Photon Interaction With Electrons: Not The Same As Idealism

I can see exactly where a tree is with regard to some other nearby object--it is impossible for spatial distance, other than the infinity of an empty space in all directions, to be identified without a reference point, such as a tree's positioning by comparison to another tree.  I can see the speed, even if I cannot tell from the movement itself precisely what it is, of a person walking, as well as their direction.  With regard to other sensory stimuli around it, I can perceive their velocity, the combination of speed and direction.  Since these are macroscopic objects or events, the epistemological limitations of the senses apply, but on the level of fallible perception, I can know the position and speed of something at once.  The subatomic issue of observing both qualities at once is tied to far more overtly philosophical matters than this.

For something at the quantum scale, the size of an observed or sought after particle is much, much smaller than anything visible to the unaided eye.  An electron can be hypothetically seen by directing light towards it, but the moment it is noticed, its movement can be affected by the process, so its trajectory will be altered.  This outcome is summarized as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, dealing with how at the quantum scale, location and velocity cannot be fully known at the same time.  The photon used for its light drives the electron away.  Now, this is not supposed to be like a rock breaking glass.  A photon is conceived of as massless and thus immaterial, joining things like empty space within atoms that are nonphysical components of what are often ironically assumed to be naturalistic paradigms.

A photon is immaterial, a massless unit unlike even something as small as electrons, which, despite having a very miniscule mass compared to a proton, still have some mass.  It is bizarre on one level that a massless unit of energy can impact the location of a physical object, however small, but it is not logically impossible for immaterial things to affect physical things, such as when my mind controls how I lift my arm.  String theory, an utterly unverifiable but entirely possible metaphysic of the universe, would even require that physical substance is ultimately created at a quantum level by nonphysical energy.  This is not the same as another somewhat popular idea about quantum physics and its relationship with the immaterial.  Some posit that observation itself, a phenomenological activity, makes the electron behave differently when perceived.

Conscious perception might generate or sustain matter in the sense of metaphysical idealism (but there would still be more than just mind and matter in existence, like logical truths and the space that holds matter).  There would be no epistemological way to prove this given human limitations in the same way I cannot know if matter alone, arranged into the structure of a brain, generates my consciousness.  If what reportedly happens in research is the case, though, and electrons are "tossed" about when photons reach them due to the former's extraordinarily small size, this would not have to be an idealistic phenomenon at all.  The photon is correlatively required to see light, and since the photon affects the electron's state, this alone would not be a mind-influencing-matter event.  It would not be the same as looking at something and making an event occur with no other act than passively focusing one's consciousness in a given place.

I cannot know if object permanence at the macroscopic scale is true.  After all, I obviously cannot perceive matter when I am not perceiving it to find out!  Moreso than this, I cannot know if something similar happens at the subatomic level that I cannot even see.  As obvious as this is upon thinking about it without making assumptions, many people never think about such things.  Either option about the external world at either scale is logically possible but unknowable for me.  A photon "pushing" an electron about would still not be about conscious observation making the electron move.  As strange as it is, it would be about a different immaterial thing, the photon, making this come about.  Quantum physics might very well reduce to idealistic metaphysics when it comes to the causal connection between mind and matter, but not because photons and electrons interact in the way they allegedly do.  In light of photon behavior, the observer-particle relationship is not suggested to be idealistic just because electrons move when one looks for them.

The Link Between Air Conditioning And Climate Change

Alone, the typical person's carbon impact on the planet could be extremely negligible.  It is when people burn fossil fuels or release greenhouse gasses en masse or in certain ways--or when corporations or very wealthy individuals recklessly emit more greenhouse gasses than many other people could across their lifetimes combined--that the effects of contemporary climate change (of the kind human output correlates with) would manifest.  While everything from automobile use to general electricity usage, if powered by fossil fuels, contributes, some emissions or their sources could be worse than others.

The hydrofluorocarbons used in air conditioning, for instance, though they comprise a smaller proportion of reported greenhouse gasses emitted, correlate to worse effects for the environment than carbon dioxide.  In this case, there is an irony in the using of air conditioning in such a world as this: reliance on this artificial cooling method, as widespread and convenient as it is, worsens global warming.  If hydrofluorocarbons are a more potent greenhouse gass than the more common carbon dioxide, the emphasis belongs on how air conditioning would be damaging because of the hydrofluorocarbons themselves and not just because of how it runs on electricity, as would many other things.

The increased heat can make cooling down even more desirable or pragmatically necessary (for health as well as comfort), which can lead to people relying more on cooling methods that use electricity powered by fossil fuels, which in turn amplifies the global heat level and makes cooling even more sought after.  This is the ironic, paradoxical scientific and psychological impact of air conditioning in a world threatened by anthropogenic climate change tied to the release of unnatural levels of carbon into the atmosphere.  A warmer environment increases the need for cooling, yet air conditioning would at certain levels only contribute significantly to the warming that makes it more needed.

Going forward, promoting cooling without adding more fuel to the air conditioning fire is the ideal way to resolve a problem that younger generations would inherit.  Building yet-to-be constructed homes in warmer regions with roofs of a light color, like a soft gray or especially white, allows them to reflect sunlight rather than absorb its heat; dark colors like black correlate with heat absorption, which can make them useful for winter warming and reduce energy consumption in that particular season or in colder parts of the world, but otherwise, even something as simple as having roofs with light colors would avert the need for the same degree of air conditioning reliance, which entails energy cost savings for residents and businesses while also easing the climate change burden.

Some of a conservative bent who oppose the very logical possibility of anthropogenic climate change (which is a strictly logical matter, not a scientific/empirical one, as those with a liberal bent might reject), without even truly knowing what logical possibility is or else they would not misunderstand this point, might at least care about the benefits for their personal finances.  If not for their health as living beings or for the sake of the environment, perhaps this would appeal to them, as irrational as they would be to focus on this at the expense of the other things.  It is not as if conserving energy or using alternative methods of cooling is financially detrimental in itself.

Of course, though political conservatives are associated with anti-environmentalist philosophy, they are also culturally associated with Christianity, which is ultimately quite pro-environment (Genesis 1:1, 6-19, and 31, for instance).  There is nothing irrational, unscientific, or unbiblical about taking environmentalism seriously as long as no assumptions are made, including the confusion of probabilistic scientific evidence for logical necessity/proof or caring more about the environment than the conscious beings that dwell in it.  Even for the pragmatic sake of one's individual flourishing in the long term, preserving the safety of the environment is no minor consideration.

Resisting Arrest

Resisting arrest, no matter how idiotic or even illegal that arrest is--not that legality according to human governments makes any stance or action valid at all--is itself an arrestable offense under American law.  This is a manifestation of the irrationality in authoritarianism, the ideology holding that those with a certain position or title deserve submission or special respect.  People are expected to yield to arbitrary conventions or to authority figures rather than reason and morality.  Since all laws are inherently irrational unless they are in perfect alignment with moral obligations, the police would not be above these things.  If no moral obligations exist, then there is no basis for any legal statutes and penalties at all, and everyone who instates, supports, or carries them out is by necessity irrational.

Neither mere human laws nor the people tasked with enforcing them (in America, the police) have any validity or value unless they wholly overlap with that which is true independent of human activities, civilizations, and presence.  Agreement, convention, convenience, and emotional appeal have nothing to do with whether a law is good or authoritative in the only ways that could possibly matter.  To arrest someone for pointing out that an action does not even conflict with meaningless human laws or that a law is irrational altogether and then refusing to comply with it is, if morality exists, unjust, and it if morality does not exist, it is still irrational.

The laws of logic are the supreme and only intrinsic authority, from which all other truths are dictated or revealed.  All other things must be consistent with them to be possible at all.  All beings must be in submission to them in order to be in the right.  God himself and whatever moral obligations are very likely grounded in his nature are the only other things that a person has to submit to in order to have legitimate standing to tell others what to believe or how to live.  Where there is no error, it does not matter what tradition or conscience or preference would lead someone to do left to themselves; there is no logical truth being neglected and no moral obligation being violated.  There could this be no basis for arrest.

It is asinine that any police officer is allowed to arrest someone for resisting an illegitimate arrest.  With accurate and even potentially belittling words, with physical force proportionate to that of the unjust officer, and with passion or even rationalistically managed hatred lurking below the surface, to resist anyone, police or not, there cannot be anything invalid about resisting arrest for something that does not deviate from reason and morality.  To resist even by killing such a person could not be erroneous, not on the Biblical worldview (then this flagrant, careless arrest would be kidnapping, which is classified as a capital sin in Exodus 21:16), just something that might be irrationally condemned by a community of delusional slaves to assumptions or preferences.

"Sometimes Dead Is Better": Pet Sematary And Revival

"Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning . . . but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe."

--Stephen King, Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary and Revival by Stephen King, written a little over 30 years apart, have some major similarities.  Both deal with death and the philosophical issue of an afterlife, the former touching more on mind-body dualism than the latter, albeit without actual focusing a lot on logically necessary, absolutely certain truths about the matter.  Each of them mentions the location Jerusalem's Lot, with the former also referencing Derry, the same place terrorized by It, in a way that exemplifies the connections between various King stories.  Even with some overlapping themes, the types of horror differ.  Pet Sematary is about how grief drives an already-irrational medical professional (Louis Creed made lots of philosophical assumptions and ignores many necessary truths) to resurrect family members using a cursed burial ground even after seeing or hearing examples of how the process can be dangerous.  Revival is about abandoning Christianity and discovering that it seems like there is an everlasting, universal hell of sorts called the Null waiting for every dead human on the whims of Lovecraftian monsters.

Since both novels explore death and the concept of an afterlife in sometimes varying ways, they have similarities that are not shared to such an extent with many other Stephen King works.  Thanks to the same locations appearing in both, even aside from how the Dark Tower unifies various stories that are otherwise not directly related, they are presented as taking place in the same world.  Do the characters who die in Pet Sematary go to the Null, the perhaps eternal slaves of a being called Mother and others like her?  There are actually many reasons why the collective dead characters in Pet Sematary are almost certainly not in the Null--events would have to have been hallucinated otherwise.  At the very least, Victor Pascow, the student whose death leads to Louis Creed being contacted by his spirit, is not appearing in a non-theological hell.  He is one of the most blatant things that makes Mother's images of the Null glimpsed in Revival either the fate of only some people or total fabrications used to frighten a protagonist seemingly near death.

In Pet Sematary (70), what is repeatedly treated as the ghost of Pascow tells Louis that the door between life and death must not be opened, no matter how tempting it will be.  Here, some parallels to Revival do show up.  Revival does feature multiple references to an ivy door through which Mother speaks to Astrid and Jamie, a "door" past which lies the the Null, a supposedly eternal dimension of decay and suffering where dead humans are enslaved so that they exist as long as the Null does (as with the Biblical hell, people often overlook that even eternal fire or an eternal Null would not mean that any or every being in it also exists forever).  Whether everyone who goes to the Null, if anyone goes at all--Mother could be projecting an illusion like It and Jamie only assumes that everyone goes there upon death--would pass through an actual door is unclear, but in either case, the more significant door is biological death.  Pascow only passed through a metaphorical door to become a benevolent spirit.

After death, Pascow does not say anything at all about or appear in the Null when he engaged in supernatural communication with Louis and later his daughter Ellie.  Another character who dies in Pet Sematary is Norma, of whom the Wendigo that reanimates corpses in an ancient Micmac burial site speaks of through the resurrected body of a very young boy.  The child Gage Creed's body, a conduit for the Wendigo's own consciousness just as the "revived" Mary Fay becomes a tool for Mother at the end of Revival, says that Norma is burning in hell, "arthritis and all."  According to Norma's husband Jud, the Wendigo that possesses the reanimated dead has never lied although it only verbalizes the more negative traits about people.  Perhaps Norma goes to hell after her death.  This would not be the Biblical hell, which no one could be in before the eschatological judgment, not that Stephen King is remotely philosophically competent enough as a thinker to realize this.  If Norma is in "hell," though, she is also not in the Null, or at least what Revival describes of it since it did not have burning.

Other parallels are present in the two stories regardless.  When he first follows his friend Jud to the human burial ground behind the titular Pet Sematary, Louis looks to the night sky, the stars making him feel small and meaningless as he wonders about whether other intelligent life exists, and the Wendigo is visually revealed later on as a superhuman kind of life; ant-like creatures of the Null as seen in Revival, themselves slaves to Mother and the Great Ones, are described as having eyes that the narrator Jamie perceives to have intelligence behind them, though by intelligence, he almost certainly did not mean rationalistic philosophical competence and awareness, but merely the ability to passively grasp reason enough to go along with the mandates of the Great Ones.  They would lack true intelligence even though they seemingly have the capacity for it if so, but they would match the lesser category of "intelligence" that Louis is thinking of.  If the Null is real at all in this cosmos (yes, if an afterlife, it would transcend the mere physical cosmos), then the subject Louis dwells on is more terrifying than many would think.

Still other similarities and contrasts are there in the books.  The Wendigo of Pet Sematary and Mother of Revival are both supernatural, eldritch beings that are spoken of as if they have the ability to influence certain humans for their own ends.  The Wendigo is directly portrayed as having this power.  The opening of Revival touches on this for Mother, without referring to her by name, and the protagonist's experiences with his periods of mind control providing more details.  Death and the possibility of some fork of conscious existence beyond biological death are explored in part using the context of these supernatural entities.  Pascow was still not in the Null, and neither was Norma, according to the Wendigo, but they were (supposedly in Norma's case) in two of the many different afterlives that have been mentioned or hinted at across different, interconnected Stephen King stories.  No one knows what happens to the mind after death as Louis Creed comes to acknowledge, and the afterlife might be different for different people (not just in the sense of heaven and hell being different).  Jud says that "sometimes dead is better" and that death is when the pain stops.  If the alleged afterlife of Revival was true, this would never be the case for any person who goes there!  The alternate afterlives in King's horror require that even among these hopefully fictional metaphysics, there is more optimism than Jamie's vision of the Null alone would imply.

An Alternate Nervous System

The human nervous system consists in part of a brain, with its various lobes, the spinal cord protruding downward, which together form the central nervous system.  The peripheral nervous system encompasses all the nerves that branch away from the spinal cord into other parts of the body.  An average of 86 billion neurons are supposedly found spanning the overall network, relaying electrical and chemical signals for the sake of functions like muscle movement.  Correlations between events in the physical nervous system such as the brain and mental events like the phenomenological experience of sensory perceptions suggest some sort of causal relationship.

It does not follow that one can know which is responsible for the other.  This would be an assumption, not a proven or provable thing, and the mind and nervous system are intertwined but distinct things either way.  It is not even knowable whether the body creates/sustains the mind during biological life (as would appear to be the case) or consciousness actually holds matter in existence.  Few will recognize what does and does not follow, with many assuming that the immaterial nature of consciousness means it must live on after bodily death or that how physical injuries can impair mental capacity means that consciousness is itself physical.  The former is possible but unknown and the latter is outright false.

As humans, people might hear more about human nervous system and its correlative connections to consciousness, but other creatures that outwardly seem to have consciousness lack human neurological structures.  Oceanic animals are quite different from us in this regard.  A sea sponge is living but has no neurons whatsoever, while a sea star, or starfish, has neurons but no brain (like a jellyfish).  Humans have around 86 billion neurons, octopi have approximately 500 million, and sea stars have closer to only 10,000.  Starfishes can still regenerate neurons, regrow lost limbs, or grow severed limbs into separate organisms.

Whereas the octopus has no single centralized brain but still has clusters of neurons for each if its arms, the starfish has a simple nerve ring encircling the mouth that feeds into a radial nerve for each arm.  It does not lack just an endoskeleton, but a brain of any sort.  Despite this, its tube feet still walk or pull apart shelled creatures and its arms can still curl.  It is an animal; it reacts to its environment and to other animals (to feed, for instance).  Though sensory observations of such things do not prove an interior consciousness of any other being, starfishes among them, it would appear that a starfish indeed possesses consciousness.  Even, should this be the case, a lack of elaborate introspective depth or the passion to discover necessary truths would not mean a starfish is not conscious.

Starfishes stand alongside jellyfish, sea cucumbers, and sea sponges as creatures that have no brain yet still have either neurons or no nervous system, not even a "primitive" one.  Scientific laws, correlations, and paradigms cannot be proven beyond the level of potentially illusory perceptions, and one can know from logic alone that consciousness is not the same as the nervous system.  Nevertheless, if an elaborate nervous system or any system is not necessary for conscious life in certain other creatures, then even the contemporary scientific premise of mind-on-neurological dependence is false within its own ideological framework.

The American Workplace: More Risk Than Reward

Approximately 40 hours of work a week, which in plenty of cases is far more efficiently assigned to four day workweeks than to the conventional five day work cycle, leaves more time outside of work than inside it, but not in a way that always gives people enough time to handle more important matters.  Many use work as a supposed excuse to not think about philosophical matters--everything is philosophical, but they might at least have greater difficulty focusing on the abstract necessities of reason.  They have no excuse for forsaking the intrinsic, universal, and universally accessible truths of reason.  When it comes to the lesser issues of practical health, however, there is still the need for sleep, hydration, and food, with any atypical health conditions probably requiring additional, precise treatments that work infringes upon.

Professional work by nature occupies time that could have been otherwise invested, whether more directly or just invested at all, in these more significant things like explicitly philosophical reflection (unintruded upon), relationships with worthy friends or family members, or managing one's health.  Though it could be unsafe for workers and people around them, for instance, a desperately exhausted worker will be expected or pressured, under the possible threat of something like homeless or starvation, to drive (if working non-remotely) to what might be an hour away for their job even when they are risking their lives to do so.

People might also have to forgo the non-necessities that make living through the necessities more bearable, even forsaking things they need to take care of non-mortal health issues because it would be inconvenient for their work.  If all jobs paid an amount that was both survivable and allowed for saving and attaining progressively more comfortable or secure circumstances, then making some sacrifices of time for the workplace would not be a terrible thing, even if it was despised by some subjectively.  The unfortunate reality is that workers could constantly offer 40 hours of their lives to a single job, some having more than one, and still do little more than financially run in place even if they are not economically reckless.

There is at large far more risk than reward in the American workplace of today.  Unless someone was born into sufficient wealth, obtains it by happenstance, takes advantage of other people, or somehow secures a very high-paying job (which is often a matter of luck), they might very well wind up giving the majority of their free time away to an employer who would kill them and sell their corpse if only it would increase their profits by a small number and they could get away with it.  Everything from irrelevant expectations for "professionalism" to vague promises to active egoism (an expression of irrationalism) and incompetence only adds to the hellacious nature of many careers.

While there is nothing about being an employer that makes this the case, many employers give absolutely no sign of caring that their workers, without whom their operations could not continue or would have a greatly diminished capacity, are losing time to solely focus on philosophical truths, to enjoy non-professional relationships, to sleep, or to otherwise maintain anything about their health due to work.  They will take what they can and rarely give even compensation that is livable without multiple jobs, sacrificing numerous needs or desires, or financially relying on someone else to get by.  All that these individuals care about is appeasing their irrationalistic version of self-esteem, fitting in with other predatory managers or business owners, or seizing whatever ounce of profit they can at the expense of practically everything else.

"I Only Believe What I Can See"

It does not contradict logical axioms, and thus is logically possible, for there to be things which are physical and yet invisible to our basic sense of sight.  Indeed, all things like genes and electrons would fall into this category if they exist.  Alternatively, something could be visible and yet not physical: if a genuine ghost was to appear before me, it could only be nature be immaterial, but it would exist (I just could not know if it is real or not because of epistemological limitations).  Apart from actual or hypothetical examples, it is still logically possible for something to be unseen or visually inaccessible altogether and still exist.  Some people assume otherwise, saying that "I only believe what I see."  Despite often being brought up, asinine as it already inherently is, in contexts regarding theism, the issue is so much more important and broad than this.  The nuance of this matter is far beyond what fools bother to even wonder about.

Such people have a completely false foundation of their metaphysical philosophy (logical axioms, not either the universe or God, have to exist in themselves and are truly "obvious" due to their self-evidence).  First of all, since the nature of the logical axioms that are intrinsically true is obviously neglected or rejected by such fools, other sensory experiences have nothing to do with sight.  For instance, you do not see sounds or smells.  Thus, the sense of sight does not even suggest that the other senses exist, yet they are experienced regardless: experiencing something often only proves that the mental experience exists, however, necessitating nothing about the existence of external things.  Seeing something does not in any way mean it exists except as a mental perception [1].  Ironically, the only way to prove that matter exists at all does not involve sight [2]!  The only things that cannot not be true, more importantly, are not accessed through the sense of sight or the other such senses.

The intrinsic truths of logic, the only necessary truths there could be, are not physical or visible things.  They are true in themselves since them being false would still require that they are true, meaning they are true regardless of whether anything made of matter exists of all, though one does not need to discover such a grand ramification of logic's necessary veracity to realize that reason is an abstract thing (grasped by the mind, though it is not part of the mind).  Absolute certainty can only come from knowing logical axioms and other necessary truths of reason that transcend and yet underpin that which is visible to the sense of sight, which is itself not verifiable beyond the basic presence of visual stimuli.  One cannot prove from the sense of sight that what one perceives exists out in the word.

As for my own consciousness, I see on the sensory level with my consciousness.  My own mind could only be separate from whatever external world of matter exists.  Aside from the fact that consciousness is inherently immaterial whatever its casual relationship to the brain and rest of the body [3], otherwise, the physical world is not external (although, as mentioned, seeing something does not prove it exists in the external world).  I do not use my sense of sight to perceive my consciousness and most its contents, the qualia from visual experiences aside since they are by nature experienced through sight.  No, my consciousness, which has thoughts that do not correspond to visual stimuli of the present moment or recalled past at all, is a metaphysical prerequisite to seeing in the first place.  I can see my body with my sense of sight but not my actual mind.

Whereas the correspondence of much of my sensory experiences to outside objects or events is entirely uncertain, despite seeming probable, the existence of logic and my own mind are absolutely certain.  So too is the existence of some sort of uncaused cause [4].  Perhaps it is my own self--this cannot be proven or disproven--but either way, it is something that cannot be visibly seen.  The uncaused cause is directly or indirectly responsible for the creation of the material cosmos; whether or not I am the uncaused cause, I do not see this entity.  You also cannot see metaphysical space (not outer space, but the dimension that holds matter, without which there could be no universe [5]) only the whatever matter it contains that is within one's proximity.

In summary, many things seen with the sense of sight do not necessarily exist beyond one's consciousness, other sensory experiences already have nothing to do with sight, and the only things that actually can be proven to exist, such as logical necessities, one's own consciousness, and even matter itself, have nothing to metaphysically do with sight or are not epistemologically demonstrated by it.  As addressed here [2], the only way to prove that some kind of matter exists pertains to what logically follows from the sense of touch and the immaterial nature of consciousness, not from the visibility of seeming stimuli.  Plenty of things are also logically possible that might or might not exist and still are not visible, whether physical or immaterial.  Common beliefs about sight, metaphysics, and epistemology only reveal how incredibly stupid non-rationalists are.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-reliability-of-senses.html

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

[3].  See here, among other articles:

A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-immateriality-of-consciousness.html

B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-overhyped-mysteriousness-of.html

C.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2021/08/substance-dualism-in-sexuality.html

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

[5].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-infinity-of-space.html

Wasteful Consumerism

Like socialism or communism, capitalism is not inherently dangerous or predatory.  It all depends on how it is implemented.  Versions of capitalism can feature or encourage reckless spending, with unnecessary debt accumulating as people rush to pay for belongings or experiences they do not need or authentically gravitate towards.  Yes, they might not even have any genuine interest in these things apart from submitting to cultural pressures!  Whether a person is lower, middle, or upper class, though, they could purchase things that are not strictly necessary for survival or basic entertainment without being wasteful consumers.  The avoidance of gratuitous, destructive, or irresponsible spending does not mean people cannot be proactive in planning for the future or buy something above the bare minimum to stay alive or participate in society.

A wife and husband buying a third car as a backup vehicle for emergencies or sudden mechanical/electrical problems is not wasteful, for example, even if they thankfully never end up having the chance to use it for this purpose.  The goal in this case is a higher probability of security in a possible scenario that may or may not be likely, not opulent, blind consumerism.  They are only buying one additional vehicle for the sake of safety or for the sake of still being able to travel to work, family members, or friends.  Thus, there are no assumptions or hints of extravagance behind their decision.  If they make it so, they have no philosophical delusions or selfishness in this purchase despite the car costing a potentially large amount of money (and raw materials), taking up space where they live, or having the chance of just sitting there.

Emotionalistically buying each new annual generation of a car or a tablet device with minimal improvements on the predecessor--without one's current version breaking down--in contrast, can be extremely wasteful beyond being irrational just for the emotionalism.  To purchase just to purchase or to fit in with arbitrary societal trends is objectively pathetic, and even if someone is not motivated by direct philosophical assumptions about consumerism, they might still be passively defaulting to the futile squandering of resources and the glorification of cultural constructs.  There are ways someone could regularly spend plenty of money while never going about it blindly and having the sincere intention of using something at least in a hypothetical future situation, but thoughtless consumerism is not a part of this.

To use a very simple example, someone might keep buying items that they otherwise would not buy in order to make use of something else.  They do not even particularly like or look forward to eating cereal, but they bought some with milk once and the former ran out, so they casually, unthinkingly buy more to use what is left of the latter.  Then the latter is depleted and there is some of the former left over, and so they buy more of the latter to finish the former, and so on.  With more expensive or culturally exalted things like Apple products that could have explicitly overbearing anti-consumer tactics associated with them, the financial and environmental cost of pointless spending can be far higher.  Hundreds of pounds of raw materials and perhaps little to no true consumer benefit over the previous model, which could have released only a year earlier, make this a far less trivial thing to passively pursue.

Making purchases one has neither the need nor legitimate desire for is wasteful of one's own time, money, and space, as well as general environmental resources.  A gutted physical world could not constantly support wasteful consumerism and personal recklessness does not necessarily, even on a pragmatic level as opposed to a moral one, help the consumer.  With planned obsolescence, specific products might even be engineered to stop functioning fully or safely, if not at all, after a certain time to "remind" customers to buy a replacement.  This adds to cultural pressures and personal (and voluntary) ensnarement of some individuals by adding a literally intentional deadline for functional use.  As long as profits keep streaming in or increasing, some executives might not care at all about the exploitation of consumers, workers, and the environment that feeds sheer consumerism.

Blind or apathetic perpetuation of these practices cannot be engaged in unless people allow this of themselves, but even if they seek an emotional high or social "affirmation" by such means, they are delusional.  Perhaps their consumerism is a means to some other end.  It might be a hedonistic cry for existential fulfillment or a supposed way to impress someone they care about.  This does not make it any less stupid, especially if they totally ignore foundational matters of reality like logic, the uncaused cause, and moral obligations to pointlessly distract themselves.  Emotionalistic gratification is an irrationalistic and thus invalid approach to anything in life by default as it is, with personal finance and general business as much as other things.  To spend and consume without truly having personal investment in a thing (even if the purchase is morally permissible on its own) or some sort of amoral/practical advantage from it is self-hindering and, en masse, far more destructive than they might begin to realize left to themselves.

Better To Have Never Been Born

The elaborate, grotesque, Biblically unjust torments of hell in the likes of literature like Dante's Inferno or video games like Agony are far from how the Bible presents hell.  The lake of fire described in the Bible was intended for demonic beings, not even the fallen humans who fail to turn to God in repentance.  Fallen angels would have been the sole inhabitants had the fall of humanity never occurred (Matthew 25:41).  What details the Bible does provide about this lake of fire include, at least according to the language various passages use, that it involves fire (Matthew 18:8), the presence of Christ or God (Revelation 14:9-11), and, at least for humans other than those who submit to the "beast" of Revelation, cosmic death for sin (Matthew 10:28, Ezekiel 18:4).  The fire is said to exist endlessly and yet reduce human bodies to ashes (2 Peter 2:6), their spirits ceasing to be as they are locked out of the eternal life reserved for the saved.

The Biblical afterlife has been greatly misunderstood by most throughout recorded church and secular history.  Even if the aspects of hell as put forth by Jesus were to be experienced forever by all the unsaved, they would still not include some of the details in the hell of artistic stories like the aforementioned examples.  All the same, it would be such a serious thing for eternal conscious torment to be the default punishment of God in hell that almost no Christians who believe in it have truly taken it as seriously as would be warranted.  Jesus says of Judas that it would have been better for him not to have been born, as Judas kills himself without seeming to throw himself to God in a desperate plea for mercy.  As Matthew 26:24 quotes Jesus, he says, "'The Son of Man will go just as is written about him.  But wow to that man who betrays the Son of Man!  It would be better for him if he had not been born.'"

If evangelical and traditional ideas about the Christian hell are true, though--and it is absolutely clear from Biblical passages that not once is this actually taught in texts that most people associate with eternal conscious torment for all sinners--this is not the case only for Judas.  It would indeed be better for anyone at all to have never come into existence than to be thrown into eternal suffering, both on a moral and a personal pragmatic level.  To be damned to hell (with its eventual annihilation for general humanity as according to the actual teachings of the Bible), one must first sin without repentance, necessitating moral error and a lack of commitment to Christ beforehand.  To suffer endlessly would be a fate far worse on the level of personal experience than anything else.

After a life of suffering, sheer nonexistence of consciousness would be in some ways a relief to many.  The only thing that could be entirely better for the humans involved would be to experience an afterlife filled with the pleasure of basking in reason and its truths, God, morality, and relational connections with the fellow redeemed.  The eternal life offered by the deity of Christianity is thankfully not a promise which has no evidence pointing to it, nor does it entail a trivial, dull, or objectively meaningless existence.  This life is for both the spirit and the body, the two metaphysical components of humans.  In this renewed unity of consciousness and the physical form it resides in, and there will be no more death, crying, mourning, or pain (Revelation 21:4).  Outside of this New Jerusalem where God's eternal life is granted are the unsaved beings (Revelation 22:15), which are clearly said to at some point literally perish (John 3:16).  It would certainly be better for them to have never come into being at all than to face the perpetual torments evangelicals and the irrationalistic majority of Christians have believed in.

So-Called Properly Basic Beliefs

Christian apologists like William Lane Craig and Paul Copan assert that some things are properly basic beliefs, simultaneously either denying the inherent truths/absolute certainty of logical axioms (as Craig has done) or claiming that something like morality can be rationally assumed, an impossibility, due to arbitrarily persuasive experience.  The contradiction of a properly basic concept being justification to believe something that does "not require" a verifiable basis for belief can only be false.  The presence of one's own mind is self-evident and absolutely certain, but this is because of logical necessity, not intuition or mere perception.  In turn, logical axioms are true in themselves and thus verify themselves and ground all other truths.  Hypothetically, people could posit different beliefs as properly basic, but some overlap is usually present.  In the case of such apologists, things like God's existence (more specifically, a very particular deity), the existence of other human or animal minds, objects in the external world bring exactly as they appear, and morality are assumed under this guise.  

Some of these are provable and some are not, though there is fallible, probabilistic evidence for them, but assumptions are not knowledge: either self-verification like with axioms or logical deduction is necessary for proof, which is a requirement of knowledge.  One cannot think to even deny or doubt the existence of one's own self as a conscious being (not other details about one's nature) without already existing.  More central than this, axioms like the fact that truth exists or that one thing which logically follows from another is necessarily true, all of which one's own mind metaphysically and epistemologically depends on, could not be false without being true.  It is impossible for them to be anything other than intrinsically true, absolutely certain (if one is not just assuming them, that is), and supremely foundational.  They are the starting point of all actual knowledge, including one's recognition that one exists.

With God's existence, however, apologists like Craig might think themselves justified because of a personal "sense" of divine presence, as he has said of the Holy Spirit, or because of an irrelevant and extremely vague intuition.  Oh, an uncaused cause exists [1], and it probably is the Christian Yahweh, but its existence is not in any way verifiable because of subjective emotional perceptions or existential longings.  It exists due to and is knowable through logical necessity.  Besides, many people think their assumed idea of God's existence automatically would entail a deity of benevolence, kindness, and fairness, when God might be aware of us but amoral, oblivious to our lives, or in possession of a moral nature that would make killing every living thing we encounter the true righteousness.  If not strictly this kind of generically "kind" deity, or whatever differing things people might mean by kind, they might believe the further assumption that it is their own culturally popular form of theism that would have to be true.

Even if God's mere existence was knowable through spiritual introspection, a impossible thing, it is not as if many details about God would be revealed this way.  This issue is not the only thing certain Christian apologists might say one can legitimately assume--as if such a thing could possibly be rational--on the basis of perceptions or "intuition."  The existence of an external world of matter is ultimately provable, but far more difficult to know than many people seem to think, and, like the philosophically apathetic masses, these apologists think "knowing" the reality of an external world is done by just passively perceiving objects that might not even truly match with our sensory experiences at all.  They think we could know by assumptions (a conceptual contradiction) that we have not hallucinated much of the eternal world or that we are not a brain ina vat whose immaterial consciousness misperceives the physical landscape outside of it.

Now, with morality, they seldom if ever distinguish between moral preferences, feelings, and obligations.  If obligations exist, whatever they are (to not murder, to kill everyone, to steal, to not steal, etc), they are what one should honor.  One's wishes would be of no more relevance or weight than the wishes of someone who believes or wants for logical axioms to be untrue.  Failing to fully if ever distinguish between an obligation and conscience or a social norm, moral intuitionists like William Lane Craig overlook many things in their assumptions.  It does not logically follow from having a feeling or desire that something is good or evil no matter how visceral the experience is.  Conscience is subjective and thus only necessitates the objective truth that there is conscience, not that there is anything morally good.  Also, if people have conflicting moral feelings, though feelings could never prove morality anyway, their moral preferences could not all be true, but all or most of them could be false.

Only a fool goes by intuition in the form of conscience or unverifiable sensory perceptions as it is, but of course it is always their own moral feelings that they believe are aligned with righteousness.  Someone who objects or who simply has a different conscience might be treated as if they err because a certain moral idea is allegedly true, but the given moral idea is assumed to be true on the basis of their own personal subjectivity.  Not only do they commit all the fallacies of conflating subjectivity for objectivity and assumptions for known truths, but they also think their own cultural practices or personal are the ones that turn out to be true, not those of anyone else who believes something else from the same invalid basis.  One never has to assume something that is true and knowable.  One could know it instead!  I believe in the existence of an uncaused cause and an external world [2] of some kind because I can prove they exist by logical necessity.  They are neither self-evident nor intrinsically true, nor are they obvious on their own, only true and knowable in light of particular prerequisite logical facts.

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

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

Sustainability In Business

Artificially raised prices, anti-consumer policies like planned obsolescence, the underpayment of employees, and the uncaring devastation of the environment are not necessary components of business.  A business can avoid each and every one of these things.  They are likely to be encouraged and practiced, though, if the goal of whoever is in power over a company is to simply continue to earn more money and expand the client base.  When people talk of corporate sustainability, they might strictly be referring to preserving or bettering the environment, but for a company and its business dealings to be sustainable, they cannot stand on perpetual increases of all things pertaining to profit.

Someone who cares only about greed, emotionalistic ecstasy, or short-term gain might genuinely never realize, despite their worldview and lifestyle being literally aimed at the goal of limitless expansion, that it is logically impossible to always have more money to siphon away.  Mathematical units go on without end, but there can only be a limited, if fluctuating, amount of people or of any physical resource such as wood or money.  This goal is not about truth or human potential, as some adherents to America's or India's style of capitalism pretend.  It is about accepting what is by necessity false and the folly of forgoing moral concerns for personal happiness (this kind of business leader would be especially in need of realizing that gaining the whole world while forfeiting uprightness of the soul is invalid).

Aside from moral aspects of this and the fact that it could be merely assumed to be valid because it is appealing to some, the objective itself is intrinsically contrary to reason.  No matter how many billions of people there would be on Earth all at once time, all of the contingent factors contributing to corporate success are inescapably finite.  There is finite money to be spent or saved, there are finite materials to make products, and there is finite time in which to buy or sell.  A finite number of people to either make purchases or do the selling is present at any given time.  The ego of a deluded executive or investor (and no, to be an executive is not to be stupid or evil by default), the allure of more wealth, and the grandness of evolving business schemes will not remove this shifting but inevitable prohibitor of endless growth.

An irrational kind of sustainability is what some business leaders want.  In its name, they sacrifice environmental sustainability (by mismanaging or needlessly using natural resources) and the sustainability of their customer base (by not paying workers enough to routinely buy things they do not need).  What would they even do with all the physical wealth in the world if there was no functioning economy to interact with?  Hoard it to feel secure about themselves?  No only is the goal of infinitely increasing revenue and success a logical impossibility, but it is also pragmatically futile if they would have nothing to do with their wealth once they amassed either the whole of global wealth or whatever arbitrary amount of money and items satisfies them.

Movie Review--Terminator: Genysis

"It's the first tactical time weapon.  Skynet just used it."

--John Connor, Terminator: Genysis

Not everything in Terminator: Genysis is awful.  The opening scenes set in the post-Judgment Day future actually have great effects for once, J. K. Simmons is amazing in his comedic (and dramatic) delivery, the acid trap is a great way to defeat a terminator, and the revisiting of key scenes from the original Terminator with time travel-related changes are a way to infuse nostalgia with novelty.  The faults of Genysis, though it would have certainly benefitted from a darker atmosphere and more violent action sequences, are also not there because of its PG-13 rating.  Acting from certain main characters that is extremely mediocre is one of the deficiencies that holds it back.  Indeed, it is the primary one.  Another weakness, depending on the execution, is that little is done to change the basic plot structure of the events, something Terminator has struggled with since the excellent Judgment Day served as a sequel to the first entry.

Production Values

The effects are at least sufficient to revisit machine designs from across the other films, including the classic terminator models without artificial skin and the liquid metal design introduced in the second movie.  There is not any enormous flaw in the general quality of the special effects.  Where there is a lack of effort or quality is some of the acting.  Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney are not at their best here, but Clarke is more often the better performer of the two in her scenes where she shows greater intensity than the often subdued performance of Courtney.  Jai Courtney is a mostly bland Kyle Reese just middling enough to not drag the film to absolutely abysmal levels, though he certainly does not help it reach incredible heights either.  The returning Arnold Schwarzenegger shows flashes of what would be a very humorous but still dramatic role in Dark Fate, yet is also not enough even at his most robotic or sarcastic to elevate Genysis.  The best performances are actually for secondary characters.  One of them only shows up for maybe three or four brief scenes at most: Dayo Okeniyi as the son of corporate inventor Miles Dyson from Terminator 2 is very well cast and does great with extremely limited screentime.  J. K. Simmons, who gets more scenes than Okeniyi, is incredible, as usual, giving some of the most fittingly comedic lines of the entire film while his character has a crucial role in the plot.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

John Connor has almost led the human resistance against Skynet to victory over the oppressive AI, but on the eve of defeat, Skynet uses a time travel device to send a terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor, as is seen in 1984 in the original film.  John's close friend Kyle Reese volunteers to be sent back to save her.  However, Sarah is not oblivious to terminator activity and time travel as he expected.  She has prepared for his arrival.  Kyle begins experiencing memories from what seems like another life, another version of himself, and these memories tell him that "Genysis is Skynet."  After time traveling again, this time with Sarah, he sees how Genysis is poised to dominate humanity in a different guise.

Intellectual Content

Genysis features the usual Terminator trappings of artificial intelligence, time and sequential causality, and the potential for people in power to pioneer the technology that destroys them.  In some moments, it does apply its concepts like a misanthropic AI in different ways, like having Skynet's Judgment Day come about from a cloud software that connects an enormous amount of human technology rather than from the military like in Terminator 3.  Very early on, before Genysis has been introduced as a reclothed Skynet, Kyle Reese asks John Connor how he can predict the future so well.  John responds, "No one can see the future, Reese."  Where Genysis goes with John is not all that related to this early line, but the movie does very, very lightly touch upon John's role as a prophet in a science fiction context, receiving his information about the future not from God or an angel, but from his mother's words before Skynet razed the planet.  This reboot just does almost nothing with any of these promising ideas other than very quickly utilize them to move the story ahead.

Conclusion

Better acting from some key cast members would have worked wonders for Genysis.  It did make Terminator lore much more convoluted, and it did forgo the R rating yet again as did Salvation, but these are things that can be done well.  They are thus not the sole reason or sometimes a reason at all for a film falling short of whatever potential its premise and execution had.  A Terminator movie set in the modern day (at the time of its release) with a different incarnation of Skynet with its own name is not a bad direction to take the franchise--Dark Fate does these same things and is a very good film in its own right.  What both Genysis and Dark Fate fail to do even with their somewhat unique narratives is take the series in a direction that does not retread the general elements of almost every movie in the franchise.  Salvation at least showed the Skynet-dominated future Earth and thus something different that did not betray the series (execution was its downfall).  Genysis would have been better either way if only Jai Courtney gave a superior performance, and this would also be true if Emilia Clarke did the same.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  In PG-13 form, the physical fights of Terminator as a franchise are not graphic in any way even as machines pummel each other.

 2.  Profanity:  "Fuck" and "shit" are used, the former only once.

 3.  Nudity:  A naked man is seen briefly from behind.

Misleading Colloquial Language

In very casual or intentionally philosophical discussion alike (everything is philosophical, but not everything is equally foundational/abstract and many people never realize everything is philosophical), there are numerous words or phrases that people might be accustomed to hearing, yet they are ultimately very irrelevant to the actual ideas being conveyed.  Words mean whatever is intended by them and needlessly incompetent communication is still incompetent communication and utterly pointless.  There are various forms this can take, all of them able to be understood for what they are, identified, and avoided for maximum linguistic clarity.

For less overtly philosophical phrases, take "sleeping with" someone as an example.  Sex could occur right before or after someone is literally asleep, but it is absolutely not the same as actually sleeping next to or in the same room as someone else.  It is a very misleading phrase.  Yes, some people have heard it enough that they can tell the probable intention behind the words in a given context, and yes, all language is ultimately arbitrarily assigned to concepts, but there is such a thing as unnecessary levels of ambiguity or outright asinine phrasing, and to believe that "sleeping with" is a strong substitute to describe "having sex with" is irrational.  Prudery might convince someone to use a different phrase than the direct, accurate one out of submission to cultural norms--or someone might actually be stupid enough to think that there is no linguistic inaccuracy here.

For a more science-oriented example, what of when people say that sugar rots teeth?  In actuality, according to what is ultimately hearsay and mere sensory perceptions (but still affiliated with the relevant evidence/paradigm), it is not sugar that destroys teeth.  It is bacteria, Streptococci mutans and sobrinus, that feed on sugar left on the enamel.  They produce an acid, and it is this that breaks down the enamel, not the sugar itself.  To say that sugar is causally to blame according to what the evidence suggests is misleading, yet some people still do it all the time.  This phrase is not even a euphemism for something else like "sleeping with" is for having sex.  It is just a misrepresentative description!

For something more abstract and important than euphemisms or health science, there is the way that some people misuse phrases like "necessary truths" in reference to logical axioms or other logical necessities.  Evangelical apologists, for instance, might say that logical truths are necessary truths, but their acknowledgement of this is often dependent purely on reactions to the impossibilities of relativism and not true knowledge of reason.  If this was not the case, they would not insist that God created everything, including truths that are correct by inherent necessity (and thus do not and cannot depend on anything else since there are intrinsically true).  They would also not think that the laws of logic are in any way made to be true by God when God's existence has to be consistent with axioms to even be possible, much less necessary.

Be they euphemisms, inaccurate summaries, or very confused but explicitly metaphysical statements, misleading language is very commonly and unthinkingly employed by plenty of non-rationalists on a very regular basis.  Logic and the concepts it governs are objective, while all words are mere arbitrary, mental/social constructs.  There is no word that could not have been assigned to a different concept than what it is popularly associated with.  There is still a difference between knowingly using words that conflict with conventional meanings (or using misleading words sarcastically) and using misleading language without even realizing how imprecise or unfitting it really is.

Irrationalistic Positivity

Desperate to feel content or positive about themselves, some irrationalists choose to believe in whatever strikes them as positive.  Instead of rejecting sexism or racism because they are irrational whether or not morality and thus justice of any kind exists, for example, they might reject them because it makes them feel bad to be on the receiving end or because they feel distraught upon seeing them directed towards someone else.  Rather than consider the logical possibility of a hellish afterlife and actually evaluate things like logical necessity, the evidence for or against specific religions, or what religious texts actually say about hell (the Biblical hell is not what many people think [1]), they might reject the objective logical possibility of a theological or non-theological hell because it hurts their self-esteem or terrifies them.

Nothing about reality changes because of any being's feelings other than the feelings themselves.  Not even God's will or preferences or undiluted power can change logical necessities, such as that he is dependent on logical truths for the very possibility and necessity of his existence as the uncaused cause.  This is the case for the uncaused cause, and it is of course the case for humanity.  The irrationalist masses either passively go through their lives without realizing this or quickly fleeing, to the greatest extent that they can, from the thought of anything that disturbs their self-esteem or emotional sense of positivity.  This is why so many people are emotionally fragile at the thought or mention of almost anything deeper than arbitrary whims or practical affairs.

Anything from the inherent necessity of logical axioms--which cannot be willed away or nullified no matter how much someone wishes they could be--to the destructive capacity of humans and more is likely to be disregarded, denied, or unrecognized by such people.  They do not strive for and cultivate an attitude of positivity that is not shaped by contradictory beliefs, emotionalism, or assumptions of any kind.  Their positivity is irrationalistic in full.  Whatever satisfies them in the moment or seems best to them at keeping unwanted thoughts at bay is what they will not just want, but also embrace.  It is not the desire for positivity that leads them to these errors, of course.  Unwillingness to discover and believe in reality, wholly governed by the laws of logic, shackles them to delusions.

Irrationalistic positivity is rampant, yes.  One can see it on display every time someone remains voluntarily oblivious to even the most accessible of philosophical truths and depth (and all obliviousness to the foundations of reality, logical axioms and one's own consciousness on an epistemological level, is voluntary) even when pressed in conversation.  One can see it every time someone says an idea is not conducive to their mental health and believes it is false or avoids the issue of its veracity altogether to salvage their mental health.  Peace and self-esteem are undeserved whenever they stand on fallacies and errors, but this, too, would be offensive or emotionally hurtful to adherents of irrationalistic positivity.

Having, enjoying, and monitoring one's emotions does not lead to irrationalism unless someone willingly, avoidably believes in something false or assumed, or ignores something they know/would otherwise know is true for emotional respite.  A basis for positivity, though, can be found on an objective and subjective level in the inherent truths of reason and the epistemological liberation of rationalism that connects one with these metaphysical necessities.  One does not have to flee from reason to find refuge in the only truths that cannot have been any other way and in deep emotional pleasure because of these truths, as well as one's knowledge of them.  Positivity is not necessarily irrational although many motivations for it are by default philosophically erroneous.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html

What Is Isaiah 33:14's Everlasting Burning?

Out of context and read with the pathetic philosophical errors of assumptions in mind, there are a small handful of Biblical verses that might seem to say that eternal suffering awaits all of God's enemies, which is everyone who sins and does not repent or commit to Christ.  Isaiah 33:13-14 is one of these, containing a brief mention of everlasting burning: "'Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire?  Who of us can dwell with everlasting burning?"  This burning is equated with divine wrath on evil.  This much is affirmed by the text earlier in verses 10-12.  Moreover, it is the sinners who should be terrified (33:13).  With other passages clarifying what hell and God's final punishment for evil as a whole really is, and the latter is not eternal agony, Isaiah 33 itself does not teach eternal conscious torment of any kind despite the word fire being similar to how Jesus talks of hell in the gospels.

Which of the sinners can dwell with everlasting burning?  No one!  Not only does Isaiah 33 not actually say anything that contradicts the blatant annihilationism of numerous, very direct verses throughout the Bible saying that God will punish evildoers with death of the mind, but the rhetorical implication after the comparison of humans to chaff and straw (33:11-12) is that fallen people simply cannot eternally exist with the everlasting burning of God's power consuming them.  The wrath of the God who will kill body and soul (Matthew 10:28)--in justice, not out of mercy--is not something mortal humans can outlast, and thus their bodies will be reduced to mere ashes as their consciousness is forever exiled to nonexistence (2 Peter 2:6).  They will perish, eternally left without another resurrection, the final condition of their mind being as if they had never come into existence (John 3:16).

Yes, just two verses before verse 14, much like the parable of the sowers in Matthew 13 where Jesus compares weeds that are burned to the wicked at the end of the age, Isaiah says the unrighteous of whom he speaks will be burned like thornbushes, which do not burn indefinitely on Earth, nor do the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that are an example of what will befall the unrighteous (again, 2 Peter 2:6).  In the eschatological day of the Lord, repeatedly referenced in scattered details, the wicked are described as stubble that will burn to ashes (Malachi 4:1-3), and not "'a root or branch will be left to them.'"  There is no everlasting burning of these sinners here, and the other passages that explicitly call the fate of the wicked death of the soul (Ezekiel 18:4), separation from an omnipresent deity (2 Thessalonians 1:6-10), and the second death (Revelation 20:15), some of these passages specifically mentioning the lake of fire or its alternative name hell (Matthew 10:28), are consistent with even some of the more vague or overlooked Old Testament passages about cosmic justice.

What everlasting burning could there be for sinners when their destiny is to be burned up, to ashes, never again to partake in the blessings of conscious life with its nonsinful pleasures that are far more in number than what legalists of all centuries realized?  Even though the fires of hell itself might last forever (Matthew 18:8), it would not logically follow that everything or even that anything thrown inside will also last forever, and the Bible already specifies that this is not the case for all except possibly some demonic beings and the like (Revelation 20:10).  Since even passages like Ezekiel 28:11-19, though it might speak of a different demon than Satan, predict that even beings like at least one major corrupt cherub will be burned to nonexistence, Revelation 20:10 might be figuratively exaggerating--something that it nonetheless does not do with the fate of collective unsaved humanity (Revelation 20:11-15).

If eternal conscious torment is unjust, then the only logically possible way for it to exist is if it at the whims of some amoral being and not at the whims of the moral nature of the uncaused cause, if it has one as the Bible teaches.  If morality exists at all, then at least this much is unjust for the general humans the Bible says will not receive it, as it would involve the greatest kind of suffering for an endless duration despite all sins being finite in scope and time, and yet if eternal conscious torment is inherently unjust, it would be the same for the most malevolent, arrogant demon.  The lake of fire is not an afterlife at all for the demons who are punished there without first undergoing a biological death; for humans, the lake of fire, though it could exist eternally rather than the people inside it, is not an afterlife without end.  People in the grip of traditionalist assumptions and fallacies, in many cases, would have to ignore the dire and often logically impossible ramifications of their misconception of Yahweh's justice in order to not live in extreme terror for themselves and others.  Who really could bear truly everlasting burning if even a much less severe fate is a cosmic horror?

Naboth's Vineyard

There is no such thing as evidence of a crime that could not be misleading or in some way an illusion, even if all the evidence of the senses and hearsay (testimony) pointed towards one possibility being true/probable.  Apart from the genuine logical possibility of almost all sensory perceptions being distorted or otherwise inaccurate, technological recordings like those of cameras or audio tapes (through either glitches or sabotage), testimony from people (through either happenstance misremembering or intentional lying), and physical disturbances at a geographical location (due to planted evidence or uncontrollable factors like weather) could all in one way or another suggest that something which did not happen did or vice versa.

If evidence was logical proof--something which follows necessarily from another truth that is both true and demonstrable through the laws of logic--it would not need evidence to be amassed, and it would not even be possible for the evidence to be falsified or misperceived.  Categorically, this is by necessity not the case with such information taken perceived by the senses, and every individual example of evidence that a person, say, committed murder or theft falls short of absolute certainty in establishing guilt or innocence.  This is the human epistemological condition, like it or not.  It is not that the Biblical requirement of two or three witnesses minimum for all criminal punishments (Numbers 35:30, Deuteronomy 17:6, 19:15) is an intrinsic marker of guilt.

Certainly, for men or women to be witnesses to begin with, they would have had to see the event in question.  False witnesses are not genuine witnesses because they lie concerning either the event itself happening or the nature of what occurred.  Other than the fact that in saying that people to be executed have to have carried out particular acts (like those of Exodus 22:18-20) or that the requirement of multiple witnesses would already necessitate that they must not be lying, Exodus 23:1 says to not falsely accuse someone, and Exodus 23:7 says to have nothing to do with a false charge and to not execute or by extension otherwise punish innocent people.  In fact, testifying against someone in an intentionally dishonest manner deserves the punishment the accused person would have Biblically received (Deuteronomy 19:16-21).

Witnesses can be in error due to memory flaws or malicious intentions, the latter of which the aforementioned verses acknowledge as it is.  It is not that two or three witnesses cannot be wrong, but that punishing someone without at least this number of witnesses/evidences is always immoral according to Yahweh.  Jezebel, queen of Israel, relies on the former truth in 1 Kings 21.  Here, when her husband Ahab is troubled because a vineyard owner named Naboth refuses to sell his vineyard to the king, she arranges to have two false witnesses publicly accuse the man of cursing God and the king, at least one of these beings a capital sin (Exodus 22:28, Leviticus 24:16).  On the testimony of these two liars, Naboth is killed, and thus Jezebel obtains the vineyard as she told Ahab she would.  Of course, in the New Testament, the corrupt Sanhedrin musters false witnesses against Jesus (Matthew 26:59-60).

The Bible gives examples of how two or three witnesses might not at all be honest and mandates specific penalties for such lying men and women--as an aside, it absolutely does not require male witnesses as the Jewish historian Josephus conflated with its teachings in Antiquities of the Jews.  It is logically possible for two or three (or more) witnesses to collude ahead of time and plant illusory physical evidence in addition to constructing a unified but false story.  This is what happened with the people Jezebel had come forward against Naboth in a very orchestrated manner.  Some people might think that other evidence or modern methods of securing evidence are less susceptible to being misleading.  Nonetheless, fingerprints and genetic evidence can be planted; as mentioned, technological records can glitch or be edited.

There is no such thing as evidence that proves a person is guilty with no possibility of illusion.  Thus, only an irrationalistic fool, though acting as if evidence is valid does not require believing that it is, actually thinks that either witness testimony or some other evidence proves innocence or guilt.  It never logically follows from anything humans have epistemological access to that witnesses or records themselves are presenting the truth about an event.  The absence of witnesses, physical (including genetic) evidence, and recordings or documentation does not mean someone did not commit a crime.  The presence of witnesses and the other kinds of evidence does not mean someone did commit it.  Mere perception and evidence proves nothing except that evidence is being perceived.  Nothing prescribed in Mosaic Law contradicts this even as minimum threshold of evidence is demanded.