Movie Review--Wonder Woman 1984

"No true hero is born from lies."

--General Antiope, Wonder Woman 1984

The sequel to one of the only consistently praised DCEU films has finally arrived, only to be met with an abundance of unexpected criticism.  From claims that Wonder Woman 1984 does not fit into the established DCEU to claims that none of the performances showed talent, some of the criticism in invalid.  Wonder Woman 1984 is clearly connected to the first Wonder Woman, which is itself clearly connected to Batman v Superman, which is then directly connected with the DCEU films that followed.  The idea that the Wonder Woman sequel is separated from the broader DCEU storyline is pathetic.  While its connections to the DCEU and its genuinely important philosophical themes are obvious to those who look for them, there are genuine flaws to be found, many of which pertain to the way the first hour of the movie unfolds.

Production Values

One thing about the general structure of Wonder Woman 1984 needs to be said directly: this is not an action-heavy story filled with enormous amounts of CGI.  It is one about characters and themes more than explosive action sequences.  Action was one of the first Wonder Woman's many strengths, so this might bother fans of the original, but there are some key fights in the second half.  What this means is that characterization and acting are forced to carry the slower first act.  Chris Pine, Pedro Pascal, and Kristen Wiig give the best performances in the movie, even if the latter two play characters that are sometimes written to specifically act over the top.

The wildness and randomness of some early scenes with Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) and Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) do fade into genuine gravity and personal stakes as the film continues, so the intentionally, blatantly awkward dialogue given to Kristen Wiig near the beginning does not haunt every scene she appears in.  Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman herself, has scenes of greater emotional intensity as the story goes on, and she thankfully has a much stronger presence in Wonder Woman 1984 than she does in Justice League.  Her character has to navigate genuine weaknesses, mortality, and her own conflicting desires in a plot that explores more of her personal side than before.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Diana Prince still sharply feels the loss of her romantic partner Steve Trevor decades after his sacrifice helped confine the destruction of World War I, even though she has taken up a new job to occupy her time.  She engages in periodic vigilante acts in which she specifically avoids killing or brutally injuring her opponents.  Her job at the Smithsonian Institution puts her in close proximity to an item called the Dreamstone, a gem embedded in an artificial base with an inscription about wishes that can alter reality.  Diana unwittingly wishes for her boyfriend to come back to life, only to meet a sort of reincarnated version of him shortly after.  Several other people become interested in the Dreamstone as well, including an insecure coworker of Diana's (Barbara Minerva) and a fraudulent television personality (Maxwell Lord).

Intellectual Content

The true feminism of the first film that treated both men and women as equally heroic and depraved returns in Wonder Woman 1984 as a core theme of the series.  Once again, Diana never looks down on Steve for being a man or a human.  Although the exact nature of how Steve's host body is inhabited by the resurrected pilot is left very ambiguous, meaning that Diana potentially sexually assaulted the host depending on how the consciousness Steve displaced was impacted, the relationship between Diana and Steve continues to be a countercultural example of how a man and woman can come together as individuals without concern for sexist cultural norms favoring men or women.

Since the genuine egalitarianism of the series was firmly established in the first movie, it does not have to be emphasized in the same ways, something that frees the sequel to focus on the dangers of yielding to all desires without exercising rationality and justice.  It becomes clear almost as soon as inconveniences and disasters result from the wishes that the main thematic point is that the nature of desire calls for careful reflection, lest people who follow their own whims without concern for other matters create an avoidable hell for themselves and others.  Like how God of War III gives a fictional example of what unrestrained desire for gratuitous vengeance could bring about, Wonder Woman 1984 shows physical representations of how even non-selfish desires can bring ruin if they are all a person looks to.

Also, like with the Infinity Stones in multiple MCU films, the Dreamstone could be used to bring about anything that is logically possible without having the power to alter the laws of logic, even though none of the characters in Wonder Woman 1984 ever do as much as hint at realizing this vital point.  Movies tend to conflate scientific possibility with logical possibility when logical possibility is inherently fixed and immutable.  The fact that this continues to get ignored in filmmaking reveals just how philosophically incomplete the ideas of mainstream directors and writers can be.

Conclusion

Wonder Woman 1984 is neither as tonally streamlined as the 2017 origin story or as incoherent as the shitshow Suicide Squad.  For all of its pacing problems in the first half of the long runtime, it is far more thoughtful and thematically important than Suicide Squad or Justice League--Joss Whedon's utterly mediocre product hijacked from Zack Snyder, that is.  This makes it stand above multiple other DCEU releases without climbing to the same overall cinematic heights as the 2017 Wonder Woman that so excellently blended action, comedy, romance, philosophical considerations about gender egalitarianism and human nature, and DC worldbuilding.  There are certainly things that merit criticism in Wonder Woman 1984, but there are also plenty of things that merit praise.  Audiences in general simply did not expect for a Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman movie to have such a mixed quality.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Wonder Woman physically fights several human or metahuman foes, and she gets wounded to the point of bleeding in some of them.  The most ferocity is shown in her fights with Barbara Minerva when the latter gains strength while losing her "humanity," but the most intense of these clashes is not a bloody affair.

 2.  Profanity:  "Shit" is uttered by Steve in one of the rare uses of profanity in the film.

Originality In Language

Communication style, like independent reflection, offers many chances for originality, except the former kind is originality of expression rather than originality of conceptual reasoning (in the sense of autonomous thought or novel discovery) itself.  The same demonstrable truths can be explained to others in many different ways, and sometimes they might even be communicated in ways that almost seem as if two separate truths are being addressed rather than the same truth in distinct manners.

Anyone capable of using language can exercise this form of originality even though the vast majority of people merely inherit languages from others.  It would be pointless and too enormous a task for every individual person to create their own language on the scale of linguistic systems like English, after all, as the primary basis for language is interpersonal communication.  Having a set of random languages created by each individual in a community would hinder the goal of communication by making it more difficult to interact with people beyond physical gestures.

Without common linguistic norms, communication on a more abstract and personal level remains impossible--unless the beings communicating are telepathic, of course!  It then falls upon the people using oral and written languages to express their own mental states and worldviews in their own words if they so desire, irrespective of whether those particular sentences were already used by others.  In this way, people not only have constant opportunities to think of new or familiar concepts without looking to anything but reason, but they also have consistent opportunities to share themselves and their thoughts in unique ways.

The addition of a even a single word to a language's canon allows for a high number of new communication possibilities for each respective person who uses that language.  With the introduction of just one word, there are suddenly hundreds of thousands of additional ways to configure sentences based on where the new word is placed.  As a result, there are now a host of novel ways to communicate familiar ideas in writing or with oral speech.  The plethora of ways ideas can be expressed leaves room for individuality and originality when a great number of thoughts are exchanged.

Since new words are constructed to refer to new scientific paradigms in particular (most other concepts have already been assigned words of some sort), and since there is no numerical limit to how many words can preside within a given language, there is practically always the potential for new terms and sentences.  Even if this was not the case and the possible scope of individual languages was far more restricted, personal variations in communication style and the desire to continue elaborating on established points in different ways would ensure that originality is an option in everyday linguistic expression.

Political Libertarianism Is Not Corporatism

Libertarianism of a Christian and secular variety reduces down to one primary goal: disallowing governments from having any power derived from unjust or needless laws by eliminating those laws.  Some misrepresentations of this basic fact exist both inside and outside of libertarian circles, such as the idea held by some conservatives or liberals that libertarianism is equivalent to anarchy.  Another false description holds that libertarianism is rooted in selfishness (as opposed to the human rights of each individual).  Yet another holds that a libertarian government would only punish people for directly inflicting unjust physical or financial harm on others.  One of the most popular misconceptions, however, insists that libertarianism is an excuse to let large companies take control of communities.

Denouncing "big government" only to want enormous businesses to control everyone's daily lives is utterly hypocritical, and thus no genuine, consistent libertarian of the Christian or secular kind would ever embrace corporatism!  At that point, businesses would be the government, and a very large government at that.  Corporatism is therefore contrary to true libertarianism.  It is literally the opposite!  Small government is not sought after in order to make room for a corporate empire the same size as the big governments that came before.  Anything else leaps into blatant hypocrisy!  Only thinking about the concepts without making assumptions is necessary to prove this.

The lack of big government does not logically necessitate that powerful businesses will swoop in to replace whatever previous government stood in place.  Moreover, businesses can only sustain their financial power if someone supplies them with funding or other capital, and thus, short of receiving resources from some unlikely means, consumers have the ability to temporarily or permanently hurt a business if they consistently boycott abusive or domineering companies.  It is not as if consumers are forever powerless to bring major companies to their knees in all circumstances.

Of course, it is always easier for non-rationalists to misrepresent ideas they do not understand than it is to remain silent or contemplate without making assumptions.  By virtue of being a minority position as it is, libertarianism has fewer proponents to clarify what exactly it does and does not entail, and so easily avoidable misconceptions are perpetuated by people too illogical to sidestep fallaciously conceiving of libertarianism and not affiliated with actual libertarians who could correct them.  Since many are too philosophically inept to avoid misrepresenting political, moral, or other abstract concepts on their own, straw man fallacies abound.

Libertarianism is not corporatism, just as libertarianism is not anarchy, and therefore support for libertarianism is not the endorsement of a world where mega-corporations with no legal oversight reign over powerless consumers.  This straw man does not reveal some glaring flaw in political libertarianism, but it does bring to light how conceptually ignorant the advocates of this misconception are.  Political straw man fallacies might be espoused with heightened zeal around elections every four years, but they are just as false and pathetic now as they were during every previous election cycle.

Democritus's Unverified Assumption

All of science is a direct manifestation of physics, but physics cannot account for all of reality; the necessary truths of logic are more foundational than scientific facts (not that any ways matter behaves can truly be known, for all we have in this regard are perceptions), and the very space required to hold matter must be outside of physical substance, or else matter would have nowhere to exist.  Then there is time, without which events in a material world could never occur.  Scientific endeavors and information hinge on purely immaterial things that still have a necessary relationship with the physical world.  Only a fool pretends this does not reflect reality.

Physics nonetheless deals not with the nature of reason, space, or time, even if there are important philosophical facts about the connection between these things and matter, but with physical objects, no matter how large or small they are, and how they behave.  According to contemporary scientific paradigms of particle physics, all matter consists of atoms, particles too small to be seen macroscopically but that themselves break down into smaller particles.  The initial philosophy of "atomism" actually held that atoms are the smallest unit of matter possible and move in an otherwise empty "void" of space.  Democritus was among the first historically recorded philosophers to propose that all physical things reduce down to atoms.

Democritus, if he thought all that exists reduces down to matter and space, was not only wholly mistaken, but he could have quickly disproven his own mistake by rationalistically analyzing the immateriality of logic, consciousness, and time.  However, this issue of broader metaphysics is beyond the scope of most comments made about him and his atomic theory.  Beyond this, however, there is still plenty to dispute about atomic theory itself.  If atoms do exist, how would one truly know?  Whether or not atoms are the smallest physical particles in existence, how could one know that there is such a thing as a "fundamental" particle in the first place?

Even though some of the scientific ramifications of atomism, such as the idea that atoms actually exist, have found empirical support in recent centuries, not even the currently supported ideas about atoms can be philosophically proven.  If the senses cannot directly perceive atoms, as any "atomist" like Democritus would have likely admitted openly, there can only be indirect evidence for their existence; if the senses can perceive atoms, their existence is still up in the air, for the senses largely establish that one is having sensory perceptions.  The actual existence of units of matter smaller than can be perceived is unverifiable.  It is ultimately up in the air in a way that most people would find puzzling.

Atoms cannot be proven to exist like logic, consciousness, or even some some sort of material world can be, but it is not impossible to gather evidence in favor of them.  This only puts atoms in the same epistemological category as something like other minds--a category holding ideas that may or may not correspond to things that actually exist regardless of what seems to be true.  Thus, atoms are by no means special in having their existence fall into unverifiable territory!  This still leaves open the very real possibility of gathering empirical support for the existence of atoms.  It is just that imperceptible atoms cannot be proven to exist when directly even looking at another person cannot prove that they exist.

Movie Review--V For Vendetta

"Beneath this mask, there is more than flesh, Mr. Creedy.  Behind this mask there is an idea.  And ideas are bulletproof."

--V, V for Vendetta

In some ways, although it is an older film, V for Vendetta is right at home in 2020, a year full of conspiracy theories, political uproar, and general chaos.  Directly exploring themes of tyranny and revolution, the movie features a virus and governmental misdirection, which only make it all the more fitting for viewing in this year of conservative and liberal incompetence.  Instead of simply portraying people as they discuss or act upon ideas in an effort to resist a tyrannical system, V for Vendetta has its titular character serve as a symbolic embodiment of anarchy--or at least one variation of it.  Everything from his Guy Fawke's mask to his early alliteration gives his presence an abnormality that lends itself to his worldview.  In fact, even the signature V emblem that is shown throughout the film is actually an altered symbol for anarchy.

Production Values

Other than the themes themselves, Natalie Portman's Evey and Hugo Weaving's V are the very heart of the film, and one of them or the other is featured in most scenes in some form.  There are plenty of other characters, many of which are acted very well, but each one of them is a minor character by comparison to Evey and V.  From the first handful of scenes onward, this trend is established.  Natalie Portman has some particularly noteworthy moments of her performance in the second half of the film when a dire situation forces her to develop her priorities and worldview, yet V himself, his shadow falling over the whole of the movie, is brought from the graphic novel to the cinematic format with the most nuanced performance of the entire film.  Hugo Weaving has scenes of emotional fury, tenderness, and resolve, and he handles them all with the same talent he shows in other roles like Elrond and Agent Smith.  His acting and that of Natalie Portman carry V for Vendetta between the more explosive parts that utilize the effects of the time well without ever sacrificing characterization for action spectacle.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A woman named Evey becomes entangled in the anarchist plot of an enigmatic and resourceful man called "V" after he saves her from predatory police officers and she subsequently saves him during an anti-government operation.  V brings her into hiding in order to protect her from government retribution, which gives her the chance to begin understanding V more deeply.  The High Chancellor of England fumes at V's plot as he desperately attempts to conceal the true circumstances around his rise to power.  Evey is eventually forced to decide whether she is willing to give her life to resist oppression even when promised restoration to her life in the established system.

Intellectual Content

Ideas, either concepts or the thoughts that reflect on them, are intangible, accessible by anyone who merely devotes themselves to thinking, and thus they outlive the people who might be killed because their ideas threaten the political status quo.  V hopes to inspire discontent with the status quo in part by appealing to the fact that ideas transcend suppression by governments.  Even though V for Vendetta shows a conservative government, liberal ideas are just as at home in a totalitarian context as those of conservatism, even if some people are more prone to associate one with totalitarianism than the other.  Neither is inherently connected to totalitarianism, of course, but both are arbitrary and incompatible with rationalism.

V sides with anarchism as he opposes the political power of his day, yet the movie never actually explores how anarchy itself is not some rationalistic, inherently just ideology.  It is just V's reaction to a particular form of tyranny.  At the very least, he is more concerned with truth than many of his fellow citizens, despite making philosophical errors of his own (he merely assumes that his moral preferences supercede those of political leaders, for instance).  However, his efforts to fight propaganda still raise vital issues at the intersection of epistemology and politics.  How can a person ensure they never fall for the lies of a government or community of any sort, then?  How can someone make sure his or her beliefs are true?

A true rationalist avoids being deceived by governments simply by virtue of making no assumptions.  Even beyond the utter philosophical uselessness of hearsay from any source beyond providing possible evidence in support of certain claims, the very existence of other minds itself cannot be proven, meaning that a consistently rational person does not think anything more of their sensory perceptions as a whole than that they are perceptions that either do or do not correspond to actual external circumstances.  A rationalist does not even believe that other people exist at all!  If someone is rational enough to grasp this much, they will by default not think of governments or media giants as epistemological authorities in the first place.

Conclusion

V for Vendetta starts out as a very over the top story of a dystopian future, but it quickly becomes very thematically relevant to not only the present day, but also to key areas of political philosophy in all time periods.  There is not a regime that is incapable of being corrupted (not that most regimes are philosophically sound in the first place) and there is not a broad population that cannot be fed deceptive information.  No amount of social or technological progress renders these things impossibilities.  2020 has its share of especially blatant political instabilities, but the elevation of political convenience and power over truth does not require a pandemic to take hold.  All it takes to plunge a community into failure and gratuitous chaos is irrationality, egoism, and philosophical apathy.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  V uses bladed weapons to kill attackers in multiple scenes.  Bursts of blood are shown in these shots, and other individuals are assaulted by government agents in flashbacks.

 2.  Profanity:  "Shit," "bitch," and "fucking" (or similar words) are used.

 3.  Nudity:  Nude corpses are shown briefly in a flashback scene.

"This Generation Will Not Pass Away"

There are two blatant possibilities when Jesus says in Matthew 24 that "this generation will not pass away" before the cataclysmic events he just described (Matthew 24:4-35) have happened.  Either Jesus meant that a generation of people living during his ministry and hearing his words would see these events or at least live until they occurred, even if only in some "spiritual" plane, or he meant that a future generation that sees these events (or at least some of them) will be the one to witness the Second Coming.  Neither is explicitly confirmed in his early statements, but the descriptions of the Second Coming later in the chapter conflict with preterism--or they could never be shown to have happened if they manifested in some unseen, allegorical manner.  Of course, if they occurred in an allegorical manner, almost everything about the historicity of the matter is epistemologically up in the air.

The age of the Roman Empire is one of the darkest and most unjust periods of the historical record, but it is still not the case that the entire world's population would have died if "those days were not cut short," as verses 21-22 state.  Death is far from the worst thing that can befall someone, so mere mass death can hardly be said to be the worst humanity could experience with any honesty, but even the total annihilation of the Jews by the Romans in 70 AD would not amount to the loss of all human life.  Even if every Jew and Roman somehow died in the events surrounding the siege of Jerusalem, others would remain alive in other parts of the world.  Many of Matthew 24's descriptions of events before the return of Christ have a scale that far exceeds that of 70 AD outside of extreme hyperbole.

If the events of Matthew 24:4-35 mostly or wholly occurred around 70 AD, yet another example of extreme exaggeration on the part of Jesus would be his prediction that the gospel will be preached in the "whole world" before the Second Coming in verse 14.  Had the passage simply said that the gospel would reach the whole world, the natural ambiguity of language would leave it unclear if he meant the whole known world at that time, as in every region of the world the majority of people could become familiar with from cultural exchanges or stories, or literally every general region of the planet.  However, he specifies that the scope of this includes "all nations."  There is still more beyond even this that poses an enormous epistemological problem for preterism.

No historical evidence whatsoever suggests that any "sign of the Son of Man," angelic trumpet call, or gathering of Christians from around the world as mentioned in Matthew 24:30-31 were involved in the siege of Jerusalem.  If such things did occur in some "spiritual" realm, then they are at best outside the scope of Biblical or other sensory evidences, meaning that no preterist understanding of Matthew 24's grandest contents could ever be supported or even defended except by assuming that the chapter itself already describes a largely non-literal events.  This is the blatant, massive epistemological problem with preterism in the context of Matthew 24 and sometimes elsewhere.  Someone reading certain prophetic passages without assumptions will often not come to the conclusions of dispensationalists, but they will certainly not come to the conclusions of preterists either.

The ultimate consequences that follow the Second Coming itself have not been reached because the world has not been renovated into New Jerusalem by any means.  This refutes full preterism immediately.  Partial preterism then must be adhered to by arbitrarily distinguishing supposedly allegorical prophecies from literal prophecies in a vague, assumption-based manner.  At the very least, there is no evidence that key events referred to in Matthew 24 have taken place, and there is also much evidence against this idea.  The phrasing of "this generation" does not truly prove that Jesus predicted that he would return to Jerusalem in 70 AD in some mystical manner in the form of the Roman army, a group of depraved, vile soldiers that almost all would deserve death according to the criminal punishment laws of Yahweh that Jesus himself affirmed.

Philosophical Pragmatism

Utilitarianism is one of the most popular forms of philosophical pragmatism, a moral framework that prioritizes the consequences of behaviors over whatever methods must be used to reach or avoid those consequences.  As long as a certain course of action leads to "ideal" results (what is ideal here is always an arbitrarily designated thing) for the individual or some collective group, perhaps even the human species as a whole, a utilitarian would deem it morally permissible, if not explicitly obligatory.  This is one of the most culturally popular ideologies that centers on the practicality of achieving specific ends, but a consistent utilitarianism has ramifications for epistemology as well.

Moral utilitarianism is only a smaller part of what could be a broader framework of philosophical pragmatism in which the practicality of an idea for a certain end goal is given precedence over its truth and ultimate verifiability.  Consistent philosophical pragmatism is therefore the epistemological, moral, and general emphasis on the mere practicality of concepts in light of everyday life and goals.  This worldview centers on whether or not something is helpful and advantageous; truth is set aside as irrelevant wherever it might not be easy, useful, or preferable to do such a thing.  Whether a goal is personal or shared by a group, practicality comes first.

Thus, this form of pragmatism insists that it is true that truth itself is secondary to whether something is convenient or even seems to be so.  After all, what would be the point in adhering to philosophical pragmatism and even trying to distinguish between what is practical and what only seems to be convenient whenever making the distinction is not itself pragmatic?  If it is convenient while pursuing a given goal to even pretend or perceive that something is useful, that itself would justify a belief or action on a wholly pragmatist worldview!  Nothing at all would be higher than practicality according this ideology.

Science often receives more attention from pragmatists than the abstract laws of logic for this reason.  Apart from the necessity of at least someone making empirical sensory observations that others may not seek out, it takes far less effort to be a scientific pragmatist than it does to be a consistent rationalist.  For someone turning to reason and rationalism after years of apathy towards matters of absolute certainty and genuine consistency, not to mention years of experiencing enormous amounts of social conditioning from people of different worldviews, it can be very difficult to look to reason instead of assumptions or convenience.

Of course, without reason, whether it is acknowledged or unacknowledged, even the most practical of ideas or experiences could not be understood.  Every worldview borrows from rationalism even when they explicitly deny or deviate from reason, just as every sentient being knowingly or unknowingly relies on their grasp of reason to be aware that they are even having an experience in the first place.  Rationalism has the benefit of actually being true: it is the one worldview and epistemological framework that contains all other true ideas, including truths about practicality itself.  Ignoring or warring against reason is by nature irrational even when it means giving up convenience.

Why Any Pagan Origin Of Christmas Is Irrelevant

Much like those needlessly frightened by the linguistic connection of the word "Easter" to the name of the pagan goddess Ishtar to the point of condemning Easter, those wary of Christmas because of its alleged pagan history grasp at non sequiturs, perhaps out of unnecessary guilt.  The aspects of Christmas they focus on the most ironically matter the least.  With Christmas on the horizon (not that our December 25 is even when Jesus was likely born to begin with), some Christians will have to hear more of this legalistic nonsense once again, but, regardless of historical events, no one needs to view Christmas with suspicion or hostility.

Would pagan origins of Christmas even be relevant in evaluating its moral legitimacy in the Christian worldview?  Not at all!  Its beginnings do not particularly matter one way or another because the issue is irrelevant to how and why many modern people celebrate Christmas--both outside and inside of the church.  Perhaps the true beginnings of the holiday are rooted in paganism, and perhaps they are not.  The more important fact is that it does not ultimately matter.  Neither possibility would make participating in standard annual Christmas celebration sinful by Biblical standards.

If Christmas had pagan origins, that does not mean that those who celebrate the modern version of Christmas endorse pagan values or metaphysics.  If Christmas did not have pagan origins, then the motives of people celebrating it today are likewise largely unaffected.  In short, what someone may or may not have intended in starting the practice has nothing at all to do with how the typical contemporary American celebrates Christmas each year!  There is no reason to dwell on the historical origin of Christmas in particular except out of personal interest or to correct misconceptions of historical evidence and its relevance to other issues.

I have never met or heard of a single person that I recall basing their participation in Christmas on what some pagan culture potentially did centuries ago.  I have, however, talked to people who object to participating in Christmas celebrations on the basis of what pagans allegedly did in the far past.  The latter group would even likely assume that to not condemn Christmas festivities misrepresents Christianity to the world, but many people, Christian or otherwise, have little concern for what others say about the origins of holidays.  Many people do indeed develop strong attachments to arbitrary holiday customs that have nothing to do with logical necessity or Biblical obligation, but they seem to rarely be swayed by the motivations behind why a holiday became widely celebrated in the first place.

The grand irrelevance of pagan origins, whether or not the origins of Christmas are in fact pagan in the first place, is one of the most important truths that one could emphasize in reaction to the Christians who condemn Christmas as an outlet for paganism.  Those who feel unnecessarily conflicted over participation in Christmas festivities are free to abstain out of personal preference, but, make no mistake, there is no Biblical reason to object.  The Bible actually insists the opposite.  Where there are no divine commands, the Christian worldview defaults to personal expression of subjective desires.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

Jesus On Divorce

Adultery is not the only Biblical justification for divorce, but it is by far the most familiar one to many Christians.  In Matthew 19:8-9, Jesus states that adultery is grounds for divorce, and since many Christians are more familiar with the often vague moral commands (apart from Mosaic Law) of the New Testament than they are with the clearer details of the Old Testament, Matthew 19's teachings on divorce are all that they are aware of.  For those who are familiar with more than just what Jesus says about divorce, his comments may appear to contradict what Yahweh already specified about divorce in Mosaic Law.

Exodus 21:10-11, for example, explicitly allows divorce in cases of certain kinds of abuse or neglect.  Deuteronomy 24:1-4 also addresses the subject, but it does not actually encourage or permit divorce in any particular scenario; it only says that to remarry someone after divorcing them and after they have been subsequently divorced by another spouse is sinful.  However, even Exodus 21's treatment of other criteria besides infidelity is outside the scope of what Jesus claims in Matthew 19, where Jesus seems to insist that only adultery justifies divorce.

Moreover, it is also worth clarifying that when Jesus speaks of adultery, he is not talking about permissible, nonsinful things like masturbating to someone of the opposite gender other than one's spouse, as these acts are neither adulterous nor sinful unless a person is motivated by a desire to betray their spouse.  Jesus is referring to having extramarital intercourse while married, which is all that Mosaic Law condemns when it addresses adultery.  It is ultimately Mosaic Law that many aspects of the Biblical stance on divorce reduce down to, not the words of Jesus, and Leviticus 20:10 plainly says to execute adulterers and adulteresses.

If a society actually adhered to Biblical morality, there would be far fewer opportunities for divorce on grounds of adultery: adulterous spouses would be put to death!  The divorce allowances Jesus clarifies here--and there are others in Exodus 21 and 1 Corinthians 7, the former of which was already mentioned--are optional for the offended party at best if one spouse commits adultery or rapes his or her partner.  Carrying out the command of Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22 to execute people for adultery would leave no place for spouses to merely divorce each other instead except as a supererogatory act of mercy.

Jesus does not contradict Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22 when he permits divorce from an adulterous spouse.  If he completely replaced a core aspect of Yahweh's moral revelation in the Old Testament with a new, inherently exclusive one, he would have contradicted Mosaic Law.  The core components of Mosaic Law encompass all of the legal penalties for specific crimes and allowances for things like divorce, meaning that a God whose moral attributes never change, as Malachi 3:6 says, will not endorse a dramatically different stance on the very same issue.

Leviticus 20:10 and Matthew 19:8-9 only seem incongruent in a non-theonomist framework, which is antithetical to Christian theology.  If the conclusion evangelicals come to about this passage--that Matthew 19:8-9 supercedes Leviticus 20:10 and Exodus 21:10-11--was true, God's core moral character would have changed, which clearly contradicts foundational parts of Biblical Christianity.  This is not an internal contradiction precisely because Matthew 19:8-9 would not even apply if outright commands in earlier parts of the Bible were not disregarded.

The Vagueness Of Nonspecific Commands To Love

"Love your neighbor as yourself" might be an important part of Biblical morality--in a very limited sense--but it tells you nothing about what it means to love your neighbor in the first place.  Like the golden rule, it is inescapably incomplete, deeply ambiguous, and wholly shallow on its own.  The New Testament merely quotes Leviticus 19:18, a preceding part of the Bible in the Torah that all Christian theology stands on, when it states this command, the context calling for an analysis of the moral revelation of Yahweh in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  Without this context, any simple command to love others is hopelessly unclear and without merit.

Just as there is no automatic way to understand what actions are just even if one understands that the concept of justice entails treating people as they deserve, there is no automatic way to know what one must do to actually be loving if there is no more clarification than this.  In other words, New Testament commands about love are utterly unhelpful when considered on their own.  Simply using the word love does nothing to actually define moral boundaries in and of itself.  It actually is less helpful to bring up unclear instructions to "love others" than it is to not mention anything about morality at all!

Rightly understood, love is a consistent way to summarize the Bible's commands about justice in the Old Testament.  Social justice and criminal justice are not unloving, after all--but a kind of "love" that is not wholly overlapping with justice is useless.  Moreover, a command to be just is equally vague and useless when there is no understanding of what acts, motivations, and attitudes are just.  Reciting ambiguous instructions when the Bible already specifies details about justice and love is pointless and the refuge of philosophically/theologically inept individuals.

Empty quotations of "love your neighbor" are therefore some of the most counter-productive, shallow, and even relativistic proclamations someone could make about moral theology.  Moreover, this kind of vague statement is almost only made when someone wants to avoid directly acknowledging a complex situation or subjectively unpleasant command of the Bible.  After all, why else would a person retreat behind vagueness except out of ignorance, insincerity, cowardice, or shallowness?  At least one of these qualities is present in anyone who chooses to not reflect or discuss Biblical morality more deeply than this, if not more than one or even all four.

The Philosophical Hypocrisy Of Those Enamored With Science Over Rationalism

I have had conversations with science-fixated people whose subjective love of science drove them to the verge of scientism even as they appealed to explicitly philosophical concepts that fall outside the scope of science.  On one hand, they attempt to throw epistemological and metaphysical issues settled only by logic behind them, as if they can escape logical truths simply by misunderstanding or ignoring them.  On the other hand, they are quick to appeal to irrelevant scientific figures who promote or hypothesize about some of the very things they only just tossed behind them, wrapping those broader philosophical matters in a needlessly specific cloak of scientific application.  The philosophical hypocrisy of those who think science is anything other than wholly inferior to undiluted rationalism cannot even be hidden well given its foundational nature!

They erroneously dismissed the objective epistemological disconnect between most sensory perceptions and external stimuli (with the exception of the sense of touch being impossible to have without possessing some sort of physical body) when the matter was framed as an explicitly philosophical issue, only to parrot what some particular scientist said about sensory organs evolving for survival rather than conformity to external objects.  This kind of person tosses the infallible shortcut of pure reason aside in favor of scientific possibilities that are usually acknowledged only thanks to someone else already popularizing the idea.  In other words, those gratuitously fixated on science, the lowest aspect of philosophy, try to sidestep philosophy only to embrace lesser versions of philosophical concepts.

The same kind of person might also scoff at a rationalist who, after merely contemplating the epistemology of the senses by looking to reason alone, says that perceiving an object does not mean it exists, only to turn around in excitement when a random and likely philosophically inept scientist says that we might be living in a simulation constructed by advanced technology.  The hypocrisy is incredibly obvious to anyone who is philosophically capable of analyzing things rationalistically.  Science is no substitute for philosophy, and many lovers of science fail to see the utter inferiority of the former.  In many cases, they will not even come to philosophical ideas about science without being spoon-fed by articles and hearsay about scientific consensus!

It is asinine to reject pure reason as a basis for understanding philosophical proofs and possibilities, for without reason nothing is true, knowable, or possible in the first place, but it is even more asinine to reject pure rationalism and then entertain certain ideas in the guise of science when they would be ignored otherwise.  Scientific concepts are either true or false.  However, science does nothing more than illuminate perceptions of the physical world and how it behaves.  It never provides actual knowledge about the world beyond one's perceptions or about nonphysical existents like reason or time.  Only logic itself can accomplish that.

Democracy's Doom

All political systems have the potential to be subverted by force or apathy.  With enough internal stress, they can shatter from within; with enough external force, they can be torn apart by dissenters.  One political system has a heightened vulnerability, however: democracy, by its very nature, is especially susceptible to implosion.  Any attempt to let the majority determine a path is undemocratic without following the majority down whatever path it chooses.  Of course, one of the many possible paths a democracy could take is one that spells the end of that democracy, and prohibiting any particular option is inconsistent with any political setup built on the will of the people.

Democracy always allows for its own proponents to choose a course of action that ironically overturns democracy itself.  In a purely democratic system, democracy is one vote away from being completely anulled and disregarded.  All it would take is a single major decision chosen by the will of the majority.  After all, a democracy ceases to continue the moment its participants convert to another political system, and democracy must give people the option to subvert a system based on majority choice unless it amounts to nothing more than a facade.  To withhold the choice to undermine and dismantle democracy would actually be an expression of anti-democratic philosophy.

A political system is not philosophically valid or invalid because of what its followers do or because of what it might lead to.  Believing otherwise means the embrace of slippery slope fallacies.  However, the fact remains that democracy cannot even preserve itself on its own terms in many situations.  More importantly, democracy contradicts the objectivity of truth, for democracy treats moral and broader political issues as if nothing matters more than the desires of the majority.  Even if implementing democracy did not ultimately involve a tumultuous clash of conflicting ideas, it would still be at odds with the nature of truth itself.

Democracy can be one of its own worst enemies on multiple levels.  Every political framework could be brought down with enough opposition or lack of support, but not every political system inherently holds the keys to its own doom in the direct way democracy does.  Since democracy is not rational because it elevates consensus over truth, the sound reaction to this fact is not to promote democracy while reminding people every democratic government is one group decision away from possible destruction.  The rational response is to emphasize the sheer stupidity of democracy as a philosophical-political worldview and never act as if group agreement has any sort of political authority whatsoever.

Stopping Short Of Premarital Sex

That premarital sex is not inherently sinful does not mean that premarital sex without sincere consideration of the relationship's future.  Recognizing that the Bible does not oppose all sex outside of legal marriage can be freeing, and no one needs to fear that all sexual contact between dating partners must result in intercourse.  Since it would not be sinful to enjoy sexual acts other than intercourse with a dating partner even if premarital sex was universally sinful, there is no need for fear of failing to refrain from all interpersonal sexual interaction, but there is also no need to fear a true inability to control oneself, even at the very line between premarital sex and other sexual acts.

Every man and woman has the ability to stop themselves from going further than any given point when engaging in sensual or sexual.  Not only does gender have nothing to do with a person's sex drive and personality traits, but sexuality is not an enslaving force that robs people of rationality, volition, and other priorities besides enjoying sexual pleasure.  It can be managed and accepted at every point without loving pleasure more than reason and stability.  In no case does sexual attraction or curiosity override a person and reduce them to nothing but a seeker of sexual gratification.

In light of this, no Christian couple needs to fret about wanting to engage in acts like mutual masturbation, sexual touching, or oral sex--or, while physically expressing their sexualities with each other, about wondering they will be capable of stopping themselves from having actual sex before they have mutually decided to permanently commit to each other, short of either party committing adultery or abusing the other.  Each member of a couple can exercise whatever self-control is necessary to prevent mental longings from leading to physical actions when the relationship is not at the point where both parties are ready for formal commitment.

The desire for sexual intimacy, catharsis, and pleasure can be quite strong and steady in the lives of those who are not asexuals.  For some, the presence of sexual impulses may be a personal challenge to handle, yet it does not have to be perceived as an frustrating annoyance that leaves no time to indulge in its delights.  Everyone can at least become more familiar with the fact that sexuality does not displace rationality and volition and take precedence over other psychological and behavioral characteristics.  Christians in particular contradict their own worldviews (or at least the worldview described in the Bible) when they insist otherwise.

Sexuality is not an obstacle to a comfortable or moral life, after all!  Dedicated couples can peacefully experience the joys of sexually expressing themselves in a physical manner while never crossing any particular line they mutually share.  Sexual pleasure is something to be embraced by Christians where it does not violate God's specific moral prescriptions.  It can be embraced, moreover, with security in awareness of personal autonomy: Christians can come to a place of deep familiarity with the fact that sexuality, despite its great capacity for providing and experiencing pleasure, is not an uncontrollable cauldron of sin.

Game Review--Doom Eternal (Switch)

"Against all the evil that Hell can conjure, all the wickedness that mankind can produce, we will send unto them . . . only you.  Rip and tear, until it is done."

--King Novik, Doom Eternal

Nine months after it was released on other consoles, Doom Eternal has finally appeared on the Switch eShop.  Those who prefer playing multiplatform games on systems like the PS4 or Xbox One have had plenty of time to try the game, but now the mayhem of Doom Eternal can be experienced using a handheld system.  That it can be played away from a television screen in that year of the original release is quite an accomplishment on its own.  That it expands upon the best aspects of the 2016 reboot title is an accomplishment even apart from the portability of the Switch port.  Third-person cinematics, new glory kills, an arm blade, a shoulder-mounted flamethrower, and more blatantly satirical comments by the UAC (such as when a hologram of an employee references 666 even though the demons of Doom are not affiliated with a theological kind of realm at all) help Doom Eternal stand out even more from what came right before.

Production Values

Better graphics greet players experienced with the Switch port of the 2016 Doom, with some environments still looking far sharper than others.  Some motion blur still remains, unfortunately, but individual frames are still mostly clear on their own.  That Doom Eternal is a 2020 console release that debuted on the PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia platforms before coming to the Switch in the same year is a testament to the competence of the team behind the port.  Of course, many recent and major console games, including the 2016 Doom predecessor, Wolfenstein II, Wolfenstein Youngblood, and The Outer Worlds have already shown that the Switch is capable of handling such games, albeit with somewhat lesser graphical presentation.  Still, Doom Eternal looks better than The Outer Worlds even though the latter came out on other consoles last year and was released much earlier in 2020 on the Switch than Doom Eternal.  Voice acting from a variety of characters is secondary but helps develop the lore to a much greater extent than before.

Gameplay

Two things become apparent early in the campaign: the combat has even more options than before and the platforming has been drastically expanded.  Regarding the former, a new shoulder-mounted flamethrower can catch enemies on fire, but it can only activate for very short periods and it must recharge like grenades, which are also released from a shoulder-mounted weapon system.  Flame belches produce armor shards, glory kills provide health orbs, and chainsaw kills yield ammunition.  This more developed way of obtaining specific refills means players have many options to restore various pickups.  Other new offensive mechanics include the Blood Punch, an amplified melee attack that inflicts more damage after glory kills fill up a meter, and the Ice Bomb, a projectile that freezes enemies solid but does not harm them on its own.

Regarding the platforming, additions like spinning flame barriers and extra life pickups like 1-Up mushrooms in Mario games evolve the environmental navigation far beyond where the series has taken it before.  Some sections even literally look like modified platforming areas from a 3D Mario game!  None of the weekly challenges I have seen so far in one of two new XP progression systems actually have achievements focused on platforming, as many pertain more to completing a certain number of levels or multiplayer matches.  An upcoming multiplayer mode will supposedly even lets other plays control specific demons in another player's campaign playthrough, possibly the "empowered demons" you must face that have killed other campaign players.  However, there is already a more developed mode that lets three players interact.

Battlemode, an asynchronous multiplayer mode, pits two player-controlled demons against the Doom Slayer, who is also controlled by a player.  The variety of demons that can be chosen each have their own particular abilities and strengths.  In order to win, the demons have to merely kill the Slayer once, and they can respawn after death, but the Slayer must survive all the way until a timer has run out if he or she is to win.  Both sides get bonuses after each match, with the victor winning at least three of the total five possible matches.  Ironically, the demon team typically has a significant advantage even though the Doom Slayer is a godlike killer in the campaign.  It can be far more difficult to kill both demons as the Slayer before of them respawns than it is to kill the Slayer even once as the demons!

Both campaign mode and Battlemode contribute to a shared XP progression system with its own weekly challenge set.  Multiple achievement systems also pertain to both the campaign and multiplayer modes, with unlockable skins, backdrops, and other items as rewards for completing specific milestones.  For example, using the flamethrower to ignite 140 demons, playing as all five demons in multiplayer, or using the Super Shotgun's new Meat Hook feature to pull yourself to enemies across a certain accumulated distance all result in achievements.  In fact, there multiple in-game achievement sets tracked in different menus, all of which could extend the replay value by keeping the attention of players who have already finished the campaign and experimented with Battlemode.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Billions of human casualties result as Hell's demons invade Earth after the events of the Doom reboot, with the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC for short) endorsing the invaders as saviors even though they have destroyed enormous regions of the planet.  The Doom Slayer, situated in his new spacecraft called the Fortress of Doom, begins pushing the extraterrestrials out of key areas as an entity named Kahn Makyr tries to preserve the invasion.  She hopes to protect her homeworld of Urdak by siphoning Argent energy from Hell and has made an alliance with the demons.  In exchange for new worlds to overcome, the demons will provide her with Argent.

Intellectual Content

The story itself, while more directly lore-heavy than that of the prior game, lacks philosophical substance, which was never the purpose of the Doom franchise.  The exploration side of the series is as strong as it ever was, though, with an even larger variety of collectibles.  Collectible items--some of which can be used to directly improve weapons and equipment--can often be seen from places where they are inaccessible, with a hidden alternate entryway allowing access from another side.  Thus, Doom Eternal does give players a chance to specifically test their observational skills and even their strategic planning for some fairly extreme platforming.

Conclusion

Doom Eternal is a very different game than the 2016 Doom in some ways, with its much more elaborate platforming, 1-Up items, Fortress of Doom, and vastly expanded array of weapons and equipment, but the optional collectible hunting reminiscent of Metroid Prime and brutal combat of the 2016 predecessor return stronger than ever.  Even after the campaign and its numerous in-game achievements and the rewards tied to them, Battlemode offers a very different approach to Doom characters and offers achievements and unlockable rewards of its own.  What it lacks in philosophical depth, Doom Eternal makes up for with some of the deepest and most frenetic single player combat in recent years.  This and its new reasons to possibly continue playing after completing the game, along with the bonus content that comes with the Switch download until December 22, make it a very worthy purchase on the only handheld platform it was made for.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Demons can have their heads twisted, limbs pulled off, and torsos cut apart.  This is one of the most graphic games I have ever played on the Switch platform!

The Errors Of Mere Christianity (Part 12)

Even after some of C.S. Lewis's false claims about the nature of arrogance in Mere Christianity were already refuted in the previous part of this series, there is still more to dissect about how poorly he handles the matter of arrogance.  Just as he sided with myths about Christian theology and philosophy as a whole in the earlier chapters of the book, he misrepresents what arrogance is and is not, as well as how someone can identify pride in their own mind.  Lewis actually posits in Mere Christianity that pride hides behind almost every sin in human history:


"The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.  Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people.  But pride always means enmity--it is enmity." (123-124)


Contrary to what Lewis says, pride can draw people together.  Arrogance is not always manifested in thinking better of oneself than others on some illicit grounds, as it can be manifested in a feeling of superiority from belonging to some group that does not give one a higher significance.  For instance, someone might feel morally superior because they are a woman or a man, a white or a black, an American or someone from a different country, and so on.  Pride certainly can bring people together, but not in rational or morally sound ways.  Of course, pride is not the "chief cause of misery" in the world.  Irrationality is at the heart of all pride, and pride is not even at the heart of all sin, so it cannot possibly be the primary sinful motive behind injustices across history!

Lewis soon proposes an illogical test for whether one is prideful that ends up having nothing to do with pride itself:


"Luckily, we have a test.  Whenever we find our religious life is making us feel that we are good--above all, that we are better than someone else--I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil." (124-125)


The entire point of redemption in Christianity is the moral restoration and betterment of the saved (Romans 6:1-2), and there is nothing arrogant or unjust about acknowledging and delighting in one's own moral character [1].  If one is morally upright, as all people are capable of being or becoming, it is actually irrational and deceitful to think that one is incapable of being good.  If one is morally superior to someone else, it is therefore not arrogant to feel good about one's moral superiority as long as it is not accompanied by a dehumanization of moral inferiors.  It cannot be arrogant to feel empowered or satisfied with moral superiority because one is not thinking more highly of oneself than one's status would permit!

Lewis, operating from his false understanding of pride and moral superiority, actually assumes that a sense of moral superiority is always from the devil, which only multiplies his errors.  He is so intent on demonizing a focus on the self that he defends the shallowness of looking to others for existential validation as being better than thinking that any special significance of one's worldview and accomplishments is worth feeling good about for its own sake:


"The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says 'Well done,' are pleased and ought to be.  For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please.  The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, 'I have pleased him; all is well,' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.'  The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming." (125-126)


It is petty and irrational to suppose that pleasing others is more important than living however one wishes as long as no moral obligations to others or one's own self are violated.  If a person is more rational and just than others, there is no reason to please them other than personal preference and manipulation for ends that are not immoral.  Whether someone is offended by this is a red herring that cannot demonstrate that it truly deserves condemnation.  Of course some people will feel insecure when called inferior for their moral apathy, and they might be tempted to assume feelings of moral superiority must be borne out of arrogance, but the two are very conceptually distinct.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/05/properly-defining-arrogance.html

Tenet's Asinine Conflation Of Time And Sequence

Imagine that a coin toss occurs in front of an observer.  A fairly small amount of time is all it takes for the event to occur.  Now comes a vital distinction: the overall event of the coin's arc as it launches into the air, spins, and comes down is not time.  Time is a prerequisite for the coin toss to even occur along with logic, matter, and space; it is the duration during which the coin was in the air.  Even if nothing had ever thrown the coin, the same amount of time would have elapsed.  In other words, time is not the same as sequence, even if many people speak as if the two are interchangeable for the sake of convenient communication.

There is a difference, after all, between truly, blindly conflating the two and merely referring to them in more casual conversations as if they are the same just to save time.  This is a difference completely overlooked by films like Tenet.  The characters in this film vaguely speak of reversal of sequence as if time itself has been reversed.  Moreover, they describe how a mere sequence reversal changes not only the order of events, but which events happen in the first place.  Instead of fiery combustion, icy windows greet someone involved in a car accident.  This kind of event is logically possible, but merely reversing events would not lead to such a chain of occurrences that are both inverted and substituted for other occurrences.  The substitution of events aside, time is not an event.

One moment still leads to another no matter what physical events are occuring.  It is the sequence of those events in the external world that can hypothetically be reversed.  Time marches on regardless of what events happen in a causal sequence--yes, even reversing a sequence of events does not erase causality, but only alters it.  Not even time and causality are identical.  As with time and sequence, time is a metaphysical prerequisite for any cause and effect relationship in the material world to occur to begin with.  Time can exist without material objects or their correlative/causal relationships, but material objects cannot causally affect each other apart from time.

The "inverted bullets" of Tenet cannot escape time or causality: they simply behave differently than conventional firearms would.  There is still a cause and an effect, and there is still a linear flow of time from past to present to future.  The only abnormalities are the sequence of certain events and the cause of the sequence inversion.  Nothing about time, its "direction," or its separation of identity from causality has changed whatsoever.  Time itself does not actually go backwards in the film.  Moreover, nothing about time's flow could change unless time ceased to exist altogether.  Any other sort of change is either a change of perception or sequence only or it is logically impossible.

Movies like Tenet and, in a different way, Terminator and (more recently) Avengers: Endgame tend to confuse audiences or convince them that logically impossible things are not actually impossible where time is concerned.  This is not because they have incorporated ideas about time or time travel that are completely possible in a logical sense but merely "misunderstood" by the public.  Sometimes the impossibility of the plots or time travel's role in the plots is suspected even when viewers cannot articulate exactly what they are thinking or when they do not personally know how to reason out why a given portrayal of time is philosophically false.  Given the philosophical ineptitude and lack of intellectual initiative and autonomy many people exhibit, it is not shocking that some of the most foundational truths about time are only rarely understood while issues that would perhaps never otherwise need to be addressed are brought to the spotlight.

Introspection And Pleasure

Pursuing pleasure and pursuing alignment with reason are not antithetical goals, even if one misconception of rationality is that a rational person lives stoically, without any significant concern for pleasure.  On the contrary, rationalism is not stoicism.  The former is an epistemological and metaphysical system centered on the laws of logic, and the latter is a system of values emphasizing acceptance and detachment from emotional outbursts.  Since even perfect rationality does not conflict with deep emotionality, given that emotion is not falsely regarded as something that invalidates or supercedes reason itself, nothing about alignment with reason drives someone away from emotion--or natural pleasures that come with various emotions.

One ramification is that an emotional craving for pleasure, whether that pleasure is of a predominantly mental or physical nature, never needs to be feared as something that will usurp reason's hold on a person unless they specifically allow it to.  In fact, it is reason that enables any conscious being that can experience pleasure to realize what it is experiencing in the first place.  There is no knowledge apart from reason, even if some kinds of knowledge also require introspection or sensory perceptions (the latter mostly establishing nothing more than the perceptions themselves).  Analyzing pleasurable emotions, sensory delights, and one's subjective reaction to them in the light of reason can yield great personal benefits.

The baseline pleasure provided by a psychological or physical stimulus might be the same with or without a direct analysis of pleasure, but intentional self-awareness and rationality can bring a far deeper level of enjoyment.  Introspection in the light of reason has the ability to let one savor pleasure more intimately and amplify whatever personal sense of fulfillment a given experience might bring.  Anyone with a mind and functioning senses can experience pleasure.  However, only someone who reflects on pleasure as a philosophical subject and as a part of human life will be able to understand, feel, and communicate their comprehension of pleasure beyond a shallow level.  The latter type of person orients themselves towards reason without sacrificing pleasure unnecessarily.

There is a large spectrum of pleasures that rationalism and Christian ethics do not conflict with in any way.  Indeed, true rationalists are in a better position to appreciate pleasure in their own lives.  Intellectual pleasures like fulfillment from autonomous reasoning and security that comes from alignment with truth, social pleasures like sharing one's mind with close friends, and sensual pleasures like regular masturbation are not hindered by rationality (or condemned by Biblical morality at that).  If someone sincerely loves pleasure, they will have some desire to understand it; in order to understand it, they must look to reason and introspection.

Rationalistically understanding pleasure enables one to accurately comprehend more of reality, as personal experiences with pleasure are a part of reality even though they are subjective, but it also provides the benefit of deeper personal experiences with pleasure.  On both a philosophical and strictly experiential level, analyzing pleasure with pure reason deepens a person.  Those who love truth can savor the fact that there are important truths about pleasure that every person can reason out.  Those who love pleasure can find a heightened capacity to recognize and dwell on pleasure without leaping into hedonism.  Despite the effort that shifting from mostly passive experiences to rationalistic, introspective self-analysis might take in some cases, the latter can become familiar, easy, and appreciated even for those who have rejected it for decades.

Logic, people.  It is very helpful.

The Invalidity Of Occam's Razor

When faced with events or truths for which there are multiple philosophical possibilities that could be behind them, some people think that a principle called Occam's razor can be rationally accepted.  This "razor" entails that smaller assumptions will be made instead of larger assumptions when approaching certain concepts.  The obvious flaw is that, small or large, assumptions are still made, and assumptions exclude proof and knowledge.  No one knows something based on an assumption.  Thus, there is never a time when it is necessary to think about Occam's razor except to understand its faults and communicate them with others.  Otherwise, one could understand rational epistemology without ever considering the invalid idea of the razor or giving it a moment of thought.

Occam's razor is nothing but a fallacious construct meant to shield select assumptions from criticism.  It is not that minimal assumptions are ideal, but that all assumptions are contrary to reason because they leap beyond what is logically provable, even if only to a slight extent in some cases.  Not only are all assumptions inherently fallacious and therefore irrational, but they are also arbitrary in that every person who defends some assumptions while rejecting or ridiculing others has.  The only basis for regarding any particular assumption as "necessary" or "rational" is preferring it to a different assumption or feeling subjectively persuaded that something is true even if it has not or cannot be proven.

The flaws of Occam's razor extend further than a favorable stance on making assumptions, though.  Those who believe the razor is a valid epistemological idea go so far as to outright assume that simpler possibilities are more likely and thus assuming they are correct or probable is justifiable.  Truth is not always simple or complex.  There are truths which are so simple that one cannot break them down any further (like the self-evidence of logical axioms), and there are truths that are so abstract that almost no one at all would ever discover them unless someone else explained them (such as the only way to prove that one is not dreaming [1]).  For both categories, there are simpler and more complex aspects or ramifications to each important logical truth.

Occam's razor is yet another example of a concept that no one would have to specifically contemplate or address if it wasn't a somewhat popular idea proposed by others.  Anyone who thinks rationally about philosophical matters--in other words, about almost anything at all, for everything is philosophical and in many cases this is explicitly clear to those who ponder it--will see that assumptions have no epistemological value and that it is impossible for them to ever be rational, for by nature to assume is to believe where reason has not been consulted or where there is no proof.  It does not matter if the assumptions are few in number or relatively minor.  Such assumptions deviate from reason less than grander assumptions, yes; they are inherently fallacious all the same.

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

An Epistemological Failure Of Sam Harris

The scope of human sociality extends into every broad aspect of life: spirituality, sexuality, morality, and anything having to do with civilization as a whole are all impacted by the capacity or desire for social interaction.  Exposure to others sometimes entails exposure to foreign or important ideas, all of which are by necessity either true or false.  In some cases, certain ideas would likely never be discovered by a given person unless it was prompted or initially explained by someone else--and this does not mean the person whose discoveries were promoted lacks initiative, autonomy, or intelligence!  However, this is not a necessity in many instances where one could reason out knowable philosophical truths, and yet Sam Harris has declared otherwise.

Harris recently posted the following statement to his Facebook page: "Conversation--whether with other people or with ourselves--remains our only means of making intellectual and moral progress."  In doing so, he has stated that something other than reason (and science, which he sometimes seems to falsely conflate with reason elsewhere) has the ultimate role of establishing worldviews.  Not only is the majority submerged in fallacious beliefs and inconsistencies, as philosophical conversations can easily expose, but rationality is not primarily about conversing with other people, nor is that even necessary to obtain knowledge of many things.  Beyond this, the very wording Harris used is vague and potentially misleading.

Calling introspection a "conversation" with oneself is a very loose usage of the word, but self-examination and personal reflection on the laws of logic and various philosophical concepts are utter necessities for understanding reality.  All of reality stands on the logical axioms that cannot be false without being true, and--although everyone is at least indirectly aware of them, or else no one could have thoughts or experiences they can consciously grasp--one must reason out the truths about reality that follow from them for oneself.  This much is true.  One cannot understand the parts of reality can be known without sincerely looking to reason.

There are also social aspects of human existence that might not even be thought of apart from direct experience.  Would a conscious person with no exposure to other people or even animals think about social matters?  Perhaps, and perhaps not.  It is certainly possible that they would contemplate if other minds exist or what it would be like to partake of friendship with other people if they had never seen anyone else.  However, it is also very possible that they would not ever go beyond wondering if others like them exist.  The very nature of sociality invites analysis of ourselves, moral concepts, and specific issues of epistemology and metaphysics that would otherwise not necessarily be explored.

Conversing with others can provide significant psychological benefits, and it can even help bring certain ideas to mind or prompt new personal discoveries of an explicitly philosophical kind.  The fact still remains that conversations are not necessary for the discovery of many logical truths about reason itself, one's own mind and experiences, the nature of epistemology, and general metaphysics.  Sam Harris is blatantly mistaken in saying that conversations are the primary or only means of intellectual progress.  That status can only be held by an intentional, thorough alignment with reason.

Arbitrary Perceptions Of Insanity

All it takes for some people to suspect that someone else has fallen into insanity is a statement, behavior, or worldview that deviates from whatever random expectations the majority of those around them.  For those who think abnormality entails insanity, they would suppose that perhaps everyone is "insane" to some extent, no matter how small of an extent it is or no matter how rarely it comes out, but even perfect consistency on this matter would not make their stance rational.  Aside from rationality and moral uprightness (if there are moral obligations, that is, as their existence is not self-evident as that of logical truths is), "normality" not only does not matter, but it is also something that does not exist in any sort of way that transcends an arbitrary standard that amounts to nothing more than a social construct.

If people in all civilizations marry or eat, this is not the same as carrying out some "normal" approach to life.  The way in which they engage in these things varies immensely, and there is nothing normal about them because the very concept of normality is inherently contradictory.  Even aside from all historical information or accumulated social experience one might have, however, the logical fact remains that there is nothing objectively normal about a given manner of approaching something, and thus the concept of abnormality is only rational when contrasted with arbitrary ideas of normality.  It follows that abnormality, rightly understood in this way, cannot be insanity in itself.

Individuality is not insanity; irrationality and irrationality alone can be rightly equated with insanity, for anything else is nothing but an arbitrary perception of an assumed standard of normalcy that does not overlap with reason.  As long as individuality is not treated as an excuse for emotionalism and irrationalism, there is no such thing as a rational objection to a total emphasis on the truths of individualism over the shallow pursuit of social conformity for its own sake.  Even pleasing miscellaneous people for one's own benefit without any specific philosophical goal or awareness behind it is deeper than passive social conformity as a whole, for at least the former is not aimed at gratifying the masses out of assuming that they deserve personal respect by default!

Sheer egoism is closer to philosophical validity than looking to others in order to determine one's worldview and lifestyle.  One's own mind and its will and desires are immediately knowable and cannot be illusory, while the very existence of other people, and especially their minds, is completely up in the air beyond the limitations of sensory evidence.  At least a person's own thoughts and existence are infallibly provable for as long as their stream of consciousness continues.  On an epistemological level alone, individuality already stands above looking to others, not that deviating from social norms is "insane" in the first place.  Someone who is quick to overlook assumptions and logical fallacies and quick to promote suspicion of those willing to embrace individuality has their priorities backwards.  It is the person who disregards or denies reason who is insane and the person who has no concern for social norms that is sane.