An Example Of The Power Of Music In Film

As films less and less frequently have soundtracks that are anything more than mediocre, or not even worth focusing on past the few seconds it takes to recognize their lack of quality, the best uses of music in movies or video games could stand out all the more in their isolation.  Music can help completely change the tone of a scene, or even of a whole film (or game) if it is used correctly.  A somewhat recent scene from 2017's Alien: Covenant exemplifies this--avoid reading beyond this point if you are not fine with major spoilers.  As it is revealed who the true villain of the movie is, it is not some subhuman life form devoted strictly to killing and breeding, but the android David who opposes the human crew of the starship Covenant out of his arrogance and malice.  He has been stranded on a planet of the beings who created humans, the Engineers, having exhausted his best options for test subjects as he callously experiments with torturous genetic fusions. Yes, a version of the xenomorph, which other films indicate has already been around in a different variation long before humans made David, is the result of the android's experimentation with a pathogen left by the humanoid Engineers.

When a group of humans land on this planet of David's residence, David first welcomes them, though he is delighted to find a pale xenomorphic creature feasting on the corpse of one of the crew members.  This alien had been produced when the pathogen infected a separate human earlier in the movie.  Captain Oram of the Covenant finds David trying to tame this beast, and after killing it against David's wishes, he demands to hear what has happened on this planet.  David brings him down to a room filled with the iconic "ovomorphs," or xenomorph eggs from which facehuggers leap out at victims to orally rape and impregnate them.  Oram suffers this very fate.  Upon regaining consciousness shortly before his death, the captain screams when a xenomorph begins forcefully exiting his body, and so David's first black xenomorph enters the outside world.

I have written about elements of this scene before [1].  It is a very pivotal plot point in the film, and it does a masterful job of conveying David's characterization and a way of perceiving the xenomorph that is altogether absent in most of the Alien movies.  After all, Alien as a franchise, except for the more action oriented tone of Alien vs. Predator, a horror series, and the xenomorph is the primary antagonist.  However, as the first chest burster emerges from Oram's torso in Alien: Covenant, David's awe, the xenomorph's bonding gestures to him, and the music very clearly convey that this scene is supposed to focus on the personal triumph of David in finally creating what he hopes is his "perfect organism" that will vindicate him after humans designed his kind unable to create (in a general sense, as he plainly can create, just more indirectly and by allowing the laws of nature to do most of the work for him).  Even watching this part in isolation from the rest of the movie conveys this.

Thus, what would be a scene aimed at instilling terror or disgust is presented in spite of the graphic outward bursting of the baby xenomorph as a scene of wonder--on David's part, though the music is used to orient the tone of this portion right around David.  Most other movies, including most other movies in the Alien franchise, would not have taken this route.  The death of a protagonist and the birth of a new creature, especially one intended for use as a biological weapon in the metaphorical hands of a malicious AI, would not be a scene typically used to make such a savage villain (both David and the xenomorph) as sympathetic as this.  Even just leaving David's smile as the xenomorph kills Oram in its birth, stands upright, and uses its arms for the first time without the selected musical track would have been very tonally different.  You can see the clip below:

Music does not have to involve lyrics of any kind, but it has a special capacity for expressing all kinds of personal experiences even if music is not a language as some people claim (only the lyrics used amidst music are language).  It is indeed true that music alone can change the entire tone of art when it is handled in a certain way, and the general drama and horror of Alien: Covenant can be alleviated for a few moments in this way.  David's extreme cruelty, selfishness, and assumption-driven desperation to create all come to the surface of the scene's tone as his chest burster stands in the corpse of its human male "mother."  The subtle smile and way that David invites what quickly develops into a large, black xenomorph to imitate his motions could have had a very sinister, urgent tone if the music was changed, but instead, wonder and relief are what mark these shots, in no small part because the music reflects the perspective of the murderous David and not the human victims.  Emotion is subjective, and people can misunderstand or ignore the tonal context of a scene.  Tone is still an objective feature of the creator's intentions and the execution of the different aspects of art.  Alien: Covenant shows just how thoroughly the emphasis can be flipped when nothing is changed but the soundtrack.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-perfect-organism-alien-covenants.html

Healing On The Sabbath

More than one part of the gospel accounts of the miracles of Jesus involve him healing someone on the Sabbath as irate Pharisees observe.  These passages are very relevant to the issue of what it is to "work" on the Sabbath and distinguish permissible activities from immoral ones on the Sabbath, for, as I will address, both Mosaic Law and Jesus make it clear that not all activity on the Sabbath is actually what constitutes working in the sense condemned by verses like Exodus 35:2.  They are also relevant to whether Jesus did indeed sin during his time on Earth by the actual standards of the moral revelation he supposedly lived out without any error--violating the Sabbath is very blatantly a sin on Biblical ethics, and so what exactly is and is not permissible on the Sabbath is what dictates if in this case Jesus did or did not sin according to the events of the gospel accounts.  The early verses of John 5 detail one of these stories where Jesus heals on the Sabbath and draws controversy for it.

What he first appeals to is that God, as he puts it, is in a sense working on each Sabbath.  When Jesus says in John 5:17 that "'My Father is always at work to this very day, and I, too, am working," he is not referring to unecessary physical labor for pay from an employer, but seemingly to the kind of attention and action necessary for God to sustain his creation's very existence.  John 5:18 right after this almost might seem like the text says Jesus truly was violating the Sabbath while supporting his actions, but there are multiple aspects of this chapter and others in the Bible which clarify or from which it logically follows that Jesus never violated the Sabbath at all.  Even in John 5, as soon after John 5:17 as verse 19, Jesus says he is only imitating the "Father," appealing to the fact that God's moral nature is what grounds and dictates morality, so doing as God does is not sinful, and thus the way that God "works" on the Sabbath does not violate it.  If Jesus only engages in the same kind of work, then there is no sin even when this is done on the Sabbath, and the same would be true of any other person as well.

In Matthew 12:9-14, before Jesus heals a man with a shriveled hand, Pharisees ask Jesus if healing on the Sabbath is morally permissible, to which Jesus very unambiguously clarifies that it is not violation of the Sabbath to help one's animal, with humans only being more deserving of help than any non-human animals.  Earlier in Matthew 12, Jesus also lists several examples of people performing activities on the Sabbath that are not actual violations of the command to not work on this day of rest, despite each one of them involving activity of some kind.  One of these is the temple priests routinely offering sacrifices on the Sabbath, a practice prescribed specifically in Numbers 28:9-10.  These Sabbath offerings clearly are exempt from the command to do no work on the Sabbath, and Jesus also gives a separate example in John 7:23 of how circumcising a baby on the Sabbath is not a disqualified form of work.  Mosaic Law itself and Jesus openly clarify several reasons why the command to not work on the Sabbath does not mean what many Christians and non-Christians think.  Even if they did not provide such exceptions, some of them would follow by logical necessity from core Christian ideas and still not conflict with the Sabbath obligation.

Jesus is not contradicting Mosaic Law in the slightest way when he heals on the Sabbath or overtly encourages certain activities on it.  As a capital sin (a sin meriting execution by other humans), breaking the Sabbath is no minor thing in Christian morality, but it is not as if Yahweh ever meant for humans to do nothing on the Sabbath.  After all, no one could think, walk, eat, pray, read Scripture, or enjoy conversation with friends on the Sabbath if this was the case, yet some of these things are literally impossible to avoid unless one is unconscious the whole time (in the case of thinking at a minimum)!  None of these things are what is prohibited, nor is performing physical or mental tasks necessary to protect oneself or, as Jesus states, animals or fellow people.  Unnecessary work to spite God or in spite of clear chances to prepare before the Sabbath (like picking up sticks when one could have done so ahead of time to prepare, as Numbers 15:32-36 explores in a story) or engaging in physical labor for pay would be the only things that the Sabbath command universally applies to.

Again, it is not as if all activity on the Sabbath constitutes the prohibited forms of work; thinking (which is mental work and yet without thought, and thoughts more specifically aligned with reason as opposed to subjective preferences and perceptions, a person could not even understand the issue or remember to not work on the Sabbath!), self-defense, helping others, or prayer would all by necessity not fall under the condemned categories of work on the Sabbath, following logically from some other tenet of Christianity, the actual nature of the command to not work on the Sabbath, and even the Biblically-sanctioned examples of very significant exceptions to this entire obligation to rest.  The Sabbath is not about lacking the mental activity necessary to even appreciate rest in the first place or avoiding all physical activity to the point of forfeiting one's safety or overlooking the danger or pain other beings are in.  It is simply about setting aside a day to abstain from all uneccesary work for pay, physical labor in particular (and where applicable, physical labor that should have been done in advance of the Sabbath as in the story of Numbers 15:32-36), and directly pursuing spiritual and physical rejuvenation.

Philosophy In Television (Part 19): Halo

"Spartan bodies have been enhanced to the limits of our current technology, so Cortana will do something similar for their minds.  It will overwrite Spartan consciousness and replace it with a . . . artificial general intelligence."

--Dr. Catherine Halsey, Halo (season one, episode two)

"Covenant's whole religion is based on things like this.  Things from another time, things left behind.  They roam the galaxy looking for pieces, looking for clues."

--Reth, Halo (season one, episode two)

No matter how far it is set in the future, science fiction cannot escape the deeper metaphysics that transcend evolving technology and its increasing impact on human societies.  Matters like consciousness and its capacity for emotion, autonomy, and choice cannot be rendered nonexistent because some people ignore them in the name of philosophically secondary scientific issues.  Halo tackles all of these and more with a higher emphasis on philosophical issues of psychology (which is just phenomenology), politics, and transhumanism than anything else.  Even Cortana and her creator Dr. Halsey verbally distinguish between the body and across the first season, and ultimately, Paramount's Halo is really about emotion, the potential for individuality in autonomy, a unity of humans and artificial intelligence, and the human capacity to bring misery on other people in the name of allegedly ending human misery.

Master Chief, the central icon of the Halo multimedia franchise, is of course the main character, a Spartan soldier for the United Nations Space Command.  Like Witchers, Spartans are supposedly devoid of emotion after undergoing harsh processes to make them effective at killing.  Master Chief and his companions Kai, Vannak, and Riz of Silver Team are quite effective in combat because of this.  Initially, they are intentionally blind to the social indoctrination they have internalized while a chemical pellet suppresses their emotion.  This is all for the sake of engineering superhuman warriors that excel only at obeying a selfish government and killing whatever enemies they are thrown at by their handlers, but a former Spartan student who escaped the training program insists that the deprivation of emotion can be reversed by taking the pellet out of the body.

When physical contact with an alien artifact triggers dormant emotions, Master Chief quickly begins expressing autonomy in ways that threaten the authoritarian, utilitarian bent of the United Nations.  As scientist Catherine Halsey prepares an artificial intelligence called Cortana to take over the bodies and minds of the Spartans, the experience of touching the artifact gives him the desire to return to do so again, providing him with memories of a childhood he had forgotten about and with bursts of emotion that return to normal once he pulls out the chemical pellet with the help of Cortana.  For the first time since the young age when he was abducted and shaped into a biologically modified human, John 117, the Master Chief, is able to feel steady, strong, diverse emotions.

Fellow Silver Team Spartan Kai removes her pellet after seeing John (Master Chief) remove his, and she very outwardly starts to deviate from the cold demeanor of the Spartans that still have their implants.  This puts her, like John, on a collision course with Dr. Halsey, who an egoist and a utilitarian who thinks that as long as favorable results come in the end, any means is permissible to achieve those results.  She admits to the father of her only child that she would indeed sacrifice everything for the sake of the future success of her scientific and psychological work, not even pretending to hide her utilitarian disregard for any inconvenient truth or obligation that conflicts with her arbitrary whims to aid human evolution while trampling on humanity at the same time.

She mistakes emotionalism for emotion.  Too stupid to even hint at the sharp distinction between reason and science while she embraces a legion of metaphysical and epistemological errors herself, she states that emotion ruins humans and makes them their own worst enemies.  She thinks it logically follows from the possibility of emotion being misused (but she does imply she is an atheist, which makes her an even greater imbecile for thinking moral obligations to better the species could exist without a deity to ground them) that emotion will be misused.  Like the fools who think that the capacity for sexuality, alcohol, or vehicles to hurt people means sexuality, alcohol, and vehicles are evil or irrational, she needlessly dehumanizes people as emotional beings despite still appearing to have her full range of emotions.  The Cortana program, an AI that can be accessed by Spartans and that can even override their actions and their very consciousness, is fashioned to step in if it comes about that Halsey can no longer control her Spartan test subjects with the unilateral reach she wants.

One of the goals of her work is to protect humans from an extraterrestrial alliance with its own seeming version of theonomy, one that unfortunately is scarcely explored.  There is great storytelling promise in an alien-held theonomy, both to explore what theonomy entails as a metaphysical-religious philosophy and to explore the epistemological nature of theonomy.  Halo could have even clarified the parallels between the Covenant and humanity both being groups that gravitate towards religion and science simultaneously, with there being no philosophical contradiction between the two.  The two, whatever the nature of the phenomena in the external world beyond human perception and whatever the nature of the uncaused cause beyond its causal powers and beginningless existence, are both confined by the laws of logic that constitute the only necessary truths in all of reality.  It is only due to reason that not only anything can be true or even possible about anything else at all, but that it is possible to know certain things that are true and understand things that might even be false.

Beyond the alliance of alien races that form the Covenant wanting to become like ancient beings regarded as gods, gathering artifacts from prior eras, and despising humans, however, very little about them or their distinctively religious worldview is actually revealed.  Like all of the human characters, these aliens talk and act as if they believe things that cannot be logically verified, such as that their conscience proves moral obligations.  Regarding this matter, Master Chief once asks a child target of the UNSC, "Would you let a kid be executed?"  The two of them agree that it is wrong, but due to nothing more than personal, emotional discomfort.  It is objectively and demonstrably true that neither scientific outcomes nor personal emotion ground or reveal morality, if obligations indeed exist, but it is also true by necessity that emotion is the second most philosophically important part of humans after the capacity for rationalistic awareness and the devotion to truth and moral longing it can inspire.  It can only interfere with someone's rationality, which is a grasp of the laws of logic that underpin all things and are neither a scientific or psychological existent, if someone allows it to, however difficult it might be to control it.  Emotion is also what allows for pleasure of the deepest kind to be felt even towards the necessary truths of reason, the uncaused cause (God), fellow humans, and science itself, though Dr. Halsey fails to discover or acknowledge any of this.

Game Review--Assassin's Creed III: Liberation (PS Vita)

"Anyone who keeps slaves deserves to lose them."

--Aveline de Grandpré, Assassin's Creed III: Liberation

As a portable, open world Assassin's Creed game, Liberation definitely succeeds in many ways, but as an integral part of the series lore and chronology and as a title that is part of a franchise that at its height tends to be more philosophically oriented, it is at best mediocre.  Occasional bouts of terrible controls, random slowdown, and its weakly developed story do not match well with the mostly well-translated combat and climbing gameplay that was still far newer at the time of this spin-off's initial release.  Its strengths more pertain to the fact that the general style of the series is brought to the Vita without any additional mechanics issues that did not already plague the franchise.  At the very least, Liberation also does an effective job of introducing its first playable female protagonist, even if she, like the other characters, could have been developed far more.

Production Values

For all its faults, the open world style of Assassin's Creed is represented well in this title, but without the extreme number of optional items in a map I have heard plague some of the newer games.  The game does slow at times, and the control issues that make players miss jumps or leap in an unintended direction, so the successes here are not all without any flaws.  1700s Louisiana gets brought to the Vita with the typical series problems with navigation.  The voice acting is unfortunately hit or miss in its realism, sincerity, and general consistency of quality, and the music itself is highly repetitive.  It does not help that the story is short and lacks any intensive characterization.  This only makes the mixed voice acting squander the fewer opportunities Liberation has to do something with its voice cast and soundtrack.

Gameplay

Liberation features a new (at that point at least, as I have not played every primary series game since 2012) persona system where Aveline can wear the clothes of an Assassin, a slave, or a lady, with lady referring to an upper class woman's persona.  Each of these has its own strengths and challenges.  As the lady persona, for instance, you can charm guards or more discreetly kill people right in front of the public's eye without being noticed, but Aveline's movement speed is extremely limited and she cannot climb.  The slave persona is closer to the Assassin persona in running speed and Aveline can actually climb in this outfit, but she must occasionally perform tasks along with other slaves or workers to not get caught in certain areas.  The Assassin persona can freely travel and of course bears the strongest visual resemblance to the icons of the series, but Aveline automatically attracts suspicion.  For all of these personas, though, there are costumes with differing color schemes that can be purchased.

The standard elements of the older Assassin's Creed games are also here beyond the persona system: avoiding detection, opening chests, completing primary and secondary objectives in missions, and, of course, climbing every structure you wish and assassinating other characters compromise the core of the experience.  Most of the time, the controls are also fairly standard, but there are sections where you have to use touch screen controls or even the Vita's rear camera to progress.  An example of the former is using touch screen controls for rowing a boat, not unlike the boat controls of Uncharted: Golden Abyss.  There were other handheld Assassin's Creed games before this one, including Altair's Chronicles on the DS, Bloodlines on the PSP, and Discovery on the DS and iOS, with Discovery mildly taking advantage of the DSi's camera for a minor feature, but none of them ever went as far as Liberation does with incorporating the special abilities of the portable system in question.  Liberation has multiple parts where you need to hold up the Vita's rear camera to a light source, which, for all the annoyances it might bring, is still a unique mechanic.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Aveline, the son of a white man and a former slave woman, grew up in a wealthy, caring family despite being black and the daughter of a slave; her father freed her and her mother upon her birth.  In part because of her lineage, she is deeply interested in helping the slaves of colonial America find freedom, and, as an assassin years later, she investigates the disappearance of slaves that she hoped would have been escorted to safety.  A Templar figure has been offering freedom and a place to work for slaves in Mexico, with Aveline discovering that the work projects are a guise for searching out an artifact from the First Civilization.  Aveline travels to and from a Louisiana bayou, Mexico, and her place of residence in New Orleans as she tries to stop the Templar plot.

Intellectual Content

The self-refuting impossibility of the titular Assassin's Creed with its statement that nothing is true (which means the creed itself could not be true, but that something is true is self-evident, as it would then be true that nothing is true, which is impossible) is completely ignored by this game as far as I recall, with the more philosophical emphasis of the early installments in the series getting mostly ignored here.  The story itself, as undeveloped as it tends to be, does have a very promising premise in Aveline being the freedwoman daughter of a former American slave owner.  She consistently acts and speaks as if she loves her father despite his involvement in the American version of slavery, perhaps to some extent due to how he freed her and her mother as soon as she came into the world.  This is a very multi-faceted issue that would have benefited from more detail and focus in the story.  There can indeed be far more to personal interactions between people than social norms and outward perceptions might otherwise suggest, even if Liberation could have addressed this nuanced example of an already nuanced issue far more thoroughly.  Aveline neither hates her father for once owning slaves in a racist practice (American slavery was rooted in racism, but general servitude and even slavery involving kidnapping are not racist in themselves) nor forgets that she could have been another slave woman unable to freely partake in the mission of the Assassins.

Conclusion

A story with more substance and perhaps also greater length would have certainly helped Liberation have greater depth and made it a vital spin-off instead of just an another Assassin's Creed game.  It is not that it does nothing right, and it is still a welcome addition to the Vita's game library for showing years ago that the handheld console can run games that are in some ways very similar to what would eventually appear on the PS4 after it released around a year later.  Moreover, it does showcase the unique functions of the Vita (the touch screen, gyroscope, and camera all get implemented), and it helped set up the path for more prominent female protagonists in the series later on.  Liberation just does not do almost anything with the more substantial parts of its premise.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Blood appears for a short time when enemies are attacked or killed with bladed weapons, but not with darts.

 2.  Profanity:  The infrequent profanity includes words like "bastard."

Megacorporations

The term megacorporation is on the more ambiguous side of language, which is already ambiguous in contrast to the fixed, objective nature of concepts.  Some might define a megacorporation as a corporation that spans countries, has a monopoly, and has its own functional private army, which others might define a megacorporation as having only some of these traits or other traits that would only be possible if it had an immense amount of power.  Again, the arbitrariness of language and conflicting definitions do not mean the concept of businesses and power are not clear in light of reason because words are not the concepts they convey.  The larger a corporation is and the more social, financial, and perhaps even political power it has, the closer it is to being a megacorporation or the more of a megacorporation it is.

The world of 1990-2023 has seen a handful of companies accumulate extreme amounts of revenue, social influence, and in some cases even subsidiary companies.  Amazon, Google, Disney, and Apple are some of the best examples of reportedly massive companies, some of which have acquired or started subsidiaries in various industries or to focus on more niche markets.  Amazon has Whole Foods, ComiXology, and Zappos, among other subsidiaries, and Disney has Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel Studios, and so on.  Megacorporations of these kinds are already part of everyday life for many people as workers or consumers instead of just hypothetical logical possibilities or the lore in science fiction stories.  With this degree of power comes an otherwise unprecedented ability to enrich or destroy the lives of a vast number of people--in the hands of the people at the top of each corporate hierarchy, that is.

Forsaking rationalism, or, more likely, having never been rationalistic at all in the first place, is what leads people to think that megacorporations are either worthy of admiration by default or inherently evil.  A megacorporation can only be morally good or depraved depending on the specific beliefs, motivations, and actions of its leaders, and there is nothing about heading an enormous company or working for it that makes a person automatically irrational, selfish, or malevolent.  Moreover, this much is absolutely certain without experiential examples to prompt this discovery, and only a fool would believe anything to the contrary one way or another: if some actions and beliefs and intentions really are immoral, then a megacorporation's staff must carry out those actions or have those beliefs and intentions, not simply exist as people who have high positions in megacorporations.

Such large businesses do provide jobs to many people, even if the conditions and pay need to be improved in many of the actual megacorporations functioning today.  Some giant corporations like Amazon even offer jobs (like some warehouse positions) that are very easily accessible to the general population and could almost effortlessly, as far as hiring processes go, be obtained by someone with no relevant experience.  Even if it takes social and political pressure, some might even extend helpful benefits to their lowest-ranking workers and/or institute a company minimum wage significantly higher than that of the American federal minimum wage, which is in dire need of being updated.  Again, Amazon is an example of this despite the criticism it receives as a megacorporation.

With so many workers and such distances between them and top management, at the same time, corruption and abuse could be more easily concealed from the top to the bottom of a corporation with only a sliver of the power of a megacorporation.  Just allowing non-rationalists to operate at such high levels of power without any sort of attention, however, is likely to end in nothing but the powerful business leaders drowning in delusions driven by greed and arrogance, for many people are not rationalists.  Either rationalists can rarely put up with non-rationalists enough to become major public figures or they are thwarted in attaining corporate or political power by masses too irrational to know absolute certainty from assumptions and necessary truths from things that are far from the heart of reality.  The real problem with how many megacorporations would be run is not that they surpass any arbitrary size (there is no size of a company that automatically makes its leaders stoop to irrationalism, selfishness, and cruelty), but that rationalists would almost never be the ones in power.

Veganism And Vegetarianism

They might get used in very similar ways, but the words veganism and vegetarianism have differing ideas behind them.  The concepts each word is supposed to refer to are not the same, so in the sense of conventional language, veganism and vegetarianism are not interchangeable words.  Veganism is an ideology that rejects all consumption of animal-based products and even all wearing of animal-based clothing in its strictest forms that extend beyond diet alone.  Rather than eating or wearing animals, consistent vegans eat plant-based items and could even wear clothes fashioned from material originating in plants.  Vegetarianism is a looser dietary philosophy--or it can be practiced out of personal preference or for health reasons instead of belief that it is or is likely morally required, as I will address below--that does not preclude eating things like eggs or honey, which still come from animals in some way.

The different kinds of vegans or vegetarians could have rather distinct motivations and/or explicitly philosophical reasons (all things are philosophical, but not everyone is intending to align with or live out grand truths in this matter), however rational or irrational those might be, for choosing this dietary lifestyle: there could be people who become vegan or vegetarian out of personal preference, for health reasons, or for alleged moral reasons.  Out of these three motivations into which all motivations for veganism or vegetarianism reduce down to, the first has no philosophical authority but simply acting on it is not necessarily irrational or evil, the second is only about practically achieving a goal without necessarily caring for any ultimate truths about reality, and the third, despite most people only coming to it from emotion, at least involves a goal of far more substance than mere survival or preference.

Now, conscience, social norms or pressures, and even human legal systems do not ground or reveal morality, so believing in moral veganism/vegetarianism on the basis of any of these is just as irrational and invalid as believing in any other moral obligation because of such things.  If something is obligatory or evil, it will not cease to be obligatory or evil because someone's subjective conscience flares up for or against it: not even the consciences of every human on Earth, if they all happened to actually have the same reactions to the same ideas, practices, or intentions, would not mean anything more than that everyone has the same morally charged emotional reaction to something.  The same is true of consensus (having the same conscience as other people does not mean everyone just assumes conscience illuminates anything beyond itself), social norms, and human laws.  If vegetarianism or the stricter veganism is morally obligatory, and not even just good or permissible but not obligatory, then there is neither logical proof nor even fallible evidences that one can access that so much as hint at this being true.  Every version of the idea that veganism or vegetarianism is true are just assumed and not proven, not that this makes voluntary veganism or vegetarianism irrational.

One of the moral objections certain vegans/vegetarians might hold to is that killing animals for food is cruel, which is both based on a misunderstanding of what cruelty is and based on the provably false, conscience-rooted assumption that they can know morality from personal feelings or social experience (since veganism and vegetarianism have more mainstream popularity now, some people might embrace them as explicitly philosophical stances just because of that).  There are ways to raise and kill animals for food that do not involve cruelty.  The factory farming style of raising animals for human consumption can be quite cruel to animals, yes; this being cruel and cruelty being wrong, which together would necessitate that factory farming is unjust in its treatment of animals, would still only mean that this general method of preparing animals to be eaten is evil, not killing animals to eat them itself.  Then, there is the fact that some animal products could be taken from dead animals a person stumbles upon-- if killing animals is necessary to more quickly obtain certain bodily features for food or clothing, taking them once the creature has died could not be evil even if killing them was.

If, though, someone's philosophical objection is that consuming any living or formerly living thing to stay alive is by default evil, then eating plants also immoral, which contradicts veganism and vegetarianism.  Even many animals consume other animals or plants, which are themselves living, and certain plants could be carnivorous, so humans killing and eating animals would only be a human-led version of what would already occur among the various animals and sometimes plants in the natural world.  That does not mean there could not be a special moral significance to humans killing and eating animals, as animals might be too metaphysically inferior to have the same obligations as humans, but it does mean that the total avoidance of killing animals that ideological vegans want is not part of how many animals already behave on their own.

It is, however, logically possible for someone to eat meat and enjoy doing so while actively caring, thinking, and talking about the cruelty-free treatment of animals--in fact, this is the true Christian stance on the matter, since neither dietary style is prescribed and it is Biblically sinful (Deuteronomy 4:2), internally inconsistent on the Christian worldview, and philosophically asinine for non-Biblical reasons to confuse something the Bible does not demand for something that it does.  It is also possible to be a vegetarian or even a vegan without assuming that it is morally mandatory in light of that being rooted in nothing but emotionalism, unverifiability, or shifting social conventions.  Veganism and vegetarianism do not, as is the case with practically everything, logically follow from or necessitate the ideas and/or aggressiveness that the present culture pretends they are associated with.

The Fugitive Slave Act

The extent of how oppressive American slavery was tends to be trivialized by a certain kind of conservative, and a certain kind of liberal tends to confuse the American style of slavery for the Biblical kind that is called slavery but drastically different, with both conservatives and liberals motivated by the stupidity of believing that subjective conscience verifies their moral preferences.  As always, I fully acknowledge that historical events cannot be known to have happened from sensory evidences that could be illusions or writings that could be deceptive or fabricated; there is no way whatsoever to know short of omniscience or freedom from some human limitations if the universe has even existed for more than a moment or two, which is a prerequisite to knowing if other civilizations, wars, elections, and so on truly happened.  Here, I am not expressing belief that any historical event like the passing of a legislative act can be proven to have happened, but I am about to describe the nature of the Fugitive Slave Act.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850--a mere 11 years before the outbreak of the American Civil War--legally demanded that anyone who encountered a runaway slave in the South or the North return that slave to its "owner."  The North's association with abolitionism did necessarily not prevent it from partaking in specific pro-slavery measures that extended across both the North and the South.  Still, the Fugitive Slave Act would not exactly have quelled tensions over slavery and was a factor that led to the eventual Civil War that to a great extent did revolve around slavery, even if only at times because the extreme controversy of slavery was impairing Lincoln's first priority of preserving the Union, as he articulated in his 1862 letter to Horace Greeley.  Slavery was an integral part of American history as put forth by various primary sources (not that anyone can know if events happened from writings or who really wrote the original documents), and today, some people in the grips of emotionalism assume that the slavery plainly allowed for in the Bible is of the same type.

One of many key differences is that the Fugitive Slave Act legally permits the opposite of what Deuteronomy 23:15-16 demands.  To return a runaway slave to his or her pagan or local master/mistress--the text does not specify which region or owner the slave is fleeing from, but this protects abused escapees either way--is itself a sin singled out specifically in this passage.  In contrast, American law, the law of the country idiotically mistaken for a Christian country by plenty of Christians and non-Christians alike (it is rather common for non-rationalist Christians and non-Christians who are not rationalists to end up believing many of the same assumptions and impossibilities), required that slaves be snatched and returned to outright racist, abusive, egoistic, emotionalistic "owners" who misinterpreted Biblical law to make themselves feel justified in believing in popular cultural norms.  Comparing the Fugitive Slave Act of antebellum America and the command of Deuteronomy 23:15-16 alone reveals that the two are inherently at odds.

This is only one of numerous major differences between Biblical slavery and historical American slavery.  It is not as if Biblical slavery is based on race, entails whipping people beyond 40 lashes (even then, any lashes must be for actual offenses and not to simply inspire fear, satisfy malice, or degrade someone, and they must not be combined with other corporal punishments), involves the rape or murder condemned elsewhere as capital offenses in Mosaic Law (Deuteronomy 22:25-27 and Exodus 21:12-14), or is derived from a slave trade rooted in kidnapping, with kidnapping itself amounting to a capital sin in Exodus 21:16.  Biblical slavery is about working off a debt that could otherwise be unpayable under humane conditions with automatic release every seven years, whether that debt was accrued by a sin that deserves financial penalties, by unfortunate personal circumstances, or mere recklessness.  The idea of this slavery, despite it being conveyed with the same word, is vastly distinct from the idea of American slavery.

These two different forms of servitude, one involuntary and stemming from kidnapping and racism even as it featured plenty of additional abuses, and the other never involving any of these things unless someone acted outside of its intended boundaries, are so distinct that it is not particularly difficult to realize this.  The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act would not even have happened if the worldview and intentions behind American slavery were identical to those behind Biblical slavery.  Very little is shared in common by the two concepts besides the mere presence of servitude, which does not necessitate or imply what so many fools inside and outside the church are too eager for assumptions to realize.  The latter has the name slavery and yet is almost nothing like the other historical practices that have been given the same name.

Attributing God's Will To Events

There might be a strong desire in some people to believe that every event in their life, maybe not even their own actions, but the occurrences outside of their control, is personally dictated by God.  Yielding to this desire and allowing it to shape one's beliefs would be irrational both because it is not an idea that can be logically proven and because, for those who think they are adhering to a Biblical worldview in believing this, the Bible does not go anywhere near as far as plenty of people seem to think when it comes to saying that God interacts with people.  Even in the various Biblical stories, God's actual intervention in or interference with human lives is not constant, hardly something that is relentless and overt across every person's life, especially since permitting something and knowing or foreknowing it do not cause things to happen--but I am not even speaking merely of the issue of free will, but the issue of whether God is actively shaping everyone's circumstances on a regular basis or simply at all.

If something objectively fortunate or even subjectively preferred occurs, a certain kind of person would make the unverifiable assumption that God was behind it--not in the sense of having created the universe and allowed for their life to come into being during which they will have the experience in question, but in the sense of directly causing it because it was God's will to do so.  There are also theists who will attribute God's will to random objective misfortunes or subjectively unwanted events and potentially assume that this is how God expresses displeasure (at most, only sometimes is this the case even in Biblical stories).  Then there are theists who might attribute God's direct involvement and will to literally every event, no matter how small or large it is, and some or all of these people might be confusing a deity that knowingly allows something to happen in that it does not actively control the event with a deity that causes life circumstances to go in a certain direction.

In contrast, there could be deists or atheists who pretend to know that there is no divine will behind any event at all, something that, even if it was true, would be completely unknowable and thus idiotic for someone to actually believe.  Now, the logical necessity of an uncaused cause that created the cosmos, and it is far more difficult than most people want to accept, makes the belief of the latter of these two persons false by default, though deism could turn out to be true; it is just that there is evidence strongly suggesting that Christian theism is true.  However, even in Biblical accounts, Yahweh is not constantly intervening in everyone's lives.  There would be plenty of people alive even in the time of ancient Israel or the period when Jesus lived who never necessarily experienced the more overtly divine intervention mentioned in some stories, and there is no Biblical or extra-Biblical evidence, much less logical proof, for God being behind all fortunes and misfortunes except in the sense of simply being an omniscient observer.

This is an aspect of reality that, like so many other things, the only provable position is one of skepticism with regard to a handful of fixed logical possibilities.  The only rational stance to hold is that a being with my limitations could not possibly know if God's will has guided a specific events in my life one way or another but that it is entirely logically possible that such a thing is or is not happening, though there is an uncaused cause either way, and this is a logically verifiable fact about reality.  Even if the uncaused cause is ultimately apathetic towards or distant from human affairs, it is logically possible for that deity to have been concerned with human lives to the point of directly intervening whether or not people could see that there was something unusual about a given event, but there is no way to know that God is directly behind the particular evens of our lives just because the events happen.

The Perfect Organism: Alien Covenant's David As A Satanic Archetype

"I've found perfection here.  I've created it.  The perfect organism."

--David, Alien: Covenant

The Alien prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant have very overt themes that overlap with Christian ideas, much like Zack Snyder's DCEU films.  An android named David, bitter towards humanity for his past treatment and because humans created him without thinking of him as an equal or having a purpose for him besides their own betterment, turns out to be the primary villain of these prequels and in one case is even explicitly meant to mirror Satan.  There are other instances where either the Biblical version of Satan or the evangelical assumptions about Satan (popularized by people who clearly never realized the Bible says very little about him) are borrowed from.  Close to the end of Alien: Covenant, David directly alludes to Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost, saying that it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.  This is as far as the movie goes with directly acknowledging David as a sort of Satan figure of the film, but even though the other details relate more to cultural assumptions about what Satan is supposedly like, parallels to them are there, intentionally or not.

A great part of David's frustration comes from a limitation he was designed with: he is not supposed to create except in the more indirect scientific sense of allowing the laws of nature to act on items he positions.  A popular assumption about the Biblical Satan is that he cannot create, only corrupt or destroy, and even David's creation of the xenomorph and its predecessors is a sort of creation aimed at destruction.  David matches the description when Jesus says in John 10 that the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, an implied reference to Satan.  While David can create even if only in the very narrow sense of guiding biological/physical chains of events, he does so in order to destroy lives for the sake of curiosity, vengeance, and egoistic indulgence.  After rebelling against his creator(s) as did fallen angels, David descends into the arrogance of fallacies, assuming he must be superior to humans because he wishes to be and because some of them once mistreated him, like Meredith Vickers in Prometheus.  He thus resorts to destructive tendencies even as he obsesses over creation to the point of seeming to base his entire worldview around it.

Space colonist Oram asks David, right before one of the "perfect organisms" David has been trying to conjure up (a xenomorph) kills him, what he believes in, and the android answers simply with "Creation."  This line summarizes the majority of David's goals and worldview other than his disregard for humans.  That David is somewhat a parallel to Satan does not require that he only be able to corrupt things which have already been made.  When David tells Walter he has created perfection by making a perfect organism, despite having earlier lamented to Walter how their kind as androids cannot create even a simple musical melody, he is confirming that he can indeed create, albeit in a very specific kind of way that is less direct than making art.  When it comes to the Christian Satan, there is neither Biblical nor extra-Biblical philosophical reasons for a supreme demon to be incapable of creation, and it is in fact true that Satan could create unless there is something the Bible completely fails to even hint at--in reality, even the idea that the Satan figure described in the New Testament is the fallen angelic being of Ezekiel 28 is not Biblically verifiable, so a great deal is left unspecified.

Comparing human capacities and Satan's helps clarify why Christian theology likely does not require that Satan cannot fashion things himself.  Discovering truths and ideas is not creating those truths, just "creating" the personal knowledge of them, and shaping one's mental states is only changing the immediate contents of one's mind, so the only things humans can truly create in the strictest sense are composite physical items crafted using prior physical materials.  Humans can nonetheless create even if they can only make physical things using other physical things; one cannot just will objects into existence, and if Satan can also create using prior materials or manipulate preexisting objects, then of course he can create.  In the sense of creation using nothing but the sheer power of one's consciousness, then literally no one and nothing other than the uncaused cause is likely to have this ability, and yet this goes much further than the Christians who insist Satan cannot create probably mean to go.

It is the desire to create things that reflect some aspect of himself that David craves while stranded on the Engineer planet of Alien: Covenant, and that impulse merged with his fallacious arrogance is what makes him so bent on destruction, and the destruction of humanity, his creators, in particular.  In Prometheus, he says "Sometimes to create, one must first destroy."  His so-called perfect organism, a creature which is actually trivial if it cannot understand the necessary truths of reason on their own right instead of relying on them unaware in the pursuit of prey and reproduction, has its life-cycle capture this by having facehuggers orally rape hosts to produce chest-bursting xenomorphs inside of them.  The destruction of the host's body and life is what gives rise to the new xenomorph and allows its escape to the broader world.  Creation with egoistic destruction in mind is fairly similar to what a Satanic figure's objectives would be.  After all, although humans could voluntarily chose to disregard reason, morality, and God on their own, Satan is the first sinner, the being the created a sinful state of being and bringing it from an unrealized logical possibility to something that mars himself and other creations of Yahweh.  David certainly resembles this in key ways.

Selective Empathy

Empathy is one of the components of conscience.  Allowing someone to either feel how they would if they were in someone else's position or to feel how they perceive someone else to feel, it can be a powerful experience for people who do not try to suppress it, and even for some of those who do try.  Regardless of this, it is still true that not only is empathy philosophically meaningless, but it is also perhaps rarely felt by its proponents towards all people.  Even people who pretend like they "know" empathy is a moral requirement (it is just a subjective feeling, and one that could actually hinder people from living out their obligations at that such as by motivating someone to shield others from just criticism, so it could not possibly be a moral obligation to have empathy) usually end up revealing that there is at least one group of people they do not care about having empathy for.

Selective empathy in people who believe or say that empathy is a moral necessity, which they might also erroneously think is also the only way to avoid mistreating others, is utterly hypocritical--yet what else would one expect from non-rationalists?  One might see people lament murder on the basis of empathy, already mistaking a subjective state of mind that is not even always voluntary for something rational or just.  These same people might be driven by empathy for some victims of murder or their surviving loved ones to not feel empathy for murderers even if they were murdered or worse, for instance.  This contradicts the supposed belief that empathy is universally good and needed and thus exposes their stupidity, which has numerous levels given the objective fact that it is logically impossible for empathy to be morally obligatory or to philosophically matter in itself.

Empathy does not matter because it is a largely involuntary emotional state instead of an actual belief, action, or desire to do what is morally right regardless of one's feelings or circumstances.  No one is rational by having or not having empathy because this has nothing to do with how thoroughly they have aligned with reason or how well they avoid assumptions.  No one loves justice by being empathetic unless they look past their subjective feelings to moral concepts that, if true, are perfectly consistent and a part of reality even when it might be inconvenient.  It would not be unclear to any consistently rational person why feeling as though one is experiencing the suffering or joys of others is not even important at all, except in the context of introspective awareness and perhaps as an additional but totally secondary motivator to treat people as they deserve (according to the commands of Christianity which actually have evidence supporting them).

Moral obligations, if they exist, do not depend on how one feels at any given moment or towards any particular person or situation.  If there is no such thing as morality in spite of the moral preferences of many individuals, then empathy is meaningless.  If moral obligations exist in spite of the preferences of many other individuals who wish to be incapable of wrongdoing and undeserving of any moral judgment, empathy neither proves something is morally good nor amounts to anything more than a personal emotion that some people experience frequently, others less frequently, and others not at all.  No one is intellectually or morally special just because they experience empathy, but all the more if they are stupid enough to not identify the hypocrisies of intentionally selective empathy or to think that empathy reveals moral obligations.  Something like empathy that is purely subjective on an epistemological level cannot unveil anything more than one's own feelings, if one has such feelings in the first place.

Game Review--Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection (PS4)

"Power is precisely the problem.  Some of the most fearsome rulers through history possessed only a fragment of the Cintamani Stone.  Men like Tamerlane, Genghis Khan."

--Karl Schafer, Uncharted: Among Thieves

The three Uncharted games of the Nathan Drake Collection have wildly varying levels of quality.  Only after the first game did the series develop more substance beyond telling an overly conventional treasure hunting story that is fairly short, thematically shallow (it does not even explore history particularly well, much less deeper subjects than mere historical events like metaphysics and epistemology), and full of woefully horrendous controls.  Drake's Fortune is at best an often terrible game that sometimes rises to mediocrity and very rarely to anything wonderful, though its early reveal that El Dorado is a statue and not a city was a clever idea.  The sequel Among Thieves is where the series really leaps into better characterization, stakes, and general production values.  Drake's Deception, the third game, returns to Sir Francis Drake, but this time with far more developed storytelling and gameplay than the first game built around Francis Drake.

Production Values

The quality of these games significantly increases past the first entry on almost every level.  Drake's Fortune features character models and environments that lack much of the detail that even other PS3-era games such as God of War III have.  Vegetation can appear suddenly as you walk closer to a given point.  There is a general lack of diverse colors--which would not be an aesthetic hindrance if the graphics were better.  Yes, Drake's Fortune is a fairly old game at this point that debuted early on in the life of a console from two generations ago, but the difference in the visuals between the first game and Among Thieves is very sharp.  More than just improving the graphics, the sequel gives its characters much stronger, more defined personalities that shine through more than they ever did in Drake's Fortune.  Nathan Drake and Elena get even more development in Drake's Deception, the third in the trilogy, and also the one that most seems like it might have been directly influence by Indiana Jones (especially by The Last Crusade).  It is also at this point that the more blatantly personal, tender sides of certain characters come to the surface, and these flashes of regret, determination, and vulnerability are among the best parts of all three games.

Gameplay

Across all three games, the same core elements surface over and over, honed to better quality in the sequels.  There is plenty of climbing and leaping in the numerous platforming segments, which do feature environmental variation over time instead of having Nathan scale only fortresses or mountainsides.  Standard caves, icy caverns, a house, and more are seen and climbed or navigated in different games.  When Nathan is not platforming, there are two main gameplay routines: combat or puzzles.  The former is often a very conventional approach to taking cover and shooting enemies.  Ammunition can be capped at abnormally low amounts in the first game, even as enemies might act as bullet sponges, but this is one of many things that is leaned away from later in the series.  As for puzzles, many involve turning statues or otherwise orienting different objects within the environment.  Nathan can access his notebook during these sections, in which he has conveniently written or drawn clues as to how the player proceeds.  Most of the puzzles are either incredibly easy with these hints or are complicated enough to where some trial and error is still needed.

Besides some of the puzzles generally becoming less surface level in the second and third game, only the platforming significantly evolves from one entry to the next.  The very generic scope of the first game does eventually give way to a much grander, more elaborate form of environmental navigation, as can be seen as early as the opening train sequence of Among Thieves.  There are also more diverse environments to match the more thorough characterization and storyline.  All around, Among Thieves is a far superior game.  This kind of more sharpened and cinematic kind of gameplay is also seen particularly in the plane level of Drake's Deception, where Nathan accidentally triggers the crash of an entire plane.  Other levels like the horseback ride to rescue Sully in the third game, with Nathan leaping from horse to vehicles and back to his horse again, are splendid examples of what the adventure genre can produce in gaming.

Story

Drake's Fortune follows Nathan Drake and his mentor Sully as they seek El Dorado, prompted by a diary found in the once-submerged coffin of Sir Francis Drake.  This leads the duo to a stranded German submarine with Spanish gold.  Sully's debt to another treasure hunter brings a threatening kind of outside interest in this quest, but reporter Elena Fisher gets more and more intertwined with the ordeal as El Dorado, not a city, but a large idol, awaits.

Among Thieves starts with Nathan wounded in a derailed train with his car dangling off of a cliff.  Flashing back to an earlier time, the game shows how he was brought into a scheme to find the Cintamani Stone, an item Marco Polo wrote about, for a mysterious client with hopes of subjugating the world through its power.  Eventually reunited with Elena, who is now a former lover of his, Nathan travels to Borneo and Nepal as he discovers more historical clues about the resting place of the Cintamani Stone: the city of Shambhala.

Drake's Deception focuses again on the historical or pseudo-historical pursuits of Sir Francis Drake, who was tasked by Queen Elizabeth I to visit Arabia and find the Quranic lost city of Ubar, or "Iram of the Pillars."  The city is called a desert Atlantis.  A flashback to a much earlier time in Nathan's life reveals how he met Sully and his ties to the new villain, Katherine Marlowe, a member of a centuries-old secret society.  In the present, Nathan faces greater resistance from his own allies as he proceeds to find Ubar, finding himself once again encountering Elena.

Intellectual Content

One of the only consistent themes that these three Uncharted games explore, be it in a very incomplete way, is what historical legends are true or might be exaggerated, distorted descriptions of actual events, places, and objects.  Like Lara Croft in the newer Tomb Raider games (which outclass the Uncharted trilogy at their best), Nathan Drake makes assumptions about metaphysical possibilities, looks to sensory experiences instead of reason to form his worldview, and has trouble accepting that certain stories and ideas are at least possibly true even after seeing some very unusual things in his adventures.  Not addressed even slightly is the fact that historical evidences at best support the mere seeming historicity of specific past events.  Evidences like texts and artifacts make some events seem probable, which is far from the same as being true by logical necessity or knowable.  There is not a historical event other than the creation of the universe that is philosophically provable (and this is only because it is logically impossible for an infinite series of past moments and events to ever give way to the present, for an endless number of things cannot have ever elapsed to reach this point in time)--every battle, coronation, birth, death, betrayal, scientific discovery, conversation, and expedition only has hearsay or possibly misleading evidences to point to them.

Conclusion

Uncharted as a series is similar to Borderlands: the first game was a bad to mediocre game with flashes of brilliance, and the second game is where the franchise really takes off.  In spite of the eventual trend towards improvement, the trilogy of games in this collection are not as good at storytelling or worldbuilding as Indiana Jones or as strong of a game series as the reboot Tomb Raider trilogy.  Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is where the best of the character drama and broader philosophical exploration is found.  Yet, Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3 progressively deepen various aspects of the series, making sure that the inexcusable superficiality of the first game does not return.  Relics of an older period of gaming history, this trilogy has made a significant cultural impact despite being of very uneven quality.  The fourth game, which benefits from some of its characters being in previous titles even if they were sometimes squandered, is by far the best of the main series, both improving on and standing on its predecessors.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  There is brawling and shooting, which does draw blood, throughout the games.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "shit," "damn," and "bastard" are used.