Ezekiel 16 and 23

It is obvious to anyone who pays attention to the foundation of Biblical ethics that God's demands for criminal justice hinge on specific sins deserving legal penalties and the legal penalties not being degrading.  After all, Lex Talionis ("eye for eye") clearly does not extend to any kinds of sexual assault addressed in Mosaic Law, anything more than 40 lashes is condemned, and even some treatments of an executed criminal's corpse are prohibited.  Still, other parts of the Bible outside of Mosaic Law either provide accounts of people carrying out unjust actions in response to other sins or allegorical stories that might feature a behavior that is unjust while using the story to emphasize something else.

In Ezekiel 16, God tells Ezekiel a story of a woman who commits adultery, betraying her husband.  The woman represents Israel.  Ezekiel 23 tells a story of two sisters that is very similar.  Both stories eventually have the women become promiscuous, after which they are stripped naked and killed as somewhat of a punishment.  Some people might read these chapters and mistakenly conclude that the Bible prescribes different punishments for men and women, when this is not the case in Mosaic Law.  Some people might read thse chapters and think that the Bible is saying this is the just way to react to infidelity (which, for the sake of clarity, is nothing but physical adultery).  Still others have read this and thought Ezekiel 16 and 23 say the women were raped, which, as false and idiotic of an interpretation as that is, needs to directly be addressed.

The first two of these objections or misinterpretions can be addressed jointly.  An action--and an action with no corresponding obligation to carry it out in Mosaic Law--mentioned in an allegorical retelling of Israel's wandering from Yahweh has nothing to do with what is just or unjust in legal or other interpersonal treatment of fellow humans.  Mosaic Law is where the details of justice are found, not in Ezekiel!  In fact, the parts of Ezekiel that allude to Biblical justice hinge on Mosaic Law, not the other way around.  No one with the right understanding of Christian theology, whether or not they are even a Christian, would look to comparatively vague, secondary parts of the Old Testament as dictating what the Bible says about justice more than Mosaic Law.

Rape is nowhere to be found; even forced nudity with the intent to make someone feel humiliated or degraded in a sexual sense is not rape.  Only someone delusional or with an assumption-driven ideology--which is its own kind of delusion as it is--would read either chapter of Ezekiel and think rape is present anywhere at all.  On the contrary, rape is a particularly extreme sin that is punished with death in Biblical law.  Even though forced nudity is never prescribed as a punishment and doing so would contradict part of Deuteronomy 25:3, it is far lesser of an offense than rape and thus comparing them as if they were similar beyond occasional superficialities is wholly irrational.

No, neither Ezekiel 16 nor Ezekiel 23 prescribes any particular course of action except perhaps not straying from Yahweh, but even then, looking to either chapter as text to ascertain what the Bible says about the morality of sexual abuse as a whole is misguided at best.  Its only real significance in this sense is in contrasting with Mosaic Law and giving people an example of something that Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy do not actually prescribe, but in fact would condemn.  When Deuteronomy 25:3 forbids entire types of punishments to avoid cruelty (meaning more than 40 lashes is one of many things that is never justified, unlike killing) and Deuteronomy 4:2 says not to add to God's commands, only a fool would think that forcibly exposing someone's nude body against their will, man or woman, is Biblically just.

Jesus And Paul

Both Jesus and Paul have had their claims in the Bible get so distorted that many people actually think the Biblical Jesus rejected theonomy and that Paul taught gender stereotypes and complementarianism, Calvinism, and that conscience directly reveals moral obligations.  In fact, most misunderstandings of the Bible reduce down to misunderstandings of Jesus or Paul.  Even with common misrepresentations of the Old Testament on the part of Christians, a misrepresentation of something said by Jesus or Paul is almost always the factor behind it.  Then, when cornered, people who use a distortion of Christ's theology or Paul's will try to prioritize one over the other.

As with many other things, this is something that might never need to specifically be thought about if it was not for encountering asinine claims to the contrary.  Two truths are equally true; neither can be more true than the other, even if one is more important, more foundational, or more directly related to how someone lives or should live.  Two ideas that are inconsistent can both be false, but they cannot both be correct.  The words of Paul and of Jesus are actually consistent in ways that are often overlooked because of various idiotic misrepresentations of the New Testament, yet, if both of them are accurate in their claims, neither has any sort of inherent alignment with truth the other lacks.

On Christian theology, Jesus does have a higher metaphysical status than Paul, to be clear.  Paul is not a divine figure (not that Jesus is Yahweh, as that is a Trinitarian myth contradicted by both reason and the Bible itself).  All the same, if Jesus and Paul are both correct in their statements and the ideas behind them, then it is not as if Jesus is more right than Paul.  In this sense, Jesus has no special authority except in that he might be able to reveal claims Paul could not on his own.  For example, if Jesus really was a divine figure, he could more directly know certain details about his return even if he did not profess to know the exact timing.

Still, one truth is not truer than another no matter how important it is or, when applicable, who advocates for it or explains it.  Jesus and Paul are either ultimately in agreement no matter how wrongly they have been interpreted or one or both of them must be wrong.  It is simply idiotic for conservative Christians to pretend like a divinely inspired book, one that is without error, would be less or more true because of who is speaking, just as it is idiotic of liberal Christians to pretend like one author is more correct than another simply because they do not like what one of them says about an issue like homosexuality (in the case of Paul).

Of course, if one author or figure the Bible passes off as truthful was actually wrong about something, every single doctrine tied to that would also have to be false.  However, even if Paul was in error, that would not require that Jesus was, as Paul builds off of Christological ideas Jesus had already introduced.  Jesus, in contrast, could be right with or without Paul's agreement.  It is just that the two are not truly in disagreement in many of the ways some people might occasionally assert.  Indeed, many of the claims that they contradict each other are usually rooted in a desire to elevate the hopelessly vague nature of standalone commands to love others over the more specific moral and metaphysical concepts Paul sometimes addresses.  This emphasis on the former is wholly asinine.

Movie Review--Mimic (The Director's Cut)

"Sometimes an insect will evolve to mimic its predator.  A fly can look like a spider.  A caterpillar can look like a snake.  The Judas evolved to mimic its predator.  Us."

--Dr. Susan Tyler, Mimic

Given that Zack Snyder's Justice League restored its director's original plans earlier this year, it is an especially fitting time to celebrate the director's cuts of other films that were initially distorted by studio interference.  The Director's Cut edition of Guillermo del Toro's second movie Mimic is a fine example of another cinematic project that was later restored in an altered version.  Mimic, in this form, is an unrated movie exploring the unpredictability of nature with a plot about disease and insects.  Forgoing more extreme onscreen violence in favor of an atmospheric story, it excels at slowly revealing its mysteries, just without developing its characters to the point of nuance or significantly greater depth than the bare minimum calls for.

Production Values

For all of its bizarre monstrosities, Mimic: The Director's Cut only shows its insects sparingly in most of its almost two hour runtime, but the practical effects hold up well and are all that is needed to portray the insectoid threat.  The majority of the movie focuses on the human cast as the characters try to figure out what is happening with a sudden appearance of large, aggressive bugs.  Mira Sorvino, a scientist whose solution ends a serious disease, and Josh Brolin (Thanos in the MCU), a character that seems to be a special kind of police officer or detective of sorts, are among the best of the performers.  None of the characters are particularly developed, not even theirs, but their roles are all useful for the plot in some way, and the seeming attempts at humor are far less gratuitous and idiotic than comedy tends to be across all genres in the past few years.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A deadly disease killing children in New York City brought by a surge of cockroaches is abated when Dr. Susan Tyler develops something called a "Judas" bug that secretes a substance which will kill the roaches within hours of contact.  Three years later, a strange creature that at times resembles a giant insect and at other times resembles a human man stalks the city, appearing to children and adults alike.  Two children bring a special bug they found to Susan shortly after, which leads to hear discovering that the Judas insects are still around even though they were engineered to supposedly die within a year and be incapable of reproduction.

Intellectual Content

As Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park would say, "Life finds a way" in Mimic, as the unpredictability of evolution and the resilience of creatures are the clear themes, even if they are not explored in the dialogue beyond a very basic level.  The Judas bugs evolve to have organs like lungs that are not part of normal insect anatomy after the entire species was supposed to die out due to artificial parameters on their ability to reproduce.  On one hand, while something like this is very unlikely to happen, it is logically possible: there is no contradiction in a species, human or not, developing in a way that is unexpected.  The issue is primarily an epistemological one.  Since evolution is a scientific phenomena and scientific events and forces cannot be proven to exist outside of perception and cannot be proven to be perceived as they are, only a fool makes something like evolution, which has no ramifications for almost any philosophical issue if true, a core pillar of their worldview.

Conclusion

Having not seen the original cut of Mimic, I do not know how much better Guillermo del Toro's preferred cut of the movie is than its initial version.  However, it probably is distinctly better--director's cuts are rarely worse than the comprised version a studio might have had great influence over despite director and cast objections.  Mimic: The Director's Cut is in either case neither the best creature horror film of the past 30 years nor anywhere near being a terrible movie.  It has obvious strengths in its atmosphere, effects, and plot despite having somewhat lackluster characters.  This, though, is the weakness of many films across different decades, so it is hardly a flaw of Mimic in particular.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  A man falls and his head is slammed against a can of paint.  Later, evolved Judas bugs are seen attacking people, and there are also dissection scenes or scenes where the innards of one insect are pulled out for use by the protagonists.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "shit," "damn," and "fuck" are used, moreso in the second half.

The Ways Intellectual Autonomy Is Universally Accessible

Almost everyone has a very vague, disjointed, selective grasp of the fact that intellectual autonomy is a necessity to some extent.  Acter all, many people admit--or at least pretend to understand--that not "thinking for yourself," as they so often word it, is dangerous in many ways.  They just probably will not understand the exact lines distinguishing purely logical truths that anyone could reason out on their own without any social of sensory input (whether the most foundational ones or very esoteric ones) from something like unprovable scientific claims or logical truths that anyone could access but only after some sort of experiential prompting, what makes some truths knowable from rational reflection alone, or the full scope of the need for autonomy.

There are actually many ways to practice or savor autonomy in philosophical thought, especially since no matter one's circumstances, the laws of logic are omnipresent and accessible and one's thoughts are inescapable: we carry our thoughts with us and all awareness hinges metaphysically and epistemologically on reason to begin with.  This means that it autonomy is universally important and universally accessible.  It is not an intellectual luxury available only to a select few because of qualities they never personally chose!  There are many different ways someone might express their capacity for autonomy within their own thoughts.

Even having someone say something that triggers a specific new discovery does not mean a person lacks intelligence or autonomy, in part because they did not even decide that the other person would say such a thing--and in part because they could have also discovered that exact thing later on purely on their own, and with certain things, they would have done so if they are thorough thinkers concerned with truth.  For example, no one who both cares about truth and is consistently thorough would be able to overlook the basic self-verifying nature of deductive reasoning for long, with or without any social prompting.  They would inevitably recognize it in a very direct way at some point, just as they might also identify the various ways autonomy could be lived out in light of reason in a very natural way as they rationalistically think over time--beyond just thinking of purely logical truths without outside help or discovering certain ideas just by personal reflection without conversations or reading.

Forgetting something and rediscovering it on one's own is just one such expression.  There could also be moments where someone realizes they would have thought of something for the first time at that given instant if they had not already thought or heard of it.  Similarly, one could think of various ideas first encountered from others without caring for how they were first thought of, which ironically is a type of autonomy that is always possible no matter what one has heard or remembered from others.  Remembering an encounter with the idea from others and yet not being influenced by it at all as one looks directly to reason and the idea is an option no matter how many things a person thought of completely on their own or with the intentional or unintentional help of others.

At times, even shallow thinkers might brush up against some of these logical facts apart from an intentional, systematic analysis of reality in the light of the laws of logic.  It is just that they will probably not put them all together because they will very likely not even understand more than one of them at once.  It is putting them all together and embracing them because they are logically provable truths, not because of what one may have heard or wants to be true, that grants a person a complete awareness of the autonomy rationality allows for.  Even if there were no new truths or ideas to personally discover or nothing that had not already been known by some other human beforehand, deep, extensive intellectual autonomy is still universally accessible.

Almost Nothing Is Self-Evident

"It's just self-evident," fools say about things that in no way verify themselves, as self-evidence necessitates that one must rely on the very truth in question to deny or doubt that truth.  Very little is self-evident.  It is not self-evident, for example, that Earth will not suddenly become a volcanic wasteland with no warning, that there is not an invisible and malevolent entity just waiting several more moments before eating you, that killing every living thing is not morally obligatory and thus good, or that a number of other seemingly unlikely things are untrue.  Only things that result in contradictions if they are not true are self-evident, the same as being self-verifying.  By nature, this category of facts is very small.

Only logical axioms--which are far from all logical truths--and one's own conscious existence are self-evident.  They need only themselves (as well as reason in the case of recognizing one's own existence) to be proven.  All other things require these to already be at least indirectly grasped in order to even be understood, much less proven, disproven, or identified as unknowable given one's epistemological limitations.  This makes everything that stands atop logical axioms and the basic existence of one's own consciousness inherently less clear and thus less easy to demonstrate as one ventures further and further from the only truths that cannot be any other way without depending on other truths.

The existence of an external world of matter, the issue of free will, whether or not there are any moral obligations, the existence of an uncaused cause, and an enormous range of other ideas and truths are not obvious at all in themselves.  One must reason one's way to certain truths about them even if not all truths about everything can be known.  It might be obvious that some truths which are not self-evident are true after one has proven the prerequisite truths and intentionally reflected on the matter, but this only means that some things are clear in light of more foundational truths.  Very few things are as foundational as could be, and it is only this small class of truths that are evident in themselves.

In other words, nothing else has to be true for logical axioms and my own existence to be a part of reality.  Other truths follow from them or do not conflict with them.  All that is self-evident is that deductive reasoning without fallacies is inherently true, that there are some truths, and that one exists as a consciousness, alongside a few other truths like how two mutually exclusive concepts cannot both be true.  Plenty of other basic but vital philosophical facts follow from these, but even the ones closest to these utter foundations of epistemology are not evident in themselves.  If a truth or idea requires any other thing at all to be even slightly grasped in order to understand them, then it cannot be self-evident because it needs more than just itself to be either true or knowable.

All rationalists will have to realize most of these facts at some point in order to be a genuine rationalist in the first place.  However, the extreme importance of such things means one never truly leaves them behind, even if one does not focus on them in the same way as before.  All actual knowledge--that is, awareness of things that can actually be known as opposed to just assumed--is either of self-evident truths or that which logically follows from them or at least is consistent with them.  It is just that the only self-evident or philosophically obvious truths are so foundational that, despite being inescapably true, they are overlooked by most people who do not search for them.

The Depth Of Humility

There is a widespread misunderstanding of both humility and arrogance on display in the church at large, partly due to evangelical stupidity.  This affects everything from the extent to which people understand themselves to how plenty of people are content to settle for the intellectual arrogance of thinking they can know things without logical proof.  When it comes to how a person regards himself or herself, the different kinds of confusion about the issue, rather than granting someone a depth they would otherwise not possess, bind them to stupidity and thus they must forfeit some depth and rationality.  Mistaking something else for humility is not intelligent, morally sound, or deep.

What many fail to realize is that humility is not failing to recognize one's own role in an achievement in favor of propping others up.  Humility is not thinking of oneself in an unfavorable or neutral way.  It is not "thinking about oneself less," as some evangelical authors might put it.  To be humble, all a person has to do is simply not think that they are greater than their metaphysical nature, epistemological limitations, or moral character makes them.  Humility has nothing to do with ignoring or distorting any part of oneself that does not indulge in true arrogance, which is itself nothing other than thinking of oneself more highly than one should in light of the aforementioned characteristics.

In avoiding negative or positive assumptions about themselves, people avoid the shallowness of blind beliefs and conceptual misunderstandings, which means intentional self-awareness and alignment with reason involve great depth.  Humility, because it is in its truest sense a refusal to think of oneself more highly than one should without any sort of negative assumptions to supposedly counteract arrogance, is thus is a trait of depth that does not conflict with something like confidence or a rightful sense of moral superiority.  It has everything to do with understanding oneself and refusing to make assumptions about one's nature in order to appease arbitrary desires.

Humility does not rob someone of an accurate sort of self-esteem or lead someone to somehow forget about their own presence as they focus almost exclusively on helping others.  These are shallow, false misconceptions of what it means for someone to sidestep arrogance.  Instead of bringing someone to self-awareness and an aversion to the errors of equating self-deprecation or gratuitously thinking about oneself less, what is often mistaken for humility is just a hollow, pathetic misconception that stands in opposition to the truth.  Avoiding something that is not arrogance while thinking it is arrogance is thoroughly irrational.

If one veers to the right or the left of humility, one has lapsed into superficiality to at least sone extent.  It is only through rationality and self-awareness that one can come to self-acceptance without believing something false about oneself.  Of course, this contradicts what so many Christians say humility is, with their insistence that it is just focusing on oneself less--as if focusing on one's own thoughts, nature, desires, and needs excludes a deep care for others!  False humility is not the liberation from arrogance some people seem think it is.  It is yet another self-imposed prison based on assumptions that keep one from understanding this aspect of reality as it is.

Consciousness And Unconsciousness

Unconsciousness as a term could refer to two things, with people at large predictably using each sense interchangeably without explicit clarification.  When a person's body has been forcefully struck by something, to give one scenario, that person could black out, their consciousness pulling away from their senses.  Outside observers might call this person unconscious because they are not displaying signs of perception.  Indeed, they might be motionless and almost seem dead.  The fact is that it is possible for them to still be experiencing distinct thoughts and mental imagery within their mind.  Unconsciousness in the first sense does not mean nothing is being experienced.  It just means that there is no perception of seeming or real external events and stimuli.

A dream still involves consciousness or else there would be no experience of mental imagery.  Thus, simply having one's consciousness retreat away from the senses does not mean one is unconscious in the strictest sense of the term.  It just means that someone is not consciously experiencing sensory perceptions.  There are actually two kinds of "unconsciousness," and only one of them truly involves a total lack of conscious experience.  Of course, the lack of clear explanations and the plague of philosophical apathy mean that people could overlook this distinction fully while embracing errors.  The distinction still remains.

This is yet another way of proving that consciousness is not derived from the senses, but sensory perceptions that are derived from consciousness.  Only one of them can exist without the other and it is plain that it is is sensory perceptions that require a consciousness behind them to give rise to them in the first place.  The idea that this primacy is inverse is a delusion born from a lack of personal comprehension of the concept of perception.  Perception as a general mental characteristic is perception with or without explicit input from the senses (though the intellect can be considered a sense that is very different from the other senses, and at least minimal awareness of reason is needed for any awareness of even basic perception).

No, this has nothing to do with whether metaphysical idealism is true--matter could precede human consciousness and create it, but consciousness is still epistemologically dominant and necessary for any sensory information to be experienced.  Perhaps more people would be willing to accept both at once if they did not assume that these logical truths force a person to embrace some unprovable or somewhat irrelevant stance on whether matter gives rise to human consciousness or whether human consciousness brings the material world into existence.  Misunderstanding and exaggerating what follows from consciousness not requiring senses deters even some who would otherwise have no problem realizing that one form of unconsciousness is not another.

Entire ideological systems have been contrived because individuals did not stop themselves from believing that which cannot be proven.  Metaphysical idealism and emergent naturalism are contradicted by the fact that there are other things beyond mind and matter--like logic, time, and space--that have natures that distinguish them from the two existents that receive far more direct attention, mostly from people who understand neither very well.  Someone who is uninfluenced by petty assumptions is capable of seeing how the difference between lack of sensory awareness (not that perceiving something with the senses makes it a part of external reality anyway) and fundamental awareness of self, concepts, and the laws of logic.

Philosophy In Television (Part 14): A Teacher

"Fuck, I'm risking my entire life to be with you!  I wish I could just stay here with you, but I--I can't, and I fucking feel like a terrible person."

--Claire, A Teacher (season one, episode five)

"Do you know how long it took me to figure out that I wasn't responsible . . . that--that you were the one creating those moments?  Do you know how long I hated myself because I thought that I hurt you?  . . . I saw my brother the other day.  He's 17 now.  Same age I was.  He looks so fucking young.  I was just a kid, Claire."

--Eric, A Teacher (season one, episode ten)

As an artistic accomplishment, A Teacher is a well-acted exploration of a highly controversial relationship.  However, is actually the boldness of its premise in this or any recorded era, as well as the timing of its release, that makes it especially significant.  From the beginning, A Teacher takes sexual relationships between female teachers and male students seriously.  It is a critical reflection of the present philosophical climate that the director is a woman, the very author of the book the story is derived from, who cares enough about issues of sexual consent and power imbalances to repeatedly come back to a story of a female teacher and her sexual relationship with a male high school student.  No matter what assumption-driven sexists on the political left and right might pretend, there are both men and women who deeply care about such issues whether or not their own gender is being victimized in a given instance.  There will never come a time when this fact does not need attention.  No, there is not actual rape in A Teacher, and therefore switching the genders of the teacher and student therefore would of course still not involve rape, but this is a show that finally, unflinchingly holds a light over the double standards that drive people to overlook women for the very same acts that they might hate men for.  In fact, a minor character is perhaps the best example of a true, self-professed feminist that I have ever seen in all of entertainment.

Set in Texas--a state known for its asinine conservatism (not that liberalism is much better)--A Teacher follows a married teacher named Claire as she meets and bonds with a boy named Eric in her English class.  SAT tutoring outside of school, following each other on social media, and flirtatious looks and comments culminate in Claire leading Eric away from a homecoming dance to have sex with him.  Eric was not raped, though it is both possible and not abnormal at all for women to rape men of any age, but he was still taken advantage of by a married woman who encouraged their relationship even in moments when Eric specifically says he is confused and that he wants more than just a brief sexual escapade.  Even as someone who initially celebrates having sex with his teacher, thinking under the influence of explicit sexism that demonizes male teachers in this situation but praises or ignores female teachers, he admits to Claire that he wants more than just a sexual relationship; he respects other parts of her personhood, including her supposed intelligence (she is clearly irrational and adulterous, not to mention seemingly sexist, so she is far from philosophically intelligent).

His affection for her seems genuine, genuine enough for Claire to confide in a friend both that she is having an affair and that it is an affair with her student Eric.  Kathryn, Claire's new teacher friend, does not even object to Claire having adulterous sex, something many characters of A Teacher actually downplay quite a bit, but she immediately shows concern.  She unhesitatingly calls this scenario "a monumental abuse of power."  Some of Eric's friends seem to at first praise Eric for having sex with an attractive female teacher, only for some unexpected characters to suddenly insist that what happened is actually disturbing.  The members of a college fraternity Eric eventually joins treat it as automatically positive, not even bringing up the obvious cultural double standards against men here, but a fellow collegiate Eric has sex with later tells him that, as a feminist, she wishes she had not brought up the teacher incident and trivialized it.  His mom talks as if he has been mistreated.  Now, Eric is not a rationalist by any means; he is confused by the conflicting claims of those in his life and has not yet realized the sexism against men that leads to some sexual encounters being condemned or praised simply because of which gender each participant is.

Half of the 10 episodes of the limited series portray the relationship as it develops and becomes sexual, showing just how a maritally frustrated adult and a youth who is almost 18 might fall for each other without thinking about the ramifications for how society would pretend like the relationship is different if the genders were reversed.  In the second half, the series starts to gradually show just how severely this relationship has destroyed Eric's life even despite it not involving actual rape.  Upon coming home a decade later and finding his younger two brothers grown up, Eric, after struggling with confusion and the wildly differing responses from people who either actively exploit his relationship with an older female teacher or are deeply concerned for him even when he himself is unsure of what he believes, realizes that his brother is now 17--exactly how old he was at the start of his relationship with Claire.  Talking with Claire for the last time in a restaurant, Eric finally puts into words what Claire's actress Kate Mara calls "the truth."  He, no longer confused, scathingly confronts her about how seeing his 17 year-old brother has helped him see just how young and vulnerable he was.  Instead of celebrating his sexual encounters with Claire, he now thinks that she explicitly used him when he was too young to know better.

Of course, there is nothing sexual about teachers and students of the opposite or same gender bonding outside of the classroom.  Eric and Claire could have had a purely platonic relationship of respect that extended beyond the classroom.  The sexism that is so ingrained in Western society nonetheless prompts many to irrationally assume (for all assumptions are irrational) that men in positions of power are somehow capable of or predisposed to certain sins that women are supposedly innocent of.  Flip the genders in almost any heterosexual relationship at all, and many people would make assumptions about each person's motivations, desires, and capacity for sexual abuse or manipulation.  This philosophically false and idiotic framework has been used to excuse sexual assault of both men and women: women by pretending like women who do not dress "modestly" are inviting sexual assaults from the "monsters" that men are, and men by pretending like women cannot rape or otherwise abuse men because men always want sex.  Now, if a man fought off a female rapist, he would almost certainly be hated for hitting or forcefully pushing a woman--even though she is a malicious aggressor--or for not wanting to sleep with any woman he could.

Ironically, both because of how small her role is and because the problem with Claire's relationship was not that she raped him, it is a very minor character with only around two scenes that best represents the kind of person who will stand up for all sexual assault survivors.  The girl that Eric briefly sees as a sexual partner in college says she wants to take their own sexual relationship slowly for his sake after she thinks about his background with his teacher.  I say all of this as I fully realize that is a sense in which pretending like arbitrary ages of 17 or 18 years suddenly make sexual relationships morally alright when they were supposedly evil only days before is an irrational submission to cultural norms.  This is not to say that pedophilic acts are not sinful; it is simultaneously true that a 17 or 18 year old of either gender should have long been sexually mature in a physical sense and has had plenty of chances to develop intellectual, emotional, and introspective maturity.  This is almost secondary in some ways to the story of A Teacher, as the selfishness of Claire and way Eric is treated merely because he is a male are the focus almost the whole time.  All of these things are true at once, even if they seem to only seldomly be grasped all at once by the same person.  In some ways, few shows are truly as thematically complicated as A Teacher.  The abuse of Claire's position over Eric is ultimately presented as rightly problematic even if she is not a rapist.

A simple difference in social standing does not make sex between sexually mature men and women, regardless of which gender is in power or which is the older or younger person, nonconsensual or otherwise abusive.  The more overlooked issue that A Teacher illuminates is simply that men are not always the ones in power, and that they can be sexually victimized by women, even if Claire is not truly a rapist--and if the character was a male teacher having an affair with a 17 or 18 year old, female high school student, he still would not be a rapist.  The biggest and most culturally needed aspect of the entire show is merely the student being a boy and the teacher being a woman, something that could force many sexist viewers to reevaluate their assumptions and hypocrisies.  The double standards around situations like that of the show are at the very heart of what A Teacher is meant to explore.  Even if the actual relationship was not adulterous and there was no manipulation, would all viewers have the same stance if the genders were reversed?  It would of course probably have been a far more controversial work of media if the genders were reversed.  It is therefore incredibly significant--a philosophical and artistic step forward--for A Teacher to explore the exploitation of men by women and refuse to support the stereotypes that hurt so many men and women, even though it does not feature rape.  The heart of the series is an affirmation of how it is irrational and harmful for men to be treated differently than women in sexual encounters.

Game Review--Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Ultimate Edition (Switch)

"Come back here--I am the LAW!  The law doesn't make mistakes!"

--CU5TM-TP, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

The Pre-Sequel may be a spin-off, but it is immensely superior to the original Borderlands game, building off of the best additions Borderlands 2 made to the series while bringing new features like the oxygen tank mechanics, cryo weapons, and item grinders (one was previously seen in a side mission of Borderlands 2 but not used beyond this).  The franchise emphasis on technology, philosophical humor, and pop culture references remains strong, and the internal lore deepens all throughout the primary and optional missions.  In fact, every playable character in some way relates to the story or characters of the previous two games in the franchise.  The Pre-Sequel has a smaller overall scope and a shorter length than Borderlands 2, yet it contributes much to the series while celebrating many improvements that the game before it had already set in place.

Production Values

The graphics are the best out of the visuals from the Borderlands ports to the Switch, with the colors and details standing out more distinctly than ever.  The molten red of Elpis, the purple of the Eridian Vault, and the blue of shock weapons, among other things, can be very vivid.  Accompanying the graphical quality is the voice acting, which is perhaps even better.  Each of the playable characters now has their own dialogue that plays at scripted moments.  This distinguishes their personalities, worldviews, and goals far more than was the case for the Vault Hunters in the previous games, letting them respond to Handsome Jack and other characters in their own ways.  As might be expected, the voice acting is excellent across the board for the whole cast--and each of the core characters gets plenty of chances to use their voice.

Gameplay

Many of the location functions and mechanics are very similar to aspects of Borderlands 2--which is not negative given that Borderlands 2 is one of the best games of the past 20 years.  Still, some of these mechanics undergo obvious evolutions.  Concordia replaces Sanctuary and moonstones replace Eridium bars, both serving the same purpose as before, but this time moonstones are far easier to find from defeated enemies and random containers than Eridium is in Borderlands 2.  Badass Tokens, which can be spent on minor but permanent upgrades that can be continuously stacked, also return and are still shared between all characters on a given Switch profile.  This provides an incentive for replaying the story with multiple characters or even developing more than one character at a time.  Moreover, the diversity of the characters themselves and their skill trees could encourage multiple playthroughs.

Athena, the rogue Atlas Corporation agent who debuted in DLC for the original Borderlands, is finally playable, wielding her throwable Aespis shield.  Wilhelm from Borderlands 2 is another playable character who appeared in the series earlier, and he has two drone companions that can heal him and attack opponents.  His fascination for machinery spurs him to gradually replace his biological organs with robotic components until he is seemingly nothing but a consciousness in a machine body in the second game.  Nisha lives out her gunslinger persona by using twin revolvers with extreme precision, going on to become Handsome Jack's girlfriend and the tyrannical Sheriff of Lynchwood in the next chronological game.  Then there is still Lady Aurelia Hammerlock, sister of Sir Hammerlock, a Claptrap unit reprogrammed to serve as an assassin, and a body double of Jack himself.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Before he became the CEO of Hyperion and one of the most tyrannical figures in the galaxy, Handsome Jack was a rather altruistic person struggling to retake the Helios station after Colonel Zarpedon and her Lost Legion suddenly attack.  A Vault Hunter named Athena who once helped him has been captured by Sanctuary's leadership, and she tells the story of Jack's change from a selfless employer to a sadistic egoist who murders and tortures people in order to bring "justice" to Pandora.  Jack eventually breaks down when faced with betrayals and Zarpedon's utilitarian willingness to destroy an entire moon called Elpis in order to stop a Vault under its surface from being opened, all of which become his excuse to eventually adopt a kind of utilitarianism driven by emotionalism.

Intellectual Content

Handsome Jack's downfall brings thorough nuance to his characterization that brings tragedy to his actions in Borderlands 2.  Starting out as an idealistic, altruistic man hoping to fight injustice, the repeated betrayals he faces and his increasing desperation to stop Colonel Zarpedon chip away at his resolve until he has become worse than the very bandits he speaks spitefully of.  With this backstory, what was once just a somewhat comedic but ultra-sadistic tyrant becomes an archetypal example of how even a mostly righteous person can fall if they refuse to remain consistent and let personal reactions to circumstances dictate their worldview instead of reason.  In typical Borderlands fashion, even some of the jokes and side missions that have nothing to do with Handsome Jack's descent into extreme egoism and tyranny are still philosophically charged.  For example, in a DLC mission that sees the player's Vault Hunter enter Claptrap's consciousness in a seeming allusion to Inception, Claptrap says he did not know he had a subconscious upon finding the "subconscious" part of his mind--which is ironic because a subconscious part of a person's mind could never be demonstrated to exist because it would literally be outside of the scope of their perception, or else it would no longer be subconscious.  Much of the game is filled with clever philosophical or artistic ideas that mock stupid beliefs or reference other entertainment.

Conclusion

One could literally play The Pre-Sequel for hundreds of hours and possibly still find grand new secret locations, special weapons, and easter eggs that help make it a very deep game in a series already brimming with gameplay depth.  It accomplishes more than this: it makes one of the standout villains of recent gaming history a formerly heroic character whose descent into egoism and sadism is a reminder that all who try to use hypocritical methods to fight evil become evil themselves.  No, it does not always reach the heights of Borderlands 2, but was that likely to happen begin with?  Taken for what it is, The Pre-Sequel fits perfectly into the established universe of the series.  Whether it is for the characters, humor, references to other works of entertainment, periodic philosophical comments, or the weapons, there is reason for fans of the franchise to play this game all the way through.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  This might be the most bloody Borderlands game yet (I have not played Borderlands 3, so it might be more violent)!  Blood spurts out from some biological enemies, even though there is little to no true gore.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "bastards" and "damnit" are used.

What Is Evangelicalism?

Evangelicalism as a word is very similar to the word evangelism, which refers to the act or process of bringing the "gospel" to others, whether they have or have not previously encountered it.  Since evangelism is something encouraged by the Bible to at least some extent for all Christians, some people think that the linguistic similarities between "evangelism" and "evangelicalism" suggest a conceptual overlap, but this is far from the case.  Yes, evangelicals do generally support regular evangelism, although they almost invariably are motivated by emotionalistic allegiance to Christianity instead of rationalism and commitment based on evidence instead of outright belief in the unproven.  It is just that there is far more than an affinity for evangelism that defines this ideology, not that evangelicals are even competent at evangelism due to usually sidestepping apologetics and broader philosophy or handling them terribly.

Aside from their incompetence with evangelism, what they mean by Christianity is a horrendous distortion of actual Biblical doctrines that almost always involves fitheism, ironic appeals to subjective conscience in the name of objective morality, an emotional attachment to church traditions for the sake of tradition, sexual prudery, sexism against men and women, broad legalism, a fixation on personal salvation over more important matters like morality, and so many other subtle or obvious philosophical errors that lead them to twist or ignore major parts of the Bible--and the concepts that underpin the Bible.  I could go on and on: there is almost no part of philosophy or Christian theology that evangelicalism does not misrepresent.  Evangelicalism as a collection of theological stances is about far more than just evangelism no matter what its proponents say.

To even be an evangelical, a person must assent to more than just the position that evangelism is a part of Christianity; he or she must embrace at least some of these other unbiblical, irrational ideas or else evangelicalism is not their worldview.  To the extent that a person does not intellectually adhere to the aforementioned concepts or several others that go right alongside them well, they are not an evangelical.  This distinction does not mean that rationalistic refutation of the false aspects of evangelicalism is a rejection of Christianity, or that a rejection of evangelicalism (as it does not match the Bible it supposedly is derived from and, more importantly, it contains inherent contradictions that render entire parts of it untrue by default as a philosophical system) is a rejection of evangelism.

Evangelicalism is not Christianity; it is a largely conservative (but sometimes liberal) set of social constructs within the church that have been amassed together by at least mostly unthinking participants who would not recognize many things about reason, science, and the Bible even if they were explained in great detail by the handful of other people who actually understand them as they are.  It is the most misleading popular misrepresentation of Christianity that has any cultural prominence and sway over individuals.  No other distortion of Christianity has the same level of societal influence over people inside the church and the same general recognition by non-Christians as evangelicalism.

When it comes to epistemology, evangelicalism is about appeals to tradition, assumptions, and shrugging off contradictions or non sequiturs in the name of "mystery."  When it comes to morality, evangelicalism is about denying what the Bible clearly says people are obligated to do (including execute people for a number of capital offenses beyond murder) in favor of vague appeals to New Testament "love," as if the Biblical descriptions of justice and love contradict.  When it comes to relationships, evangelicalism is about treating gender stereotypes as if they are valid and Biblical obligations, as well as acting like almost all interactions between people are sexual in nature or will easily become sexual.  This is evangelicalism.  What each of these and other aspects of this unbiblical theological system have in common is that they contradict logic, meaning they cannot be true, and contradict the Bible, meaning they deviate from the book they are allegedly found in.

Sexuality Deserves Contemplation On Its Own Merits

One of the reasons sexuality is such an important aspect of human life and nature is that it spans so many different sides of philosophy and experience--there are not only logical and conceptual truths about sexuality and how it relates to morality, theology, and relationships as a whole, but there are also potentially deep experiential sides to it on an individualistic and social level.  It is almost inevitable that someone who tries to think thoroughly about a topic not predominantly related to sexuality will still brush up against sexuality in some way, and any sincere seeker of truth can recognize that sexuality is an entire part of reality to be understood in its own right.

Indeed, sexuality spills over into other areas of philosophy and life precisely because it is such an important thing on its own.  It does not need to connect with other concepts and aspects of reality in order to merit philosophical attention, but it still connects with them anyway.  Everything from introspection to the nature of friendships and romantic partnerships to the metaphysical nature of clothing overlaps with sexuality, even if the truth about how sexuality intersects with these things is often different than what many people believe or even want to be true.  Sexuality is actually one of the most far-reaching topics a person could contemplate!

There is so much more to sexuality even just within the context of Christian theology than just that the Bible specifically condemns certain sexual acts like adultery, rape, or incest.  Unfortunately, most Christians fail to even think about the Biblical ramifications of sexuality beyond whether or not something like homosexual expression is sinful or how God is supportive of consensual marital sexual acts.  Almost never will one find a Christian openly talking about how not all sexual expression outside of marriage is Biblically immoral (masturbation, sexual flirtation, and so on are not condemned at all), partly because almost no Christians let reason and the Bible bring them to aspects of Christian theology rather than erroneous church traditions.

Moreover, almost never will one find a Christian or a non-Christian who understands deeply how something like bikinis are objectively, universally nonsexual even though they might or might not be perceived or enjoyed in a sexual way--most people just do not think or talk about things like this despite their importance or do anything more than pose questions they pretend have no demonstrable, objective answers.  Both inside and outside the church, even very basic aspects of sexuality that fall outside of arbitrary issues focused on by culture are, for the most part, just ignored.  This, in turn, means almost no one ever gets to the point where they understand sexuality as it is due to reason and thus never can experience the relief, fulfillment, and freedom rationalistic knowledge of sexuality can bring.

Sexuality does not need to be contemplated only when it overlaps with other issues for the sake of those other issues.  Those connections reveal more about the specific relationship between sexuality and other truths or concepts than they do about sexuality itself, and things can be understood, appreciated, and savored simply for what they are.  With reason and introspection, plenty of truths about sexuality are already accessible even apart from social experiences, whether in an educational context or one of sexual expression between partners.  All a person needs to do to discover these is just reason out what objectively follows from certain truths or ideas about sexuality and be attentive to the experiential side of the subject they probably carry with them into daily life.

Distinguishing Religions From Religious Traditions

Straw man fallacies abound in the public perception of everything from rationalism to feminism to Christianity.  In the case of something like Christianity, these well-meaning or intentional distortions of Biblical theology are regularly rooted in the fact that many people look to cultural ideas about the Bible rather than the Bible itself when they try to figure out what Christianity entails.  The same is true of Judaism or Islam.  Whether curious or hostile, a random person is likely to look at commentaries, sermons, or books about the Bible in order to find out what the Bible says instead of just cutting out epistemological unnecessary and usually misleading statements by non-rationalistic authors (though even rationalists do not need to be consulted in order to see what a book states or what logically follows from the ideas in it).

Christian or Islamic commentators do not ultimately determine what is or is not the content of Christianity or Christianity; the Bible and the Quran determine that.  Writings and traditions that are not part of these core texts have become so prevalent that they are often mistaken for the religions themselves, when very few inside or outside of these religions actually read the Quran or Bible without making assumptions about its teachings based on cultural representation or supposed consensus.  Hearsay can never be known to accurately represent the nature of an idea, and the words of people who talk about a religion without accurately citing its ideas and its central text are useless no matter if the religion is true.

A religion, like any other ideology, can be very different than what it is considered to be even by its supposed followers--and even by the self-professed subscribers of deep sincerity.  In order to know if Christianity or Islam entail the ideas that are associated with them, one must actually read the core texts (the Bible and Quran), make no assumptions, and rationalistically analyze what does and does not follow from the statements therein.  There is no shortcut to understanding a book by just talking to people who claim to have read it.  One must actually do the reading and simultaneously engage in reflection.  Otherwise, a person has only reacted to something removed from the foundation of a religion.

Now, a book like the Quran can be demonstrated to be false at the heart of its claims because it teaches that the Torah is valid while contradicting the Torah [1].  This, however, has nothing to do with the often rabid stereotypes of Muslims or what Muslims themselves might say about the Quran, much less whatever ideological opponents who might misrepresent the book say.  It has everything to do with the concepts of Islam as described in the Quran.  If someone does not reject the Quran based on what its actual contents are and the relationship of those contents with the laws of logic and broad epistemology and metaphysics, they have only rejected it or accepted it out of some bias or assumption.  In other words, they do not understand what Islam truly is or how to directly demonstrate what it is.

The way many people come to believe certain things about what claims are featured in Islam is often the same way many people come to believe certain claims are a part of Christianity: they just listen to several random, vague comments about it from people who almost never cite the actual text the religion is based upon and who have perhaps never so much as had a single epistemological thought in their life that did not pale in comparison to the most basic aspects of rationalistic contemplation.  If there are any references to the Quran or Bible involved, they are selective, unhelpful, incomplete, or held up without any attempt to explore their connection to other verses or philosophical concepts that do not depend on religious doctrine.  Honesty about a religion's true tenets is rarely found in such representations, yet even accurate claims about what ideas are a part of the religion would not be known to be accurate just because someone else claimed so.

Acting Upon Sexual Jealousy Out Of Legalism

Not everyone, contrary to what some films or common cultural assumptions imply, experiences jealousy at the thought of someone finding their romantic partner sexually attractive, seeing them in minimal clothing or wearing nothing, or flirting with them.  With or without societal pressures, some people might just naturally not be bothered by this even if they have never thought rationalistically about sexuality, romantic partnership, and introspection.  It is objectively easier for someone to never have to experience this jealousy and wrestle with whether they will be petty and legalistic or not, and yet this ease is not always chosen.  Just as this lack of alarm is a subjective state of mind a person might not be able to choose, so, too, is sexual jealousy.

Some people feel naturally distressed when their partner is thought of as sexy by someone else of the opposite gender, look at admiringly, or spoken of flirtatiously.  The jealousy itself is not something that justifies a person actually thinking that flirting is infidelity or that there is anything morally problematic about opposite gender friendships or publicly displaying one's body while dating or married.  Literally nothing other than physical adultery or the desire to disrupt a relationship to take someone's spouse from them (which is what the Bible means by the word lust, in spite of relentless claims to the contrary) is actually unfaithfulness and thus there is nothing else to inherently object to no matter how one feels.

No boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife can act on baseless jealousy and still behave in accordance with logical truths about romantic relationships and sexual attraction.  However, if someone in a romantic relationship truly does feel distress at the thought of someone else of the same gender nonsexually or sexually appreciating their partner's body, they have not become irrational.  Involuntary feelings or preferences do not make someone irrational.  It is what someone believes, whether or not they believe it because of logical proof, and how they act that make a person rational or irrational.  They must deviate from reason in one of these ways to be irrational.

Still, it is very irrational to mistake nonsexual things for things of a sexual nature or think that preferences dictate how someone else should live.  Ironically, the Bible itself allows many things people would incorrectly associate with cheating on a romantic partner, whether a married or not.  All one has to do to show this is read Deuteronomy 4:2 and then think of which things the Bible does not condemn in other passages.  Biblically speaking, a person's body is everyone's to admire but only their partner's to have sexual intercourse with if they are in a committed, consensual relationship with someone of the opposite gender.

Conceptually speaking, the only difference between a close friendship and a dating relationship is whatever sexual and romantic components are a part of the latter.  This means that it is simply untrue to attribute any further special characteristics to a dating or marriage that merit acting based on jealousy except when true adultery is involved--not sexual talk or expression where someone else sexualizes one's romantic partner without committing adultery or vice versa.  Not everyone, even if they know all of this, will be able to live in light of it with no emotional difficulties at all, though some people certainly would.  Instead of trying to change certain emotional preferences that are not always controllable, those in the former category, like those in the latter, can opt to follow reason where it leads and not act in a way that conflicts with any fact about the nature of sexuality or marriage.

Religion And Political Power

Rationalistic philosophy is the only correct approach to metaphysics and epistemology, and this of course includes epistemology of religion.  No appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, or non sequitur fallacy is anything other than a distraction from a genuine assessment of the internal consistency of a religion, the parts of it that might be true by logical necessity, and the external evidences for it that cannot prove the parts that are not true by necessity.  The real or supposed benevolence of a person aligned with a religion--either in the sense of actual belief that it is true or commitment on the basis of evidential probability--is irrelevant to the truth of a worldview.  That anyone would deny or doubt this is a mark of stupidity.

There is still reason to examine the actions and attitudes of people who claim to represent or belong to a given religion, and to Christianity in particular, since this religion has far more philosophical support and cultural influence than many others.  One reason is that it is still helpful to see where a person deviates from the worldview they profess allegiance to.  Another is that there are fallacious misrepresentations that need to be refuted.  A somewhat popular stereotype of religious adherents in general or Christians in particular is the idea that religion is ultimately about nothing more than solidifying political power.

First of all, whether or not someone who is committed to a religion has political power, having power is not automatically the goal either according to their religious ideology itself or of their own subjective desires.  Having or seeking power is not a logically necessary aspect of religious life.  The type of religion someone lives out and the personal motivations of the individual are the only things that might have to do with acquiring power.  Second, power is not inherently destructive, so this objection to religion as a whole is either a slippery slope fallacy or a dismissal of an ideology based on how its proponents behave, which might very well be an insincere attempt to understand or live out a religion.

It is outright asinine to believe that power is truly the goal of all religions or religious adherents--and the two are not the same no matter how many times they get conflated.  No one needs examples of the contrary to prove this much to themselves.  However, there are plenty of examples one could find of Christians in particular who clearly have no political power.  What of people who, in the name of a religion (not that benevolence makes a religion true or probable), devote their lives to working with the poor and overlooked for little to no pay?  What of people who go out of their way to help those with few resources when they themselves have few resources from which to give?

Power is neither benevolent nor malevolent.  It is, in either case, a red herring to proving the consistency, truth, possibility, or probability of a religious worldview.  Moreover, it needs to be understood that theism is not religious by default, a mischaracterization that persists despite its blatant falsity.  Even if everyone committed to every religion was motivated by a desire for power, that would not demonstrate that any of the claims about God's nature are true or false.  It just happens to be true that there is no inherent connection between religion and political power and that there are people helping others despite their own poverty who, if they are seeking power, have done such a terrible job of obtaining it that it either is not their goal or is likely to remain outside their grasp.

The Motivations Behind Sexual Assault

There is no singular motivation that must be present behind every violent action--or friendly one, for that matter.  Even if everyone did have the same motivations, it would still be logically possible for people to have had diverse motivations, just as it would be possible for a new generation of people to not share the same motivations as those before them.  Thus, it is always idiotic to think that there is only one possible set of motivating factors that everyone inevitably faces.  This has ramifications for everything from understanding why someone might form a particular worldview to why someone might carry out the act of rape or other sexual assaults.

When liberals sometimes say that a desire to express power is behind sexual assault rather than sexual desires, they are making assumptions based on the fact that it is possible for something other than sexual feelings to motivate sexual assault.  When conservatives say that sexual assault is normally an expression of "overwhelming" sexual feelings that they falsely attribute to men in particular, they, too, are making pathetic assumptions based upon the fact that it is possible for some rapists (or people who commit lesser sexual assault) to perform the act for something other than the hope of expressing sheer, general power.  Neither of these stances is rooted in reason.  At most, they both mildly start to acknowledge what follows from genuine logical possibilities.

As is almost invariably the case, both major political approaches, despite being two of the most popular, are utterly false because sexual assault does not have to be motivated by anything in particular--a nature it shares in common with other harmful acts like murder or purely physical abuse.  Some rapists might feel like they cannot control sexual attraction to specific people or like they deserve to just have their own sexual feelings sated regardless of who the victim is.  Rape is, after all, a sexual act, even when it is not done strictly to appease sexual desires of some kind.  The error arises when someone thinks that because rape could be enacted for a different reason, it is therefore always enacted for another reason.

Indeed, if not for the fact that sexual assault is not always about acting on sexual desires, no one would ever sexually assault another person to display alleged social dominance or humiliate someone as a supposed act of "justice."  It is obvious to anyone who rationalistically contemplates the issue that it is possible for people guilty of sexual assault to have differing motivations and that there are examples of people who report having different motivations for such a thing.  To believe or say that sexual assault is always (or mostly) about sexual desires or always (or mostly) about reinforcing social power is just reductionistic nonsense.

It is neither truthful nor helpful to anyone to believe anything fallacious, and with something like sexual assault, the philosophical and personal stakes are even higher than they are with plenty of other errors.  There is never any benefit other than personal delusion from fallacies to begin with, but a set of acts as harmful as sexual assault call for special care when describing possible motivations.  What fool would think that murder or kidnapping is always about one intention or another?  One does not even need to be thoroughly rational in all areas to realize that murder could have far more motivations than one.  So, too, can sexual assault of any form.  It takes a genuine fool, and likely a conservative or liberal at that, to believe otherwise.

Game Review--Tales From The Borderlands (Switch)

"Obviously, money isn't everything.  Sure, sure, it's important, but it doesn't have to drive your existence like it did mine."

--Rhys, Tales from the Borderlands

Tales from the Borderlands is quite the grand mixture of two historically separate kinds of games, one mostly a dialogue-based string of decisions and the other an RPG shooter.  It is by far the most unconventional Borderlands game yet, but one with a story and characters that fit perfectly into the world set up in Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel.  It even has plenty of gun and fight-related sequences despite being more like Telltale's The Walking Dead than the comedic loot shooter formula of the others.  Players will see or hear of a host of series characters such as Commandant Steele from the first Borderlands, Shade from Borderlands 2's Captain Scarlett DLC, Nakayama from The Pre-Sequel and some DLC for Borderlands 2.  This makes the most irregular addition to the series a great starting point for newcomers and a way for familiar players to remember classic franchise cast members--and it even can become a very sincere celebration of friendship (between a man and a woman at that!) and self-discovery by the end based on player choices.

Production Values

The art style and noises of the Borderlands series are all replicated here very faithfully, from Pandoran psychos to loot boxes.  The only major difference is that this is the first and only Borderlands game so far that is not a first-person RPG shooter.  There are some first-person segments, like when using Rhys's scanning function, but the majority of the game is like other Telltale games: you either walk around for brief periods or just watch cinematics and make dialogue or behavior decisions.  This gives plenty of time for character development, and Tales from the Borderlands excels at utilizing old characters while introducing new ones in a way that honors Borderlands lore.  The animation, voice acting, and writing converge to provide a very authentic Borderlands entry with high quality all around.  The excellent Troy Baker is just one of many superb voice actors or actresses who contribute to this quality.  Here is a game full of style and heart that does not need to sacrifice its connections to a series defined by its absurdist comedy to tell a story with gravity.

Gameplay

Conversations and cinematics carry most of gameplay, as is the case with other Telltale games, and the humor and characters of Borderlands make it easy for this style to be integrated with the IP.  You will still get to use grenades, firearms, and even Athena's throwable shield, so it is not as if all remnants of the action-oriented gameplay the series is known for vanish.  Whereas decisions and optional dialogue were just some of the attractions in the main games, they are given a new emphasis in Tales from the Borderlands.  This lets players tailor aspects of the story to their choices for better or for worse.  For instance, another character might become more or less friendly and helpful based upon what dialogue the player chooses.  Adding a layer of realistic pressure, the choices must be made within a short window of time--or else silence is the response (when it comes to dialogue) or the playable character will die (in quick-time events).

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Tales from the Borderlands focused on the intertwining stories of two new characters--Rhys, an employee of Hyperion, and Fiona, a con artist.  In the aftermath of Handsome Jack's death, Hugo Vasquez has become the leader of Hyperion, but his manipulation of Rhys drives the latter, with the help of two of his best friends, to try to get a Vault key before Vasquez can.  Fiona happens to have a role in the events that follow.  Both Rhys and Fiona are actually abducted prisoners of a mysterious stranger who wants each to tell the story of what becomes their search for an Atlas artifact called Gordys.  However, plenty of unexpected things happen during the search, including the appearance of a holographic version of Handsome Jack that only Rhys can see.

Intellectual Content

The sometimes major and sometimes minor impact of specific responses and other decisions later on is a deep part of Telltale games, including one based on the absurdist humor of Borderlands.  It is still actually the backdrop of the two main characters telling their supposed "version" of the story of how they worked together, though, that is one of the most intentionally or unintentionally philosophical parts of the game.  Deception, memory, and denial of past events for personal gain are all issues that have something to do with how the plot is structured.  In this regard, Tales from the Borderlands reminds me of another game called Call of Juarez: Gunslinger.  Both share the central story similarity of having the playable parts take place before the present day narration that opens the game and periodically comes back onscreen.  It is rather fitting that I played both for the first time this year.

Conclusion

It does not have the hundreds of hours of diverse choices and progression that the main Borderlands games have, but Tales from the Borderlands is an excellent addition to the franchise thanks to its signature comedy, worldbuilding, and characters returning, as well as its new lore.  Borderlands, after the largely shallow first game, has developed into one of the most creative and deep franchises in gaming history.  Tales from the Borderlands honors the best of the series while presenting a new gameplay style.  Having a spin-off game to tell the story between Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3 allows for variety in the gameplay genre--the kind that could appeal to people who might not desire to put dozens of hours into the other games.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  There is actually a lot of blood in one scene of the episode one in particular, with other parts featuring shootouts, sword fights, or brawls that have little to no blood.

 2.  Profanity:  "Damn," "shit," "bitch," and "bastard" are used at least a handful of times.