likely figurative "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" as living entities that enact the will of the Creator and the Charred Council, a being with three faces created by God to maintain a balance between the forces of Heaven and Hell.  The first game provides the backdrop to the second: War, the first of the Horsemen (one of whom is actually female), arrived on Earth ahead of time without knowing the prerequisites had not actually been met, and he was confined to a sort of cosmic prison by the Council.  Reacting to this framing of War, Death, the second of the Horsemen, seeks to establish his brother's innocence and undo the extinction of humanity brought about by the premature fights between angelic and demonic beings in the first game.  Darksiders II expands on both the theological hierarchy and lore of the franchise while becoming more of an RPG than its predecessor.  Even a handful of horribly constructed puzzles/sections that might call for a walkthrough do not overshadow its general excellence.

Production Values

The art style for this sequel has more of an almost cel-shaded look than the first game does, which is still right at home in the series aesthetic thanks to the events and characters still getting treated as serious parts of a grim world.  Blurry background details do not infringe on how the game looks and runs in the immediate vicinity of Death.  Animations in and outside of combat are mostly very smooth, highlighted when Death dodges enemy attacks without the frame rate ever suffering (at least in my recalled experience).  The game did freeze up twice to the point that I had to restart it, an issue that is not a graphical problem as much as a technical one.  Of course, this is a Switch port of a somewhat old game made for consoles two generations prior to the era of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, so the Switch is entirely capable of handling it even if the are some freezes here and there.  The initial quality of the game upon its original release is preserved well, it would seem, with both the visuals and audio.  Expanded RPG-like dialogue options give more opportunities for voice acting to an already cinematic franchise.

Gameplay

As with the first game, dungeons comparable to those in the Legend of Zelda franchise await players, complete with chests, bosses, dungeon maps, room keys, and sometimes new items.  Death eventually has an array of distinctive weapons or tools, such as the Deathgrip that allows him to pull himself to certain objects from a distance and vice versa, that enable progression in the main story and the finding of optional chests scattered around the lands.  Also like in the first game, a horse can be summoned in specific areas for Death to ride (after all, he is one of the Four Horsemen).  The other aspects of the game are actually different than those of the first one.

For starters, enemies periodically drop new items or articles of clothing with differing levels of primary damage, defense, elemental bonuses like fire damage, and so on.  This is a new development that makes Darksiders II more like a traditional third-person RPG than its predecessor was.  Some of the mandatory or random equippables are much more useful than others, going so far as to restore missing health for every successful swing of the blade or raise the chance of execution kills.  Additional combos can also be purchased directly from several merchant characters separate from loot drops even though they will buy unwanted items as well.  This preserves the God of War-like elements of the first game to some extent.

Story

Some spoilers are below!

One of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse named Death, in the aftermath of some of the events in the first game where the Apocalypse happens before it was supposed to, wants to bring humankind back to life after its destruction so that his brother and fellow Horseman War can be absolved of his false accusations of prematurely bringing about the Apocalype.  He holds to the idea of his brother's innocence even when others question it, descending to find the Tree of Life.  Death encounters the Makers and a force called Corruption as he desperately tries to bring human life back to a world fought over by angelic and demonic forces.  The Tree of Life brings him to the land of the dead and beyond, the journery leading him to the realization that all conscious beings besides God depend on the Well of Souls, and it is the Well that could help him restore humanity.

Intellectual Content

In addition to regular environmental puzzles, explorarion, and collectible hunting, Darksiders II features the return of the metaphysics of a universe loosely inspired by the Bible.  The Nephilim are added alongside Corruption and the Makers.  The Makers are a kind of blacksmith-oriented race that is said to have created the architecture of Heaven and Hell and even to have brought other worlds into creation.  While the Nephilim are very briefly mentioned as the product of seeming human-angel sex early in Genesis (in the game they are a "cursed union of Angel and Demon), the Charred Council, the Makers, and the Corruption of the game are all extra-Biblical entities devised for the series.  The deity of Darksiders and Lucifer are both largely background figures, with the Charred Council serving as a third party to maintain balance.  So far, each game I have played ignores the fact that there is no such thing as too much righteousness, only the foolish assumption that an amoral thing is good or evil or vice versa.  It is neither logically possible nor Biblical for good and evil, if they exist, to both need to be in existence or for their proponents to have equal influence, for it could never be good or beneficial in any way except one of petty selfishness to tolerate evil for the sake of balance.

Conclusion

Few game sequels add to the core mechanics and style of the first from a series as much as Darksiders II does.  The original Darksiders was not an RPG, even if it had elements very reminiscent of the pseudo-RPG series Legend of Zelda.  Darksiders II rennovates the gameplay to the point that it is a different style of game other than that they share a third-person camera, all as it expands upon the Nephilim, the significance of humanity, and the Tree of Life in a pseudo-Biblical way (no, it is not Biblically accurate, but like the film Noah, the Darksiders games are only meant to be somewhat inspired by Biblical theology).  It is an ideal sequel for those who like experimentation within the same series and anyone who appreciates the complexity of THQ's loose adaption of parts of Revelation.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Depending on the enemy type being fought, there can be a lot of stylized blood that appears in short bursts during attacks.

 2.  Profanity:  Very rarely, words like "damn" and "bastard" are used.

The Possibility Of An Afterlife

Nothing a person could experience in life on Earth proves or disproves the basic idea that there is an afterlife of some sort in which human consciousness lives on.  No sensory experience provides anything more than potentially misleading perceptions of an external world of matter (with the exception of truths about the sense of touch necessitating an external world [1]) and no introspective experience provides anything more than an exploration of one's own mind and its thoughts, perceptions, and desires.  In short, neither kind of experience establishes that an afterlife does or does not exist because neither can illuminate what happens after biological death.

There is not even a way to logically prove that there must or must not be an afterlife independent of specific experiences in life, as the only things one could prove about the general concept of an afterlife would be things like the fact that a post-mortem conscious existence is only possible if it does not violate the laws of logic or contradict itself.  To put it differently, reason proves that certain ideas about the afterlife could be true or could not be true, but there is still no way to know if the possible kinds of afterlife are really true or not.  There is not even just one kind of afterlife that is logically possible!

What form an afterlife might take, whether reincarnation to another life on Earth or on some other planet, a spiritual void without matter comprised of empty space and unembodied consciousnesses, or a different physical plane where mind-body composites dwell like the heaven of Biblical theology, is up in the air.  All of these are logically possible even though reincarnation is less like the conventional idea of an afterlife than the others.  As long as there are no metaphysical or conceptual contradictions, a thing is possible even if it is unverifiable or unfalsifiable.

That multiple kinds of afterlife are logically possible, though, does not mean there is not evidence for a particular version of it.  Just as the historical and broader evidence for the veracity of the Bible (which is something that by nature could only be proven in part at most) means there is evidence for the moral obligations described therein, the evidence for the veracity of the Bible means there is evidence for the kind of afterlife described therein.  Of course, not only do most Christians and non-Christians thoroughly misunderstand the heaven and hell of Biblical theology in various ways, but the existence of an afterlife could not be proven by any means before death.

Lastly, there are reasons why a person might contemplate the subject that have nothing to do with an emotional desire to be reunited with dead friends and family (or, if they are still alive, to eventually be together again when all are dead), however.  It is not true that someone who realizes an afterlife is possible just believes one actually exists or that it must be anything other than free of contradictions if it does.  An afterlife might even be one of incredible temporary or eternal torment for every single human, after all, or one that has little relationship to the uncaused cause.  The possibility of an afterlife is something no rational person mistakes for anything but that--not a certainty or a myth, but a genuine possibility that could take many forms if it truly does exist.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html

Pretending Like Christmas Is An Urgent Theological Holiday

With Christmas almost here, it is the season of the year where certain people take Christmas so seriously as a cultural holiday that they champion it as a crucial part of Christian life or attack it due to real or imagined pagan roots.  Like many issues, it is not very difficult at all to understand the truths that can be known about the matter for everyone willing to forsake assumptions of all kinds, but to ask this of many people strikes them in their deluded state as more than they can handle.  Focusing exclusively on whether historical evidence suggests (though it cannot prove) if Christmas had pagan beginnings as a holiday already entails erroneous priorities.  The real question of significance here is whether the holiday matters at all even if Christianity is true.

Whether it is pretending like Christmas as a holiday has no similarity or derivation from pagan roots or pretending like there is anything truly urgent about fighting misguided "culture wars" about Christmas, some Christians treat the Christmas holiday as if it is far more philosophically and theologically vital than it is.  In reality, there is neither a purely logical nor Biblical reason to even care much about Christmas as an issue on any level, and to demand that people celebrate it or to condemn it as immoral both lapse into the stupidity of legalism, of adding to Biblical moral commands in the name of the Bible, which is a hopelessly contradictory goal.  December 25th is almost certainly not when Jesus was born as it is, so even this supposed reason for fervently celebrating Christmas as a Christian is irrelevant.  In fact, there is no way to actually demonstrate, rather than assume, the exact time of year Jesus would have been born at.

The Bible does not specify the time of year at which Jesus was born, though it does provide information about the political context of this story.  Christmas is ultimately one of many arbitrary holidays people celebrate out of culturally manipulated sense of familiarity.  To know this and still personally enjoy Christmas celebration as a rationalist and/or a Christian is not irrational as long as one does not embrace any assumptions about the matter.  To either realize or not realize this and treat Christmas as if revering it is a mark of philosophical or Christian maturity is just asinine.  Even the excuse that people "need" a specific day to celebrate the birth of Jesus on is erroneous because such a thing is neither prescribed by the Bible nor something that only deserves to be celebrated on a single day of the year.

Yes, attacking Christmas and all who celebrate it as pagans (or Christians succumbing to paganism) is stupid because pagan or Christian origins of the formal holiday have absolutely nothing to do with why most people celebrate it now.  All the same, Christmas is not some morally special holiday that means one sins if one does not celebrate it.  Deuteronomy 4:2 would actually condemn those who think Christmas celebration is a moral obligation on the Biblical worldview, for there is not even a hint of an implied command to celebrate the birth of Jesus on an annual basis, and certainly not on December 25th specifically--what an arbitrary date!

Whether Christmas as a holiday has predominantly pagan or Christian roots--or some of both--it has nothing to do with whether Christianity is true, with providing evidence for Christianity's likely veracity, or illuminating anything of real philosophical substance except how irrational what many people believe about an issue like Christmas really is.  Celebrate it or do not celebrate it as you prefer; there is no sin in either choice if Christianity is true.  Either way, there are far more foundational, grand, and pressing philosophical and theological things to focus on.  After all, I have not met or head of a single person who complains about Christmas as being a "pagan" day in the present or who focuses on defending Christmas who ever even got something as basic and vital as the epistemological self-verification of logical axioms right.

Philosophy Is About Truth Rather Than Wisdom

The word philosophy may have initially been used to refer to the love of "wisdom," but it is truth and not wisdom that all valid philosophy aims for.  All beliefs and ideas, the true and false ones alike, are either philosophies or part of one.  It does not matter what words one uses to refer to philosophy; this is what it is.  There is nothing outside the scope of philosophy, nor is such a thing even hypothetically possible.  There are only more or less foundational and more or less important or precise truths and ideas.  Wisdom would be at best a subcategory within the subjects of philosophy that is a mere background issue compared to truth and epistemology.

That the word philosophy was once used in reference to wisdom does not mean that philosophy has anything to do with the pursuit of wisdom by default, with wisdom already being something vague and irrelevant at the start unless by wisdom one means something like rationality or justice, in which case the word wisdom is not needed at all.  A truth is a part of reality no matter how "wise" it is or seems to be.  In fact, there are entire philosophical ideas that, if true, would entail that there is no such thing as wisdom (in most conceptions behind the word wisdom, that is), like nihilism--so the idea that philosophy is always about pursuing wisdom is asinine from the start for this reason as well!

Another side of this that needs to be addressed is the matter of what wisdom even is in the first place.  Some people use the word as if it refers to practicality, in which case there is nothing special about wisdom beyond personal convenience and wisdom is not about truth or morality at all.  Of course, truth is what grants something the sole justification it could have for being believed in the first place, and truth reduces down to logical necessities and deductions.  Wisdom does not have this kind of centrality to all things that reason and truth itself if it is not synonymous with them.

Yet wisdom is usually described as something beyond having knowledge and exercising consistency in one's worldview and actions.  However, when one distinguishes it from such things, it becomes unverifiable (how would one know something is "wise" as opposed to logically verifiable in the case of belief or consistent with a goal or worldview in the case of some course of action?).  Even the Bible, which does mention wisdom in a positive way, scarcely describes what it means, whereas it goes into great detail about how to treat other people and animals and how to regard God.  Wisdom is very clearly not a particularly high priority for the Christian God in his revelation to humanity in the way that metaphysics and moral obligations are.

Philosophy is simply not about wisdom at its core unless by wisdom one means something completely different from the normal usage of the word.  It is about truth, verifiability (without which one could not know truth), and how one lives in light of them.  Whether something is practical is secondary at best to metaphysics and epistemology because convenience and usefulness do not dictate the nature of reality.  Practicality might not even be what someone means by wisdom in the first place, either further distancing the concept of wisdom from mere truth and knowledge or reducing what they mean by the word down to some other concept that is ultimately not about wisdom at all.

Sexual Self-Control

Self-control is one of the handful of possible evidences for a person's moral transformation as a Christian according to Paul in Galatians 5, the "fruits" of the Spirit, as they are called.  This trait could come naturally to someone or require intense focus to develop.  Paul does not say that either men or women have a greater need for self-control or that any sins, including sexual sins, are the natural inclination of anyone because of their gender.  He presents self-control alongside several other virtues as morally positive characteristics to strive for regardless of gender and regardless of whether a situation triggers sexual feelings or not.

It is true that not everyone necessarily has sexual desires or that those who do are not automatically attracted to almost every person of the opposite gender, much less that they are even attracted to someone enough to want to act on it.  It logically follows that sexual self-control is not something every person even needs in the sense that not everyone has the kinds of desires which self-control cannot be developed or experienced apart from.  In addition to this, neither sexual feelings nor reactions to those feelings have anything to do with gender, nor does the Biblical prescription of self-control.  Evangelicalism holds to lies about this, attributing sexual eagerness, promiscuity, and lack of sexual self-control to men and random or practically nonexistent sexual feelings to women.

Men are not naturally attracted in a sexual sense to every attractive woman they see or automatically sexually attracted to a beautiful woman; women are not naturally uninterested in men sexually or unmoved by the male body.  All of these traits are purely individualistic or acquired by submission to cultural expectations rooted in stereotypes of men and women.  Beyond having a certain body--quite literally having certain genitals or chromosomes--men and women are just individual minds.  No psychological trait makes someone a man or woman because they are neither logically tied to the concept of having certain genitals and physiology nor would there be even a single example of men and women having diverse nonphysical traits if their bodies dictated their personalities.

How some sexual desires, degrees of sexual attraction, or a general gravitation towards sexual eagerness wrongly became culturally associated with men or women is a matter of individial people failing to understand reason, themselves, and the epistemological invalidity of social conditioning.  I found it ironic as I embraced rationalism six and a half years ago that not only are gender stereotypes both logically fallacious and disprovable by pure reason, but women in my life were the best examples of people who loved sexuality and did not hide this part of themselves.  It is not even that I have not met men with minimal interest in sexual expression or who have self-control when needed, but that the only people I have met who both are very open about their sexual attractions and say they have very intense sex drives are women, and rationalists and Christians at that.

Thus, these women, including my best friend Gabi whom I have mentioned so many times, are the best examples of sexual self-control I have ever seen!  This completely contradicts the evangelical ideas that people have little to no capacity for self-control, that every person struggles with actually committing sexual sins like having noncommittal sex (which is not identical to premarital sex), and that there is some special sexual status that one has by being a man or woman.  Men and women are equally sexual beings and equally capable of exercising or not needing sexual self-control.  Evangelicalism distorts these truths as it does so many others.

Movie Review--The Ward

"Did you treat a girl named Alice?"

--Kristin, The Ward

Not all of John Carpenter's classic movies are as particularly good as his reputation might suggest.  The original Halloween, for example, is a sometimes uneventful film full of gratuitous 80s cheesiness that happened to introduce a now-iconic killee.  With his most recent movie The Ward, he tells the story of a woman trying to break out of a mental hospital with a supernatural horror bent.  His film is thoroughly halfhearted and lackluster despite some of its cast members making the most out of mediocre moments in the script.  A rushed plot with minimal events, low character development, and more of a surface level exploration of epistemology and mental illness is what The Ward ultimately offers.

Production Values

It is not that The Ward has lots of poor CGI that takes precedence over the characterization or themes.  There is little CGI to be found.  It is also not the case that the characters are all incapable of formulating a plan to escape the hospital--Amber Heard's character even makes some very clever decisions as she tries to escape, especially in the last third.  The issue with the characterization is the bare minimum, often showing itself in short dialogue exchanges that do little to reveal anything about the characters, and not in the sense of keeping them ambiguous in a deep way.  Amber Heard's lead role is one of the one characters to get more backstory, but this occurs near the very end and does not change the very limited characterization beforehand.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A woman named Kristen is apprehended by police just after setting a house on fire, and she is brought to an almost century old mental hospital.  She actually escapes from her room very early on, only to be caught before leaving the building--and even before this escape attempt happens, evidence that someone is intruding into her room unnoticed appears.  It later becomes clearer that a set of items left in Kristin's room have probable ties to a woman named Alice whose history is linked with that of the hospital.

Intellectual Content

Not even the stunted dialogue can avoid touching on the issues of epistemology that are so prominent in the subjects of certain mental disorders or story types.  When Kristin is first brought to the hospital, she is unsure of why she is there, and she is told that she has great emotional trauma, something she denies outright as she demands to know why she is being held.  "How do you know?" her overseer asks Kristen, as if a person cannot immediately know exactly what they are feeling or not feeling with absolute certainty.  It is only the claims of other people or one's own ideas that cannot be proven by logical deduction or immediate introspection that are ultimately unknowable or false.  For peopled with certain mental disorders, this means they have more potential for rationality than the typical imbecilic non-rationalist would probably believe.

Conclusion

The Ward will hopefully not be John Carpenter's laat film, as he could certainly go out with a better fijal project.  Its setting of an asylum is not thematically utilized as well as it is in something like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its horror aspects are lacking in sincerity and intensity compared to those of something like season two of American Horror Story.  Of course, I want to emphasize that neither repeating familiar story elements nor doing something relatively new isa guarantee of quality or successful execution.  The Ward does not suffer because its plot components have often been used before.  It suffers because bare minimum effort is all the writing and directing evidence.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Someone has a tool shoved into their head through the eye area.  Another character is killed by an overload of electric current.  Yet another character has her throat slit onscreen.

 2.  Profanity:  "Bitch" and "goddamn" are used occasionally.

The Desire For Mercy

A desire for mercy does not have to be motivated by a petty, selfish wish to trivialize justice.  The two are still separated so that seeking mercy is by by nature seeking something other than justice, just not necessarily for the sake of injustice.  A common but idiotic misunderstanding of Christian theology holds that there is something obligatory about mercy, when this would by necessity mean that there is an obligation to never treat people as they deserve.  Mercy cannot be obligatory.  There are Christians and non-Christians who would pretend like it is, or at least like it is something that should be desired more than justice.

The confusion seeps into issues of how people should treat others in everyday life and, by far most importantly, what criminal punishments should be in place.  For example, many evangelicals would not have a consistent framework injustice to understand the following in any thorough sense: if it is morally wrong to cut off someone's arm as a punishment (which actually would be prescribed by the Bible is very select cases) but there is a country that practices this, then someone who does not enforce that legal penalty is not merciful.  They are instead just because they did not treat someone in an unjust way by supporting or inflicting an action no one would deserve.

Now, even the typical evangelical who might revere the idea of mercy out of hope for personal gain might still think they care about justice sincerely and consistently.  They just will make avoiding justice for themselves (if not themselves and otherd) an erroneously inflated priority.  The desire for mercy does not have to be rooted in selfishness, yet for most people, it seems to be based on how they trivialize or try to sidestep justice at whim.  Notice that almost no one appears to care about mercy until they think it would be useful for them.  It is true that experiences can prompt sincere thought about mercywith the intention to actually not mistepresent it, but if it was sincere, there would likely be no setting aside of moral concerns, but a more grave desire for mercy so that one can avoid making the same mistakes again.

There is no evidence many people want me4cy out of a sincere desire for positive change and there is much evidence to the contrary (hypocrisy, backsliding into rather major sins, fallacy-riddled stances on mercy, and so on).  Mercy is almost invariably sought out of self-interest and an arbitrary desire to be excused for whatever injustices a person has committed while longing for justice for the sins of others.  One can see that a person who asks for mercy or who at least pretends to care about it is a philosophical fraud the moment they do not show mercy to everyone who asks for it as they have, or when they try to argue for the elevation of mercy over justice despite professing awareness of what it means for something to be just.  Insecure, morally shipwrecked fools are of course the ones who would have the most to gain from believing or acting like mercy has some sort of inherent need to be pursued other than the arbitrary willingness of God or other people.

It is not that mercy is evil, of course.  Only the idea that mercy is obligatory or superior to justice could be evil.  Within Christianity, mercy is a supererogatory (good but not obligatory) quality.  It is just that there could be nothing immoral about a world without mercy no matter how much a person craves it out of sheer subjective preference or out of desperation behind personal guilt.  Whether or not one assesses the issue from the context of Christian theology, it is clear that mercy cannot be obligatory and that, although by definition no one can deserve mercy, those who desire mercy in order to save themselves from true justice would "deserve" mercy less than anyone else.

Livable Wages

Economics is not what anyone intelligent bases their worldview around, as the most explicitly philosophical sides of economics depend on preceding truths about morality and politics, which in turn depend on logic and broader metaphysics.  Economics, especially since all economic systems are in practice social constructs even though there are conceptual truths about economics that hold in the absence of social systems, is far from primary.  This has not deterred either liberals or conservatives from basing a great deal of their prominent strategies and claims around how society should operate at a financial level.

Liberals have their own conceptual misunderstandings that motivate them to believe or say asinine things about economics, to be sure, such as the myth that abusive applications of capitalism are direct expressions of the idea of capitalism.  Conservatives as a whole, though, like to pretend to be rational despite their legions of assumptions, errors, and logical fallacies that are often just the inverse of whatever stupidity liberals advocate.  They will straw man socialistic redistribution of wealth as this inherently tyrannical thing even though it could be voluntary.

Their fear of socialism, and even of ideas that are not actually unaltered socialism, spurs them on to viciously despise anything that involves a change to the American economy as it currently is.  This means they tend to oppose increasing the minimum wage across the nation, but it also means they usually condemn individual companies for paying high hourly wages.  Why is this ironic as it relates to the conservative abhorrence of everything the word socialism is associated with rightly or wrongly?  Actually, whether one uses socialism to refer to government intervention in economies to enforce restrictions or redistribute wealth or to refer to a proto-communist society, the irony is large, and not just because livable wages are not conceptually or societally linked to socialism whatsoever.

The irony is not even that socialism is morally obligatory or automatically better than capitalism, but there would be no need for anything resembling the socialism conservatives despise in the first place if people earned enough to live without government intervention or the redistribution of wealth, and yet conservatives routinely oppose almost any attempt to update minimum wage laws at the federal level or practices at the level of individual companies.  If people were paid wages that consistently kept up with the rising costs of basic living, there would not even be any crisis for people to rightly or wrongly call upon the government for wealth redistribution or free market restrictions to solve!

Livable wages have nothing to do with socialism or communism despite conservative paranoia, yet conservatives are willing to misrepresent socialism despite claiming intellectual clarity for the sake of the status quo.  This is the essence of conservativism: its adherents wish for things to stay as they are or almost exactly like as they are or were in some imagined golden age of American politics.  The more a person is not opposed to changes to the status quo, the less conservative a person is.  Combined with the fact that a person can accept the few specific things conservatives are right about simply because they are true and not out of a connection with conservatism, conservativism's irrational default to traditions and slow change even where change is morally required make it a philosophical abomination of a political worldview.  Economics is just a part of where these delusions are expressed.

All Appeals To All Authorities Are Logically Invalid

Appeals to authority are some of the most common uses of invalid arguments or beliefs stemming from a lack of alignment with reason.  It is easy for unintelligent people to just default to what someone else says about an issue, especially if they have some strong level of emotional appreciation for that person for arbitrary reasons.  The grand irony other than people thinking something is true just because someone else says so, as opposed to because of logical proof (not even evidences are proof and hearsay is scarcely evidence in plenty of cases) is that people will believe in conflicting ideas based on appeals to authority.  When expressed in words, this looks like two people both arguing that the other one is wrong because someone they subjectively and probably needlessly respect says so.

Instead of imitating the fools who respond to someone else's idiotic appeal to authority with their own idiotic appeal to authority--as if a person's social standing, cultural background, age, gender, professional credentials, or any other such factor means they are not stupid or lying--a rational person just looks to reason.  They do not pretend any person, regardless of their societal standing or experiences, can know what is locked outside of human epistemological limitations or that someone's words are necessary to understand logical truths that cannot have been any other way (logical axioms and so on), which are then used to reason out other knowable truths.

There are only two possibilities when it comes to logical facts, the only kind of fact that underpins all others and is inherently knowable by default: either one can prove a logical fact to oneself just by reasoning it out, like the fact that some things logically follow from others or that every idea is either true or false, or logic reveals one cannot prove something because it is beyond human epistemological limitations, like whether I am in a simulation that originates in the baseline external world.  In none of these cases does the testimony or expressed belief of someone else give one new knowledge about concepts or metaphysics that is not already within the grasp of rationalists except when it comes to encountering information that is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, such as the supposed "evidence" for a multiverse.

If one cannot presently prove with the light of reason that something is true, false, or possible based on the concept alone, then one needs to come to rationalism so that one understands what it means to logically prove something in the first place or recognize an idea as unprovable.  Since many things fall into the category of logical possibility but ultimate unverifiability, from specific events that will happen in the future to whether the external world is even as it appears or whether other people even exist at all, the words or beliefs of alleged authorities are irrelevant on these matters.  At most they can bring to light evidences that cannot be proven to establish anything more than that the evidences are there, while purely logical truths and the only facts about concepts and experiences reason reveals are accessible to literally anyone who seeks them.

There are no special authority figures who can deserve to have their worldviews believed because of credentials or social influence, but this is not about something as petty as conservatives or liberals responding to each other's appeals to authority with more appeals to authority; it is the very nature of epistemology.  The things that authorities focus on are either knowable without their help or unknowable by all humans bound to ordinary epistemological limitations line the inability to confirm if one's memories are of real events, meaning that they are philosophically unnecessary.  Anything they say that is logically possible could be true, but that does not mean it is, and in either case their endorsement, beliefs, or urging is epistemologically irrelevant.  All appeals to all authorities are fallacies held to out of subjective longing and persuasion instead of proof.

"I Said You Are 'Gods'"

Even aside from the way Genesis says humans have God's image, there are passages in the Bible that describe humans as being pseudo-divine or able to "participate in the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).  Jesus himself references an Old Testament statement in favor of this when faced with hostility in John 10:31-36, the verse in question being Psalm 82:6.  Ironically, Psalm 82 appears to speak sarcastically of some group of people as if they are "gods," even putting the word in quotation marks to signify that they are not truly God himself, only to say that they will die as mortals despite being figurative sons of God.

This chapter of Psalms is only eight verses long and does not elaborate any further on just how much humans resemble divinity.  Still, Jesus paraphrases this verse in John 10, in which he argues that the "son of God," or Messianic figure, being divine should not be entirely surprising given that all humans are god-like.  If ordinary people are "gods," and if all of God's revelation is valid, Jesus explains, why would certain Jews object to the idea of the Messiah being divine?  Since Psalm 82:6 clearly calls the so-called gods of human societies mortal, Jesus is not saying human rulers are truly divine in that they are uncaused causes or the highest moral authority, but that he is even closer to being God than they are.

The ramifications of how Jesus presents Psalm 82, however, might be unsettling for some Christians who have let themselves think that humans and God must have nothing in common.  Beyond the fact that both humans and God are inescapably bound by logical truths, humans bearing God's image places the two in much closer categories than some might suppose Biblical authors would dare to.  Genesis is only affirming that humans, saved or unsaved, have similarities to God by default.  God's image does not even refer to a moral standing since humans have different moral standings and yet are all human, so it entails basic metaphysical characteristics.

There is still the opportunity for people to become more like God than just having God's image grants and participate in divine nature as 2 Peter 1 says.  In reconnecting with God at a salvific level, it is thus true that, in at least one sense, we become more like God and thus can be legitimately thought of as becoming little "gods"--just not in the sense of being the uncaused cause or our preferences dictating how others should live.  Moral perfection, reconciliation to God, and an intentional embrace of introspective spirituality in all of its potential scope are not beyond any person who is willing and who does not seek assumptions over truth.

Of course, moral perfection is dismissed by most Christians as something they can never voluntarily align with in this life, but that is the entire point of salvation: that a person will actively turn from evil in all of its forms rather than cling to it in the name of cosmic forgiveness.  Even if someone was truly unintelligent enough to cling to the fallacies of anti-perfectionism after thinking about how there is no sin anyone must commit or how the Bible repeatedly commands people to be perfect, there is still so much more to the way the Bible states humans are or can be like God at the present.  After all, it goes so far as to say that we are "gods" of a lesser sort than the being without which the cosmos and humanity would not even exist.

Reflecting On Superficiality For The Sake Of Depth

Contemplating superficiality, identifying examples of it, and pinpointing just what distinguishes shallowness from depth are themselves very deep things that any philosophical awareness is incomplete without.  To recognize logical truths about superficiality, superficial epistemology, and the refusal to go beyond the most basic ideas or truths is not shallow.  Ultimately, identifying superficiality and the ways in which foundational, important, or precise truths and ideas (these are the three kinds of depth) can be approached in a shallow manner is about coming to or basking in the light of reason.  This can be a very deep celebration of truth and the laws of logic that both ground it and reveal it to all willing thinkers.  In fact, all intentional avoidance of assumptions has inherent depth because it is easier (in one sense, not that people cannot become so used to rationalistic thought that it becomes easy) and irrational to just make assumptions instead of reason out logical truths, refrain from believing things because of unexamined perceptions or preference, and identify mere assumptions.

In light of this, I want to (for the second time) explain the intention behind this statement of mine in a 2018 post [1]: "The only reason why many people regard talk about the basic nature of axioms as particularly deep is because it is generally rare to find people who engage in serious discussion about even the elementary aspects of reality . . . there is nothing incredibly deep about merely realizing or describing simple axioms, like how truth must exist because it would otherwise be true that truth does not exist."  This would be false, and easily disproven, if I had meant that the epistemological self-evidence of logical axioms themselves or a person's awareness of them (or restructuring their worldview around them) is not especially deep, and it would also contradict everything else I know and have stated about the laws of logic.  Many people do seem to find discussing or thinking about the most basic facts about logical axioms deep because they are not used to doing so, but this is a reflection of their own subjective experiences and not axioms themselves.  As I have specified before, this is not what I was conveying with the aforementioned words from years ago.

I will again clarify that I only meant that a person who barely recognizes the epistemological self-evidence of logical axioms and stops there or does not understand that their self-verifying nature is the core of everything is not particularly deep.  Both a person who directly, intentionally recognizes the basic but all-encompassing truth of logical axioms and the axioms themselves (not even their full ramifications) are in any way shallow.  No one has to discover the more esoteric logical truths that go beyond the mere starting point--including some of the more explicitly metaphysical truths about how logic transcends all but itself by existing by necessity even if all other things were removed from existence--to be an immensely deep, rational philosopher.  The basic concepts of some aspects of reality or least perceptions of reality (like chemistry) are not intellectually deep or philosophically vital, but the basic self-evidence of logical axioms underpins all things, from the most familiar things to the most unfamiliar, mundane, subjectively exciting, trivial, practical, or abstract.

There is nothing deep in and of itself, in the sense of being utterly foundational, epistemologically or metaphysically vital, or even precise to the point of demonstrating general philosophical aptitude, in many subjects that commonly dominate public and corporate interests.  Subjective fascination with something as trivial on its own as this can still be deep, and understanding and acceptance of the logical fact that things like this are unimportant by themselves brings a depth behind even thinking about the less important aspects of life or perceptions.  Reflecting on and seeking out information (unprovable information, but information nonetheless) about some less central aspect of history or a scientific model-- with history and science already being far less central to philosophy and reality than logic and consciousness--can be deep if it is done with the truths of rationalism in mind.  Motivations and the ideological context of a reflection can make a huge difference in imparting depth to ideas or the contemplation of ideas that are not significant, but only subjectively useful or appealing.

The deepest possible part of reality regardless of how a person subjectively approaches it in the sense of being supremely foundational, though, is the self-evident, necessary veracity of logical axioms (and one's own existence alongside this awareness).  The deepest possible part of reality in the sense of specificity is related to how logical axioms and logical truths are not just epistemological methods, psychological constructs, or true because of things other than themselves; there is nothing but the laws of logic that exists by inherent necessity as a metaphysical thing that would persist if all else hypothetically ceased to exist.  All deep truths about everything else, from the epistemological inadequacies of scientific methodology to the existence of an uncaused cause to the nature of values, are rooted in and revealed by the laws of logic--logic and even a beginner's earnest recognition of logical axioms could therefore not possibly be shallow.  The only shallow ways to approach reason are to misunderstand, ignore, or trivialize it, and this is only a lack of depth on the part of non-rationalists, not a lack of depth in reason and knowledge of reason.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-ramifications-of-axioms.html

Trickle Down Economics

One does not need to be a liberal to understand that certain economic policies that have been advocated by conservatives are counterproductive for a great deal of society.  Trickle down economics might not be as popular as historical records suggest it was when Reagan was president, but elements of it appear in the approach to economics contemporary conservatives often take, since they strongly oppose any sort of increase on taxation for the upper class even when this would be both better for taxes than taking more money from the lower class (there is far more money to be taxed) and ease the financial burden of poverty.

Under trickle down economics, tax breaks or other benefits are explicitly given to those who need them the least--the wealthy in the business world--because they will allegedly "trickle down" to the typical person given enough time.  The flaw with this idea is that wealth does not necessarily "trickle down" the way that some conservatives think, and even then, trickling down from a wealthy person to a lower class person is not some grand resolution to the problem of poverty.  The word trickle itself refers to a very small or slow movement of something from one place to another, which is precisely what those in the lower class do not need.

Trickle down economics is a clear example of directly favoring the wealthy or those with a greater ability to change their economic status in order to possibly, eventually benefit those of a much lower economic position.  There is nothing at all wrong with being wealthy as long as one did not personally attain it through unjust means, but it is far from true that the rich "need" exemptions from taxes or tax breaks in order to keep society, much less a random business, afloat.  If any tax breaks are to be given, they are most helpful when received by the lower class.  Those at the top of the class system, the ones targeted with tax breaks under trickle down economics, will be completely alright either way.

Liberals might despise the wealthy simply for having and conservatives might revere them in at least some arbitrary situations (and this does not mean every single liberal or conservative is like this, only that their assumption-riddled philosophies easily lend themselves to this), but when it comes to taxation, it is clearly more beneficial to society to have much lower taxes on those who cannot afford to pay as much as those with far more resources.  The myth of trickle down economics is that wealth just transfers from one class to another when the upper class is exempt from certain tax rates that others will still have to pay.  Again, even then, that would not automatically be enough to help people in the lower class stay financially afloat.

The Stupidity Of Pantheism And Panentheism

Pantheism and panentheism are two approaches to theism that either completely misrepresent the core of the philosophy or venture into the territory of inherent vagueness or details that contradict reason, not to mention sheer irrelevance to the first steps and most abstract truths about metaphysics.  Though their names are similar, they are distinct enough to merit separate refutations.  Whereas pantheism holds that God is synonymous with the entire universe and usually is never thought of in a way that even distinguishes between the universe and something as important as the laws of logic, panentheism holds that the universe (as opposed to other metaphysical existents like reason or the space that holds matter, not that panentheists are slightly likely to ever be as precise as is needed) exists inside God and that God is in the universe.

What the hell does it even mean for God to be "in" the universe without the universe being part of him?  Either God is the universe (conventional pantheism), in which case theism actually is not true because there is not really a deity in existence and thus pantheism is a contradictory ideology, or God is separate from the universe but potentially omnipresent, which is the case with an uncaused cause.  Even a single massive consciousness that inhabits every particle of matter would not be the same as the cosmos, but a mind that presides over it and inhabits is, so pantheism and panentheism fail on these fronts.  The vital issue of the distinction between the universe and the laws of logic, time, space, human minds, and other provable or hypothetical things has also been completely ignored in every take on pantheism I have seen from others.

This issue aside, what cannot be true is the universe or any contingent thing that is not God's mind existing "in him," unless "in" him simply means "because of" him.  The universe can metaphysically depend on God so that if he vanished from existence so too would the universe, but it cannot be true that the universe is literally within any mind because mind is not matter, the former being immaterial and the latter being physical.  There is no world of matter if it is not outside of a consciousness, whether it is divine, angelic, human, or animal.  The only kind of cosmos that exists within a consciousness is one that is an illusion of the senses or imagination.  This is what panentheism reduces down to if God is thought of as truly being in the universe and the universe is thought of as being in God, yet this is not what panentheists appear to mean at all.

Pantheism is an asinine denial of the distinction between the uncaused cause and other things, especially the natural world it is often characterized as equating God with, and a philosophy that ultimately cuts off its own legs.  If there is no distinction between God and nature or anything else, there would be nothing divine about the universe, human consciousness, or whatever else pantheism conflates God with.  The only way pantheism could be true is if only God exists, and yet any physical matter that exists is outside of but dependent on God, reason is a set of necessary truths that do not depend on either God or matter, and so on.  Panentheism is almost just as asinine.

With panentheism, there are related mistakes in metaphysical identification present that just have a slightly different setup.  The difference is that pantheism wrongly equates distinct concepts and things while its counterpart with a similar name mistakes one thing for being "in" another just because it is caused by it.  Both are erroneous, although panentheism, in more clearly referring to the universe itself instead of confusing the physical cosmos for literally everything that exists alongside God, has a lesser stupidity.  Panentheism is more just a bizarrely flawed attempt to make something far less sophisticated than it is seem more philosophically deep, a somewhat misrepresentative exaggeration of the basic metaphysical dependency of matter on the uncaused cause, or something a person encounters with no ability to independently prove it with reason which emotional awe still drives them towards.

Game Review--Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods - Part 1 and Part 2 (Switch)

"By Hell's law, if the Dark Lord is defeated in ritual combat any demon outside his realm will be destroyed."

--The Father, Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods - Part 2

DLC campaign additions to single player games can reach great heights.  Minerva's Den from BioShock 2 and Whistleblower from Outlast exemplify how naturally they can flow from the narrative of the base game.  Doom Eternal's expansion campaign The Ancient Gods fits into the same general category, although the extreme difficulty of certain parts even on the default difficulty setting (the second lowest) could frustrate some players enough to stop playing altogether.  The Ancient Gods is primarily a story DLC--it does not provide access to a grand array of new weapons.  It does get to expand the somewhat theological lore of the reboot Doom games and go as deep into the metaphysics of the series as has ever been done.  Yes, there is even a pseudo-uncaused cause that is introduced.  From the new Spirit enemy type to the Seraphim to the enigmatic "Father" credited with creating Urdak, Hell, and the universe as a whole, the theological words, and in some cases concepts, behind the reboot games are placed at the forefront from the start.

Production Values

As a PS4/Xbox One generation console release from 2020 ported to the Switch, The Ancient Gods could have looked far worse.  The returning motion blur from most of Bethesda's first-person shooter Switch ports interferes with precise screenshots and sacrifices some visual clarity, but the graphics are fairly strong given the context of where the base game and DLC originated.  Visual variety can be easily found as well.  From the Kaminoan facility-like structures protruding out from the ocean in the first level of Part 1 to the Avengers: Endgame-like final showdown with portals in the last level of Part 2, the level design changes very distinctly with every mission.  The story, after all, leads the Doomslayer from Earth to Urdak to the new location Immora, the capital city of Hell.  This lore-heavy plot contains a great deal of voice acting.  Thankfully, the speaking characters receive just as much effort for their voice acting as the characters of Doom (2016) and the base game Doom Eternal do.

Gameplay

Other than the addition of a few enemy types, most notably the bosses, Spirits (which feed into the enormous challenges of just surviving the later levels), and variations of previous enemy types with new abilities, the gameplay is very similar to that of the core game.  The environments receive the most variation, with the opening level of Part 1 of The Ancient Gods taking place on a facility elevated above the ocean, the second in a fog-filled part of Hell, and the third in a fallen Makyr city, and so on.  You can still both gain and lose health, shield pieces, and ammunition very quickly.  Collectibles and 1-Up (or 2-Up) pickups are still scattered around levels.  Slayer Gates likewise return as optional enemy fights in a confined location, but now completing them awards the player Support Runes, of which one can be selected on top of the other runes from the non-DLC campaign.  The small benefit of the equipped Support Rune is at least something to help with the extreme combat.  Another small benefit comes with the new Sentinel Hammer, the only novel weapon, which smashes enemies to produce ammunition and health/armor if they are frozen or caught aflame.  This melee object can be upgraded with its own optional challenges.

Yes, the core gameplay mechanics have undergone little change since the main game besides these occasional additions, but one thing has: the difficulty.  The Ancient Gods is the toughest Doom experience yet.  Little can rectify issues related to platforming, exploration, and non-boss combat besides practice or luck, but the optional Sentinel Armor provides a massive advantage in boss fights.  Unlocking as a temporary aid once a player dies multiple times, it drastically reduces the damage when fighting bosses like the Seraphim.  Continually dying when boss fights switch to phases where the boss itself is inaccessible can even trigger an automatic skipping of those sections after one dies enough times (yes, I learned this from direct experience). In general, The Ancient Gods can be absolutely brutal in almost any combat situation without the Sentinel Armor, offering a far more challenging set of missions than the primary campaign does on its own.  This is most evident in the later missions when the expansion throws wave after wave of Doom Eternal's strongest foes at the player, with a Spirit possessing/empowering them (and Spirits can only be killed using a specific weapon attachment).

Story

Some spoilers are below.

The Doomslayer has defeated the Icon of Sin and Khan Makyr, but the victory has allowed demons to infiltrate the Makyr city of Urdak.  Samuel Hayden and a group of human allies guide the Doomslayer in a quest to find the Seraphim, an angelic companion of "The Father," who is in turn said to be the supreme being in existence and responsible for creating the first beings beyond himself.  There is also a Dark Lord who needs to be summoned in physical form so the slayer of Khan Maker can destroy it forever.  If this Dark Lord dies, all the demons of Hell, formerly known as the advanced city of Jekkad, will perish as well.  This revelation and several others push the Doomslayer to a climactic confrontation with the Dark Lord for the sake of the universe and all living, non-theistic creatures besides angelic and demonic aliens--but the Dark Lord has secrets of his own to bring to light.

Intellectual Content

The philosophical potential of telling a story where Hell, or at least the Hell of the Doom series, is just a realm called Jekkad in another dimension at war with the realm of Urdak, or Heaven, is vast.  This potential only compounds when the actual uncaused cause is discussed and makes an appearance--with a major narrative twist.  A literal deity, the angelic aliens of Urdak, and the demonic aliens of Jekkad all appear in The Ancient Gods.  The issue is that the 2016 reboot very blatantly set the full lore and associated themes aside, which made Doom Eternal have to introduce the more exotic but foundational metaphysics of the series alongside its sometimes satirical, ironic lines.  The Ancient Gods then introduces even deeper lore that comes too late to shift the series as a whole to explicitly philosophical waters despite the surprisingly theistic revelations.

Ironically, the most philosophical Doom has ever been is in the unpopular Doom: Annihilation, which had a very explicitly intellectual and serious approach to the source material.  The reboot series could have done more to foreshadow or explore its eventual lore earlier on (such as the inherently theistic ramifications and clever inversion of the relationship between the Dark Lord and the Father).  Still, the core metaphysics of the franchise gets its most unflinching portrayal here, despite the stupidity of some of the concepts presented--like the idea that the uncaused cause created all things.  This idea is only derived from assumptions and outright errors, not from reason; it is impossible for the uncaused cause to have created the laws of logic, the empty space that preceded the universe, or itself.  Issues like this, either way, could have been more holistically integrated into the story if the theological, pseudo-theological, and cosmic backstory came to light earlier in the franchise.

Conclusion

The Ancient Gods mostly delivers expanded lore and extreme difficulty, adding another approximately 5-7 hours, depending on how many times one dies, to the reboot story started in 2016 and continued last year.  This DLC campaign coupled with the main game are Doom at its most narratively complex.  Familiarity with the 2016 game and Doom Eternal helps, but even some who loved those previous games might be overwhelmed by the sheer challenge of the combat in this addition to the Doom mythos.  Those who can endure the new enemy buffs, the often confined fighting quarters, and the presence of multiple semi-boss demons have a better chance of seeing how The Ancient Gods is a grand sendoff, for now, to a story far more lore-heavy than the 2016 game ever directly suggested.  If anyone is looking for a bloodbath for both the Doomslayer and his foes, this DLC campaign will be the best way to sate that urge so far.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Lots of blood, severed limbs, exposed bones, and violent physical strikes are part of the regular gameplay.