What Leviticus Says About Disability

A particular excerpt from Leviticus 21 mentions an exception to the sons of Aaron who are permitted to participate in the giving of food offerings to Yahweh: a man who is physically disabled.  Not all disabilities are outwardly evident or have to do with the body, but the kinds described in this chapter are.  Does the Torah disregard or dehumanize the disabled here?  I myself would be unable to perform the food offering, though my physical disability is one that I can forget about because it is so relatively minor.  There is nonetheless nothing oppressive in this case.  The passage says enough to indicate what it does not directly or by logical extension require, and there is more to the Bible on the ethics of how to treat the disabled than this.  Here is the passage:

Leviticus 21:16-23--"The Lord said to Moses, 'Say to Aaron: "For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God.  No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles.  No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the food offerings to the Lord.  He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God.  He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary.  I am the Lord, who makes them holy."'"

From these verses alone, several vital points are clarified.  First, the scope is rather limited, pertaining to nothing more than the offering of devoted food to God and the related act of approaching a specific curtain and altar.  This is not matter from which it follows by logical necessity that the deformed Levite man must be tossed aside or keep himself away from all Levitical activity.  Moreover, the passage itself explicitly permits them to still eat from the offerings to Yahweh, which are allowed to the priests.  All that it actually forbids is the very precise action of giving food offerings to God or approaching the curtain or altar to do so.  The ideas behind this passage are quite far from dehumanizing the disabled or prescribing any sort of systematic segregation, barring from professional labor, or interaction with the full-bodied.

In the very same book of Leviticus, though, there is a verse which condemns mistreatment of the disabled, providing two non-exhaustive examples similar to what Exodus 21:26-27 does with the physical abuse of male and female slaves which entitles them to emancipation.  In fact, reading through the book in chronological sequence would take one to the verse prohibiting the oppression of the disabled before one arrives at Leviticus 21:16-23, which I again emphasize is strictly about the Levitical priesthood and has nothing to do with treatment of the disabled in a broader sense.  Also, among the declarations in Deuteronomy 27 about how people who commit miscellaneous sins are cursed, other examples being dishonoring one's father or mother (27:16), bestiality (27:21), and killing an innocent person for a bribe (27:25), there is a similar statement in favor of the rights of the disabled.

Leviticus 19:14--"'"Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God.  I am the Lord."'"

Deuteronomy 27:18--"'Cursed is anyone who leads the blind astray on the road.'  Then all the people shall say, 'Amen!'"

The Bible clearly does not in any way teach that disabled men and women are subhuman, unworthy of a spiritual relationship with God, or deserving of societal exclusion or neglect.  On the contrary, Mosaic Law affirms their humanity and calls anyone who would take advantage of them cursed.  The restrictions of Leviticus 21 are exclusively for the administration of specific priestly obligations that parallel how the animals to be sacrificed were also to, with some exceptions (Leviticus 22:23), be entirely unblemished (Leviticus 1:3, 10, 3:1, 6, 4:1, Deuteronomy 15:21, 17:1, and so on).  All people are still made in the image of God on Judeo-Christianity (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2), whatever their bodily status, be they sons of Aaron from distant generations or the mute, blind, or quadriplegic men and women of today.

Not Choosing To Be Human

One of several reasons why discrimination like sexism is unjust and would be irrational even if there is no such thing as morality is that a person belongs to a gender or race without their wishes making it so.  Other reasons include the fact that it does not logically follow from having a certain kind of genitalia or skin color that one has intellectual or moral traits.  What one person, moreover, believes or does only pertains to them as individuals, not everyone else from their demographics.  If something if morally good or bad, it is the nature of the act/intention itself (as it relates to God's nature) that dictates whether it is evil, not the doer's gender, race, age, or nationality.  These are all separate but relevant reasons why the likes of sexism and racism is by logical necessity irrational and, if moral obligations exist, unjust in all of its forms.

It is still a major factor, though, that a person cannot will their gender or race or age to change, though the last of these three specific examples does change as time elapses.  Any of these multiple logical truths about gender (or race) and its irrelevance to worldview, human rights, talents, and personality already disproves the entirety of all possible sexism against men or women.  It is only being human and an individual that would be relevant to a person's philosophical standing or personality traits except where they yield to cultural idiocy.  Unless there is some sort of unprovable existence before one is conceived and this pre-conception consciousness that can choose to live as a human, however, there is nothing about being human that is voluntary either.

If it is irrational and unjust to treat, say, a man or a Hispanic person better or worse because of a factor they cannot will away, then how would it be any different to treat humans as better than other creatures simply because they are human?  None of these factors seem to be capable of being initially chosen, though an unverifiable, unfalsifiable pre-conception conscious existence would of course allow for such a choice.  Not even Christianity, which is far more "strange" in some ways than many Christians seem to understand (a tree that grants eternal life and a donkey that speaks are just two examples even aside from its very heavily nuanced metaphysics and epistemology), teaches or suggests this kind of existence.

Whether humanity or any type of being has moral value, of course, depends on whether there really are moral rights, which cannot exist without moral obligations, which cannot exist without a deity with a moral nature--the existence of the uncaused cause is not enough.  God exists as an uncaused cause regardless of the veracity of any specific religion, but if this being has no moral nature, then no human can have value (not that the uncaused cause having a moral nature means it must be a moral nature that is favorable to humanity).  If humans do not have value, they might not have chosen this status or their very existence as humans, but their gender or race would not change the amorality of reality.  Likewise, if humans do have value, then gender or race would not be a factor because they, for the reasons listed before, could not have anything to do with rationalistic ability or moral character.

The contrast between not choosing to be human and not choosing to be of a certain gender or race or nationality or physical appearance is a significant one when it comes to this issue.  It is a very precise irony that could take a lot of time and effort to realize, but it is connected with some of the most important philosophical facts about moral metaphysics (whether or not morality exists as opposed to moral feelings or preferences).  The seeming inability to choose to be human does not mean that it is logically impossible for humans to have moral value.  Gender, race, and more are objectively irrelevant to the only characteristics that would be morally good or vile in the first place, so this does not contradict the truth that not choosing one's gender or race is itself irrelevant to whether humans are valuable at all.  It is still human value or meaninglessness that would make all people have a baseline moral significance or no existential value whatsoever.

Quantum Physics And Consciousness

A scientific obsession of this era is the causal relationship between quantum physics, which deals with subatomic matter, and various aspects of macroscopic physics, including biology, which is the subset of physics dealing with living matter.  Phenomenology is a different matter, for it is about consciousness--something that, whether it gives metaphysical rise to matter or the other way around, is objectively nonphysical [1].  This does not logically necessitate any such thing as an afterlife of unembodied consciousness after biological death, but it is true that consciousness, one of the only things that is self-evident (to deny or even doubt that one is conscious can only be done if one is already conscious to do so), is demonstrably immaterial.  It thus cannot be identical to the physical brain and extended nervous system.

All the same, in accordance with the broader fixation of this age, some people try to discover or provide alleged support for all sorts of ideas about the relationship between the particles, energy, and interactions of quantum physics and the nature of consciousness.  Logical necessity allows a being making no assumptions to realize that they exist as a consciousness, that consciousness is immaterial, that it still metaphysically and epistemologically depends on logical axioms, and so on, but many who explore the issue are not rationalists.  Even if they knew all of these other things, for any assumptions prevent true knowledge and one cannot know anything at all without starting with self-necessity of logical axioms, they still might overlook that scientific investigation will never prove that other minds exist, that the external world gives rise to matter, and much more.  At most, they can speculate based on hearsay or unprovable inferences about quantum physics.

Perfect correlation of two events over many years does not prove there is a casual connection; perhaps some other unrecognized or unverifiable thing is truly the cause of the effect.  How, though, would someone observe the quantum realm through their experience of everyday macroscopic life?  They could not!  Not even the seeming dependence of human consciousness on the presence of neural matter proves anything more than that this appears to be so.  Although there is no way to prove this is true beyond the perception-based evidence one is restricted to--for instance, one can see other creatures that appear to have their own consciousness die and realize that it appears like certain alignments of matter produce nonphysical consciousness, which seemingly perishes and leaves an inanimate body behind--it really does nevertheless seem as if matter creates the immaterial mind of humans and other animals.

If certain arrangements of matter that form a nervous system produce consciousness, the seat of perception, then immaterial consciousness would be derived from matter in accordance with popular emergent naturalist philosophy regarding this particular existent [2].  This would be how science could hypothetically lead to a means of resurrecting people's minds and not just their bodies [3].  If quantum particles exist, and they contribute to the formation of atoms, which together comprise molecules, which if massed together into a brain  somehow are correlated with the sustained existence of consciousness, then this is the general connection between quantum physics and the mind.  Whatever the exact particle-to-particle chain of composition, this would be the units of matter that constitute the larger neural substance from which consciousness is causally derived.

It is still not true that all organisms that are likely conscious have nervous systems as extensive as that of humans, or any nervous system at all.  For many oceanic life forms, the nervous system is quite different from that of humans so that creatures like jellyfish, starfishes, urchins, and corals lack brains.  Sea sponges appear to be conscious and yet reportedly have no neurons at all [4].  If this is the case, then consciousnesses living in this universe do not always stem from nervous systems, despite how they could still hinge on some sort of body.  However, for humans or any other creature down to the sea slug, if matter in a given configuration, like that of  a primate brain, sparks immaterial consciousness, then consciousness has a material cause despite being inherently immaterial itself.  In turn, if matter reduces down to subatomic units like quarks, then yes, this is how quantum physics is involved in consciousness.

[1].  For just some of my many posts detailing this, see the following:

A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-consequences-of-denying-substance.html

B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/02/conflating-mind-and-body.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/03/what-is-emergent-naturalism.html

[3].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/09/a-hypothetical-method-of-scientific.html

[4].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-sea-sponge.html

The King Of The Angels: Satan In Lords Of Shadow

It is very common for entertainment inspired by Christian philosophy, like the video games Darksiders or Agony, to egregiously distort Biblical concepts--unless they truly were intended only to be inspired very loosely by the source material.  The Lords of Shadow games in the rebooted Castlevania series feature lore very heavily borrowed from Christianity--but it is more the common cultural misrepresentations, like eternal conscious torment, that are emphasized.  Some abnormally accurate Biblical ideas or things logically consistent with the Bible, though they are not often recognized as such, still get included at times.  Some have to do with Satan.

In the first game, the presence of this cosmic demon is a revelation that comes at the end, when Lucifer shows himself to Gabriel Belmont as the schemer behind the necromancer Zobek's own manipulation and the plan to assemble the God Mask (this being something Gabriel wants to resurrect his wife Marie).  The second game very abruptly states that Satan is returning for revenge on Gabriel and Zobek for the finale of the original game.  The in-between events of Mirror of Fate do not involve the appearance or coming of Satan, instead focusing on the reign of Dracula and the attempts of his lineage to kill him.  From Satan's initial manifestation to his seemingly literal death at the end of Lords of Shadow 2, some of his moments are much closer to the real Biblical teachings than many might think.

There are at first few or no hints that Satan is behind the events of the first Lords of Shadow.  Baba Yaga of the first game vaguely calls her master the King of the Angels, and yet she does not specify who exactly this being is.  It is probable that this is an allusion to Satan, as not only is he a fallen angel, but it is also the case that some of the only other candidates for this title are God or Christ themselves, who are not exactly presented as being aligned with the witches of the Lords of Shadow franchise even though the Brotherhood of Light ironically uses magic in violation of Exodus 22:18.  Satan does eventually appear, seemingly the entity Baba Yaga hinted at, and declares himself God's equal or superior.  Asserting that he is a victim of divine injustice, he fights Gabriel.

The Belmont warrior insists that God loves even Lucifer to the point that he is willing to offer total forgiveness if Satan will go back to him.  Unsurprisingly, he refuses, but he is pummeled by Gabriel to the point of retreating away from Earth.  Later cutscenes portray the devil of the Lords of Shadow games as if he is the malevolent ruler of hell, incorporating the incredible cultural and artistic misconception (if it is meant to match the real Biblical doctrine, that is).  Satan is who hell was created to punish (Matthew 25:41).  It is not a realm where he is free to do as he wishes or eternally mistreat the resurrected human wicked sentenced to hell (an experience that ends in their annihilation according to many verses, including Matthew 10:28 and 2 Peter 2:6).  The just penalty for sin is not to do whatever you want or to be mistreated by demons!

When he finally comes back to Earth at the end of the second game, riding the Leviathan to destroy the planet and the human lives within it, Satan enters another fight with Gabriel Belmont, this time as Dracula.  The power of Dracula is what deterred Lucifer from returning sooner.  Only Alucard putting his vampiric father to sleep for centuries made it seem as if Gabriel really had died.  This confrontation does not end with Satan being sent back to hell, which is itself an unbiblical idea as it is because he is not in hell until well after the return of Christ (see Revelation 20).  It ends with the death of Satan, just not at God's hands as, if Satan is the demon in reference, Ezekiel 28:11-19 culminates with.  However, Lucifer by all appearances really is killed as is said to happen to the unsaved in hell (Ezekiel 18:4, Revelation 20:15).

Despite all of the occasional talk of eternal torment in hell in the Lords of Shadow games, the demise of Satan here is in an indirect way much closer to the actual stances of Biblical philosophy than plenty inside and outside the church imagine.  I have scheduled a separate post for this very year to address the nuance of the Biblical stance on Satan's defeat as opposed to how entertainment has presented it--this will touch on annihilationism as opposed to eternal torture and the possibility, or even the very high likelihood, of Yahweh at some point offering salvation to even the devil and simply being rejected yet again (2 Peter 3:9).  Lords of Shadow parallels or is consistent with what the Bible really says and does not say about Satan.

A Ramification Of Full Preterism

Full preterism entails that all Biblical prophecies, those about the Second Coming of Christ and beyond included, have already happened before or with the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple (the ruins of which are pictured below) by the Romans in 70 AD.  Was there a last trumpet call, a gathering of living and dead righteous individuals (the first resurrection of the dead), and a return of Christ in the First Roman-Jewish War?  While there is nothing in the historical record to suggest that any such things happened in an invisible, mystical sense (for that is what preterism would require), and while the Second Coming of the Bible, followed by resurrection and judgment, has plainly not occurred, let us focus on a particular ramification of full preterism.  Revelation 21-22's words about New Jerusalem being the final abode of the righteous/saved could not be figurative without John 14:2-3 also being figurative, as Jesus speaks of his Father's house that he will prepare for his disciples.

This would mean Jesus would have to have been highly misleading outside the context of a parable.  Both Revelation and the gospel of John describe a physical dwelling for followers of Yahweh after Christ's return.  Jesus says in John 14:2-3 that he will leave the world, prepare a place for Christians, return, and only then will his "sheep" (John 10) be with him.  This is consistent with the teaching of soul sleep throughout the Bible: humans are not by default in some conscious state between death (James 2:26) and their bodily resurrection (Daniel 12:2), the latter being an eschatological event.  They are totally unperceiving, knowing not even self-evident things like logical axioms and their own existence since they know nothing (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10).  Revelation 21-22 does not touch on soul sleep, as the resurrection and judgment of the dead has already occurred (20:11-15), but it does describe a magnificent city where nations come and go and where the righteous thrive.

If Revelation 21-22's details about New Jerusalem, which in context is unveiled after the wicked are cast into hell to be killed (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:15), are figurative and do not have to do with a literal future state, then John 14:2-3 is also not literal.  The two passages speak of the same kind of thing.  Clearly, Revelation goes into far more detail than Jesus does in a mere handful of verses, who said only that this other dimension has many rooms, is the domain of the Father, and will be the residence of his followers after his return.  There is no mention here of the walls, (in a terrestrial sense) precious materials, light, or gates that John references.  The tree of life is said to be here only in Revelation as well.  Of all the events addressed in Revelation, everything from the fate of Satan in verse 10 of chapter 20 onward is far more direct.  New Jerusalem is described as a city with very specific features, not as something blatantly figurative or more bizarre like a woman clothed with the sun, moon, and stars (as in Revelation 12).

Did Jesus lie or give a very misleading summary of New Jerusalem?  If full preterism is true, he absolutely did if the Bible accurately represents him, though full preterism also very blatantly contradicts the idea that Jesus has a single return and not multiple returns (a flaw shared with the concept of the pre-tribulation rapture), as well as the idea of Jesus returning very visibly (Acts 1:9-11, Matthew 24:30-31) to resurrect the Christian dead and bring the living to himself at a trumpet blast (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, 1 Corinthians 15:50-54, and again, Matthew 24:31).  According to the Bible, if there is not yet a resurrection of the righteous dead, then there has not yet been a Second Coming.  If there has not yet been a Second Coming, then Jesus could not have "returned" in 70 AD.  The Second Coming, the real rapture (which occurs at Christ's direct, one-time return), and the eventual reveal of New Jerusalem are presented as literal.  Since they are addressed in passages outside of Revelation, it cannot even be the case that Revelation is too strange to ascertain these doctrines!

The Small Business Excuse

Small businesses can be great sources of innovation, community engagement, and workplace experience, and by no means are their founders or leaders ever oppressive because of the nature of small businesses themselves rather than their own nature as individuals.  They could still impose workplace exploitation on workers as those with the highest position(s) assume that the small scope of the business calls for rationalistic, moral, and financial lenience in reacting to them.  This small business excuse is logically invalid because it does not follow from a business being small that it can do whatever its owner/managers wish while still having philosophical legitimacy, and because as easy as it is for much larger companies to get away with workplace oppression, small businesses can be intentionally or unintentionally guilty of the same hypocrisies, arrogance, incompetence, and sheer stupidity as the more sizeable corporations that more often get negative attention.

As likely as it is that current leaders of major corporations like Amazon would be unwilling to pay workers better or universally give them better working conditions or benefits without immense outside pressure--and it is avoidable philosophical assumptions or errors, egoistic personality, or cultural conditioning that leads to selfish corporate leaders exploiting others, not simply the fact that someone holds executive positions--larger companies, including megacorporations, are the only ones that by default have the resources necessary to actually do these things easily.  Some small businesses might be able to pay their workers much better than is the norm and still make significant profits for the owners or managers, yet there could be small businesses that legitimately struggle to pay a genuinely livable wage that allows for meeting all basic needs, saving money, and some spending on "non-necessities" like entertainment and events with friends that ironically make life actually enjoyable.  If a small business cannot afford to pay people a salary or wage that is livable, though, then that business should not stay open.

Even a small business cannot deserve to remain in operation if its survival can only be ensured by underpaying or otherwise exploiting workers.  Greed, incompetence, and philosophical stupidity can characterize small businesses just like companies with more resources to spare, though of course neither is fated to lapse into these things.  Malicious or egoistic small businesses leaders might just directly pretend like their companies being small somehow legitimizes their workplace exploitation.  Benevolent but naive or outright idiotic small business leaders who are unable to pay well, in contrast, might not realize what they are doing if they hire multiple employees with low wages instead of perhaps hiring one or a handful of workers to do the tasks, but with superior pay.  There is a difference in worldview and personality here, yes, but some of the consequences are the same for workers.

Either kind of small business owner, if exploitation is indeed immoral, does not deserve to have their company last.  The "small business excuse," as I call it, is invalid by necessity in either case because the company still engages in some of the same unjust or otherwise irrational practices, still has idiotic philosophical motivations behind it, and tries to escape condemnation just by pointing out its size.  A struggling small business is not itself something to loathe.  A well-meaning small business owner/leader would not merit the same kind of hostility of a more explicitly egoistic small business owner even if both of them have some of the same idiotic ideologies, goals, or habits.  Because of this, at the same time, any small business that is not able or prepared to give its workers livable compensation is indulging in the same lunacy as the massive corporations with leaders who think their whims dictate the truth about morality, business, and people.

The bigger the company, the easier it would be to offer truly "competitive" wages, yet the easier it is for someone with power to trample on others and have their deeds and worldview concealed or avoid opposition quite stern enough to deter them.  The smaller the company, the less likely it is that a job can support multiple employees with livable pay and strong benefits, yet the easier it is to invest in a small, focused pool of workers.  Whether a small business actually sacrifices quantity of workers for quality of workers and compensation alike is decided by each individual owner/leader.  Some of them will erroneously believe in the small business excuse, using it as an illusionary shield to protect their feelings or reputation from criticism.  Others can choose, if they are rational and committed enough to do so, to take advantage of the smaller structure and size of their businesses to better invest monetarily and otherwise in a potentially lower number of workers.

Movie Review--Color Out Of Space

"It came down in the rock.  It lives in the well.  It grew down there.  Poisoning everything.  Changing everything into something like the world it came from.  Into what it knows."

--Ezra's recording, Color Out of Space

H.P. Lovecraft's story The Colour Out of Space is wonderfully adapted in a 2019 film starring Nicolas Cage of all people.  Setting up its human characters within the first 20 minutes before the titular color arrives, some of them to an unusually effective extent, Color Out of Space is a sometimes excellent cosmic horror movie with the visual flair this exact story calls for.  In a flash of purple, a strange object falls to Earth outside of a family residence, and yet Nathan Gardner has trouble recalling what color the impact projected.  A distinctively Lovecraftian tale ensues despite the absence of enormous beasts.  The city of Arkham--yes, this is actually what inspired the name of Arkham Asylum in the Batman mythos, as Lovecraftian horror can often involve a descent into insanity of a kind--is also mentioned repeatedly, a part of Lovecraft lore with an extreme impact on later storytelling far outside of cosmic horror, and it is fitting that this name would be acknowledged in recent cinema for its fictional roots.

Production Values

Opening with a unique approach to introductory credits, Color Out of Space displays its visual excellence very early on.  These credits appear and shift into the foreground or seem attached to trees as the camera rotates.  Not long after, there is a shot of the inside of a well that turns out to be showing the reflection in the water rather than showing the characters looking below from underneath them.  Before the 20 minute mark, the first of the color from outer space is seen in an explosion of purple.  The meteorite and its exotic color are later portrayed as a mixture or rapid changing of colors like purple and blue.  Cosmic horror is severely misunderstood by people who think it shows things that are logically impossible or that humans cannot understand, and there is of course no such thing as a color from an object outside of the planet that would not ultimately be a color we can find in our lives or a mixture of familiar colors.  In spite of this, the foreign nature of the color is triumphantly conveyed.  The wildness of the ending only highlights the color and its powers (though only objects can have colors, so the color seems to be emanating from an energy or even an alien consciousness) all the more.

The acting and characterization is, while secondary to atmosphere, also handled very well as a whole.  In the right role, Nicolas Cage can do far more than radiate unintentional humor or dramatically panic as he does in some of his most famous scenes.  His voice changes as the film progresses, starting with a more dramatic, lifelike vocal tone that lapses into one of his more unusual but still iconic ones as the Lovecraftian force exerts its influence on him.  He switches back and forth within the same scene on occasion.  Without being his best or most adventurous or bold role, Nathan Gardner is still one he is perfectly at home in, as the cosmic horror circumstances give Cage a new context for some of his signature style.  It would still have been better for the sake of tonal consistency to not have him lean as much into his almost self-parody levels of acting in some moments when the extraterrestrial substance alters his mind.  Besides Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Elliot Knight (from the DC show Titans), and other cast members do their part with the situational humor, gravitas, or confusion that each scene calls for.  Madeleine Arthur and Elliot Knight in particular have to carry certain scenes, including their meeting in the opening, that are of great significance to the plot, which they actually do.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A young girl attempts a Wiccan ritual to grant several of her desires, such as the removal of her mother's cancer, which incidentally leads to her meeting a boy surveying the groundwater of the general area for a hydroelectric company.  That very night, a bizarre meteorite falls to the ground in a blaze of purple.  The youngest son of the family living on the property enters a catatonic state for a time, and soon, almost every family member begins experiencing unusual perceptions or situations.  The mother cuts off two of her fingers as she zones out.  The daughter hears garbled speech when she answers her phone.  The older of the two sons finds animals that he already fed wandering about as if they have not eaten.  A small creature also comes forth from with an insectoid body of purple, seen only by the child who went catatonic when the object first landed.  The groundwater surveyor finds evidence of contaminated water, encouraging people not to drink from it.

Intellectual Content

The events of the film do very much reflect the Lovecraftian idea that the physical world and the beings that inhabit it are ultimately quite hostile or indifferent to humans, except when it suits them to toy with people as a means to their alien ends.  In contrast with a popular misconception of Lovecraftian or general cosmic horror, the laws of logic are true by inherent necessity, but the scientific correlations of ordinary life are not.  Color Out of Space indirectly touches upon the former in that it only shows logically possible but bizarre things, with logical impossibilities being impossible even in fiction, and thus they cannot be portrayed even when people intend to because they cannot avoid logical axioms.  The movie addresses the latter much more directly, depicting a terrible spiral into what is implied to be a terraforming of sorts where the alien "color" or the potentially conscious being behind it alters both the laws of physics and the mental perceptions of the Gardner family.  The "final boy" of the story recognizes the in-narrative non-universal nature of Earth's scientific laws in the final scene, and not only does his survival mean he replaced a character that could have filled the final girl trope, but he is also a black person, someone Lovecraft himself would have despised or feared.  There is a great double irony in how this film inverts a classic horror role and honors the cosmic horror of Lovecraft while disregarding his renowned racism against black people.

Conclusion

Another cinematic accomplishment for Nicolas Cage, an actor with one of the most wild filmographies, Color Out of Space succeeds in adapting its source material yet again.  It could have sometimes actually benefitted from a less over the top performance by Cage, but even when he embraces a style reminiscent of some of his other films, he is never a bad fit for the story and for this particular adaptation of it.  As a slow burn cosmic horror narrative, the movie manages to emphasize both the otherworldly glow and invasive corruption of the meteorite that brings doom with it, all without showing the breakdown of a family quite as well as other horror films like The VVitch or Hereditary.  It also does not feature any of the more culturally recognizable Lovecraftian entities like Cthulhu, which is not a flaw, just something people craving a more conventional Lovecraft story might not prefer.  For a movie adapting a story that could be quite difficult to visually tackle, this is generally a solid offering that incorporates all of the standard subgenre trappings like distortion of perception, an extradimensional or extraterrestrial being, and a quiet start that gives way to pandemonium.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  A woman slices two of her fingers off.  The hand is shown with blood.  Mutated alpacas are shot onscreen, a scene that also shows eruptions of blood, as is a transformed human.

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

 3.  Sexuality:  A man and woman are briefly shown engaging in clothed, passionate sexual interaction.

Social Media Debates

You do not need any social prompting to realize miscellaneous logical truths such as how if the universe was to exist forever, everything inside it would not necessarily also exist forever, or how just because there is a God would not mean the deity is personally invested in humanity.  You do not need to debate anyone to initially realize that the existence of one's thoughts and emotions cannot be illusions even if one's sensory perceptions do not pertain to any external objects, for something cannot be perceived without at least the perception objectively existing and being knowable with absolute certainty.  More importantly, you do not need anyone's assistance to realize that logical necessities of any other type, such as that it is impossible for nothing to be true because then this would be true (this is not about any scientific, moral, or theological fact, but pure logic), are inherently true.

Many people still do not come to see the fact that logical truths, as intrinsically necessary truths, do not depend on anything else, and yet everything else depends on them.  As such, one can know them independent of all conversation, research, or sensory experience, for they are true regardless of such things and can be known in themselves.  Each person is already relying on them both metaphysically and epistemologically.  It is only a matter of whether someone has recognized this or not--and the vast majority do not.  For the masses who might think of debates as necessary prompting for any philosophical reflection, rather than for initially thinking of certain scientific or historical ideas that are neither self-evident axioms nor something that follows logically from what is inherently true, social media can be a popular set of platforms.

Any deluions of people in social media debates, to clarify, are not present because of the nature of social media, which has no special qualities that make people believe or act in a given way unless they decide to, but because the nature of irrationalistic people.  Superficial, irrelevant, non sequitur arguments are always easier for non-rationalists to think of or cling to because assumptions do not neessarily require effort to make, but avoiding them might be psychologically strenuous for a non-rationalist at first if they do become a rationalist after all.  Although no one has to use it this way, social media makes it easy for incomplete philosophical stances, hearsay misconceptions, and a host of assumptions to reach mainstream appeal.

Of course, it is reason and introspection and other such things one must look to instead of any form of debate or media in order to discover objective and demonstrable truth.  If one wants to know logical axioms or necessary truths about reason itself or anything else, look to reason.  If one wants to focus on their own mental states or discover something about them as an individual soul, one must look to introspection and reason, for the laws of logic govern all, without making assumptions about one's own direct beliefs, personality traits, desires, and perceptions.  To learn what a religious text says, read the text without assumptions and identify what does and does not logically follow from the claims, rather than looking to hearsay, consensus, or traditions mentioned on social media that allegedly represent the religion.  Social media debates are not often about true logical necessity, but about cultural "hot button" issues through emotionalistic frameworks, expressions of subjective preference without rationalistic analysis of them, or whatever scientific fad is currently a widely-accepted paradigm.

Non-rationalists, being slaves to assumptions and particularly self-serving or convenient ones, also might, for instance, believe that someone who does not immediately reply to them must be quaking in their boots and full of intellectual cowardice.  As if a truly rational person could not stop conversing with them out of frustration, or as if there are not planned or spontaneous things alike that occupy time in a person's life outside of social media debates!  They might altenatively or additionally think that posting links prove something rather than reason itself, or that citing scientific, historical, or other hearsay (which is all that sources can ever offer) is philosophically valid as justification for belief in some supposed condition of the distant past.  They also might try to use this to in someone over emotionally regarding morality.  Posting a link describing the horrors of a natural disaster does not prove a moral obligation to aid the survivors, though it might still be used in attempts to pressure people into fallacious basis for belief and action.  War is not evil just because it can be destructive, no matter what any news article or opinion piece says, as this is only true if morality objectively exists and the obligations are such that war is immoral.  Perhaps misrepresenting their opponents and seeking social approval or emotional manipulation instead of something more than linguistic fluency, mere passion, or subjective persuasion, such people are far from reason indeed.

A rationalist will of course probably not wind up convincing someone of the truth through logical proof on social media or elsewhere.  For non-rationalists, only invalid epistemological means tend to be sought out, though they either require mere faith to sustain belief (in the sense of assumptions, not commitment to fallible but probablistic evidence) or are obviously erroneous to begin with, such as using scientism or moral subjectivism as starting points for expanded philosophical beliefs.  Again, using social media does not make a person irrational.  It just makes it easy for irrational people to ignore the truth while interacting with others or make themselves feel intelligent for believing fallacies or contradictions.  One can still engage in social media debates if one wishes.  To do so does not require that one believe anything false or slander an opponent!  There will simply be no point other than celebrating the truth on one's own as one tries, likely in vain, to help the many irrationalists of the online world.

The Prophet Of 1 Kings 20:35-43

1 Kings 20:35-36--"By the word of the Lord one of the company of the prophets said to his companion, 'Strike me with your weapon,' but he refused.  So the prophet said, 'Because you have not obeyed the Lord, as soon as you leave me a lion will kill you.'  And after the man went away, a lion found him and killed him."

As strange as this scenario might be, the wording does attribute the prophet's instructions to God, who in the extended story had the prophet accept a wound so that he could lull King Ahab into a false sense of security (1 Kings 20:37-43).  This actually is from God, who cannot sin and whose moral nature does not change (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17), and the prophet himself invites the blow, communicating divine judgment to follow in the form of death when the first person he talks to disobeys Yahweh.  These things crucially differentiate the strike in question, which the next person the prophet asks does carry out, from many other kinds, like that of one person striking another because of subjective whim or out of malice.  There is no contradiction between God genuinely instructing the prophet to have someone hit him and physical assault being universally evil.  The act required by God here is merely not physical assault.

The Torah says not to murder (Exodus 20:13) and gives clear examples of many situations where killing is not murder, so not only is the line between murder and non-murderous killing very clear (Exodus 21:12-17, 22:2-3, 18-20, and so on), but murder is never to be committed even if someone wants to be treated in this way.  Murder is by nature illicit killing, as opposed to mere killing, so it could never be morally legitimate.  The same is not true of physical blows--it is physical assault, which always entails unjust or unwanted physical contact, that is condemned in the Torah, not everything involving physical blows.  For instance, a husband and wife can engage in rough sexual interactions as long as they are mutually consensual (Deuteronomy 4:2, 1 Corinthians 7:2-5; only nonconsensual sex is condemned in Deuteronomy 22:25-27 as opposed to rough sex or other sexual behaviors), and wrestling for physical development can be done without malice or either party being physically abused.

Here is an excerpt from Exodus 21 dealing with general assault and battery:

Exodus 21:18-19--"'If people quarrel and one hits the other with a stone or with their fist and the victim does not die but is confined to bed, the one who struck the blow will not be held liable if the other can get up and walk around outside with a staff; however, the guilty party must pay the injured person for any loss of time and see that the victim is completely healed.'"

 

It might be easy to overlook, but the fact that Exodus 21:18-19 does not say to never strike someone with one's fist is vital: it in actuality specifies a context of quarreling, which can only come about if at least one party is in error logically and/or morally, or else there is nothing to fight over whether with words or with physical harm.  Thus, the situation is already one where at least one person is irrational and in sin.  The blows in this case law are born from malice or emotionalism, as they are not just.  Corporal punishment with rods or whips is allowed with clear moral boundaries like never going above 40 lashes and never using it as a means of execution (Exodus 21:20-21, Deuteronomy 25:1-3); also, physical wounds of a permanent kind can be given strictly for a particular category of sexual assault (Deuteronomy 25:11-12) or in cases of assault with permanent injury--see Exodus 21:23-25 and Leviticus 24:19-21, but see Exodus 21:15 and 26-27 for exceptions even to this. Exodus 21:22 only affirms that nonpermanent injuries deserve a lesser punishment according to the Bible [1].  Attacking someone with one's fists or an object is nonetheless evil unless it is in self-defense (as with Exodus 22:2-3).  

However, like two athletes physically training in the form of wrestling or a wife and husband hitting each other in a mutually desired manner for sexual gratification, hitting someone upon their own insistence to help them lay a trap at God's behest is not physical assault, for it is not about quarrelling, malice, and so on.  It would not be the type of brawling or physical mistreatment addressed in Exodus 21:18-19 or Ephesians 4:31.  In fact, the entire category of nonlethal physical blows that are consented to, short of something like a person calling for himself or herself to receive more than 40 lashes in criminal punishment despite how this is declared inherently unjust, is not sinful.  Actual consent from the party taking a strike can otherwise make hitting someone entirely permissible.  With the example of the prophet of 1 Kings 20:35-43, striking the man was morally mandatory: since God's nature authorized it, and the prophet consequently consented to it, it would be sin not to strike a person under such circumstances.  This necessity is not in the act being justice, as if the prophet could deserve physical discipline for doing what is right, but from this case entailing an unusual exception to what would otherwise be a matter of strict justice or injustice.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-many-biblical-exceptions-to-lex.html

Objectively Subjective

Pain is pain, and all pain is mental.  These are examples of logical truths about pain.  Without a mind, their could be no pain, since it is an experience of anguish within the mind.  Even physical pain, and physical pleasure or any other bodily sensation for the same reason, requires mental experience as well as a body, without which there would be only an inanimate lump of material tissue with nothing engaging in perception and no suffering to be perceived.  Since mental experience is subjective, this makes pain and other experiences objectively subjective.

Pain of the exact same objective intensity could be experienced by various people as if it is to differing extents.  Does this mean there are no objective truths about pain?  No!  That pain is subjectively perceived by an individual is one truth.  Pain could not have existed in any form if its presence contradicted logical axioms (it does not), rendering it metaphysically impossible, for logical axioms are not arbitrary presuppositions or just potentially true on an unverifiable level, but they are true in themselves because their falsity still requires their veracity.  No truth is subjective, but there are truths about subjectivity, and thus about things like pain that can only exist within experience.

One such foundational truth about subjectivity is that all experience is subjective.  There is no such thing as people avoiding the inherently subjective nature of experience because they look to groups instead of a sole person's experience [1], as if their own mind is not the only one they can know unless they were to not be under human limitations.  Gazing at trees during a forest walk is a subjective act whether or not the trees are objectively there beyond one's mind--the sensory perceptions objectively exist within one's mind either way.  Emotions and dreaming, while typically more passive, involve subjective experience: that is, they occur strictly within minds.

A person can allow themselves by passivity or by the active embrace of assumptions to stray from only believing in that which is objectively true and demonstrable, for something could be true without being knowable.  To do the opposite would mean they start with the epistemologically self-evident intrinsic truths of reason, as well as the objective self-evidence of their own conscious existence, and discover other logically necessary truths.  Ideological deviation from the objectively self-necessary truths of logic entails turning towards subjective persuasion or preference as a basis of belief, but this does not mean that anyone, by virtue of being conscious, makes assumptions based upon their subjective experiences.  Nothing can be true that contradicts logic, though it is possible for people to believe in anything they would subjectively like to, no matter how impossible or unverifiable it is.

However, all logical truths about subjectivity are objective, true by logical necessity independent of recognition or belief or emotional appeal.  Objective reality is knowable wherever there are logically necessary truths that are not locked beyond human epistemological limitations (for instance, while it could only be true or false that my memory of an event is accurate, I have no way to prove that the memory is correct).  All thoughts are still experienced subjectively by minds, and there are by necessity objective necessary truths about subjectivity.  Experience in its totality is objectively subjective and nothing about logical necessities or the real nature of one's immediate thoughts, such as one's worldview or intentions, is beyond one's ability to know them.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2021/09/group-subjectivity.html

Taking The Bible Literally

A lot of people say that they take the Bible literally or try to strive for this.  Making no assumptions, however, which does often mean taking the Bible literally, does not usually lead to the same ideas that are culturally associated with Christianity by the historical/contemporary church or by the secular world.  In a linguistic context as pertaining to the Bible, making no assumptions involves recognizing what the words really do or do not say and what does or does not logically follow from the concepts mentioned.  Though avoiding assumptions as a whole is is far broader than this, a necessary part of having true knowledge about anything at all from logical axioms to religious doctrines, it is of course a foundational philosophical necessity in knowing what any text appears to say.

Even what a Biblical text appears to say still is very commonly not the same as what many people have heard.  So many have been told that the Bible teaches that Christians go to heaven right when they die, but a single passage out of many is all it takes to refute the idea: Ecclesiastes 9:5-10 says the dead are unconscious, lacking all emotion, activity, and perception.  Also, Daniel 12:2 says the dead sleep until their awakening at their resurrections.  No one could take this literally, even if they believe they are, and think that these verses teach an intermediate afterlife before the resurrection.  Moreover, a verse like John 3:16 says those without eternal life from Yahweh and Christ will perish, not live forever in torment after their resurrection to be placed in hell as many are told is the case.  This is incredibly clear in itself aside from personal or cultural stupidity.

Even something that appears to literally say one thing can still obviously say something to the contrary in a very literal manner.  Does Ephesians 5:22-33 actually teach gender roles of any kind?  No, it is not that the Bible is saying men and women have their own personality traits and moral obligations (if it did, it would be incorrect here), that only men need to unilaterally love their wives and only wives need to unilaterally submit to their husbands.  Ephesians 5:21 very literally says before the mention of wives submitting to husband's that all Christians should submit to each other, with the obvious prerequisite being as long as there is no sin involved in what one yields to or if one is doing so for rational reasons.  Other parts of the Bible repeatedly say that love, the respect for all humans because of their divine rights, is an obligation all people have towards everyone else.

The literal statements of Ephesians 5 thus cannot be complementarian, but even if verse 21 was missing, it still would not logically follow that Paul is doing anything more than tailoring his commands to a specific church audience where men and women let cultural conditioning poison their worldview in differing ways.  The antidote would be both men and women doing what is good, which does not depend on their genitalia but on righteousness itself, no matter what their community demands.  However, even just in the context of Ephesians 5, gender roles are not taught either way because of both the literal statement of Ephesians 5:21 and the fact that it does not logically follow that addressing husbands or wives means something is morally good only for one gender.

In spite of the literal teachings of the aforementioned verses not being their popular misconceptions, there is sometimes figurative language in the Bible, indeed.  The parables of Christ are full of them.  He clarifies details about the literal truth or concept many of his stories touch upon, however.  Other miscellaneous statements are also figurative.  Is Jesus literally bread (John 6:35)?  A divine being inhabiting a human body cannot possibly be the same as a piece of bread, yet Jesus calls himself the bread of life.  The context literally clarifies that Jesus is like bread that sustains people, but far beyond what human food allows for (6:32-40) due to granting eternal life.  The text always has some clarity about what it is not talking about even if its intended meaning is generally obscure or comparative trivial.  Take the Bible literally when the context requires this and make no assumptions at all, though, and these things become obvious in light of reason.

The Null And The Evangelical Hell

Standard evangelicals actually believe that everyone will receive eternal life--the righteous or saved in heaven and the wicked in hell.  To exist in inescapable torment endlessly is of course eternal life, just not what many people mean when they specifically use the phrase.  The ironic contradiction of Yahweh or Jesus having to extend eternal life to someone when they will already live forever is extreme, but this is the typical evangelical stance on hell: the damned will live forever in agony and separation from God, although it would be impossible to be away from an omnipresent bring unless one did not exist.

Hells of (hopefully) fiction, like the egregiously contra-Biblical hell of Dante's Inferno or the supposed non-theological hell of Stephen King's Revival, often differ from whatever arbitrary details evangelicals believe mark the Biblical fate of the wicked when it comes to just that, the specific details.  The Null of Revival is presented as a realm of eternal slavery and torture (though the Null is an illusion or not for everyone like the narrator assumes in light of other stories by King), which is similar to the evangelical misconception of hell except for the creatures there being like enormous Lovecraftian insects, everyone allegedly going there after death regardless of their identity, and the suffering not even having the pretense of a moral nature.

It is not ant-like beings or the possibility of being consumed by Mother or other eldritch entities that makes the Null worse than almost any other afterlife in any established philosophy or fictional story.  It is the "universalist" nature of this hell, the intent behind the torment only being the sadistic whims of the supernatural creatures, and the assumed eternity of conscious existence there.  Even so, the concept of the Null is still fairly close to the evangelical notion of hell simply by the latter being eternal in duration and almost unavoidable.

No, the Biblical hell would not involve insectoid "demons" tormenting or overseeing people.  It was still originally created for demons to be punished, not humans (Matthew 25:41).  They are not able to abusively prey on humans, much less in order to enact "justice," for emotionalistic cruelty could not be morally permissible and they were the intended inhabitants to be destroyed in the consuming lake of fire, which is for humans the second death (Revelation 20:15).  Satan himself is to be punished in hell as opposed to being given the status of its egoistic "ruler."

Although the evangelical hell is logically impossible because eternal torment cannot by default be just for temporary sins of a limited number--and the nature of hell is not that everyone continuously sins and thus deserves eternal torment since the Bible plainly says that death of the soul awaits people (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6)--the Null of Revival is in some ways not different at all from what is popularly believed, on the basis of errors and pathetic assumptions, to be the hell of the Christian worldview.  Both are terrible; both are unjust or amoral at best, and both could only be worse by the degrees or kinds of suffering involved.

Their Worm Does Not Die

More often than not, the details that people associate with the Biblical hell are not included in the Bible itself, and in many cases even contradict what it does teach.  The most blatant of the cultural myths about the Christian hell is that it involves eternal conscious torment for every unsaved being.  The actual details the Bible does provide, such as how everyone would be punished according to their deeds (degrees of punishment because sins are not equally vile), the physicality of hell (Jesus speaks of people having their bodies in hell, so he is not describing a metaphysical space void of matter), and how cosmic death in hell is the ultimate penalty for sin instead of eternal torture [1], are not even generally recognized as the Biblical teachings on the matter.  

For all of the aforementioned details about hell that are included in the Bible, there is indeed much that is not elaborated upon.  Jesus does say that the physical body is punished in hell and not just the mind, but he does not specify what hell is supposed to look like or whether its physical environment is nothing but an actual lake of fire.  When multiple verses say that the wicked will be punished according to their deeds, they do not say if the general unsaved will be tormented for different durations of time at equal severities before their annihilation, or if they will be tormented prior to annihilation for an equal duration at different levels of pain.  However, these details are not necessary to understand the ideas that the Bible does posit about hell.  The same is true of Mark 9:47-48's description of the physicality of hell, as it states that is better to lose parts of one's body than to have a full body and be cast into hell, but casually mentions that "their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."

This reference to a worm is paralleled in Matthew 18, but this other part of the Bible does not reveal details about what exactly this worm is.  The mention of fire that goes unquenched refers to how the realm of hell itself is described as eternal (Matthew 18:8), made for Satan and his fellow fallen angels (Matthew 25:41), and this is entirely consistent with the many statements in the Bible about how unsaved humans, as opposed to the devil, are to be punished with an eternal death of consciousness (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28, Romans 6:23, and so on).  That a realm will last forever does not mean everything inside of it must last forever.  Even so, Mark 9 specifically says that "their worm does not die" in hell without clarifying what precisely is being conveyed.  If literal, Jesus is saying that there is a worm/worms that devours the physical bodies of those in hell, living forever even after the unsaved perish.

Even though this does not bring much more to light, it is true that Mark 9 is paraphrasing Isaiah 66:22-24, where God is speaking of a new heavens and a new earth to which humanity will come, looking out at the corpses of God's enemies as their "worm," it is implied, consumes the dead flesh.  The onlookers likely experience hatred towards the wicked based upon the comment that the dead who rebelled against God are loathsome to "all mankind."  The seeming eschatological context of this is clear from its use of wording much like that of Revelation when it talks of a renewed physical creation.  The bodies are dead, which is consistent with the common Biblical teaching of annihilationism, and though 2 Peter 2:6 says that the unsaved will be burned to ashes instead of ceasing to exist as minds while leaving full bodies to exist forever, it is possible that even if Isaiah 66:22-24 is a literal description of the saved witnessing the aftermath of the wicked permanently dying on the level of consciousness, the bodies will persist for a while in the presence of a worm until they are reduced to ashes.

Regardless, the worm of Isaiah 66 (and Mark 9 by extension) is like terrestrial worms that feast on corpses, and it is clear from passages all throughout the Bible that general humanity is destined for death of the soul, without which the body is also dead.  Though Jesus does not give much clarity, it would seem that the Biblical hell is associated with some sort of worm.  This has not deterred some Christians from somehow thinking that the "worm" of Mark 9 is actually conscience as it torments the wicked, as if that in any way is present in the text of Mark 9 or the part of Isaiah 66 it paraphrases!  Of course, the kind of evangelical who would come to this non sequitur is likely the kind of Christian who genuinely thinks that the Bible is very literal in its teachings, yet he or she remains unaware of the fact that the literal words of the Bible do not teach that conscience is involved in the agony of hell or that all humans in hell exist forever, alive and in pain.  Whatever the worm of hell is, death of the spirit (the conscious mind) and the eventual deterioration of the body to ashes is what the Bible literally teaches is the ultimate, deserved fate of unrepentant humans.

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

Endangering The Life Of One's Neighbor

By saying things such as that we are to love each other, the Bible is not in those precise statements detailing what makes something loving.  This is where some people mistakenly think that an irrelevant deed is really mandatory.  Not holding the door open for a random person is not unloving, so even according to this idea that is objectively vague on its own, there is no Biblical obligation to show kindness in this exact way.  One would need to know the contents of Mosaic Law to know what love is.  A moral concept put forth in Leviticus is somewhat similar, pertaining to the narrower range of behaviors that can gratuitously put others in harm's way, which it does not elaborate upon afterward.  In this case, instead of corresponding Biblical passages along with reason, reason alone illuminates the matter.

Leviticus 19:16 does say not to endanger your neighbor's life, but it does not prescribe or even hint at many specific precautions many take against danger to humans--because for the most part, those measures are only situationally or individualistically obligatory.  Traffic laws, for instance, are in part motivated by the intention of protecting life and health, as well as that of extracting money from the citizenry, of course.  However, on the Biblical worldview, it is absolutely not driving at 65 or 75 or 100 miles per hour that is sinful, nor is it disobeying social constructs like mere human laws; it is a reckless, selfish approach to driving, such as driving even 45 miles per hour into a tight crowd of innocent and unwitting pedestrians, that endangers other people rather than any arbitrary daily speed of driving.

Deuteronomy 4:2 and the fact that it does not logically follow from driving at a speed like 50 miles per hour that there is automatic, unnecessary endangerment of life make it clear that such laws are still asinine.  At most, an individual person can be situationally in the wrong by knowingly or negligently putting someone else in danger, but it is not the simple act of driving "fast" to any arbitrary extent that is the sin.  Had this person never driven this way around a pedestrian or a stalled vehicle, there would be no sin because the error is not in the act or anything but the disregard for other lives.  This entire category is an example of endangerment-related laws in modern America that actually violate Deuteronomy 4:2, treating a permissible thing as if it should be criminalized itself.

To provide another example, it is not as if holding a knife within a three or two foot radius of another person, outside the context of something like a legitimate wartime kill for clarification, is actually immoral according to the Bible, or holding a gun in the presence of a companion.  It would be trying to harm someone with these items under the guise of a joke or active negligence in making sure the other person is safe the whole time that would be sinful.  In this way, someone could endanger their neighbor's life, though the deed or even the situation is otherwise entirely non-problematic.  Again, the obligation is respecting and caring for human life.  The mere possibility of danger to any person, in the sense of a slippery slope fallacy or otherwise, is not what makes something violate Leviticus 19:16.

Job-Based Classism

Classist arrogance and stereotypes, no matter the direction they are aimed at, are invalid and thus have to be assumed out of blind stupidity or, also out of stupidity, believed in denial of truths that someone has brushed up against and tried to set aside anyway.  Because of systematic underpayment in many industries or roles, only certain jobs pay enough or more than enough to thrive on without sacrificing necessities for survival or very important problems that make life incredibly difficult or less appealing.  Because of the economic and social power that they wield, executives can often escape social uproar because of their wealth even if they do egregious things.  In both cases, there are people who look down on or up to them arbitrarily because of their occupation on irrelevant grounds.

Unlike what a multitude of conservatives seem to gleefully think, people who bring mobile orders to vehicles, process items in warehouses, or serve as the front lines between a company and its consumers are indispensable in their roles.  No, unlike what some liberals might think, a person is great as an individual, beyond whatever human rights they might have by being human (not because someone feels like rights exist or because a government says they do), exclusively because they are a rationalist and hopefully a moralistic Christian because of their rationalism, not because they are a part of the "working class" or whatever meaningless criteria certain liberals practically deify.  No one is a rational or righteous person by virtue of having a job that is useful to society, though indeed some of the jobs that pay the least are the ones that are truly the most vital.

At the same time, short of jobs that are immoral (for instance, on Biblical ethics, prostitution or torture of any kind except for the very limited kinds prescribed by Mosaic Law), there is no such thing as a job that lowers a person's value.  There are morally permissible jobs that might be underappreciated or underpaid, but there are not jobs that render one person superior or inferior to another.  Aside from the irrelevance of such jobs to someone's rationalistic awareness and moral standing, not everyone even has the same access to different options.  Geography, family circumstances, mental health, school, and the business needs of a company all are significant variables that impact the ease someone can find or maintain a given job.

Those who look down on someone just because of their job--from that of a waiter or waitress to that of a C-Suite executive (no, it is logically possible to be an executive who is not predatory or selfish, as uncommon as examples of this seem to be in American society)--and not because of their philosophical competence or their moral character are fools.  It can be pragmatically better for people to seek some jobs more than others because certain occupations are not properly compensated or treated well, but there is nothing besides this unfortunate reality that is relevant besides a person's individual needs and preferences.  They have not sinned by not wanting or pursuing some incredibly prestigious career.

The conservative tendency to look down on the lower class or those with less prestigious jobs and the liberal tendency to assume malice and greed on the part of anyone in the upper class are asinine failures to be rational.  Manual labor, casual labor, computerized labor, educational labor, executive labor, and many other kinds are no more or less dignified in their own way as long as the role is not misunderstood irrationalistically, for all of them can both lead to personal fulfillment without irrationalism and to the enrichment of broader society.  There is no specific class of work other than the immoral types that deserves to be regarded with suspicion, contempt, or neglect by the communities that benefit from them.

"I Am Who I Am"

The story of how God communicated to Moses through a burning bush is known to even plenty of young children, a portion of the book of Exodus about how Moses encounters the miracle of a bush that burns without being consumed.  Telling Moses of how he will free the Israelites from oppression, God says he will use Moses as an instrument to bring about this liberation.  Wondering what he will say if he was to be asked for the name of the deity who would rescue the Israelites from Egyptian captivity, Moses asks for a name.  "I AM WHO I AM," God replies in Exodus 3:14.  God offers a phrase alluding to his higher metaphysical status in place of a standard name.  This brief part of the story is rather relevant to core truths about language and its relationship with the things words refer to.

Though there are many specific names for God across the Bible, the word God itself is just that, a word, a title meant to describe a certain kind of metaphysical being.  The diverse names and descriptions given to or by God in the various books of the Bible are only linguistic constructs that, like all words, refer to something more fundamental and transcendent than words all at once, for a logical truth or some other metaphysical existent must either already exist or already be understood as a concept in order for words to be created and matched with ideas (and I do not mean mere thoughts as they occur within minds, but the ideas and truths themselves that do not depend on human perception).  God, as the uncaused cause that created the physical world whether or not it is the deity spoken of in the Bible [1], would neither need nor inherently have a name, only characteristics that human words can later be used to communicate.

Names are contrived by conscious beings, whether by God or by humans.  The things names are assigned to can exist independent of or prior to the words that are paired with them.  Words are secondary, a means to the end of communicating truths and concepts that do not depend on words for their nature.  These are much more abstract, foundational truths about language than might be conventionally associated with the story of the burning bush, but they are true by necessity, and it is clear in the text of Exodus 3 that God is focusing on realities behind and beyond mere words.  Even when he elaborates after identifying as "I AM," he only calls himself the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob (3:15), abstaining from providing a singular name like Yahweh or Jehovah (not that there is anything blasphemous or otherwise erroneous about these names, contrary to what some idiots suggest).

There is no being besides a true deity that could exist uncaused and without metaphysical dependence of any kind on some other being, though even the uncaused cause only exists because of logical possibility and necessity, making it the ultimate being, the being without which there could be no material world, consciousness, or moral obligations, yet not the ultimate metaphysical existent.  Even so, the Bible presents the supreme being as not even needing to bother with names because its nature is not a construct like words.  As such, without describing it in this exact manner, Exodus addresses how reality is more significant than the words that so many people rely on for epistemological prompting--or fail to look past to ideas.  Whether one calls the Christian deity by the title God or by names such as Yahweh is nowhere near as important as the fact that there is an uncaused cause and that human existence is to God's existence as words are to truths: secondary at best.

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

If Rationalists Fight

If two people often fight, and yet both are supposedly rationalists, then one or both of them must be in error, even if only in a subtle way.  Logical necessity entails that contrary ideas cannot be simultaneously true.  Since contradictory things cannot be true at once, when two people verbally quarrel over something, either they have a disagreement of some kind or one of them has lapsed into irrationality, or else they would not be fighting.  If they have a disagreement, one or the other must be proclaiming an (at least epistemologically) invalid notion or mishandling their personality.  Ongoing fights between two individuals can thus only mean that one or both are in the wrong on some matter.

There would be nothing else to fight over.  Certainly, nothing else could merit any sort of confrontation.  One reluctant conflict over a misperceived communication is one thing, as this can happen with two perfectly rationalistic people who know and cling to reason and thus make no assumptions.  This could even happen more than once; misperceived communication is not necessarily avoidable in all cases just because two people believe the right things, starting with the inherent truths of logical axioms, for the right reasons.  However, if two people genuinely fight each other in their words and it is not an (hopefully) easily resolved issue of communication, they have different worldviews or are acting out of something like emotionalism.

Of course, if they have different worldviews, at least one of them is inevitably wrong and cannot deserve to not be confronted.  They also cannot deserve to not be treated with some degree of harshness.  Fighting repeatedly and about multiple subjects, an even greater form of conflict, can only be done when someone is being flagrantly, persistently irrational.  Knowing something is true on the level of rationalistic proof does not mean someone will always honor a necessary truth in how they approach conversations.   Perhaps they still needlessly or fallaciously fight with their friends, siblings, spouse, or parents.

Some people might be in a troubled relationship of this kind due to frequent verbal sparring (or the looming threat of it).  Still, they might desperately want it to not be true that one party must be at fault if such a thing is happening.  This can only be the case!  For those in such relationships, there is the option to show mercy or endure the needless conflict, and there is the option to walk away from the other person.  There can be rational and irrational motivations behind each course of action.  If two rationalists in particular fight as opposed to some other arrangement, one of them at a minimum has faltered, and if they continue to fight, at least one of them has not aligned in their words and behaviors with the necessary truths they might still know.

Horror In Gaming: The Most Immersive Art Form

Gaming is objectively the greatest art form.  Encompassing literally everything that makes the other mediums artistically great while uniting or transcending these elements, it is the interactivity that separates gaming from the text, audio (including music and voice acting), or aesthetics of everything from literature to sculpture.  Someone might personally prefer something like the passivity of watching a film, with movies having their own potential for greatness, but artistically, gaming has more to it than cinema ever could and it could contain everything films themselves possess.  One can control to some extent the pace at which one reads, regarding another medium, but the act of reading does not affect either the broad plot or the details of moment by moment events.  Video games require player input to progress and that progression is not necessarily uniform for every player.

What separates gaming from all other art formats is its inherent component of controllability as affected by the player's choice, that of being able to make the character do or not do whatever is permitted within the full range of actions.  Horror has the potential to become all the more visceral thanks to this.  No longer is someone merely imagining imposing events, conjuring up mental imagery to match the words, while reading them or watching things occur in a strictly cinematic fashion with or without their input.  Ominous environments are not just observed; they are navigated with real-time human direction.  Hostile entities are not just seen as a fixed, exact course of events unfolds; they must be fought or fled from by the player.

With gaming, the character only advances through whatever grim or intimidating circumstances are present if the player makes them.  When you have to make your character conserve bullets or other limited weapons, like in The Callisto Protocol or certain Resident Evil games (though only certain franchise entries actually embody serious horror well), this vulnerability is heightened.  When your character cannot defend themself at all, as with the entirety of Outlast and the human portions of Agony, the vulnerability that comes with player control is at its highest.  Someone who gets anxious towards a horror movie they do not need to manually progress through could be downright terrified by a horror game--some enjoying this and some avoiding it.

You have to hide, you have to aim the firearm, and you have to find your way through the digital world, perhaps while being hunted and with no means of protection.  Gaming is already interactive by nature, or else it would be an entirely passive experience like other artistic mediums.  This is what gives it a more potent capacity for making it likely that even people otherwise not philosophically oriented would reflect on their actual beliefs and decisions and perceptions, when this is facilitated correctly (BioShock does this very well).  Horror gaming has all of the philosophical potential of literary or cinematic horror to address fear, survival, and general metaphysics, as with cosmic or religious horror, which can be easily combined.  It also has the even grander immersive nature of player control.

What delights or intoxicates someone in artistic form might still be unwanted in real life, so it is not as if everyone looks to horror to find experiences they wish they themselves had.  The very nature of a video game nonetheless lends itself well to deeper levels of dread, unease, or excitement than the same genre in any other medium.  Of all that gaming can offer, virtual reality would be the most immersive possible subset of this already more interactive art form.  Other than being attacked or stalked or forced to walk through macabre settings, there is no experience closer to the real thing.  Far from being a medium to dismiss for its immersion and storytelling, gaming has no superior or equal in all of artistic expression: while some mediums might be more suited to particular goals or creative urges than others, there is not one with greater potential or transcendence of the others than gaming, and this inevitably spills over into interactive horror.

"It's Only A Clump Of Cells"

Only logical axioms and, though it depends on logical axioms both metaphysically and epistemologically, one's own conscious existence are self-evident since one must rely on them to doubt or deny them.  Moral and scientific facts, as opposed to logically necessary facts about ideas concerning morality or science, are not self-evident or deductively demonstrable, although one can discover evidence for certain notions about them, recognize the contradictions and thus impossibility of others, and realize in any case what would or would not follow.  This is all by necessity the case with the concepts relevant to abortion.

If killing people for convenience or on a whim is murder, then it would not matter if they are inside the womb or outside of it.  What of whether a pregnancy entails the carrying and development of an actual human at any or all stages?  If the zygote, the ovum successfully fertilized by a sperm, is what will become a human outside the womb left to itself, it is a human at that stage of development no matter the biological particulars beyond this.  In fact, even the empirically supported concept of the gametes unifying in fertilization is unnecessary to realize that whatever is being developed during pregnancy would have to be a human in its current stage.  Without fertilization, though, a sperm and egg are not a person on their own, just the basic components to potentially create a new person.

Some people adhering to liberal philosophies might insist that what is inside the womb, especially a zygote, a blastocyst, or perhaps an embryo, is "only a clump of cells."  While abortion is hardly the most significant issue of morality and general metaphysics, amidst the often purely emotionalistic and non sequitur-riddled stances held by many conservatives and liberals on this subject, this is something that might be articulated sincerely as a justification for, should the mother wish, terminating a pregnancy.  Depending on the variant of pro-choice ideology, this might be regarded as morally permissible, up to the sole discretion of the mother, at any point in the pregnancy or up until some often sheerly arbitrary line is assumed.

Consciousness is immaterial [1] regardless of whether it metaphysically creates or sustains the body as with idealism or the body causes it to come into existence, as well as whether or not it outlives the body in any sort of unembodied afterlife.  However, at least according to the paradigm of today, the human body outside of the womb consists of up to trillions of cells depending on its age and size.  On a physical level, a zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, newborn, and adult alike are still just "a clump of cells" if contemporary cell theory is true, just with differing numbers of cells.  Thus, if this is basis for there to be nothing immoral about killing the clump of cells that will eventually become a newborn even when the mother's life is not threatened, then there cannot be anything immoral about the mere killing of someone outside the womb, not if it too is convenient.

There is no way to prove that any human rights exist because there is no way to prove that morality exists, but the standard liberal positions on abortion are contradictory and thus logically impossible.  Some of the tenets or others could be true on their own, but not at once.  It might be true that there is nothing morally wrong with killing the group of cells that form a human, but it is not because the unborn would not be human or because only those outside the womb could have a right to live (contingent on them not committing any act that would render them deserving of execution), or else it would not be a matter of human rights.  If all living bodies are made of cells, then differences in appearance, size, and location would not make a human at an early developmental stage, including the zygote phase, less human than that of a more mature stage.

[1].  A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/02/conflating-mind-and-body.html

B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-consequences-of-denying-substance.html

The Impossibility Of All Things Being Possible

If everything was possible, whether in the sense of being metaphysically capable of being true or of being epistemologically unverifiable and unfalsifiable so that one cannot know if it is true or false, then nothing would be impossible.  If, however, no individual idea is impossible, that is, incapable of being true, then it is impossible for all things to be possible, since anything contrary to this "truth" would still be impossible.  Even without directly acknowledging logical axioms, a person will always hold to this contradiction if they genuinely believe that anything is possible.  It is in actuality true necessarily that only things which are consistent with logical axioms and other necessary truths are possible, though almost no one chooses to be intelligent enough left to themselves to have as much as started exploring issues of logical necessity and possibility without making assumptions.

If nothing was true, it would be true that nothing is true, so truth still exists; this much is the case regardless of what else is.  If nothing followed logically by necessity from anything else, or if what followed by was not inherently true, it would follow logically from the nature of reality that nothing follows from anything else (or that what would have followed is not true) and that it is not necessarily true.  Thus, one thing logically follows from another with inherent truth either way.  If contradictions were possible, it would only be because contradictions being impossible is false, and so contradiction is still excluded from truth in this regard.  In other words, contradiction would still be incapable of being true!  These and a handful of other such things are intrinsically true and thus absolutely certain.

In turn, if something is inherently true, nothing else can be true which conflicts with it, for that would require its falsity.  A necessary truth cannot be false, so it would be whatever contradicts them that cannot possibly be true instead of the opposite.  As abstract necessary truths that depend on nothing other than themselves--axioms and other logical facts stemming from them--the laws of logic are what metaphysically dictate possibility and impossibility.  Yes, if all things were possible, the idea would still entail that it is impossible for anything to be impossible, though this itself would have to be impossible--much like how pure relativism entails that all things are relative, in denial of logical necessities, while also holding that this truth is absolute, rendering it false one way or another.

The real error of the concept that everything is possible, though, is that logical axioms cannot be false because they are inherently true, not hinging on God or the cosmos or any other being's preferences or perceptions.  Indeed, each of these things and all others besides logic itself depend on reason, not the other way around, and necessary truths could not have been any other way, unlike the world's exact laws of physics or historical events or someone's subjective experiences.  It is utterly impossible for all things to be possible since logic can only be true and whatever conflicts with it can only be false.  The metaphysical and epistemological arbiter of all things is reason, superior to all else for its intrinsic veracity and thus supreme centrality, immutability, and absolute certainty.  Nothing could be more simple and yet more abstract.

The Affordability Of The Sabbath

For some families, not being able to work on even a single day a week would significantly hinder their ability to save money, as a day spent not generating some sort of income would greatly slow their accumulation of vital wealth.  Some people might alternatively not have to even think about what abstaining from professional work one day a week would do to their income.  There is nothing wrong with having this kind of privilege, for no one who possesses it is necessarily irrational or unjust, and anyone who hates another person for being able to have at least one guaranteed day away from work can only do so on the basis of stereotypes or envy (assumptions and emotionalism).  But what about those who might suffer from not working every day of the week?  The Biblical Sabbath, if Christianity is true, would be an obligation for them just as it is for everyone else, though the Sabbath does not mean that absolutely no one can perform physical labor or that there would not be exceptions even with labor for pay (such as hospital work) [1].

The Sabbath is something ignored or trivialized by a great number of Christians.  Keeping a day of rest might be far from the most vital of moral obligations detailed in the Bible, but to violate the Sabbath is a capital offense (Exodus 35:2).  If more Christians were to take it as seriously as the Bible itself does, setting aside their emotionalistic love affair with conscience and church tradition, they might quickly begin to think about the ways to implement a personal Sabbath in a culture very different than that of the ancient Jews.  In an economy like that of America where some people can scarcely afford to wait two weeks to receive their next round of pay, how the poor should keep a Sabbath is a significant issue (though the Bible never prescribes Saturday or Sunday as the Sabbath, only saying to abstain from general work for one day of each week, which makes it easier to uphold).

The Sabbath is not about penalizing the poor for being poor or giving the illusion of a respite from work while taxing people with worries about how they will survive.  It is a day of rest, not a day intended to provoke deep financial anxiety.  Ultimately, any difficulties in keeping the Sabbath and staying afloat economically in modern, Western society would be due to the oppressive manner in which capitalism is practiced in America, which drives many people to let work dominate their lives.  The problem would not originate from having a day to acknowledge and rest in the fact that professional work and unnecessary labor in general are not the defining things of life.  With or without Christianity being true, in fact, work is at most secondary to other matters (the core of reality is reason rather than social constructs like economic practices).  The Sabbath is about knowing and celebrating this truth, which transcends even a theistic context, and the poor are just as able to understand these logical facts as the rich.

Professional work and physical labor in general are not the most important parts of life for either the rich or the poor.  The "affordability" of the Sabbath would have nothing to do with whether it is obligatory anyway, as pragmatic consequences do not make something good or evil, but the Sabbath is needed no less by the poor, who would benefit from as much physical relaxation and spiritual rest as they can find.  The Sabbath, as Jesus says, is for the sake of human wellbeing (Mark 2:27).  Having a day of rest is never the problem to begin with when a society is structured so that people are pressured to let work occupy the majority of their lives, and just to simply survive at that.  Evangelicals unfortunately tend to be too infatuated with American social norms to see how far many of them deviate from Biblical commands.  Holding a personal Sabbath each week would could actually be liberating in ways that could prompt someone to see just how arbitrary, hypocritical, and baseless so much of the American economic system truly is.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/11/healing-on-sabbath.html