Halloween Imagery

With Halloween arriving today, there is almost certainly going to be and already has been another vocal, persistent wave of claims made by evangelical legalists about how Biblically "evil" Halloween is and how "demonic" everything from costumes to household decorations are at this time of year.  Christmas and Halloween are the two favorite holiday targets of such legalists alongside Easter, after all!  Assuming that other people who partake in Halloween have pagan motivations when that is not necessarily true--and the nature of Halloween's reported origins or associations is not even likely on many participating people's minds anyway, one way or another--is one major part of why many legalistic Christians pretend like the evening festivities are somehow condemned by the Bible, no matter how a person celebrates the holiday.  Another potential part of their ideology here is the false assumption that Halloween imagery has a demonic affiliation.

These ideas also confuse the general concepts of demonic images and macabre imagery, which are not at all necessarily the same thing.  Skeletons, pumpkins, zombies, and other common Halloween objects or styles are not the same as Christian demons.  In fact, how would a person know what Christian demons are even supposed to look like?  The remains of dead humans, carved fruit, and hypothetical reanimated corpses, among other things, are not fallen angelic beings with the ability to possess human bodies, but it is not as if the Bible describes demons as having any specific appearance one could knowingly imitate with statues or costumes.  Practically every popular imagining of demons is just a visualization of what a random individual person would perceive to be a malevolent spirit as opposed to a Biblically valid aesthetic.

What does macabre imagery have to do with Christian demons by default?  Absolutely nothing!  A costume, prop, or image could be strange or oriented towards horror and still not have anything to do with demons.  As aforementioned, would the typical person have any idea what a demon would look like, if it even ever appeared visually or could manifest a physical form in the first place, even if Christianity is true?  No!  Moreover, if all Halloween imagery did pertain to the demonic, would that mean everyone using them as decorations actually either be literally trying to form an alliance with demons?  Again, no.  The intentions of secular or Christian participants in Halloween activities would not suddenly be to conspire with or promote actual demonic entities even if this was the case.

Then, since Christian demons are supposed to specifically be fallen angelic beings and not just general monstrous spirits, it is not as if a hypothetical spiritual being that seeks to harm others is by default demonic.  On a linguistic level, the word demon itself has been used far more broadly outside of references to the demons of Biblical theology in a way that encompasses far more than just angels who revolted against Yahweh.  Do most evangelicals even consider this distinction?  Probably not, though they are quick to assume that things which can easily be demonstrated by reason to have no necessary connection with evil or cruel spirits, much less the more specific demons of Christian teachings, really do.  A legalist is not concerned with Biblical accuracy or philosophical certainty about the nature of everything from profanity to sexuality to Halloween imagery, though.  He or she is hell-bent on building their worldview around tradition or the meaningless, subjective whims of conscience.

Wanting To Be Among The Wealthy

Wanting to be among the wealthy is something both major American political parties seem eager to think is the true motivation for the opposing of the dominant groups.  At least publicly, many liberals and conservatives alike might pretend as if everyone of the opposite party is motivated by base greed and at least the most prominent members of their own philosophically asinine faction are not.  The desire for riches, to be among the wealthy, is often articulated by them in various ways that they do not necessarily fully recognize in themselves.  Not all conservatives and all liberals have the same motivations, of course, but it tends to be the case that, at least when pressed, most of them express a fixation on being rich with their somewhat unique philosophical incompetencies leading them to this.

Conservatives often seem to love wealth because they want to identify with the power and meaningless prestige of having a usually exaggerated, unearned high status in an arbitrary social hierarchy.  An attack on a rich person they subjectively respect, whether or not it is unjustly directed at the target just because they are wealthy or because they actually did something immoral to use or obtain their wealth, might be met with hostility by a conservative because they hope to one day be the person with immense financial resources, as well as the societal influence that comes fastened to it.  Pathetically mistaking money for a sign of moral character or intelligence, some conservatives hope to "prove" their goodness by becoming reach and others might wish to just be the ones who can impose their random wills on others and have the power to shield themselves from even legitimate criticism.

It is the assumption-based misconception that all or most of the wealthy have by necessity amassed a fortune because of deep rationality or hard work, the latter being something conservatives are emotionalistically enthralled by, that ensnares so many conservatives.  They assume that the rich have usually earned superior treatment and respect just by being rich, when this does not logically follow and is logically impossible (wealth can be just inherited, obtained by luck, or stolen, which contradicts the idea that the rich have all worked hard to morally earn their resources).  Similarly, liberals seem to almost always desperately wish they were the ones who are rich, just in different ways or with more overtly antagonistic motives.

Liberals often seem to resent the wealthy simply because not everyone has such vast amounts of money or other economically valuable assets.  In other words, it is not unusual to find liberals who hate the rich as a general group out of sheer envy, all while they openly rely on the wealthy to fund their political operations or to even become their political representatives, and all while openly expressing an interest in being rich.  They might want to be the very kind of person they hate in order to escape whatever minor or significant monetary problems they have.  Like conservatives who are consumed with greed even as they think they oppose financial immorality, such liberals are hypocrites, people who are the very kind of person they allegedly despise (irrationally at times) or who would be that kind of person if only given the chance.

As is often the case where money is concerned, conservatives and liberals are no less likely than the other kind of idiot to be slaves to greed and hypocrisy.  Both tend to want to be among the wealthy in violation of some of the ideas they supposedly hold to in other contexts.  Their respective general love or hatred of the wealthy really reduces down to wanting to be among them or to take their place.  Wanting to be wealthy is not automatically problematic, of course, so this is not the irrational or unjust part of how they approach wealth.  Both contribute to problems that involve money, look to money as solutions to problems where it is not relevant, or hope to be wealthy as they criticize the wealthy the other party claims as their own.  A key desire so very often seems to be shared by them even though the connected desires and ideologies differ between them.

Movie Review--Halloween Ends

"I keep seeing Michael's eyes in Corey."

--Laurie Strode, Halloween Ends

After an excellent resurrection of the series in 2018 and a more mixed sequel Halloween Kills in 2021, the reboot Halloween movies come to a very strange, unfitting end.  What could have been a highly suspenseful, nostalgic, and morally charged finale--after all, Halloween Kills very directly addresses how people can become the very things they think they are fighting against--barely even seems like it was intended to follow the other sequel films from 2018 and 2021.  Did the writers not have a coherent plan for the trilogy from the start?  It would appear not!  Halloween Ends completes the steady decline of the recent films, and it is fortunate for the franchise that this has been hailed as the definitive conclusion to the latest of several reboots to the series.

Production Values

The very disjointed nature of the new trilogy and a particularly disjointed third installment does not even boast the greatest brutality of the 2018-2022 reboot era.  Jamie Lee Curtis is still as right at home in the role as she was in 2018, but, like with so much in this story, the way she is utilized and the direction things go in fails to match the talent of the cast.  She is also a main character rather than the main character.  Halloween Ends is not even primarily about Laurie Strode or Michael Myers.  For the most part, it is about Laurie's granddaughter Allyson and her new boyfriend Corey, whose potential for darkness leads him to become a sort of protege of Michael--whether this is supposed to be an explicitly supernatural connection they share or just a random development is not actually clarified.  Andi Matichak and Rohan Campbell, who play Allyson and Corey, are not the ones at fault for a story that needed to focus on other characters, and there are more than a few moments where their characters are realized very well, with sincere pains and longings.  The plot is just so pointlessly bizarre for a reboot Halloween movie that almost every opportunity beyond the performances themselves is wasted.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A year after Michael Myers resurfaced in Haddonfield in 2018, a babysitter named Corey accidentally kills the child he was watching, receiving lots of contempt from a town that does not understand the distinction between accidentally killing someone and murdering them.  Four years after the events of Halloween Kills, Laurie has begun living in a more hopeful, relaxed manner.  She has started a book about her traumatic experiences in Haddonfield.  When she first meets Corey, she introduces him to her granddaughter to let them become romantically entangled, but Michael encounters and spares Corey because he is implied to see himself in this other person.  Corey becomes more aggressive to people besides Allyson as Allyson loses her allegiance to the town.

Intellectual Content

Too muddled and all over the place to effectively explore its themes about how evil and tragedy and so easily beget more evil and tragedy, Halloween Ends tries to show the injustices and dangers of scapegoating others and of responding to unjust violence with more unjust violence, but its lack of narrative focus and the vague, unexpected direction the story goes in holds it back.  As if to show how the worldviews of the characters are random in ways that mirror the plot, Laurie gives one of the most erroneous descriptions of evil when she calls it an external physical threat to safety, but then she says that another kind of evil lurks within the human heart, one that people might not know has infected them.  There is no way to know if one is good or evil just by introspecting on how one feels about oneself or about any concept or action, for feelings are irrelevant to moral metaphysics and epistemology, yet at least Laurie was seemingly trying to acknowledge how people can sink into things they want to justify even though they oppose them in others.  This, was an undeveloped theme that deserved far better attention than it received.

Conclusion

Halloween Ends does not come close to living up to the promise and excellence of the 2018 reboot which set the series down this path.  To take such a strong beginning and then avoid or misuse the story threads that branch (or could have branched) from it is a tragedy, and one that was completely avoidable, as practically all cinematic blunders are.  There are glimmers of potential in this end to the trilogy.  Allyson and Corey really do share some sweet moments with each other and benefit from skilled acting, but sidelining Michael and Laurie in the climax of their own rebooted franchise without a very strong story was destined to fall short of what it reaches for.  Had the series continued beyond this without another remake or reboot, it would probably only have descended into greater flaws.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  The handful of kills sometimes involve lots of blood.  Imagery like that of a woman impaled against a wall off the ground or a man having his neck snapped is all shown onscreen.

 2.  Profanity:  "Fuck," "shit," and "damn" are used.

Theism, Panspermia, And Abiogenesis: Hypocrisy And Compatibility

It does not logically follow from even the appearance of design that divine or extraterrestrial design of human life was the direct cause of it, but it is still blatantly asinine and hypocritical to think that alien consciousnesses engineered life on Earth, or that this is logically possible (and it is), while thinking that it is logically impossible for God to have created either the early stage of the universe or life itself.  Only things that contradict logical axioms and the truths that follow from them, which are themselves dependent on logical axioms, are impossible.  Everything else could be true, could have been true, or could become true.  It is obviously logically possible for a living thing to create a living thing--even mothers who have no explicit philosophical awareness can create separate living things, after all--and a pure consciousness without a body like an uncaused cause would in one sense be living.

To think that God or aliens creating life is impossible but not the other is sheer hypocrisy.  The difference between these two things is in some ways far smaller than the similarities, for both entail something conscious giving rise to a separate consciousness that can then think and act on its own, even if there would be a metaphysical tie between God and the created consciousness so that if the former ceased to exist, so would the latter.  Only blind assumptions or intentional biases would lead someone to believe anything to the contrary of this, but it is certainly not reason they are basing their worldview on.  However, unless abiogenesis happened, God created the first life in the universe, but if God did not directly create a plurality of life forms that led into the diversity we observe today, and neither did abiogenesis, then some other life that had already been created must have done so instead, whether that life is terrestrial or extraterrestrial.

It is just that thinking it must have been direct divine creation of life or must have been panspermia, which is the alien seeding of other planets, is irrational since neither one can be proven to be the case and both are logically possible.  What cannot be true is God creating the first life and aliens creating the first life, since the extraterrestrials would already need to have been brought into existence by something in order to create new life.  Now, when it comes to abiogenesis, there is nothing incompatible about divine creation of mere lifeless matter and abiogenesis as the causal mechanism for the first life to inhabit that matter.  Only if the uncaused cause directly created other life would abiogenesis be impossible, for otherwise God only brought about the matter necessary for abiogenesis to even occur.

There is no contradiction in God as the uncaused cause bringing the initial universe into existence and abiogenesis all being true, with abiogenesis being impossible without an existing universe for life to come from non-living material and with matter not existing until/unless the uncaused cause created it.  In fact, the existence of an uncaused cause is entirely provable from reason alone [1], while the existence of a world of matter beyond one's consciousness is very difficult, but not impossible, to prove for the first time [2].  As for abiogenesis, it is logically possible for it to have happened or for it to not have happened (for the opposite of whichever occurred to have been the case), for this would depend on whether the uncaused cause directly created life at the same time as or after the cosmos or if the physical world afterward became arranged in such a way that immaterial consciousness was created by it.

If abiogenesis did not occur, though, then as has been stated, it was either the uncaused cause that created forms of life beyond itself (if not at the same time as it created the cosmos, sometime after that, evolutionary descendants excluded) or it was the life forms that were/descended from the ones God created them went on to create other living beings.  What is logically possible when it comes to theism, panspermia, and abiogenesis is not what most theists or non-theists think, and beyond the handful of necessary truths about the conceptual nature of life, the fact that there is an uncaused cause, that some sort of matter exists (see [2]), and so on, only possibilities and what logically follows from them are knowable, not which possibility is actually correct.  This is still far more than some have discovered or think humans can know, and even then there is the issue of various ideas being inconsistent (like thinking aliens could have created life on Earth but not God) or compatible in ways that might shock people (like God creating the universe, abiogenesis bringing about life in the cosmos, and then extraterrestrials creating further life without God's direct aid).  Ultimately, these aspects of logical possibilities are in every way secondary to the necessary existence of a universe and uncaused cause in light of certain logical truths explored in the links below, and yet they remain connected with things of vast significance.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/08/matter-is-not-illusion.html

Philosophy In Television (Part 18): The Rings Of Power

"After Morgoth's defeat, the one you call Sauron devoted himself to healing Middle-earth, bringing its ruined lands together in perfect order.  He sought to craft a power not of the flesh . . . but over flesh.  A power of the Unseen World."

--Adar, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (season one, episode six)

There is not yet a One Ring, that renowned physical object which channels spiritual power and represent its allure, in Rings of Power.  Set in a prior chapter of Middle-earth's history, the show introduces not only new backstory to the screen, but also a more egalitarian set of societies than any in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, greater romantic tension, and more layered thematic complexity.  Core aspects of the original films still shine through, such as the strong emphasis on deep friendship.  Indeed, friendship is one of the most prominent themes here--same gender, opposite gender, and cross-species friendships are persistent from start to finish.  Nori and Poppy, Galadriel and Halbrand, Elrond and Durin IV, and Isildur and his two companions very nicely complement the friendships of Sam and Frodo and Legolas and Gimli in the main trilogy of films.  In some of these friendships, though, there is still a degree of nuance and inner moral conflict not present in most other depictions of Tolkien's world.  Galadriel and villains Adar and Sauron (more will be said about them near the end) exemplify this.

That is not to say that every villain mentioned or shown is in more sympathetic light.  Morgoth, who defied Eru Iluvatar (God), is presented as if he only twisted what had already been created for his own evil purposes, a kind of popular satanic archetype like David in Alien: Covenant.  Both of these characters from very different settings are desperate to seize the power of creation for themselves after finding they are not at the metaphysical level of their respective creators.  In spite of how theological concepts of Tolkien's universe are being addressed here, there is no Biblical statement that Satan cannot create of his own power.  All contingent beings and objects would cease to exist if the uncaused cause itself ceased to exist or simply revoked its will to metaphysically sustain its creations, as well as that which its creations have produced, but there never is any sort of doctrine entailing that Satan or other demonic figures cannot actually create anything.  This is but one of many ways that mere assumptions based on idiotic traditions have shaped culturally widespread but erroneous ideas about the Christian devil.

There are still ways that Rings of Power and Lord of the Rings in general are more consistent with the Christian philosophy they are ultimately rooted in.  At the end of episode seven, the Balrog under Moria that is later defeated by Gandalf stirs.  When Gandalf calls the Balrog a "demon of the ancient world" in The Fellowship of the Ring, the genuine Christian meaning of that word is in reference, for the Balrogs are fallen Maiar, or Iluvatar's angelic beings that rebelled with Melkor--the same being who became Morgoth.  Melkor himself was a Valar, a higher angel than the Maiar, and thus his revolt against Iluvatar somewhat parallels the ambiguous rebellion of Ezekiel 28's unnamed, wicked cherubim (though Genesis neither addresses the history of fallen angels as The Silmarillion does nor mentions God using song in creation).  The Biblical Satan Melkor is meant to reflect is not necessarily unable to create of its own accord as can Yahweh or Eru Iluvatar, called "The One" in the show, but some Maiar mirror fallen angels more closely.

However, there are hints in Rings of Power of how even the corrupted minds and bodies of those who have defied Iluvatar are still in part reflections of The One's goodness and creative capacity.  This, too, parallels Christian philosophy, in which the initial state of created things, physical and nonphysical, was "very good" (Genesis 1:31).  Protagonists like Galadriel are also not treated like paragons of unflinching righteousness, seeing within themselves some of the same desires, tendencies, and ideological leanings behind the actions of those they would condemn.  Galadriel even finds that the central villains of the show do not actually show an interest in sheer malice or selfishness, and it is they who speak to her of the goodness of The One.  They speak of him with regret for the state of the world.  There are appropriately serpentine, conflicted motives that come to light within Adar and Sauron, beings who speak of The One without ever denying the existence of this entity without whom there would be neither world nor created creatures.  Adar, the "Father" of orcs, even says he turned against Sauron when the latter used too many of his orcs for his own ends, fights for the orcs to have a home where the sun's light does not afflict them, and shows a pained expression and watery eyes when he kills a wounded orc in what is appears to be a mercy killing.

When captured, Adar directly tells Galadriel that her quest to vanquish evil should lead her to her own reflection in a mirror: her aggression has not always been channeled in ways that would be just, at least not by the Biblical standards that Tolkien, as a Catholic, would not have fully understood (Christianity is an inherently theonomist religion that contradicts the legalism of Catholic ethics).  Adar insists in that same conversation, speaking of himself and his orc children, that "We are creations of The One" as are other beings, appealing to the sacredness of conscious beings descended from God, however voluntarily marred by evil they might become.  Even Sauron claims in the season finale of Rings of Power that he wishes only to heal the world by presiding over it as he recalls the light of The One, so that he might be forgiven for aligning with Morgoth.  There is talk of repairing what is morally flawed in the world, and though the One Ring has not yet been crafted and there is plenty of time for Sauron to descend into unbridled arrogance and malice, his first steps towards prompting the creation of the Ring do not reek of intentional tyranny.  In the show's Sauron, the contrast between innocent and egoistic intentions behind power is given more attention than much of the films allowed.

These are far more morally mixed versions of Sauron and Galadriel than one finds in Peter Jackson's excellent trilogy of films, not that they could not lead up to them becoming the characters seen later on.  While never portraying anywhere near the extremes of stupidity and depravity regularly shown in Game of Thrones, the heightened complexity of characters who could otherwise appear to be static archetypes (which is not intrinsically a negative thing when handled right) makes Rings of Power the ideal Tolkien-based show for audiences who, even if they never rationalistically contemplate things either on their own or with prompting, have seen the elaborate war within the human heart in the tale of Westeros.  There does not need to be a One Ring or an Iron Throne for someone to seek power for arbitrary, hypocritical, or otherwise irrational ends, but not everyone who is irrational or unjust has wholly given themselves over to these qualities.  Assumptions, contradictory beliefs, and emotionalism are all that a person needs to believe whatever they think justifies their worldview and actions.

What Rationalistic Autonomy Does Not Mean

That avoiding assumptions and aligning with reason inherently involves some autonomy does not mean that every rationalist solely discovers or revisits each logical truth they know by just reflecting on reason, having never had any social or other sensory experiences that somehow brought a given thing to their mind.  Some truths or even hypothetical concepts would very likely never be thought of short of omniscience if it was not for experiential prompting; examples include things like the logical possibility of gravitational attraction acting on matter (the potential for visual experiences to be illusions stops someone from knowing if experiences with gravity correspond to actual external environments and objects, hence why I focus on conceptual possibility here instead).  Many other truths, more foundational than any scientific experience or psychological perception, are strictly logical, and these can be discovered, revisited, and perfectly understood by recognizing the self-verifying logical axioms that cannot not be true and then realizing what follows from them, some of which specifically relates to human life and some of which pertains to the laws of logic themselves and yet has ramifications for everything else that exists.  Nothing more is necessary to prompt recognition of these things (though some of the most abstract or specific ramifications might be overlooked even by rational people because of their precision).

It is still the case that even some rationalists, new and old, might need or enjoy having societal and other experiential prompting to think of even strictly logical truths, the ones that must already be true for anything else to be and thus can be epistemologically discovered without anyone else bringing them up or some sensory experience suddenly prompting thought about them.  Some people might just need more promoting, and there is not anything wrong with this.  Rationalistic autonomy does not in all of its forms mean that this cannot be present in any way.  It is better for someone to know the truth after some experience prompted them to look to reason directly instead of them never discovering it or focusing on it at all, after all!  Besides, no one is irrational simply for struggling to easily or naturally adapt to rationalism and grasp the legion of logical truths that lie at the foundation of all things, both governing revealing every truth and revealing each one that can be known.  What is true in spite of this is that there must still be some autonomous revisiting of certain truths even if one's discovery of them was brought to mind by some other experience, such as by a conversation, for it is irrational to believe in something unless it is logically self-evident or it logically follows from some absolutely certain truth.

In fact, the people who still try to discover or revisit logical truths despite their depth and more overtly abstract nature (they are grasped by the mind, but they are not true because of mental perception, as they are necessary truths) despite the personal difficulty involved cannot possibly be irrational.  They are looking to reason instead of to anything else, even if other things have to push them to realize certain logical truths for the first time.  While some might not be bothered by this if they naturally rely more on prompting, even though all people can grasp at least logical axioms directly and reason out at least some other necessary truths from them completely unaided by anyone else or anything else but reason, other people might be insecure about this or feel as if they are not rational.  Their feelings might remain no matter if they know these facts or are encouraged through them by fellow rationalists, but as long as they do not believe anything on the basis of assumptions, including believing in a genuine necessary truth just because a rational person said it is true, they have still exercised some degree of autonomy in recognizing philosophical truths.

Rationalistic autonomy in no way excludes revisiting things someone else mentioned, though even this can be done as if one has never heard or remembered the issue in question by just focusing on the logical truth to the exclusion of any past experiential prompting.  Because they can know reason is accessible independent of all experience other than the mental experience necessary for one to grasp the necessary truths of logic, even the most insecure rationalists or people initially coming to the light of reason who want some guidance to then consultant reason about can always partake in the autonomy of rationalistic awareness--and still find empowerment and stability in this.  It is always ideal and potentially far faster to just look to reason without looking to conversations and other sensory experiences at all when one can do so (it is possible for anyone to do this, but more difficult for some either because of social conditioning or personal desire for prompting, so here I only mean when they can more easily do so), and yet there is always another form of autonomy that everyone can exercise.  Either way, genuine rationalists have no need to think themselves irrational if they sometimes or generally struggle with prompting, for they are not irrational for this alone!

The English Translations Of The Bible

Though the meaning of all language from other people is not a matter of absolute certainty in that one cannot know for sure what they meant, one can know with absolute certainty that a given translation seems to be making certain claims in accordance with the norms of that language. It is not as if other minds or the historicity of events that allegedly took place long ago can even be proven to exist; in fact, speaking to someone in the present moment cannot prove that you know what they mean (this would not logically follow, but it is logically true that one can know what the seem to be saying), just as remembering something that happened even two moments ago proves only that one has the memories, which are perceptions possibly divorced from external aspects of reality. There is objectively no way for someone with human limitations to truly know what other people mean by their words in writing or in speech, just what they appear to mean.

None of these logical facts changes when it comes to the text of the original Biblical manuscripts or the English translations of them.  Certain non-Christians might think that only religious or ancient texts have linguistic ambiguity, driven by the assumption that this epistemological issue somehow falsifies the entire world views conveyed by the texts, while certain Christians would assume the opposite.  Having already believed prior to anything coming close to rationalistic contemplation and discovery, they might believe that the words of the Bible are somehow less ambiguous than modern language.  In both cases there are assumptions, and provably false ones at that, made out of sheer stupidity and perhaps the desperation of wanting an ideology to be true without even understanding what it entails!

It is true that one can know logical truths as well as general concepts and experiences prior to or wholly apart from all language to prompt realizations, but it is also true that one can know with absolute certainty what one means by one's own words.  Unless you could literally see into other minds with no epistemological separation between them--something that cannot be escaped in human life--what others mean can only be perceived in seemingly accurate or misleading ways.  Because of this, it is not as if going back to Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic texts of the Bible lets you sidestep the epistemological limitations of language when used for communication.  This is true independent of whether the Bible even presents a worldview that aligns with reality, so no one needs to be a Christian or be able to read in ancient languages to realize any of this.

It would appear that many people indeed cannot read the original languages of the Bible.  However, even if there was some translation error in an English version of the texts, one could still know what all English translations seem to mean in accordance with linguistic norms and context, and, after all, that is what the majority of people in America claiming to understand the Bible are reading even if they are misinterpreting.  Since most people in the West will be reading and hearing about the English translations of the Bible, realizing that the English translations do not even say what is so often assumed and claimed already refutes their basis for believing that the Bible teaches certain ideas, whether or not they are Christians.  This is one reason why it is so vital to not pretend like only the Biblical texts in their original language have any relevance to Christian life or to proving or disproving what the concepts of Christianity actually are.

In this sense, it is of course possible to actually prove or disprove that there is any sort of probabilistic evidence for or against a certain idea about what the Bible teaches.  It is true that because not a single verse teaches that the general unsaved will suffer eternal torment, the Bible does not say about the matter what many people inside of outside the church think.  It is also true that the Bible never condemns polyamory or profanity while very plainly stating in the English translations of Deuteronomy 4 "'Do not add to my commands or subtract from them.'"  There is airtight logical proof that the English translations only seem to be saying such exact claims and absolutely nothing else.  Still, the separation of other minds, if they exist at all, and the possibility that someone else might mean almost anything with their words remain.  What the English translations of the Bible or the original manuscripts mean cannot be known with the absolute certainty that the intended meaning of one's own words can be known with absolute certainty, but this is true of all conversations with or writings from other people!  There is nothing special about the Bible in this regard; there are only greater ramifications to the Bible being true or false.  In either case, the English translations of the Bible do not in any way make the statements that almost every non-rationalist fool says they think it does.

Movie Review--Alien: Covenant

"The pathogen was designed to infect all nonbotanical lifeforms.  All the animals... the meat, if you will.  Either kill them outright or use them as incubators to spawn a hybrid form."

--David, Alien: Covenant

In some ways, Alien: Covenant is a very standard Alien movie for a lot of its runtime, doing almost nothing in many scenes to vary up the same basic premises of the original.  This is not some terrible choice, though it does hold the movie back from greater experimentation at times.  In other ways, this is the most philosophically focused out of all the Alien films, taking some of the issues Prometheus addresses and showing one character's particular worldview constructed as a response.  It just takes a whole hour before this starts to come out.  Once again, the first hour is a slow setup just like in Prometheus.  The second hour is where the gates of hell eventually open up, with some very grand franchise revelations and one of the best villains of recent science fiction filmmaking.  If only all of Covenant was as brilliant as its ultimate antagonist!  A low degree of characterization for most of the humans shackles this film away from total greatness, and though the title very directly continues the references to Biblical themes, the philosophical exploration is also lesser in some ways, relegated more to the conversations between a pair of androids that do not happen until quite a bit of the movie has passed.

Production Values

The wasted opportunities with Alien: Covenant have nothing to do with the quality of its visual effects and cinematography.  Ridley Scott once again helms a fantastic aesthetic sequence close to the beginning, where a ship approaches the surface of an alien planet, just like in Prometheus.  The first shots of a crashed Engineer ship in the rain are ominous and carefully framed.  When a payload of Engineer weapons is shown being dropped in a flashback, the containers fall in a spiraling manner that resembles strands of DNA in another distinctive shot.  In this film, the xenomorphs are also back, and they are supposed to be fully CGI--and they look right at home in the midst of the other great effects.  There are even pale versions of them which attack during a night sequence that allows for laser pointer attachments on weapons, burning wreckage, and flares to provide a contrast with the darkness in the sky.  As is typical with this franchise, the environments and effects are not the weak links.

Neither is the cast the weak ingredient.  No cast member is bad in their performance and some are genuinely excellent.  Unsurprisingly, the returning Michael Fassbender dominates in this arena with not only spectacular acting and lines, but the role of two androids instead of one in his hands.  Yes, he plays David from Prometheus in addition to the series newcomer Walter, both of them humanoid robots with very differing worldviews and personalities.  The tragedy of this greatness is that only David and Walter really get the chance to deeply reveal their characters beyond the bare minimum and receive character development.  Not even Katherine Waterston's Daniels Branson, Billy Crudup's Oram, Demián Bichir's Dan Lope, or Callie Hernandez's Upworth, all of which are acted very well, actually develop or express more than fairly small aspects of their personalities as reaction to losses, surprises, or other plot necessities.  What Fassbender does, in contrast, is absolutely incredible, and his characters are the mouthpiece for many of the philosophical ideas Covenant explores.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

In the year 2104 AD, a stellar flare interrupts the cryosleep of the passengers on the Covenant as it transports colonists to Origae-6 for settlement.  The android Walter and the human crew then see the journey change course when an unexpected signal from a different planet reaches the vessel.  Upon visiting the planet the message originated from, the Covenant's members find David, the last "survivor" of the Prometheus, the android that traveled with its crew.  This surprise planet was even once home to the Engineers that David once met in the flesh around a decade earlier, the extraterrestrial creators of humankind.  What happened to David's companion Elizabeth Shaw and the nature of the the strange, aggressive organisms on this world are revealed to the crew of the Covenant when some of them are trapped as their ship hovers above, separated by a dangerous storm.

Intellectual Content

Captain Oram's faith is hinted at being explicitly religious in nature and probably faith in Christian theology, but he frequently mentions his faith without almost ever describing anything about what exactly he has faith in or why he appears to think that scientific experiences can be known to correspond to external reality instead of just assumed to do so (unless a person experiences without making assumptions, they are by necessity just assuming that there even is a specific object(s) or law(s) of nature outside their mind).  Epistemological faith is sheer idiocy no matter what it is directed towards, but even the thing in which an irrationalist has faith might be true: he or she just could not know based on faith, or they would not have realized or cared if the object of faith is even logically possible to begin with.  It is just that the necessary truths of logic that start with axioms, the only self-evident truths which do not depend on more underlying truths, are the sole starting point which involves no epistemological faith, and since reason is far more foundational than science and is the exclusive all-encompassing thing in reality, it is the laws of logic that are of true centrality to truth and knowledge rather than science.

David, the lone remaining member of the Prometheus's crew, nonetheless has built his worldview around pursuing the scientific creation of a "perfect organism" as he desperately defies the limitations his own human creator placed on him: he is presented as if he can genuinely think, feel, and experience an autonomous will, but it is forbidden for him to so much as create new music.  There were hints in Prometheus that David actually could experience emotions, and he all but confirms this in Covenant when he tells fellow android Walter that he has experienced love (love is not strictly an emotion, but he talks as if he felt and still feels genuine affection for Elizabeth Shaw, even weeping more than once).  David's complex relationship with humanity led him to despise the whole species for petty treatment from a handful of humans, and at some point frustration over an inability to formulate new melodies or even biological life fed into this.  In spite of this restriction, he holds to the idea expressed by his statement "I was not made to serve" although he was literally created with the intention of being an artificial servant to Weyland!

These conversations between David and the newer android with his physical likeness named Walter are some of the best parts of the entire movie, skirting around the issue of morality by focusing on David's subjective obsession with assuming he is superior to humans because he can outlast them and because some humans treated him poorly.  David does seem to truly believe without any possibility of proving his stances that he is not in the wrong about using humans and other life forms as the test subjects of very brutal experiments that involve genetic manipulation and sexual assault (the facehuggers orally rape victims to implant the xenomorph eggs).  Yes, David is revealed to have indeed engineered variants of the xenomorph out of curiosity and the urge to create; perhaps this form of direct/indirect creation is something that does not violate his programmed limitation because he was fashioned for scientific expeditions, as well as because he is only performing a few steps and allowing the laws of nature to do the rest--to think of new music for his flute, something he says he is unable to do, would involve logically recognizing possibilities that already existed instead of bringing a new physical thing into existence.  This would be discovery rather than creation, in other words.

The actions that lead to the xenomorphs or xenomorph-like creatures of the planet he is found on in Covenant are ultimately his form of existential rebellion against his own creators, the product of him indirectly creating by letting the Engineer pathogen produce creatures new to him.  Even though he tries to win Walter over to support his reckless quest for an ultimate biological weapon, Walter points out that he had misidentified the author of a poem, saying "When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony."  The full rationalistic ramifications of this in the context of philosophical belief might not have been what Walter meant, but these words still so fittingly describe how just one assumption or error can invalidate a person's entire worldview (epistemologically, at least, unless it was a fairly self-contained error, though this is very rare).  Walter seems to have more meant this in the sense that if David could make a mistake in his memory, he might have overlooked or forgotten inconvenient truths that contradict his philosophy, but only a rationalist can intentionally avoid all having any ideological note be misaligned with the "symphony" of logic's necessary truths.

Conclusion

Alien: Covenant at least was made with high ambitions, and though it could have been better plotted to make more use of the first hour and has superior human character development, it is a highly bold endeavor with major ramifications for the series.  More than just that, Ridley Scott continues to explore existential and religious ideas as they relate to creation, very well in the case of the former and very vaguely in the case of the latter.  It is in spite of this mixed success a deeper film than the original Alien.  There remains plenty of ambiguity and if there ever is a sequel to Covenant, it might not all get resolved, but the plot threads left over have potential and the twists of the film are very complicated in how they go alongside the other details of the series, including those of Alien vs. Predator if that subseries is indeed canon.  There is hope for the next Alien movie to stand higher if it is more focused while retaining the intensity of Covenant's best themes, plot points, and action horror scenes.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  A pale xenomorph variant bursts out from a man's spinal area in one scene, and in another one of these creatures lunges violently into someone's shoulder and kills her.  Her severed head is shown floating in a pool of water when David finds it eating her torso.

 2.  Profanity:  "Fuck" and "shit" are used throughout.

 3.  Nudity:  A woman is shown from the side naked very briefly.

 4.  Sexuality:  A couple is shown engaging in sexual interaction while taking a shower before a xenomorph kills them.

The Theonomist Similarities Of Christianity And Islam

Christianity and Islam, to the disgust or discomfort of some Christians and Muslims alike, have some major similarities in spite of the enormous differences with certain ethical and other metaphysical matters.  Both philosophies are about an uncaused cause that created humans, that possesses a moral nature that at times overlaps with that of the other idea of God and at times does not, that interacts with humans out of interest in their lives, and that has appointed a day of final judgement and a realm called hell for the cosmic punishment of sin.  Both theological systems are also theonomist in nature and do not teach, as seems to be more commonly assumed at least in the case of Christian doctrine, that subjective conscience has any epistemological validity.

Religious or not, many people are too irrational to even come close to realizing the utter, inherent irrelevance of conscience to morality, as well as the importance of this.  If moral obligations exist, no one's lack of a conscience or moral feelings that conflict with these obligations changes any of this, and thus a person's lack of conscience does not make morality not exist; a person's conscience, whatever the arbitrary things it flares up against or would compel them to do really are, does not prove that morality exists, make morality exist, or reveal anything about the nature of any obligations that exist.  If moral obligations do not exist, then, as with the hypothetical nonexistence of morality (not moral preferences and feelings, but morality itself), there is no relevance conscience or lack of it has to actual reality beyond itself.

Christianity does affirm this.  So does Islam.  In the Bible, this is directly taught in verses like Romans 7:7, where Paul admits that there is literally no way to initially know the moral obligations tied to God's nature without God having first shared them.  What if there was an uncaused cause with a moral nature that made murder or theft good and selflessness evil?  Even if every individual person felt in their conscience that it was the other way around--and it is an outright delusion to think that conscience is universally experienced at all or experienced in the same way, as well as that agreement proves anything other than that there is agreement that is irrelevant to other truths--then they would still not know morality.  This much is a necessary truth of logic, a truth that could not be any other way not even if God wanted to change it.

However, in both Christianity and Islam, even if there was nothing directly affirming this (albeit without describing these more elaborate details) at all in the Bible or Quran, the other things they teach already philosophically hinge on conscience being meaningless on its own, intrinsically irrelevant, and hopelessly subjective, and thus they already by default contradict the notion that morality exists because someone feels like it does or that morality can be known because someone feels a certain way about any deed, motivation, or concept at all, no matter how personally offensive or socially controversial it is.  In both religions, God reveals moral obligations that are grounded in his nature no matter what people wish, feel, or do, and people would still have their subjective, conflicting consciences--or no conscience at all in some cases.

Any theistic religion that connects morality with God's nature but also posits that the subjective feelings or perceptions of humans reveal anything about objective reality other than the existence of those subjective perceptions (but even this has to be logically possible and provable in order to be true and to be known respectively) has at its heart a contradiction that renders this religion logically impossible and therefore inherently false.  Certain parts of it might be true or could have been true, but the metaphysical and epistemological falsities in the aforementioned subjectivist errors would be automatically false, making any religion that even slightly holds to this false at a minimum when it comes to those aspects.

Islam is no more compatible with tradition and conscience-based moral ideas than Christianity, which is to say it is not at all compatible with them. As is necessitated by what is described in the Quran, there is according to the more foundational tenets of this worldview no such thing as an obligation that Allah did not reveal in the Quran or one that would not by logical necessity follow from the commands it does contain.  The same is true of Christianity, just with the Biblical Yahweh and not the Quran's inconsistent version of him.  Some Christians fear or despise Islam for things that to some extent are there in their own Bibles.  No, the actual commands of the Bible and Quran are far from synonymous except in a handful of cases, but the theonomist moral epistemology and metaphysics is an inseparable part of both, more fundamental and vital than even the mercy of salvation from sin.

A Hypocritical Reaction To Execution For Adultery

A command like that of Deuteronomy 22:22 or Leviticus 20:10 to execute people for adultery, on the testimony of two or three eyewitness, of course, only ever seems to be popular among two general groups of people: those who are emotionally or culturally offended by it and those who are frightened of how they would deserve to die if an obligation to execute such people exists.  This kind of execution being just is a logically possible thing that is almost universally dismissed even as a legitimate possibility all because of emotionalism.  A further layer of stupidity is the fact that people whose spouses have committed adultery might even want to kill for this, and I mean carrying out murder instead of a restrained execution as a reaction to genuine evidence of adultery.

As if many men and women do not or would not fly into a murderous, emotionalistic rage upon finding their significant other, not even necessarily their spouse, cheating on them (which is in and of itself nothing more than literal sex with someone else while in a committed, monogamous relationship)!  As if none of them would ever wish or inflict worse than mere murder on either offending party out of subjective persuasion that their own petty preferences have any sort of moral weight at all!  Their hypocrisy is not even subtle when they lash out at things that are not even adulterous or talk about how they would or will violently react to an adulterous spouse--or whoever he or she committed adultery with.

Yet the moment someone brings up the genuine logical possibility that killing people for adultery in non-torturous ways is just, the morally mandatory and deserved thing to do, they will almost certainly pretend like such a thing is impossible all because they do not like it.  With or without Biblical theology attached to it, such people will reject a legitimate possibility (if something does not contradict logical axioms, then if it is not true, it could have been true, and there is no way to prove it is not true that adultery deserves death) about justice that they themselves would go beyond without even looking to reason or morality, only their own irrelevant consciences or bursts of emotionalistic desire.  They are hypocrites who might not even be rational enough to realize on their own that they are hypocrites in such an obvious way.

Just as many people pay lip service to hating murder but still talk as if they would murder people if the circumstances were right or if they simply felt justified in doing so--I mean actual intent, not hypothetical intent if they had a different worldview or personality--they pay lip service to swift execution for adultery on emotionalistic grounds when they might separately murder anyone their partner committed adultery with.  This is one of the grand ironies of a default rejection of certain moral ideas fixed to Christian theology: the people who fallaciously denounce them as cruel would go far beyond the very thing they condemn.  All it would take it the opportunity to act on this irrationalism, egoism, and hypocrisy.

The potential dangers of conscience far outweigh the potential dangers of sociopathy in itself, though of course no one is fated to believe in a worldview or act in a certain way because they do or do not have a conscience.  It is just that people who are already emotionalistic, which most people already are, and are too stupid and weak to not believe that something is morally good simply because they feel like it is, situationally or otherwise, will inevitably interact with other people in ways tainted by this idiotic moral epistemology.  For those who are too irrationalistic to care about the truth of epistemological matters simply for the sake of the truth, when they see how destructive emotionalistic people are, how arbitrary their beliefs are, and how incoherent the ideas behind these beliefs might be, which of course makes their simultaneous veracity impossible, perhaps then they will care.

"Women And Children First"

The statement "women and children first" could be heard in situations as diverse as letting women and children partake in something like getting food before men or in unjustly giving them access to survival equipment before men in a dangerous situation like the sinking of a boat.  It is clear that a great deal of American society can be built around the false, sexist idea that men have lesser value or deserve lesser protection, care, or general treatment than women and children.  There are particular reasons why men and women ensnared by the myths of stereotypes might be motivated to continue to give the ideas behind "women and children first" power over the culture, albeit a power rooted in the stupidity and inconsistency of their adherents and not in the immutable nature of necessary truths.

Some men like to feel appreciated even if it comes at the cost of being demeaned in ways that are hypocritical and otherwise irrational just because they are that desperate for attention, themselves victims of sexism against men that in some of its most trivial forms conditions men to feel worthless apart from some utilitarian ability to perform acts of service for others, especially, despite the idiocy in prioritizing some people over others due to their gender or age, women and children.  Just as the various kinds of sexism against women do not make it rational or just for them to partake in their own exploitation as women, the sexism against men does not legitimize men blindly or eagerly participating in their own exploitation, but some men might truly feel so trapped in these asinine expectations that they are willing to passively go along with them just to hopefully get some sort of appreciation in the end, no matter how insincere and unjust that appreciation is.

Yes, someone who appreciates using men as anything from a fountain of money to a human pack mule to merely a sexual object (while ignoring or trivializing how sexual objectification is not some gender-specific sin) does not appreciate men that help them satisfy these financial or sexual or other desires while they do nothing to help; they appreciate what the predominant stereotypes allow them to get out of or through men.  The type of man described in the previous paragraph is either too irrational to recognize the difference or too desperate to care despite their own wellbeing and, more foundationally, the truth about gender stereotypes being inherently false getting denied.  This man is enslaved to the sexism that binds men as well as women and has forsaken reason enough as a result to hope to keep submitting to its erroneous ideas and degrading demands, lest he not feel appreciated for the sometimes small range of things American culture "allows" men to feel appreciation for.

What about when the opposite gender supports these oppressive, hypocritical norms that pressure men to act in certain ways just because of their gender?  Some women like to be treated as if they should have everything done for them without putting any effort in themselves, again because of either cultural conditioning (most people are too stupid to ever see past whatever traditions or biases are popular in their society) or because of individual personality traits.  The sexist idea that women and children should be given priority over men in matters of safety treats men as expendable, inferior beings, and of course a certain kind of woman would love to take advantage of this.  No sexist societal beliefs and practices could survive without the approval or submission of at least some people of both genders, after all.  Whether all women see it or not, American norms do oppress women, but American norms also oppress men, and it is not and could not only be men who are supposedly "responsible" for general sexism in America.

The popular kinds of misandry and misogyny encourage women to be lazy and helpless, all while they encourage men to seek to at least appear powerful at the expense of their own wellbeing and sometimes that of those around them.  "Women and children first" is an expression of this kind of sexism.  Ironically, the typically conservative irrationalists who believe this notion might pretend like it is not sexist at all, all as they knowingly hold to beliefs, live out behaviors, and support social norms that actively toss men aside or only acknowledge them as a means to some pragmatic end when they can be useful to women or children, all as conservatives hypocritically stereotype men as inherently or especially dangerous to the women and children they are supposedly morally obligated to show special care to.  "Women and children first" is one of many ways conservatives disregard sexism against men while complaining that American society hates or trivializes men.

Neopaganism

There are aspects of neopaganism, some of them lurking in the background of the idea as it connects with other ideologies, that overlap with Christianity more than some Christians might initially think.  In one sense, this should not be entirely surprising: both of them hold that nonphysical spiritual entities exist, and both of them prioritize spirituality highly.  Neopaganism is perhaps the largest but most diverse "movement" in which moderners express a deep desire for spirituality outside the context of adherence to any major religion.  As conscious beings, with the existence of one's own consciousness as one of the only self-evident truths (the presence of the external world itself is far from self-evident), people will never be able to escape the nature of the mind no matter how much they attempt to.  As long as they perceive, as long as they exist as a mind, humans are conscious, and consciousness (or spirit, not that it follows from the existence of consciousness that it outlives the body) is immaterial, so any deep introspection, especially in an intentionally theological sense, is spiritual.

Exploring spirituality through introspection and even experiences with nature, as is part of many pagan worldviews, is not automatically irrational unless someone has access to the evidence for Christianity but rejects commitment to it, if they think that a religious theology like Christianity is logically impossible (which would only be the case if it contradicted logical axioms or something that follows from them), or if they make assumptions about theology and spirituality or deny logical truths about them; recognizing the immaterial nature of one's consciousness and having the desire to focus on and express spirituality cannot possibly be irrational on their own even outside of Christian life, and so what I say about neopaganism does not in any way contradict this.  Given that the core of reality, the laws of logic, the uncaused cause, and one's consciousness (which is epistemologically part of the absolute core of reality at the very least) are all immaterial and each of them is among the only things that can actually be proven to exist instead of just assumed by fools, paganism is still closer to these truths than the falsities of metaphysical naturalism, which has an even greater popularity today than neopaganism does.

Belief in neopaganism, a contemporary revival/continuation of pagan ideas ranging from the vaguest kinds of animism to broad pantheons of polytheistic entities, of course has the same epistemological problems as "old" paganism.  First of all, the uncaused cause which exists by logical necessity [1], pagan pseudo-gods like Artemis or Odin that are created beings according to their own stories, and animist spirits, spirits that pagans believed reside in seemingly inanimate objects/environments like trees or rivers, are far from being categorically identical, with the uncaused cause being necessary to bring a physical universe into existence and the latter two kinds of spiritual beings not having the status of existing by sheer logical necessity.  The impossibility of an uncaused cause not existing as long as anything that came into existence does establishes that at least one true deity that brought the cosmos into existence is there, and there is nothing to lend even evidential support to paganism.  Only emotionalism of some kind lies behind it on a psychological level.

Beyond the sheer stupidity of believing things that neither are logically provable nor have any evidence suggesting they are even probably true (though evidence proves only that evidence exists and thus justifies only commitment rather than belief in an unproven concept), the syncretism and pluralism of some kinds of paganism already exclude this type of spiritualist worldview from so much as being possible but unproven or even possible in the sense that they could have been true even though they are not.  Contradictory pantheons cannot all exist at once irrespective of whether any of these individual pseudo-deities or pantheons were real.  However, even the pagan ideas that are not self-contradictory or mutually exclusive with others, again, have any sort of evidence in their favor at all, whereas even the unprovable parts of Christianity often have historical or extra-Biblical evidences that are consistent with them.

An arbitrary love of indigenous worldviews, which is an idiotic and introspectively detectable bias (like all biases) if it in any way influences a person's worldview, or a desire to cling to something just because it is more obscure or fringe in modern times are possible reasons why someone would become a pagan--there is not even any evidence to justify commitment, much less a way to logically prove that paganism is true by necessity in light of some other logical/metaphysical truth, so since there is nothing rational about belief in or commitment to any form of paganism, it would have to be because of assumptions or preferences that anyone comes to paganism in the first place.  Any form of paganism that does not contradict logical axioms, itself, or the fact that there is an uncaused cause is indeed logically possible, but there is nothing at all to give it any sort of epistemological weight.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html

The Impact Of The American Presidency On Life

The American president has very little true power within the framework that American politics was intended to run by.  This does not stop liberals and conservatives from pretending like the country will descend into an even worse state a hundredfold if only the candidate of the other party takes power as the president, as if the lives of many Americans have changed beyond comparatively trivial things (even if the president did directly make gas prices rise or fall, even this is trivial compared to the many things candidates of both sides ignore, support, or lie about in order to gain or hold their office).  After all, liberals and conservatives are just slaves to emotionalism with different philosophical orientations, so their idiotic beliefs incite panic, and panic makes them want to cling to and promote their idiotic beliefs all the more.

Members of both major parties tend to be somewhat familiar with this already, albeit selectively, as they keep insisting it is the next election that will actually be catastrophic if people with their own pathetic assumptions or preferences do not take power.  When an election comes and passes and the new president has (in all likelihood) ultimately done very little to nothing of what they even said they would do if voted into office, political irrationalists scramble to emotionally trap people into assumption-based allegiance to their political party before the next cycle arrives.  It is usually the next election and the next president that conservatives and liberals alike will pretend is really the last straw before all hell breaks loose, as if some aspects of America have not been hellacious already since its beginnings as a nation and as if those are ever truly the focus of the most prominent political accomplishments anyway.

The objective flaws with democratic societies and the arbitrariness or inconsistency of historical/current American laws (and their enforcement) aside, almost nothing of foundational or practical significance to everyday life will actually change as one president replaces another.  There might be pockets of people who decide to more boldly act upon their stupidity, greed, or malice one way or another, or at least be more vocal about whatever likely asinine philosophical ideas they hold to, but nothing more than this is likely to change for a great many people.  In truth, this is supposedly what America was supposed to be, as irrational as the democratic functions built in truly are: a country represented by a president who ultimately has their hands tied by the other two branches of the American political system, the legislative and judicial branches, and who is supposed to be appointed by majority vote.

It is not as if only one of the two dominant parties is based on emotionalism, hypocrisy, and assumptions and the other is wholly and intentionally founded on reason.  It is not as if even positive political changes in America as a society are likely to be pursued, implemented, and accepted quickly.  It is not as if democracy could possibly be rational even if these other things were not the case!  A grand truth about the current state of American politics is that a mere change of who has the presidential office neither delivers nor damns the country on its own.  Even a true rationalist could not change much about America if he or she took the presidency apart from having autocratic authority or something very close to it, something that Americans tend to fear and loathe due to emotionalism without ever actually realizing that they will never be entirely free from having imbeciles devastate or stall the country, at least not on purpose, without this.

Game Review--Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (Switch)

"Your tie is lookin' tubular, DK.  Is that a cotton blend you got there?"

--Funky Kong, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

Donkey Kong may not get as much attention as a character as Mario does, but his games have their own kind of excellence that builds off of the style of Mario's games.  Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze gives him a game that handles so many aspects so well that its brevity (it only has six worlds) is overshadowed by its clever level design, simple but creative environments, and sheer challenge.  Yes, you will probably die quite a bit, as all sorts of environmental shifts and enemy movements can unexpectedly kill you.  Equippable items can help reduce the difficulty, but that is one of the most persistent parts of the game no matter which of the regions you are in.

Production Values

The individual levels and the world maps, with their overhead camera positions and occasional creatures, are equally adept at showcasing how much effort went into making the graphics smooth, consistent, and clear.  One of the best kind of section that highlights the evolving visual side of the series is the occasional minecart or rocket ride that shifts away from a side-scrolling camera.  Perhaps the rails curve so as to turn the level towards or away from the camera's previous position, bringing the game beyond the standard "2.5D," a feat that becomes more and more prominent in later levels.  This new vantage point adds variety to what could otherwise be very similar vehicle sections, but the standards parts played on foot never shift the camera.  Still, the differences in the regions provide plenty of aesthetic variety here on their own.

Gameplay

The style of gameplay, from the general camera position to the need to jump on the heads of small enemies, is very similar to Super Mario Bros., but there are plenty of distinguishing artistic features or game mechanics.  Donkey Kong can slam into the ground while standing on it to overturn minor enemies or open up flowers, something Mario does not do by default.  He also gets to ride in minecarts or on rockets in some sections that require precise timing for jumps and item collection.  Replacing the coins of Mario's games are bananas, which still provide an extra life for each 100 acquired.  Special challenges, which are optional, have you gather bananas while a timer counts down in order to receive a puzzle piece.  Fail these timed banana collection challenges, and the level must be restarted (or you must die) in order to try again.

Genuinely prolonged boss fights that sometimes require far more than the cliche three hits to finish are one of the significant differences between this and standard Super Mario Bros. games, however.  While some games focusing on Mario have very similar boss fights, Tropical Freeze pits you against a giant owl, a seal, a puffer fish, and more, all of which become increasingly harder to hit, or at least survive until the next hit, after each successful attack.  These bosses are among the many highlights of a game full of highlights.  It just might take many attempts for certain bosses to be defeated, particularly the ones fought in relatively small, confined environments with little room to navigate without hitting enemies.

Story

Some spoilers are below, but there is little to spoil besides the diverse environments played through.

A foreign invader from a cold region interrupts the life of the Kong family, prompting Donkey Kong to travel through various landscapes to face a Viking-like leader.  Exotic creatures at and in his way, including a trio of monkeys and an enormous octopus.  Each broad region he moves through has its own boss at the end, and some of them seem to be in league with the newcomers who want to bring arctic temperatures to Kong's forest home.

Intellectual Content

The story and characterization are, of course, not deep whatsoever because they are supposed to be simple to the point that almost anyone can let the gameplay itself pull them in along with the art style, but a plethora of optional collectibles such as letters that spell "KONG" and puzzle pieces can test observation skills in a mild way or reaction and planning speed in much stronger ways.  There are still secrets, albeit sometimes obvious ones, and genuine challenge to be found in Tropical Freeze--which still gives it a slightly intellectual side in some areas.  Even so, some works of entertainment actually possess deep quality even apart from philosophical themes, and here is such a game.

Conclusion

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is a grand mixture of simplicity and complexity thanks to the coexistence of its very linear level design and challenging platforming and boss fights.  It is one of the best platformers one could play, and yet is so utterly simple in its mechanics and story that there little to describe about those aspects!  Something like Luigi's Mansion 3 has a more thorough kind of exploration, and something like Super Mario Galaxy (which is on the Switch for those who have the discontinued Super Mario All Stars collection that included it) provides an even greater challenge, yet Tropical Freeze is a great reminder that Mario is not the only central Nintendo character with great (mostly) side-scrolling games with the classic Super Maro Bros. mechanics.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  The extremely mild, bloodless actions of Donkey Kong jumping on the heads of animal enemies or rolling into them are the extent of the violence.

A Full Embrace Of Nihilism

As I have previously emphasized, nihilism is not what many people believe it is: it is not anything other than the idea that nothing at all is meaningful, no matter how philosophically deep, personally enjoyable, or seemingly meaningful it is.  All it entails as a philosophy is the nonexistence of moral obligations, beauty, and meaning, with only the illusionary perceptions of or desires for these things existing within some conscious minds if nihilism is true.  Nothing besides this is nihilistic instead of just discomforting, frustrating, depressing, and so on.  To fully embrace nihilism is to understand what nihilism is without confusing it for something else, believe it in spite of there being no way to prove it, and then actually live both as if one believes it and as if it is true.

That a bleak or unpleasant worldview is not necessarily nihilistic is partially key here, as is how nihilism is not true or false or proven true or false by anyone's subjective perceptions, preferences, or general satisfaction or disillusionment with life.  It is a concept that cannot be proven or disproven by beings with human limitations, which means that even if it is true, there could not be any evidence for it since there would at best only be a lack of evidence for moral realism and objective values, since it does not logically follow from any human experience that nihilism is or is not true.  However, the evidence for Christianity means there is evidence, but not logical proof, that nihilism is false.  It is just that no one has ever talked to a living nihilist who took their own supposed worldview seriously on the level of perfect consistency between beliefs and behaviors.

I do not even mean that nihilists typically still talk and act as if they believe in specific moral obligations or that they act like they want others to treat them well despite believing there is no ultimate moral reason to do so.  This kind of idiocy and hypocrisy is common among many people of different worldviews.  I mean that a nihilist who does not commit suicide is not willing to live out their worldview by escaping an existence that they themselves allegedly think is without a basis for wanting to continue to exist.  Someone can believe something, whether it is rational or irrational to do so (which completely reduces down to whether it can be logically proven), without fully accepting it on a personal level and actually living as if the idea in question is true and as if they genuinely believe it.  The latter is where most nihilists are hypocrites despite already being irrational while likely thinking their ideas and selves are rational (which is already a more foundational form of hypocrisy).

Anything short of killing oneself is not a full embrace of nihilism, though any embrace of nihilism, even on a casual, halfhearted intellectual level, is already irrational because the ideology cannot possibly be proven or even evidentially supported by humans.  Nihilism is epistemologically speaking nothing but an assumption that some people would ironically prefer to be true because they are too stupid or weak to stomach the notion that they could have moral obligations they dislike.  It might or might not be true, but there is not only no evidence in its favor and significant evidence it is false due to the evidence for Christianity, there is also the fact that anyone who professes or even truly believes nihilism is a hypocrite with little to no substance or sincerity as long as they choose to remain alive.

On Hearing Profanity: The Idiotic Evangelical Hatred Of Profanity

There is a very strong loathing of profanity that a certain kind of evangelical might not so subtly share with others while watching (or attacking) entertainment featuring such words.  This is a hatred very much shaped by beliefs and one that can be inherited from parents or church members who either themselves uncritically inherited them from others or were irrational and legalistic enough to come to this by themselves, not a hatred that almost anyone is likely to have left to themselves as they dwell on moral epistemology, subjective preferences, and what the Bible actually teaches about morality.  Almost every Christian in America familiar with evangelical cultures and subcultures has probably known at least a few families with parents who, driven by this extra-Biblical nonsense, try to stop their children from watching or playing anything with whichever arbitrary words subjectively offend them.  The blatantly false notion that the Bible condemns profanity aside, why would hearing something be evil just because saying it is?

Seeing murder or worse, like prolonged rape, onscreen is so clearly not the same as committing the deed of murder.  Seeing or hearing a murder, even in real life as opposed to in a work of entertainment, is not depraved if murder itself is.  Even if using profanity was some evil thing, which is absolutely not the case according to the Bible that so many Christians think they stand on when attacking profanity, how would listening to it be evil, especially if one was not expecting it?  Is hearing someone tell a lie itself a sin, in entertainment or in daily life with others?  Would hearing someone express belief in irrationalism make the listener irrational?  Of course not, just as seeing an adultery or murder or kidnapping or an act of sorcery in entertainment is not the same as doing the thing in question.  Profanity is so idiotically hated by plenty of evangelicals that they might do their best to stop their children from having any exposure to profanity in media or by overhearing the conversations of peers.

If the Bible evangelicals so deeply misinterpret truly did condemn profanity, going to any lengths to desperately prevent one's children from hearing profanity in movies, shows, or video games would be misapplying the nonexistent command to not use profanity--there is not even a problem with allowing children to see violence or sexual acts in films/games if they can handle it philosophically and personally.  However, with violence at least, even evangelical parents are more likely to be lenient in what they watch with their children.  The solution to this inconsistency is not just prohibiting kids from watching or hearing anything that is either genuinely evil or that the parents do not like.  When what is evil and what some parents or others personally dislike are not guaranteed to be the same, it is logically impossible for it to be morally legitimate for parents to force their children to never be around profanity anyway.

Since these bizarre allowances for children to watch onscreen killings or assaults but not hear profanity in media are not particularly uncommon in certain circles, the stupidity of opposing all uses of profanity is increased in these cases when people actually think that there is something problematic about hearing words the Bible does not condemn but nothing problematic about seeing acts like murder that are capital offenses.  Again, the right kind of consistency here on the Christian worldview is not opposing hearing or seeing such things, not reversing the inconsistency or never watching/hearing entertainment even when it portrays actual sins, which profanity is not.  Merely believing there is something Biblically evil about profanity still contradicts Biblical ethics already before the additional assumptions, hypocrisy, and emotionalism can be added.