God's Existence And An Afterlife: One Does Not Follow From The Other

If people only believed in God, across all the varying forms of that belief and its ramifications, out of a desire to have eternal life in an afterlife, then no one would ever even consider, believe in, or probabilistically gravitate towards something like non-religious theism or deism.  In a purely rationalistic sense, it is obvious that the existence of an uncaused cause (God) and the existence of an afterlife for humans have no inherent connection no matter what assumptions many people make to the contrary.  However, because so many prominent religions feature somewhat specific details about an afterlife, especially Christianity, the typical thinker, who is already not a rationalist, fails to avoid believing that theism is inherently religious or that it automatically entails an afterlife of some kind.

This is ultimately a classic example of an unwillingness to separate ideas that are not linked by logical necessity except in very particular religious contexts.  If Christianity is true, there is an afterlife directly related to God's nature.  If Islam is true, there is an afterlife directly related to God's nature.  If a deity with no moral nature who is uninterested in human affairs is all that the uncaused cause amounts to, then there might not be an afterlife at all.  The existence of an afterlife does not logically follow from the existence of God.  Actually, the inverse is true as well: it would not logically follow from the existence of an afterlife that God exists, though an uncaused cause exists by logical necessity.  This is not particularly difficult to prove.

In fact, even some actual or hypothetical religions might not involve the idea of an afterlife.  Basic theism certainly does not (though theism is not a religion at all by itself).  After all, mere theism only posits that a deity exists, and even then basic theism being true does not require that this deity has a personal relationship with humans, any sort of moral nature, or any sort of post-mortem experience for humans.  All religions, as opposed to the arbitrarily broad range of things some people might erroneously call religions (like secularism or any ideology at all), involve the existence of a deity or pseudo-deity (not an uncaused cause, but something regularly mistaken for an actual god regardless, like Zeus), but not all theism is religious in nature on a conceptual level.

An atheist could believe in an afterlife and not contradict their atheism, despite the irrationality of believing that there is an afterlife as opposed to believing it is possible or even probable (given the evidence for the Bible.  A theist could believe that there is no afterlife--the latter belief is irrational but not inconsistent with being a theist despite the provability of the uncaused cause's existence and the unprovability of an afterlife.  The rationalistic stance, given human epistemological limitations, is to not believe that an afterlife must or must not exist, for either of these is possible and neither is true by pure logical necessity in and of itself.  Whatever the truth about the issue of an afterlife's existence is, it does not contradict any necessary truths or what follows from them.

The Clue That 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 Is Not A Genuine Part Of Paul's Original Letter

There are really only one or two verses in the entire New Testament that can seem, without a deeper rationalistic analysis, to genuinely prohibit women from doing something allowed for men.  Both are written--or supposedly written, in the case of one of them--by Paul.  One is 1 Timothy 2:11-12, which is addressed to a specific church and would contradict other parts of the Bible if intended to describe a universal obligation, as Deborah was appointed by God to lead men.  The other is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which is a seeming instruction for women to not speak in church and ask questions to their husbands at home.  With the latter verses, there is a major clue within the words themselves that this part of 1 Corinthians 14, as some have suggested, was not even written by Paul.

This clue that these two verses were not part of Paul's original writings is probably overlooked because of the emotionalistic, tradition-based aversion to Mosaic Law.  Almost no Christian is intellectually or personally bold enough to even consider that there is more than the extremely limited Ten Commandments that would still be obligatory today according to the Bible, and there are many myths about how "brutal" Mosaic Law is, so it is more appealing to many Christians to just never read or think about Mosaic Law beyond a few passing thoughts to dismiss it as unimportant.  This kind of thorough but asinine cultural relativism is utterly antithetical to the Biblical moral framework, and anyone who actually read Mosaic Law and reasoned out the concepts it speaks of without making assumptions would be in a better position to evaluate even something like 1 Corinthians 14 that might at first seem unrelated.

When 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 says that women should keep silent as the law says, it is not alluding to anything in the Torah.  What part of Mosaic Law or what other Biblical command from a mouthpiece for God (like a prophet) ever instructs specifically women to be silent?  There is none.  Since Deuteronomy 4:2 condemns adding to God's commands, pretending like the Biblical deity condemns women for speaking or teaching in a church-like context is a violation of the clear command to not add to what Yahweh instructed.  If the Bible is true, since the core of Mosaic Law is what all human laws are supposed to conform to (including its punishments for particular sins that are what response that sin deserves on Earth), a just, righteous society would not silence either men or women on the basis of their gender.  This is not all, however.

There is also (at least in some translations) the "oddity" of 1 Corinthians 14 addressing men and women alike before and after verses 34 and 35, yet the reference to both of them starting in verse 39 is about them prophesying, as is much of the passage before this.  Women cannot prophesy legitimately unless they are divinely permitted to speak!  Before and after this random and erroneous claim that the "law" forbids women from speaking in a place like church, with the only law that has true authority in Christian theology being God's moral revelation in the Torah and that law never saying such a thing, Paul tells both men and women that speaking in tongues is useless if onlookers cannot understand what is being said.  It is actually disruptive of the main points of the chapter to suddenly say something broader about women in church that contradicts what Mosaic Law actually allows for in its egalitarian prescriptions.

Nothing about the context of 1 Corinthians 14 at large nor the specific prescriptions of Mosaic Law suggests that the random comment about women not speaking in church is an authentic part of Paul's original letter now known as 1 Corinthians.  The textual evidence and its ramifications directly suggest that the sudden inclusion of a command for women to be silent in church came after Paul wrote the rest of the chapter.  Otherwise, Paul contradicts himself in this very chapter by addressing men and women about speaking in tongues while saying women need to refrain from speaking in such circumstances--and also cites something from what appears to be Mosaic Law that both is not found in the Torah and contradicts it as well.

Philosophy In Television (Part 17): The Promised Neverland

"The delicious food, the white clothes that show when we're dirty, our regulated lives, all of it is to keep up our quality of life as merchandise."

--Emma, The Promised Neverland (season one, episode two)

"You're not that different, are you?  Like us humans, demons come in all shapes and sizes, too."

--Emma, The Promised Neverland (season two, episode three)

Animation can tackle or convey deep truths about reality as much as live action.  The Promised Neverland rather deeply explores the intelligence of children, the inability to know other minds, the fact that one person does not reflect the individual contents of another person's mind, the injustice of hypocrisy, and the tyranny of classism in the two seasons of its dark fantasy anime.  The plot first follows three of the oldest children at the supposed orphanage called Grace Field, Emma, Norman, and Ray, as they decide what to do when Emma and Norman find evidence that their "orphanage" is a farm of sorts to cultivate human flesh for consumption by a race they call demons.  Earning high scores on tests can delay the passing over of a child to the demons for killing and consumption, but only up until the child is 12 years old, at which point he or she is sent off regardless of their performance.  Emma and Norman desperately scheme to lead themselves and their fellow children away from the demons, thinking of masterful ways to outmaneuver the adults presiding over them.

The Promised Neverland is a storytelling monument to the potential intellectual capacity of children in a sense, though the young protagonists are not always an example of people who intentionally seek out philosophical accuracy.  Of course, proving to oneself the objective nature of logical axioms, the depths of consciousness, epistemology, and other miscellaneous truths about the foundations and nature of reality is more significant and deep than any amount of strategizing could ever be, but the planning and counter-planning that the lead characters engage in throughout the first season in particular still require intelligence, and a great deal more than is necessary to just passively live a life of simple practicality.  A very young child named Phil noticing things like Sister Krone searching under a bed and that Emma was scared of "Mom" (a human woman who raises them named Isabella) and realizing that there might be something sinister unfolding at Grace Field is an example of this that even involves a character younger than the primary trio.

Eventually, some of the children do indeed escape Grace Field.  The escaped children soon run into benevolent demons who call themselves heretics for not consuming humans from the farms as is the typical demon custom (or at least seemingly benevolent in one case, though nothing further comes from this plot thread whatsoever).  Named Sonju and Mujika, these demons, along with later demons that Emma observes who have not even abstained from human flesh, prompt Emma to realize that there are actually more similarities between humans and demons than differences despite the oppressive function of the farms like Grace Field.  Both are living, sentient mind-body composites that have wills, emotions, desires, and the capacity for elaborate practical and abstract comprehension--or at least both act as if they possess these qualities.  Both, furthermore, need to eat to survive, and the ruling elite of the demons have conditioned the lower classes to crave human meat and organs because it grants them human-like physical and mental attributes, all despite hearing that Mujika's blood has the power to cure them of their reliance on eating humans and free them from the shackles of a tyrannical aristocracy.

When it comes to eating, there is a character in the second season who goes so far as to eat the flesh of demon corpses as a sort of hypocritical vengeance.  However, she expresses the desire for them to be tortured in ways that she herself says are worse than being simply killed.  She says that "Demons deserve worse than death," only to support Ray's plan to kill them all, which would end the demons' suffering, so she is very inconsistent about what she even says she wants or says they deserve.  Her philosophical inconsistency and resulting behavioral hypocrisy could only come from stupidity and emotionalism.  If something truly is wrong, it is still evil to do it for the sake of releasing mere subjective feelings in reactions to injustice, no matter how intense whatever anger, hatred, or malice a person has is (and the three are very distinct).  Moreover, at least if hurting people is universally or mostly wrong, the worst of tortures would be the worst of moral errors, far exceeding literally anything else, including deceiving, murdering, and eating children, in depravity and cruelty.

Emma is shocked by the hypocritical savagery of this girl and her companions, but she herself makes vital philosophical errors in her ideological response.  Where Emma so obviously errs is in thinking that logic can be set aside, as if it is not inherently true, that Norman's plan was logical in the values it was aimed at despite him making assumptions rooted in conscience and a longing for self-preservation, and that logic and morality could possibly be in opposition to each other.  Norman assumed that it was either morally right to exterminate all demons without even truly considering the option of saving them using Mujika's "evil blood" or that even if his planned actions were evil, it would not matter, because survival matters more than morality (survival is objectively meaningless without morality, so it would have to be the other way around).  Regarding the other falsities she puts into words, logic and morality cannot be at odds, for moral obligations can only exist if it is logically possible for them to, and logic is true by necessity, so there is no exception to its intrinsic truth; there is nothing that even God himself could change about the laws of logic.

The hypocritical would-be torturers of demons also overlook that, as someone named Ratri says, humans have treated each other close to how the demons have treated them for centuries: "Do you think what the demons do to you here is bad?  It's no different from what humans have been doing to each other for ages now.  Well, all except for the child-eating part."  Consistency becomes a major theme of the show, especially moral consistency. While The Promised Neverland does not always have what seems to be the mouthpiece character be perfectly consistent, it does address issues that are universally relevant because every generation, every situation, and every creature with the capacity for deep thought has to grapple in some way with such things.  What humans have done to each other is actually far worse than what the demons of The Promised Neverland have done, but even when humans mistreat other humans in much more trivial ways, there are those who think the worst of cruelties are justified simply because it will appease their personal emotions.

The Rationalist's Superiority

All rationalists are intellectually superior to all non-rationalists by default, no matter how little or much an individual rationalist has reasoned out or how much unconfirmed or assumed "knowledge" a non-rationalist has acquired, but if truth matters--and if truth has no objective meaning in the sense of existential significance, nothing does, for all things hinge on logical truths and possibilities--then non-rationalists have squandered their lives in pathetic apathy or in emotionalistic or assumption-driven delusion.  In either case, non-rationalists have no deep value just because they believe they do, and in either case rationalists are intellectually superior at a minimum even if they do not have superior existential value.  There is nothing for anti-rationalists to stand on that does not disprove their own ideas or that is not sheer falsity and self-deception.  Far from being arrogant if they realize these things, those who truly understand reason and who avoid assumptions are simply seeing this aspect of reality as it is.

All genuine rationalists can both rejoice in their submission to and connection with reason as more than a methodological means to an end, but the very core of all metaphysical and epistemological realities.  They are also free to rejoice in their intellectual superiority over anti-rationalists, the philosophically apathetic, and people who think themselves to be rational as they make a horde of glaring and often false, destructive assumptions.  Arrogance is thinking of oneself more highly than one's metaphysical/epistemological limitations or moral status support; one can rightly recognize one's rationality while rightly recognizing the stupidity of anti-rationalists, so this on its own is far from arrogance.  It is living for the truth.  Someone who cannot understand the difference is lost indeed.

In a world full of people whose words and actions strongly suggest they truly believe they are superior or inferior to others based on arbitrary or irrelevant things like their economic status, job prestige, gender, race, age, real or perceived attractiveness, sex appeal, or other factors that have nothing to do with the only characteristics of a person that could matter (philosophical accuracy and moral character), it is still controversial to simply admit that non-rationalists by logically necessity either have no value or lesser value than rationalists.  If truth matters, it is the thorough rationalists alone who have intentionally made themselves familiar with it and who have sought it free from personal and cultural delusions, so of course they would not just be superior intellectually and in the sense of philosophical clarity, but they would literally have more value as people than anti-rationalists do (very young children and those with mental impairments that prohibit them from grasping more than basic philosophical facts would be the only non-rationalists exempt from this).

Their only hope for having any sort of value lies in human rights thay could never even understand apart from reason and that, thanks to human epistemological limitations, cannot be ultimately proven or disproven.  Even then, they would be too blinded by assumptions, ideological hypocrisy, or apathy to identify their own human rights even if these rights could be logically proven to exist.  To even be a non-rationalist, one must literally oppose or even just not pursue genuine alignment with reason, and all who do not embrace rationalism are by default using reason in a futile effort to refute reason or the true logical ramifications of ideas and experiences.  Only a permanent, holistic devotion to rationalism will ever get someone past the recognition of a handful of self-verifying logical axioms to more specific truths about reason itself and other things alike.  Still, non-rationalists refuse this with or without social prompting.

Instead of just aligning with reason, most people are so concerned about how they feel about themselves or about how others perceive them that they will only try to act like they were actually the rational ones the whole time, when their worldviews are full of contradictions, believed on faith (including faith in things like the existence of other people or the idea that morality exists or does not exist), and selectively believed or acted upon as is most convenient for them.  The desire to feel justified is so strong in many non-rationalists that they will quite literally impale themselves on their swords of false philosophies rather than just walk away from the swords altogether.  They could just become intellectually superior to their former selves and to other people who are anti-rationalists, but their desire to be justified in embracing whatever they wish to be true outweighs their desire for truth, if they have such a desire.

The Tel Dan Stele

I have made it clear from the beginning that I am a rationalist before all else; scientific and historical evidences are always incomplete and potentially misleading because they only offer seeming evidences rooted in mere subjective perception, emotions reveal nothing but emotional states as they are experienced, and assumptions of any kind, including assumptions that something is true because it merely seems to be, are outright asinine.  As such, I am a Christian in the sense that I am committed to living as if Christianity is true on the grounds that there is significant evidence that this is the case, not in the sense that I believe everything in the Bible actually is true.  Only logical axioms, truths that can be established about my own existence as a conscious being, and truths that in some way follow from these things are knowable and inherently true no matter what anyone feels, wants, or is aware of.  Historical evidence does nothing more than provide possible hints that some events might have happened.  Whether or not they even happened is unprovable.

Much of the Bible is still devoted to detailing what, according to Christianity, happened at various points throughout human history.  The historicity of Jesus himself is by far the most significant and evidentially supported part of the history the Bible proposes, with Jewish and non-Jewish historians like Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews) and Tacitus (The Annals)--and even competing religious texts like the Quran--mentioning a Jew named Jesus as if he really lived.  These and other historical or theological sources might say or imply conflicting things about his identity beyond this, but his historical presence is something that many sources still point to.  There are also plenty of other Biblical figures that various historical evidences suggest the existence of (including the New Testament prophet John the Baptist).  One crucial example because of his importance within Old Testament history is King David.

The Tel Dan Stele, which was reportedly found in the 90s in Israel, is a remnant of ancient Near East culture describing the defeat of a son of Ahab that references the "House of David."  The stele actually refers more directly to Jehoram/Joram, the son of King Ahab (2 Kings 8:16), and calls him a descendant of the Israelite King David, so even though David is a more Biblically central figure than Jehoram/Joram or Ahab, the Tel Dan Stele is actually evidence for all three of them.  This kind of casual message referencing three Biblical figures that were all connected in the text to the political history of the Jewish monarchy is not trivial.  While it is far from the whole of the historical evidence for certain rulers and events of the Old Testament, it is noteworthy for the number of people it affirms all at the same time, especially since Jesus is said to have come from the line of David and since David himself is a major Biblical figure in his own right.  People just need to remember what does and does not follow from this and other historical data; nothing follows from this except that this stele is an addition to the probabilistic evidence that the Bible is likely true.

A lack of historical evidence does not prove that a certain person never lived or that a supposed event did not happen because something can be true, as long as it is logically possible, without being either logically necessary or having any accessible evidence for it.  Historical evidence could be misleading or illusory, so archaeological, textual, and oral evidence for specific events or figures of the past does not prove that history unfolded as the evidence suggests it does.  All the same, evidence for a historical person or event does mean that it appears more probable that these things really were a part of history.  It would be irrational to deny any of these things to oneself or others.  Thus, while it is objectively impossible to logically prove that the Biblical David or Ahab really lived or carried out the deeds the Bible ascribes to them, the fact that there is evidence for their genuine presence in history is philosophically important.

Health And Obligation

Physical health, when it receives attention, can be mistaken for something valuable independent of truths about morality and other metaphysics.  Without a very specific kind of objective moral value (of health), health, the convenience of not facing physical ailments, and survival itself are entirely meaningless, and even then, the only foundational reason one would have to be healthy is because of more explicitly philosophical matters like reason and moral significance.  Since there is evidence for Christianity, the implications for how people should regard and act towards their health are worth understanding given that health can affect so much of one's life.  While it is not the most central or important part of Christianity, there are some moral dimensions to this that, as usual, fall in-between two erroneous mistakes, and the body's health does have objective importance if Christianity is true.

It is the same reason why pursuing physical beauty can have added weight on the Christian worldview.  Instead of being an expression of subjectivist vanity or a striving for a pointless goal, doing one's best to pursue physical health can be an expression of love for God, whose most significant physical creation is the body the human mind is integrated with.  A person could care for the durability, strength, and epidemiological readiness of his or her body specifically because they are a Christian who takes the various ramifications of Christianity for human life seriously.  At this point, they would need to ensure they do not fall into an error that some Christians who do emphasize physical health could lapse into.

There is no moral obligation on the Biblical worldview to drink or eat things which are evidentially recognized as not promoting peak health, so it is not as if failing to eat natural foods or consuming something that is, on its own, unhealthy is automatically a sin.  It is active disregard for the health of one's body under circumstances where one does not have to exclusively focus on other things, such as when one has the time, energy, and/or money to pursue health that is morally problematic.  It is ideologically trivializing the body and its health that is the real Christian error here.  As the shell that houses the only kind of consciousness the Bible specifically says contains the image of God, the human body is nothing for Christians to ignore when they are not forced to focus on other matters.

Disregard for health, to clarify, is not even the same as being so focused on more substantial matters when one's career or family is not interfering with consistency in eating well (or doing something else aimed at health).  Even when a person has all the money and time they need to invest in their physical health (or mental health) without detracting from their philosophical concentration or immediate survival, the health of the body is still far from the most important part of human existence.  Then there are those who might understand all of this and still not be able to afford healthier food or have free time to devote to consistent exercise because they are working during most of their waking life while not being given enough resources to make the most of their health.  They cannot be at fault for not being able to chase after it to the same extent as someone else even if perfect physical health was otherwise an inherent obligation; this is not a disregard for health.

Someone who is unable to give much attention or time to steps towards physical health could not be sinning either way.  Moreover, health is a means to an end without any intrinsic significance unless certain philosophical ideas are true, making a blind, emotionalistic love of health based on practicality alone pathetic and objectively meaningless.  Physical health is a genuinely good quality on the Christian worldview, however, because of the high value of human life in this particular worldview for which there is evidence, but many specific ways to pursue it are still at most superogatory: good in the sense of having objective moral value but not obligatory, which would then necessitate that everyone who is not healthy, who sacrifices physical health for other things, or who does not do everything possible to benefit the health of their body is sinning.  This is clearly not the case according to the Bible.

Game Review--Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 (Switch)

"There is no greater satisfaction than that of triumph forged on the battlefield."

--Kang the Conqueror, Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2

"I'm all over this game!  At what point do I stop being a cameo and start being a star?"

--Stan Lee, Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2

Before Loki introduced Kang the Conqueror to the MCU, Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 had already given contemporary gamers a taste of what his personality and abilities are like.  The game, which sometimes borrows the aesthetic and jokes of the MCU, follows various Marvel heroes and villains as they are displaced by Kang's time travel and thrown into a Chronopolis, which consists of different realms like Asgard, Wakanda, Ancient Egypt, Manhattan, Medieval England, and a Hydra-controlled territory placed next to each other.  Fans of the MCU and broader Marvel lore alike can see that this is a game that cleverly uses Marvel-based characters to set up side missions and and humor that breaks the fourth wall.  The main story brings together parts of Marvel universe history that might otherwise be unknown to plenty of fans and it provides a coherent plotline to unify them.

Production Values

The art style and general smoothness of the graphics are not the problem with the visual side of Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2; that would be the tendency for important things to pop in up close.  Sometimes characters and objects appear only after standing or arriving at a place in the map for a few moments.  Occasionally, the game also freezes and stops running completely, a much less common thing than the delayed appearances of some environments--but a flaw that also shows up in Lego DC Super-Villains at least when played long enough on the Switch.  Whatever the reason, the more recent Lego games on the Switch simply have the same freezing glitch.  Something that I experienced few or no consistent glitches with is the audio.  From the voice acting for individual Marvel characters and random NPCs to the sounds of classic powers, the sound is excellent, especially since many characters make statements that serve their comedic purpose while actually touching on actual traits of their Marvel history or on the futility of real life goals (like M.O.D.A.M. complaining about how taking out her anger on people unrelated to her problems is irrelevant and yet doing it anyway).

Gameplay

You can play as familiar mainstream characters like Captain Marvel, Iron Man, and Venom, but some of the more obscure characters like Squirrel Girl, Howard the Duck, and M.O.D.O.K. are also playable.  The roster is enormous, containing the likes of Man-Thing, Dormammu, newcomer Carnom--a mixture of the Venom and Carnage symbiotes--and characters from the Old West and underwater landscape of Lemuria, things the MCU has not (at least yet) incorporated into its stories.  Still, the game definitely alludes to the versions of characters from the MCU through things like having Ronan the Accuser say "No amount of dancing will save you this time, Quill" or Thor say he wants "Another!" when he unlocks a new character via a sidequest.

The diverse range of characters allows for more mechanics than what appears in something like Lego Jurassic World.  Examples of the mechanics include the symbiote-takeover m that lets you control other characters or the web-slinging of Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen, Venom, Carnage, Scarlet Spider, and so on.  In fact, things associated with Spider-Man and the Spider-Verse are integral to the game's structure.  Main story levels are preceded by broadcasts from J. Jonah Jameson, a character made famous by the J.K. Simmons portrayal in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man series.  The following is a looser connection, but special missions can be unlocked by completing optional missions and get narrated by Gwenpool, whose name borrows from the names of Gwen Stacy and Deadpool.

There is far more to the game than Spider-Verse related elements, though.  Groups like the Inhumans and plenty of other miscellaneous characters outside of the Avengers appear and have their own class of abilities.  Wasp and Miss Marvel can shrink and regain their normal sizes, entering special miniature mazes that have to be rotated to progress.  Hulk and A-Bomb can trigger their larger, more powerful alter egos as needed.  Thor and Black Bolt can use their electricity-related powers to activate certain machines.  Black Widow can cloak herself to sneak past security cameras, and so on.  These diverse abilities are necessary to collect all minikits, secret character cards, and Stan Lee cameos in both levels and the open world.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

The Guardians of the Galaxy are told by the leader of the Nova Corp that Kang the Conqueror is coming, wielding his time travel technology that he soon uses the merge different locations from various eras.  Kang persuades multiple villains like Kingpin and Maximus the Mad to cooperate with him in exchange for rule over their personal areas of the new Chronopolis.  In the meantime, other smaller villains take advantage of the chaos.  The Avengers travel from one region of the new world to another to help Asgard, Attilan (home to the Inhumans), and other cities or communities resist Kang.  Outside of defeating his minions, they can also help the citizens of the different times and locations that find themselves facing new practical troubles.

Intellectual Content

The more comedy oriented nature of this game means it stays away from somber philosophical exploration, but there is a multitude of puzzles.  Some are so short that they can be "solved" with one brief action.  Others are prolonged, multifaceted challenges that do require skill, careful observation, and environmental analysis.  There are, in fact, probably around 100 such puzzles of varying lengths scattered around the open world hub that can be explored outside of story, bonus or DLC missions.  They might rarely approach the same level of complexity as something in a Legend of Zelda game, but they are both optional and numerous.

Conclusion

As a Lego game, a representation of Marvel lore, and a game that can last for 40 hours or more even without completing the DLC, Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 is an excellent offering with plenty of content and strong ties to both popular and largely unheard of Marvel figures.  Its original character Carnom even goes beyond the comics and movies by introducing a new mixture of two previously established characters (who actually have their own bonus level as separate entities as well).  The character roster is extensive, the mandatory and optional puzzles are numerous, and the humor cleverly parodies both daily life and the Marvel universe.  Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 is one of the better recent Marvel games and a game with few flaws.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Extremely tame minifigure violence is a regular part of the gameplay.

The Greater And Lesser Teachings Of The Bible

The many statements of the Bible and the concepts behind them have far from equal importance.  Executing rapists (Deuteronomy 22:25-27) is an objectively more important part of Biblical morality than random acts of kindness (with these acts being good but not obligatory as it is) because rape is worse than mere unkindness.  That the Bible teaches that there is an uncaused cause is a more philosophically significant doctrine than its claims about the Second Coming because it is logically necessary for there to be an uncaused cause, while the future is epistemologically uncertain.  Passages about God's nature are more vital to Christian theology than random historical details about the Jewish monarchy because the ideas expressed in them are more vital.

Affirmation from Jesus is in no way logically or textually necessary to prove that some concepts have larger ramifications or are more foundational than others, but even Jesus directly acknowledges that some parts of what we would now call the Bible are more important than others.  Matthew 23:23-24 sees him call justice, mercy, and faithfulness the "more important matters of the law" when he condemns the Pharisees for giving a tenth of their spices while neglecting the true core of Mosaic Law.  The issue was not that they gave the required amount of their spices, but that they trivialized or ignored commands far greater than this while they acted like carrying out minor obligations made them moral giants.

Some entire books of the Bible are less crucial than others to Christian theology.  Haggai or 3 John are not particularly important books of the Bible.  Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Matthew, and John are examples of books that are objectively more important for understanding Christian metaphysics, ethics, and soteriology than the vast majority of other books.  Books that are less significant overall might even have several verses that need to be grasped with or without even bothering to read the other portions.  It would not even logically follow from all of the Bible being divinely inspired that all of it is absolutely vital!  However, there is an epistemological irony to this.  One could not reason out which books are more or less important than others without directly reading the text.

The irony lies in the fact that, short of having omniscience, one would have to read each of these books and make no assumptions as they let reason reveal the concepts therein to discover if they are important or unimportant.  No one just automatically knows that some parts of the Bible are comparatively trivial and objectively irrelevant to its most important commands, verses, and doctrines.  One must read--and even then, reading while making assumptions or not actively reasoning out what the text says snd what its ramifications are is not sufficient--to realize which aspects of the Bible call for more attention, reflection, and emphasis.  Still, a single reading can be all that is necessary to realize that a given book has little importance on a foundational level or one of extreme precision.

What this does not mean is that the less important parts of the Bible are therefore unimportant.  They might be less important or unimportant by comparison to something else, but if the Bible is true, then there is genuine philosophical/theological significance to all of its contents.  From the genealogical passages to the context-limited commands to sacrifice animals to the most vague eschatological prophecies, all of the Bible would have some place in the spectrum of information that God would have conveyed through it.  Then, of course, reading most of the Bible would be a prerequisite to actually pinpointing which passages and broad books have more substance, greater foundational weight, or larger moral significance.

The Evangelical Fantasy That Murder Alone Deserves Capital Punishment

Even though Genesis 9:6 and Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:12 and other places) both say to execute people for murder, evangelicals treat Genesis 9:6 as if it has more authority than the punitive laws of the Torah that Deuteronomy 4:5-8 teaches are meant for all nations to follow.  Then there are the repeated statements about how God's nature does not change, so it is only out of a selective emotionalistic or cultural admiration for some commands of the Bible over others that evangelicals treat murder as especially deserving of the death penalty--and even actively reject the idea that other Biblical capital offenses really deserve death at all.  That Genesis 9:6 attaches the death penalty to murder does not mean that the divine commands that come next would have lesser validity or no validity at all.

Evangelicals might just keep referring to Genesis 9:6 anyway, as if the moral obligations described in Genesis 9:6 and Exodus 21:12-14 are not supposed to both be derived from the same source, that source being God's nature.  There is neither a strictly logical reason nor a Biblical reason to think that capital punishment is only universally appropriate or obligatory as a response to murder.  When it comes to extra-Biblical facts, murder is nowhere near the worst thing a person could do to another human, so it would be logically impossible for it to deserve death without at least some things worse than it also deserving death.  When it comes to the Bible, it is clear that God is said to call for the execution of far more than just those who murder.

This is a conflict that arises when the evangelical desire to dismiss the Torah's capital and corporal punishment commands as somehow "irrelevant," despite them being tied to the moral nature of a deity that does not change (Malachi 3:6), meets the irrational belief that murder is somehow the epitome of cruelty or malice.  Most evangelicals believe both ideas, so they pretend like the Bible agrees with each one.  In truth, it explicitly contradicts both of them.  All that evangelicals tend to do is start with an emotion-based idea (that God would not want the other capital offenses of Mosaic Law to always be punished with death across all times and places) and then appeal to some pastor or author that concurs.  They are insects before rationalistic truths and they are generally ignorant of how the Bible even compares another capital sin to murder.

How ironic it is that Deuteronomy 22:25-27 specifically says that rape is like murder as it prescribes the execution of all rapists--even if murder had some special permanence as a capital crime according to the the Biblical texts and something like kidnapping or sorcery did not, Deuteronomy 22 would still bring capital punishment for rape alongside capital punishment for murder.  It is simply idiotic to believe that the Bible does not universally call for capital punishment for anything besides murder without actually reading the Bible and not making any assumptions, and it is idiotic to read the Bible thoroughly and still think it says to only execute murderers.  There is no refuge for these evangelical ideas except fallacies and errors.

There is nothing special about murder that leads to the Bible labeling it alone a permanent capital offense across geographical location and different eras of time.  According to Biblical morality, it does always deserve death, but this is because God's moral nature does not change, which would mean all other Biblical capital offenses also forever deserve death.  Murder is not even the worst Biblical crime assigned execution!  This is the same false premise from which evangelical launch their asinine ideological emphasis on eradicating abortion above all other sins, as they ignore far greater cruelties that people have to live with.  Killing the innocent is no small sin.  It is just not the greatest sin and so it is not the only one that deserves execution.

Almost Everyone Is Privileged: The Tragedy And Nuance Of Privilege

Almost everyone is going to, at least in some situations, be treated better or worse by an irrationalistic culture based on aspects of themselves that have nothing to do with the judgment made, or aspects of themselves they cannot simply change.  Many people like to pretend they are rational, consistent, and prone to treat people in a way that is not motivated by assumptions.  Most of them only lie to themselves and others.  Though the word "privilege" is most regularly encountered in reference to men and white people, almost every group--men, women, the old, the young, those of different skin colors or cultural/national backgrounds, and so on--is discriminated against or treated with special reverence by various people who dare to think that they have reason on their side.  In reality, there are many different forms and extents of privilege that can be noticed in how Western culture treats different groups.

There is male privilege: men are often assumed to be better leaders, more rational, or physically stronger than women.  There is female privilege: women are often assumed to have some special moral innocence that men lack, to be incapable of doing anything truly heinous when it comes to physical or sexual abuse, and to deserve more protection and care than men.  Ironically, men and women are also both mischaracterized as being shallow by default according to conflicting stereotypes, but each one tends to be given privilege in Western society and others.  Then there is white privilege, to give another common example: whites are often assumed to be more intelligent than blacks or to not be threatening by default as blacks sometimes are.  There is also black privilege: blacks are often treated as if no one can criticize them even for genuine faults just because of past injustices against them, and they are not condemned as consistently if they are guilty of racism against other races.  I could continue.

Some pretend like only men are treated in a way that is always more positive than how women are treated and that the inverse is not just as generally common; some pretend like only white people are somehow the victims in a culture more broadly shirking away from racism.  Others might think women, blacks, the young, the old, or some other group is the grand collective victim of society at large and that other groups deserve double standards or are not treated unfairly at all.  In truth, people are routinely discriminated against for a variety of things, from their attractiveness to their family background to their economic status to their level of education to their gender or race.  Almost everyone is discriminated against by someone or benefits from idiotic biases of others, but few would ever realize this due to personal stupidity and a fixation on the very limited forms of discrimination that are now popular issues.

Nothing except a person's rationality and moral character could possibly make them worthy of special respect, love, and affirmation, yet genuine concern for these things is rather selective and rare.  No matter the basis for discrimination, looking down on or up to anyone for reasons that go beyond their worldview and moral consistency is an asinine and futile thing that does not change core reality.  It is irrational and unfair to assume that someone is more intelligent because of their beauty or less competent because they are not conventionally attractive, that someone is weak because they are a woman or deserving of harshness because they are a man, or that someone faces constant hatred on all sides because they are black or that they are uninterested in defeating racism if they are white--or any other such things.

Only one group is superior, at a minimum in the sense of having philosophical clarity and aligning with reality, to those outside of it (with the exceptions of very young children and those with mental impairments that prevent them from realizing things beyond logical axioms and their own existence): rationalists.  Distinctions of the body like gender and race do not divide anyone from reason and relationships built around it.  Other distinctions of circumstance like economic class, baseline physical attractiveness, or family descent dictate nothing about a person's understanding of reason and self-awareness.  Anti-rationalists, though, are lesser beings than rationalists.  All the nuanced, arbitrary types of societal privilege in the world do not make someone valuable for other reasons, but if truth has significance, then rationalists have more value than all others.

The Gulf Between Minds

One of the only things that almost all non-rationalists selectively understand after years of life is that there is a gap, a gulf, between minds that prevents one from seeing the actual thoughts, intentions, and perceptions of anyone else--or at least that is the nature of my experiences.  Not only does it not logically follow from it seeming like other people are real conscious beings communicating their thoughts that this is the case, but if it was not, it would be impossible for anyone to ever be deceived or taken by surprise by another person.  It is both logically possible and experientially familiar for people to act in random or deceitful ways.  Even non-rationalists can realize this on some level, as they might have experiences that bring them to mourn their inability to know if someone can be trusted--with trust being impossible when you can directly see someone else's mind.

One of the deepest paradoxes about even the closest human friendships is that no amount of time together or communicating with each other via technology, no duration of time, and no sincere longing to actually see their minds will ever so much as prove that they even exist as anything more than sensory perceptions without their own existence or consciousness.  This does not mean friendships of practically unspeakable closeness cannot be formed, but it does logically follow that not even emotional or physical intimacy actually bridges the epistemological and metaphysical gulf between minds.  The ramifications of the inability of beings without telepathy or omniscience to know if other minds are even there go far beyond the more mundane things non-rationalists are likely to realize.

The gulf between minds is even part of the reason why proving that there is an uncaused cause is not the same as proving to myself that I am not the deity who created time and the cosmos.  I can prove that I exist with absolute certainty through the self-evidence of my own consciousness: I cannot perceive anything at all, even to deny that I exist, unless I exist in order to deliberate on or perceive in the first place.  I can prove that an uncaused cause exists with absolute certainty by deductive reasoning: something with the ability to create other things must have set the causal chain in motion because self-creation (of myself or the universe), infinite regression, and coming into existence without a cause are logical impossibilities.

However, nothing in proving the knowable logical facts about my own existence or that of the uncaused cause establishes that I am not the uncaused cause.  All it proves on that matter is that I exist and that an uncaused cause exists, not that we are distinct entities!  I can prove that by all appearances, I am not a deity, but mere perceptions, as opposed to logical proofs, can be illusory or misleading.  If I could gaze into other minds and know with absolute certainty that it does not only seem like there are other minds as I look within them, but that they are actually there, with no barriers to truthfully perceiving all other minds in existence, then I could know if the deity whose existence can be logically proven is my own self.

The gulf between minds, if minds besides my own are even there, is not the kind of thing that can be just taken for granted forever if one wants to pursue truth.  Even on a more personal or "practical" level (although friendship is a very abstract subject, like all philosophical truths and issues are to some extent), I cannot know if the friends I cherish and the ideological enemies I loathe are or are not just illusions, visual and auditory hallucinations that have neither bodily existence in the external world nor consciousness that inhabits a body on the physical plane.  Ironically, though human companions can be right before me, speaking and embracing me, they could be illusions of the senses or the mind from which the senses spring, while the uncaused cause, an unseen entity, can be fully proven to exist!  That I myself might be this uncaused cause is the part that so many Christians irrationally object to, as if a God who knows my limitations and wants humans to find the truth as the Bible proclaims would ever condemn me for realizing these logical facts.

A True Love Of Morality

A simple question can put someone in a position of revealing (as much as mere words can reveal) if they have allegiance to the concept of morality or to their own preferences: "Would you kill everyone else on Earth if it was the obligatory thing to do?"  I do not mean that I believe that this particular process of eliminating all other life forms is obligatory or even that there are any moral obligations (although there is evidence that they do exist because there is evidence for Christianity).  The question is something people can wonder about themselves or ask others in order to see how sincere they are about actually caring about the idea of morality itself instead of just personal preferences and cultural norms.  The issue is about whether someone would kill outside of self-defense or some other more conventional context if that was the right thing to do.

If someone would not slaughter every living thing if that was morally obligatory and if he or she knew with absolute certainty that this was how they should live, all of their supposed concern for morality is at best a pathetic attempt to make them feel good about themself or to make others subjectively approve of them.  Any concern for morality that is driven by philosophical assumptions and an unwillingness to actually live in accordance with whatever might be obligatory, no matter how subjectively painful or objectively destructive it might be, is not concern for morality at all.  It is a hollow illusion that any sincerely rational thinker can immediately see right through in themselves and others.  Whether or not morality exists and what moral obligations there might be has nothing to do with the desperate hopes and fears of any person.  Conscience itself is of no use at all in knowing anything beyond one's perceptions, and following it could lead someone into a figurative or literal hell without them knowing until the end.

Killing is hardly the worst thing one carry out, but the point is about testing sincerity, not seeing if oneself or someone else is willing to do the most malicious things possible out of emotionalistic motivation.  Since I know the contents of my own mind and not those of other minds (if any exist), I can know with absolute certainty that I am or am not willing to do literally anything as long as it is morally required of me--not required according to the meaningless cries of other people, or conscience, or arbitrary laws, but according to actual moral obligations.  The same is not true of other people.  They can act and talk as if they care about the core fact that one should fulfill any moral obligations that do exist, but as soon as specific examples come up, especially examples that make their petty consciences flare up, they submit to conscience instead of the hypothetical moral obligations in question.

Someone who understands that something is only obligatory if it should be done no matter what and that it is true that their preferences have no value has the rationality, self-awareness, and maturity to realize that even an obligation that terrifies or enraged them would still be obligatory.  Most people show no signs of being this type of person.  The masses will verbally fight to make themselves feel or seem better according to the arbitrary perceptions of others, but they almost invariably fail to even live out their own random, logically invalid (because of conceptual inconsistencies) ideas about morality.  They do not even begin to approach the idea of moral obligations with a true love of morality and a desire to do whatever they should instead of whatever they wish!  Whether or not morality even exists, such people are pathetic fools to dimwitted and selfish to even grasp necessary truths about what it would actually mean for something to be obligatory.

Game Review--God Of War: Ghost Of Sparta (PSP)

"You were given the honor to walk among the gods and yet you spit on it as if it was dirt."

--The Grave Digger, God of War: Ghost of Sparta

Ghost of Sparta does a fine job of returning God of War to the PlayStation Portable without compromising the general style of the series.  Half an hour to 90 minutes longer than Chains of Olympus, it even requires more time to complete than its PSP predecessor (though I downloaded it to my PS Vita).  Visual and performance hiccups do not offset the iconic franchise gameplay or diminish the ambition of again putting the series directly on a handheld system.  Within this one game, Kratos does not change very much as a character despite showing different sides of himself, but as part of a larger story, Ghost of Sparta helps show a gradual slide from a still-oppressive but more humanized Kratos in Ascension and the original God of War to an utter monster in God of War III.  The evolution of Kratos to this point and then to his place in the 2018 God of War reboot/sequel is far more tragic and nuanced over the entire series than it might seem in Ghost of Sparta alone.

Production Values

The jagged edges and blurry textures suggest the increasing age of this game: it is a 2011 PSP game that I am playing on the larger PS Vita screen, meaning the images are slightly stretched and could look genuinely better on the smaller screen size originally intended to display them.  It might be the age of my Vita, but while I played it again this year, Ghost of Sparta did momentarily freeze, and not all that unfrequently, especially in the beginning parts.  The cinematics freeze less often and have smoother, clearer graphics than the game does while someone is actually playing it, at least.  Scylla (from Homer's The Odyssey) and the giant Thera the Titan, contrived for this game and not pulled from Greek mythology, look the best in either cutscenes or gameplay--likely because they are some of the bigger entities in the game and thus could not be as distorted by the small and stretched screen ratio.  The voice acting seems unaffected by running this PSP game on the Vita, and Kratos benefits from having the most lines thanks to his chance to show subtle changes in his mood as he experiences different situations and feelings.

Gameplay

The combat is very similar to that of the other main God of War games before the 2018 release, complete with the Blades of Chaos, a handful of magic attacks, quick-time events, and some of the same combos.  Anyone who has played the main trilogy, Ascension, or Chains of Olympus has already seen what the fighting is like.  A new mechanic called Thera's Bane that lets Kratos temporarily infuse his blades with fire damage and the eventually usable Spartan spear and shield are the new elements of the combat.  Of course, red orbs can be spent on enhancing the damage of various weapons or magic abilities, which can also make new attacks available with them.  These emerge from select chests or from enemies when they die, and chaining hits without waiting too long between successful strikes or being hit by enemies yourself earns more of these orbs.

Besides slaying enemies, light platforming, puzzles, and exploration constitute the rest of the gameplay.  Connected with the last of these three things are the scattered items like Gorgon eyes that extend your health (or magic or Thera's Bane meter) when you collect a certain number of them, as well as the Relics of the Gods.  These are items like Callisto's Armlet or Athena's Owl that unlock passive or active abilities for second playthroughs after completing the story.  Some of them can be very useful for obtaining enough red orbs to unlock the entire contents of the Temple of Zeus, which unlocks after beating the game for the first time.  Beyond this, there is the Challenge of the Gods, this game's version of the traditional challenge mode after the other entries (with the possible exception of the 2018 one, which I have not yet played) and a customizable arena mode--there is plenty to Ghost of Sparta!

Story

Some spoilers are below.

After killing Ares in the original God of War, Kratos continues to have visions and nightmares that torment him, prompting him to search for his brother Deimos, who was snatched away in his youth.  First, Kratos journeys to Atlantis and unexpectedly meets his mother, who tells him that Deimos is in the realm of Thanatos and will not last much longer.  A Spartan temple of Ares supposedly holds a significant clue.  The journey reveals more of how the Olympian "deities" (none of them are uncaused causes) have meddled in the life of Kratos in ways that come to haunt both them and he himself.

Intellectual Content

Mild puzzles and exploration are the only gameplay-based aspects of Ghost of Sparta that require more than the most minimal awareness or rational intentionality.  While the game also further showcases the conceptual/metaphysical distinctions between the so-called deities of Greek mythology and a true deity--again, none of them are supposed to be an uncaused cause--in perhaps unintentional ways, as the series has long done, the most philosophically developed side of this title is the snapshot of how Kratos changes across the different games.  Although he is neither as outwardly sensitive as he is in Ascension nor as harsh as he is in God of War III, Kratos is still a conflicted character here, transitioning to his most egoistic and rageful version of himself in the series before he eventually transitions again to a more restrained, thoughtful being.

Conclusion

Ghost of Sparta is not the longest, most narratively complex, philosophically deepest, or most central of the God of War games, and it is still a great game in its own right all the same.  What it accomplishes well is providing more of the familiar but excellent hack-and-slash combat that marked the series before 2018, as well as as casting more light on the personal evolution of Kratos as more than the simplistic character he might appear to be out the of context of the other games.  Additionally, it does have bonus content beyond the first playthrough in the form of many unlockables in the Temple of Zeus, the ability to use artifacts collected in the initial playthrough, a player-dictated combat arena, new costumes, and, of course, the usual challenge mode that becomes available after beating the game the first time.  While the PSP version does not have PlayStation trophies, it does give some incentive for replaying the game, even at higher difficulty levels.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Blood is routinely spilled in this game.  In one scene, a Greek soldier is shown after he has been cut in half, with his organs spilling out.  However, most of the game is far from this graphic.

 2.  Nudity:  As always, I know this is not true nudity, but the breasts of gorgons, Spartan prostitutes, and Erinys, the daughter of Thanatos, are visible.  The only context where this has sexual intent in the world of the game is when it comes to the prostitutes.

 3.  Sexuality:  An optional sex minigame can be played and replayed in Sparta, though the sex ultimately occurs offscreen as players complete a quick-time event.  Finishing this minigame three times actually grants a special relic.

Ambiguity In Storytelling

Ambiguity can be a great enhancement to a well-crafted story or a major pitfall that exposes just how stupid the concepts behind a story actually are.  If used correctly, this can be one of the most impactful and thoughtful ways of crafting fiction.  It can add genuine depth to various aspects of a plot or complement deep themes about the nature of reality.  Unfortunately, this is not the only way ambiguity can be used, and it is not even always the most common one.  People can recognize the distinction between the two as they consume media or think about the distinction by just reflecting on entertainment they are familiar with even without immediately viewing or reading any examples.  This could drive them to think about why someone might want ambiguity in stories they are creatively involved with.

There are two general reasons why a storyteller would lean on ambiguity as a major part of their stories.  They might personally enjoy or intellectually appreciate the epistemological nature of ambiguity with matters outside of strict logical certainty.  Perhaps a lack of clarity on certain events, motives, or in-universe truths actually makes the stories more thematically powerful or artistically clever.  However, the other reason someone might rely on ambiguity is far from a mark of excellence: they might be trying to disguise either a lack of plot or thematic coherence or draw attention away from a logically impossible and therefore asinine aspect of the story, or they simply did not even put enough effort into thinking about the story that they are not attempting to disguise anything.

This is the difference between something like Annihilation or Us and something like Tenet.  While the former films use ambiguity to accentuate their stories and the philosophical themes therein, Tenet has nothing but a story that is so utterly vague that almost nothing has a clear reason for being in the plot, not to mention that its characters confuse causal events with time itself (events happen in time, but time continues in one direction even if events could be reversed).  Tenet is both ambiguous to the point of being superficially gratuitous attempt to seemingly come across as deep and philosophically erroneous in the core ideas about time discussed as if they are true.

Ironically, Christopher Nolan handled ambiguity far better in Inception before he directed Tenet.  Now, the movie does help reinforce the ultimately false idea that a person cannot know if he or she is dreaming in any grand philosophical sense--something I am rather excited to have proven entirely false [1]--but at least the story, themes, and execution were more coherent than the contradictory elements of Tenet.  Not only was Tenet a philosophically asinine movie far beyond the kind of stupidity asserted in many other movies about time, but it was ambiguous to the point of it being entirely up in the air if even the director knew what was supposed to be happening at times.  At least Inception uses ambiguity in clever or thoughtful ways, such as when the top is left spinning at the end as viewers wonder if the lead character is still in a dream.

When used right, vague settings, dialogue, imagery, and themes can express something very artistically and philosophically significant.  This approach can hold a mirror to real epistemological limitations while honoring the fact that some things can be known.  When used poorly, vagueness accomplishes little other than drawing the attention of intelligent audience members to the storytelling deficiencies and philosophical errors in a work of fiction.  Ambiguity can be used for either end.  It would usually not be difficult for an observant, rationalistic person to tell the difference between the two when an example is right before them.

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

Surrounded By Hearsay

No one has to believe what they are told by others about everything from the location of everyday items in a house to historical events to specific experiences they say they have, and it would be folly to believe anyone else's claim that they are experiencing certain emotions or that unwitnessed events occurred.  The one exception, the only case when believing what others say that is rational, is when one is told about purely logical or introspective truths that anyone could access with or without help, as these are intrinsically and independently verifiable.  Self-evident logical axioms, the nature of the laws of logic, the existence and contents of one's mind, the presence of one's perceptions, and various logical truths that follow from these things are all knowable, and one can quickly confirm or disprove what someone else might say about such things.

The regular stream of verbal or written claims from others about unprovable things--things that are not self-verifying or provable by logical deduction with no assumptions whatsoever--might be so normal and so vast that some think it is impossible to not just believe people by default.  Nevertheless, it is true that being surrounded by hearsay does not mean that it is ever rational to just assume that someone is telling the truth about something that cannot be proven by reason and introspection.  Assumptions are idiotic leaps into uncertain beliefs and are thus irrational by default.  Even if the ideas assumed are true, and regardless of whether it is possible for a human to know if they are true, assumptions leave someone without any way to know if an idea is true.

There is actually no way to prove or disprove an enormous number of claims that must be encountered through others because they are not knowable by logical deduction and direct introspection alone.  Although some people think there is an epistemological difference between hearing that a first century Jew rose from the dead and a friend saying they have the day off from work, the only major differences are one's proximity to the event (or supposed event) and the importance of the claim being made if it is true.  Epistemologically, there is no distinction between the inability to prove the former and the inability to prove the latter.  There can still be evidence for or against the truth of such claims, but the idea that some hearsay is epistemologically valid to believe in and other hearsay is not is objectively false.

Ironically, most of the supposed "proof" that someone was lying is still just fallible sensory evidences, hearsay from other people instead of the supposed liar, or other things that do not have to be accurate and yet are still assumed to be true by non-rationalists.  Believing that one person is lying about what they say their motivations are because of the words of a third person is not rational.  Both people's claims about someone else's motivations are unknowable for a being like myself, as the only motivations I can prove to myself are my own.  It is folly to think that something other than that one is observing claims is either true or knowable based on hearsay.  In other words, hearsay proves only that one has heard or read the words of someone else.  It does not even prove that other minds exist!

It is not just matters of history like the occurrence of wars or certain matters of science like the existence of a quantum realm that no one can prove, even if one can amass limited, potentially illusory evidence that these ideas are true; it is impossible to know if someone is being honest when they say that they love you (although this is far easier to directly support with evidence than something like historical events) or to know that they are correct in saying that they have seen some random event.  Hearsay is easily found all throughout daily human life and yet it is never rational to believe the contents of someone else's claims just because they made the claim.  It is almost just as easy, unfortunately, to find fools who believe in hearsay as it is easy to find examples of hearsay itself.

Wars And Rumors Of Wars

Wars and rumors of wars are among the things Jesus mentions in Matthew 24 as he describes signs leading up to his return and towards other definitely eschatological events.  Contrary to the assumptions of some Christians, the brief comments in Matthew 24 pertaining to wars specifically neither point to an ever-present impending return of Christ (while he says we cannot know the day or the hour, for reasons I have examined before and will somewhat address again here, the time right before the last days would be much worse than seems to be the case now) nor are presented to cause alarm over every armed conflict of the reader's era.  Many evangelicals like to feel adrift in the stupidity of assuming that every generation is probably the last before Christ's return, and they are likely to miss these logical ramifications of Matthew 24 even if they stare at the words on the page.

What Jesus does say is that, in themselves, wars are just one of many birth pangs/pains preceding the true last days.  He even says to his listeners in Matthew 24:6 that wars and rumors of wars will happen, but the end is still to come.  Wars alone are not supposed to be Biblical signs that the Second Coming and the last days are here, but that they are someday coming.  Evangelicals love to on one hand dismiss the severity of many world events that do not directly impact America while on the other hand treating each and every war or catastrophe as if it means the return of Christ is about to happen literally any day now.  On the contrary, according to all sensory evidence the typical person could have access to, there is no war currently happening that is the worst one yet, so if anything, the prophetic trend in Matthew 24 of intensifying birth pangs is paused.

After all, that the end follows a series of worsening wars, plagues, and other tragedies does not mean there are no intervals of time where some societies get objectively better according to a Christian moral framework and wars temporarily decrease in frequency or severity.  Wars and rumors of wars are simply not the automatic Biblical affirmation that the Second Coming or any other major specific eschatological event promised by the Bible is really right around the corner.  If anything, Matthew 24 is talking about extended periods of time and how various things like wars might almost make the end seem nearer than it is as they really only tend to worsen or improve over long periods of time, much more than the few years or decades that evangelicals like to assume we have left.

If one reads past Matthew 24:7, one can even see that Jesus calls wars and rumors of wars the beginning of birth pangs instead of their climax: "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.  All these are the beginning of birth pains" (Matthew 24:7-8).  One ramification of this is Jesus saying that while wars are one of multiple indicators that there would someday be a Second Coming and more explicitly apocalyptic events, there is no need to fret over every single war as if his return is literally moments from occurring.  Paradoxically, this can have a calming impact on otherwise anxious Christians who see the eschatological relevance of wars and rumors of wars (and famines and natural disasters) but do not assume that whichever event they are living through is the final sign that the last of the last days have begun.

There is no way that the final events of Matthew 24 would be about to happen if the status of the world is as it seems, in fact [1].  Christians have no need to worry that the latter eschatological events are about to be sprung upon them, for there is not only no evidence for that despite the high evidential probability of Christianity, but there is also plain Biblical evidence that we are not about to reach the last days if Christianity is true.  That Jesus singles out wars and rumors of wars as being the start of birth pains instead of their culmination in and of themselves is a reason for present Christians to find relief that they were born into this era.  Although it might not always look like it at a micro-scale, by Biblical standards, this is one of the best times to live in the timeline of recorded human history.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-days-of-noah.html

Falsely Extrapolating Motivations Behind Relationships With The Opposite Gender

There are false philosophical ideas that stop some from accepting that men and women can be close platonic friends, like gender stereotypes or the idea that sexuality is an omnipresent, overpowering force of human existence that inevitably enslaves every person.  There are also random personal assumptions that some people make about the subject without even having ever reflected on the issue of opposite gender friendships very thoroughly.  Moreover, there are some people who simply have difficulties in desiring, forming, or continuing platonic relationships with the other gender and then pretend like reason and reality are behind them when they pretend that this is true of everyone else.  This kind of person is useful for little more than serving as an example of how irrational making assumptions is.

It is possible that some people who oppose opposite gender friendships or perceive them with irrationally motivated caution are aware that they, as individuals, have trouble seeing anyone of the opposite gender (except perhaps family members or the very young or elderly) as anything more than sources of sexual or romantic gratification--and they assume that anyone who says or acts as if they do not have the same tendencies must be lying, naive, or stupid.  The truth is that the person who thinks men and women cannot or should not be friends is the self-deceitful, naive, and stupid one.  It takes only a few moments of rational thought to realize that there is absolutely nothing logically impossible or even probabilistically unlikely about opposite gender friendships.

If a person thinks that anyone else must have a trait that is not logically necessary to be human in the first place, they have made an assumption.  They have either assumed that other people must personally mirror them or that they do not.  Both are asinine mistakes that non-rationalists can deceive themselves and others with.  In either case, there is nothing but fallacious lies that someone who thinks opposite gender friendships are unlikely or impossible could ever appeal to.  If they do not have trouble thinking of the opposite gender as more than a romantic or sexual pastime, why would they assume other people do?  If they do have such troubles, why would they assume other people share their weakness?

There is no way that these extrapolations or assumptions are anything more than the false pretense of knowledge about other people or outright false notions about how men and women can relate to each other.  The logical possibility of opposite gender friendships--regardless of marital or dating status or even the potential presence of sexual attraction--could be easily understood by anyone who was not already a slave to assumptions.  It is a further testament to the stupidity of some people that they will think others must share their same motivations, desires, and perceptions or misperceptions, both with regards to opposite gender friendships or anything else.  No truth about the possibility of such friendships itself, as opposed to truths about people's responses to the issue, is grounded in how any individual thinks or behaves.

A Time For Love And A Time For Hate

The author of Ecclesiastes uses much of the content in what is now called the third chapter to clarify that certain contrasting pairs of activities or emotional states have their own respective relevance to different scenarios in life.  The first verse of Ecclesiastes 3 says that there is a time for every activity, although it is not speaking of every manner of engaging in activities, or else it would mean that there is a time to murder or rape, among other things.  Its pairs emphasize contrasts like killing and healing (Ecclesiastes 3:3) or carrying out war or pursuing peace (3:8), all of which can actually be conducted in ways that contradict the commands found earlier and later in the Bible--or in ways consistent with its commands.

There is a time to kill, but not a time to murder.  There is time for sex, but not a time for adultery or rape (though sex is not directly addressed in the chapter).  There is a time to love and a time to hate (3:8), but never a time to love irrationality and sin or to hate truth and justice.  This would contradict even what the author of Ecclesiastes says in chapter 12 about how obeying God is the duty of humanity, not to mention Mosaic Law and the New Testament commands.  Even a single circumstance that calls for hatred, though, refutes the evangelical and secular idea that hatred is universally evil or at least destructive enough to avoid at all costs.  With this in mind, anyone who reads Ecclesiastes and thinks about the third chapter thoroughly without making assumptions can see that this is actually an unbiblical stance.

Ecclesiastes 3 does not specify what the love and hate contextually encouraged in the chapter are actually directed towards, but other passages in the Bible make it clear that God both loves all of humanity and hates some humans for their sins, especially for sins involving unjust violence (Psalm 5:5-6, Proverbs 11:5), the most intense expressions of which go far beyond quick, painless murder.  It nonetheless affirms that hatred itself is not the automatically vile, useless, unjust thing so many Christians have assumed it is due to emotional dislike and popular but vague ideas.  Ironically, so many people hate hatred because of mistaken slippery slope fallacies or the false equivalence of something like racism or misandry/misogyny with a hatred of the morally inferior.

There are far more passages in the Bible demonstrating that some forms of hatred directed at some people, not just some ideas, are not immoral.  The aforementioned parts of Psalms and Proverbs convey this.  Leviticus 20:23 and still other verses do the same.  They speak of God's just hatred of specific people, and with God being the only metaphysical anchor for moral obligations, hatred cannot be evil if he himself harbors it.  Hating someone for a nonsinful deed or for being born with physical characteristics they cannot change is evil by Biblical standards, and Jesus condemns so much as being angry without cause (Matthew 5:22), meaning that hatred without cause would be am even more severe error.  Anyone who reads the Bible can still see that within its own internally consistent moral system, there is conditional allowance for hatred to the point pf Ecclesiastes 3:8 saying there is even a valid time for it.