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.

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 epistemologically 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 to 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.

Professional Work Is Not Inherently Morally Imperative

The third chapter of Genesis describes God saying as a covenant curse, "'Cursed is the ground because of you, through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.'"  "'If a man will not work, he shall not eat,'" Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 3:10.  These are several parts of the Bible most relevant to the morality of work.  If theft is sinful, as the Bible so clearly states on multiple occasions, then some sort of work either directly with nature or set up by other people is necessary to some extent so that a person can live without unjustly taking from others what belongs to them.  But what of people who go further than this and asininely think professional work is some existentially, morally, and psychologically capstone of life?

Someone who has a gratuitously--and thus irrationally--high regard for professional work is more likely to overlook the genuine moral flaws of successful or socially important industries and companies, be less thoughtful about trading away massive parts of their life to a job even when they do not need to go quite as far as they do, and erroneously look down on others for not having a specific kind of job.  The personal ramifications are clear, as are the philosophical ramifications: a person who thinks work grants humans some special metaphysical status by comparison to others believes this based on nothing but assumptions and non sequitur fallacies.

If someone is able to survive with whatever job they have and is still looked down on by someone else, the latter person has embraced philosophically flawed ideas about the significance of work, leaping into stupidity that is most likely to be associated with conservative evangelicalism.  No one gets this arrogant stance from reason or the Bible, so it must be personal delusions or cultural pressures that led to it.  It is rather obvious to any Christian who reads the Bible thoroughly and does not make assumptions about its texts that, since anything not in some way prescribed by the Bible is a matter of pure subjective preference (Deuteronomy 4:2), working for an income does not have to involve anything more than the bare minimum effort to not be incompetent and thus forfeit the job.  Any attitude or effort beyond this can only be supererogatory.

Even the limited extent to which the Bible demands that able people work for a living is only as it is because theft and apathy to the point of allowing oneself to unnecessarily die are unacceptable on the Christian worldview, which is the only reason Biblical theology calls for people to work in order to make a living in the first place.  Otherwise, the only reason to engage in any sort of work, professional or not, is for practical benefit or subjective self-expression.  It is not as if having a job that earns income is a moral necessity in itself!  It is not even practically necessary to have a professional source of income in order to survive, as people can live by growing their own food, building their own shelter with environmental as opposed to purely artificial material, and so on.

There is nothing morally praiseworthy about treating a job as anything more than a temporary means to the end of survival, as if apart from this, someone would be sinning if they neither cared about professional work nor had a standard job.  They would not be, at least not according to the moral standard of the Bible.  The conservative Christians who talk and think about professional work as if it has some special moral nature are just victims of their own fallacies.  If a person can survive without a job and wanted to live that way, there is nothing sinful about them doing do.  Work is hardly the height of philosophy and human life in any way.

Mind "Over" Matter

Uttered in support of everything from supposedly willing physical ailments away to trivializing the way the physical world can impact consciousness, the saying "mind over matter" is in one way a direct admission of mind-body dualism, but in another sense it can be a distinction implied to have misleading characteristics.  It is entirely true that a person's mind, which is their consciousness and its contents of thoughts and perceptions, can enable them to endure otherwise harrowing circumstances and steel their bodies against everything from pain to abnormal temperatures.  Consciousness is even "over" matter in that it is what allows matter to even be contemplated, experienced, and, in the case of bodily actions like raising a leg, directed.

The human mind does control certain bodily movements, and it would be asinine to not believe this as long as one understands the sole way to prove that there even is such a thing as a body our minds inhabit--assumptions that things are as they seem just because they seem that way leave someone unable to know they have a body.  Ultimately, someone who has either never engaged in truly rationalistic analysis of reality or (having become a rationalist) never realized how to prove their body exists would have no way to prove the body exists and thus no basis for belief it exists.  Once a person understands that it is the mind that is responsible for spurring bodily motions of some kinds, however, it is clear to them that mind truly is "over" matter in that the body is inanimate without it.

It is just that our thoughts and wills do not change anything about the external world by sheer reflection and willpower alone.  No sensory perception would ever otherwise be unwanted if someone could just will it away every time.  Certainly, a person can think of a plan to change something in the external world, such as burning a log and thus changing it in some ways, will to carry the plan out, and do it.  This, though, is not the same as changing the material world outside of one's body just by thoughts and will.  Action is the bridge between these and the doable change one wants to enact.  Action where one's thoughts and will drive the body to perform some task is what allows anything in the perceived external world to be intentionally changed by humans.

Mind thus inevitably controls some behaviors of the body, while others can occur inside our bodies without any awareness or psychological involvement.  There is thus such a thing as mind dictating how the body behaves and such a thing as bodily functions that happen involuntarily or without thought.  Mind "over" matter is often used as a hopelessly vague phrase meant to do little more than rally people around some optimistic goal, but it is a phrase that has limited philosophical accuracy depending on what is meant.  What person finds themselves walking while awake without a corresponding desire of the will on some level, even if they reluctantly take each step?  What person has to constantly deal with their limbs acting as if they have their own intentions?  I have neither experienced this nor heard of anyone else experiencing such a thing.

That is not to say that no outward movement of the body is voluntary.  All it means is that the experience of being in control of one's outward behaviors is the default human experience as far as all evidence suggests.  This in turn brushes up against the issue of free will, which does exist in at least some form--otherwise, nothing would be knowable since no one would be in control of their thoughts and would be carried to one idea or another on grounds other than logical proof and personal thought in alignment with the laws of logic.  I do know at least some things; it is impossible for logical axioms and my own existence, along with the existence of several other things like the present moment of time and the and many other conceptual truths, to not be absolutely certain.  Free will is not self-evident, but it is proven by the attainability of true knowledge.  It is other minds and their wills I cannot know the existence of.  My own cannot be an illusion of any kind.

Skepticism And Historical Revisionism

Even if all the historical documentation in the world agreed perfectly and was without any ambiguity in terms of what the evidence itself points to in all cases, no one would be justified in believing that a single war, ruler, or other part of the historical information truly corresponds to past events.  This unity is not the state of the evidence, however, making it even more fallacious when people believe they know not just evidences but the events themselves.  Claims of historicity and historical revisionism are even largely irrelevant to matters of true importance, such as what can be proven, how one should live, and the foundations of epistemology and metaphysics.

This still leaves us with a plethora of historical information in the form of documents, excavations, and oral traditions that can be examined rationalistically so that willing people can see what the evidence does and does not suggest about the past.  When a person insists on an alternate stance on what has probably happened in history, if that alternate stance conflicts with the evidence, it could be legitimately called historical revisionism.  Oftentimes, though, the charge of historical revisionism is thrown around when someone truly believes that an event did not happen with what seems to be absolute certainty, something that historical documentation does not come anywhere near providing.

If a person makes a claim about history that contradicts the evidence or has nothing to do with what the evidence addresses, they are guilty of misrepresenting the evidence, yes.  It is also true that anyone standing in opposition to this who goes beyond believing that the evidence points away from their stance to belief that the exact events can be known is guilty or misrepresenting the nature of the evidence.  Both have committed inverse errors, but both have fallen for ideas that do not logically follow from any conceptual truth or sensory evidences.  Even though both might object, they care more about random assumptions and preferences than they do about historical truth.

One simply cannot prove that a claim truly distorts a historical event itself just because the claim is contrary to the historical evidence.  One can prove that certain ideas about historical events differ from what actual evidence (and I mean primary sources as opposed to the secondary sources that sometimes follow them) supports, but there is still an insurmountable epistemological gap between evidence that a certain figure existed or that a certain war happened and actual proof.  Historical revisionism, then, is only a non-hypocritical charge when the accuser is not assuming anything one way or another about the historicity of a particular person or chain of occurrences.

Knowing alleged information about historical events as stated in documents or suggested by archeological remnants and knowing whether or not entire events like wars ever took place are not the same matter.  As such, the rationalistic skepticism of historical documents--a skepticism that does not insist the events did not happen, but that they cannot be known to have happened with absolute certainty--has ramifications for how historical revisionism is understood.  The belief would not be "look at how history is being denied," but "the evidences for certain historical events are being distorted."  There is actually an enormous difference between these two stances on historical revisionism.  In fact, only the latter is valid as an epistemological position because it is all that can be proven.

The Many Mind-Body Interactions Of Everyday Life

Everyone already knows that there are both phenomenological and sensory aspects of human life, but rarely does someone understand how to prove the nature or existence of these things, and few even go beyond just taking them for granted based on mere assumptions.  Substance dualism is implied in almost everything people say although very few have ever given serious thought to epistemology and metaphysics.  Thus, some truths about mind and body and how they relate might not be entirely new to everyone, but the context in which they are reflected upon and the details are not known by default unless a person rationalistically puts effort into reflection.

There are nonetheless dozens of ways that a person's mind and body relate and interact on a given day.  What about hunger?  The desire to eat food and to eat food that is specifically pleasing to taste is explicitly phenomenological--that is, desire cannot exist except within a mind that experiences them.  Bodies without consciousnesses experience nothing at all.  A body without a mind is lifeless, unable to even partake in sensory perceptions of the mist trivial kind.  At the same time, a mind without a body could not consume food, which is made of physical substance and thus cannot be ingested simply by willpower or thought.

For an even grander example of the distinction between mind and body, consider sexuality.  Sexuality is an even bigger philosophical subject than something like hunger could ever be because it spans and directly touches things like individuality, ethics, relationships, and introspection in a far deeper, more thorough way.  Sometimes one might hear people speak of sexuality as if it is solely dictated by psychological factors or by physical ones, but it inevitably involves both.  Desire, attraction, affection, and pleasure are, again, experiences of the mind, apart from which there would be no thought or experience.  Arousal of the genitals, in contrast, is a distinctly physical thing that may or may not be accompanied by sexual excitement on a mental level.

Even asexuals demonstrate this distinction: their bodies can still function sexually even though they have little to no sexual feelings.  They might even experience excitement about sexuality without experiencing sexual attraction, and either way they only lack a mental experience that goes alongside or motivates people to seek out physical actions.  If there was no difference between consciousness and matter, then having a sexually functioning body would make asexuality impossible.  Sexuality is a key aspect of life in which the mind-body distinction is evident to all who reflect without making assumptions.

There are many other examples of this distinction in every life, though.  People who drink coffee with the purpose of being more alert are trying to use a physical drink to induce mental clarity.  People who wish to stand up and then use their legs to actually stand are using their will, a feature of consciousness as opposed to the body, to move their bodies in a desired fashion.  Many things people do on a daily basis are really just different cases of letting the mind or body influence the other in some way.  This, of course, means there is not just a mental and not just a physical dimension to human existence; both are involved regularly.

However, it is the existence of the mind that is self-verifying and the existence of the body that is so difficult to prove that I am very relieved and fortunate to have realized it.  The existence of any sort of material object is neither self-evident nor as epistemologically or metaphysically foundational as something like reason and consciousness.  Without reason, there would be no truths about mind or matter to know and no way to prove them, and without consciousness, there would be nothing to do the perceiving and thinking about the body or about itself.  A hypothetical mind without a body could still grasp reason and look within itself, but a body without a mind perceives nothing real or illusory because it is inanimate.

Matthew 24's Conditions Are Not Met

The conditions of Matthew 24 for the return of Christ have not been met, or at least the evidence directly suggests they have not been met.  Amid the chaos of modern life, some Christians mistake various current or historical events for signs that the end of the age as described in Matthew 24 is upon us.  In actuality, some of the clear requirements for this listed in the chapter have yet to be fulfilled.  For example, when Jesus says that the gospel will be preached in the whole world and to all nations before the end, why would anyone think he meant something other than what he said?  Has literally every region on Earth already had the gospel made accessible to it?  Not even evangelicals tend to think so, yet they might still act as if we are moments from the Second Coming because of our time in history.

When Matthew 24 literally says that every nation--the "whole world," to be more precise--will have the gospel preached to it "and then the end will come," it is very asinine to say that we are already in the final moments before Christ's return.  When Jesus says to "see to it that you are not alarmed" when hearing of wars and rumors of wars, it is ironic that Christians tend to do the exact opposite: to act like we are already near the very end of the eschatological timeline.  Like almost everything else in the Bible, the eschatology of Matthew 24 is misrepresented by those too irrational to avoid just reading the text without bringing assumptions into the analysis.

If even a single unreached people group exists, then the prediction of Matthew 24:14 about the matter cannot be at hand.  If wars and rumors of wars, famines, and earthquakes are just the beginning of "birth pains," it is idiotic to point to plagues/diseases and wars of lessening severity as evidence that we are now in the last of the last days.  Humanity is ironically more just by Biblical standards now, in spite of its grievous faults, than it was at any previous broad era of the historical record.  The worst forms of persecution of Christians are limited to certain regions of the world.  In light of any single one of these points, there would be a basis for rejecting the idea that we are about to face the very last days, but there is even more to consider.

It is also important to know that just because the prerequisite conditions for Christ's return are met does not mean his return would even happen immediately.  What if the conditions dissipate and come back later on?  All that the Bible says about this is that the "birth pains" will get progressively worse at some point before the Second Coming, but it never says that there is no possibility of moral and practical improvement to human civilizations before the return of Christ finally comes [1].  If one event is set to happen after another, just because the first event in the sequence happens does not automatically mean the rest will follow the first time.  It only means that the later events will not happen except after the prior one.

If no wars, earthquakes, or persecution of Christians ever occurred at all throughout the last two millennia of history, Matthew 24's eschatological predictions would lack all outward evidence and have no immediate relevance to historical and current events whatsoever.  However, just because these things occur even today does not mean we are living in the worst of these predicted disasters.  Not only have the not conditions of Matthew 24:3-14 not all happened according to historical and present evidences, but humanity has at least temporarily started to rise to an even higher quality of life and moral standing by Biblical standards.  Only a very irrational person would read Matthew 24 and think that the return of Christ, if the Bible is true, is likely to happen any year at this point.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-days-of-noah.html

The Word Science

Clear thought can exist without a person using language clearly and consistently, a person who uses language inconsistently or haphazardly without care can contribute to fairly significant cultural confusion about certain issues.  Take the word "science."  People use this word frequently in ways that are not identical without ever directly clarifying what exactly they mean and do not mean, something that means they might not understand the basic concept of scientific epistemology.  For example, they might say "science is how nature operates" and say "science can be manipulated with money" and never think about how, unless they mean something different in each case, they would be saying that the laws of nature can be manipulated with money.

Sometimes people might use the word "science" when the context indicates they are referring to scientists, the epistemological scientific method, the actual laws of nature, popular ideas about science, and scientific paradigms of the past.  The issue is that not only are these things not the same, but they are also very different.  For example, unless the behaviors of nature changes--a logical possibility that just happens to seem unlikely--scientific laws themselves do not change, only popular ideas about science advanced by people.  Thus, referring to both scientific laws and scientific paradigms as "science" is misleading at best and outright asinine at worst.  There is no reason to not be more specific in words, but perhaps most people who use this word in these multiple contexts are simply too shallow to seriously think about the basic distinctions here.

The typical person does the same with words like "reason," referring to anything from the actual laws of logic (which dictate what follows from things no matter who realizes or acknowledges it) to an individual's ability to grasp reason to a subjective sense of comprehension.  Some even think reason and science are interchangeable words because they have not realized the difference between sensory investigation and the abstract laws of logic!  Again, none of these are the same.  Confusing these concepts is even more disastrous because logic is what literally underpins everything epistemologically and metaphysically; people cannot understand knowable truths or how to prove them to themselves apart from understanding distinctions like these on some level.

One easy way to stop both personal and public confusion is to just use words in a consistent manner.  This is already more than some are willing to do, or else there would be no major linguistic inconsistencies in any culture.  With words like "science," conceptual confusion, epistemological confusion, and confusion about their own intentions behind the word can lead to massively different ideas that get articulated using the same statements.  There are simply few people who are consistently self-aware, rational, or concerned with truth, and thus the ambiguities of using language to communicate are unnecessarily amplified when they could be easily minimized.

Language is used most inconsistently by people who are apathetic to rationalism or who specifically enjoy fitting into society as it is.  This is why words like "philosophy," "truth," "proof," and "knowledge" also get used inconsistently.  Reason and science are not the only conceptual casualties of random usage of the same words to mean wildly different things, some of them incoherent and therefore conveying impossible ideas!  The example of the word science is just one of many that could be given of linguistic stupidity.  With something so culturally vague in itself, people must speak as consistently as they can if they wish to avoid the pointless difficulties of even greater linguistic ambiguity than words already have by nature.  Consistent terminology avoids a great deal of communication issues by default.

How Ecclesiastes 7:8 Is Relevant To Eschatology

The two mainstream attitudes towards Christian eschatology are unsurprisingly erroneous.  There are plenty of visible Christians who are eager to make mere assumptions about whether they are living in the "last days" in the sense that the return of Christ is directly at hand, and others are content to either assume the last days are far off or to practically never think about eschatology out of dismissal despite some entire sections of the Bible being clearly devoted to it.  Since it is a part of Biblical theology, a thoughtful Christian will not avoid it forever.  However, he or she will not make any assumptions upon thinking about the subject directly.  Neither the importance nor immanence of eschatological events will be distorted.

The evangelical obsession with distorted eschatology usually treats the end as just around the corner when the "birth pangs" of Matthew 24 leasing to the return of Christ have historically been far worse than they are now, which means there is not just no evidence that we are in the Biblical last days, but there is direct evidence we are not.  Diseases that could have eliminated entire civilizations are manageable today or mostly gone; for all the sins of the world in the present age, at least there are now more overt attempts to move past some of the more destructive ones (things like rape or racism), even if liberals and conservatives alike are very selective and therefore irrational and hypocritical when it comes to these goals.  In no way are we living in the worst of recorded history.

This does not mean that eschatology is not an issue worthy of reflection for Christians now.  To be sure, it is far more philosophically important to understand Genesis than anything pertaining to eschatology.  After all, without a definitive beginning of the cosmos, the universe itself becomes a sort of uncaused cause, and the fact that it is possible to prove that time and matter came into existence at some point in the past (no one can prove when, only that it is logically necessary for them to have come into existence [1]) makes the beginning of the universe, and humanity to a far lesser extent, more important for everything from rationalistic philosophy to its applications for Christian apologetics.  At the same time, a verse from Ecclesiastes comparing the beginning and end of something is very relevant to eschatology.

Ecclesiastes 7:8 explicitly says that the end of a matter is better than its beginning.  Now, everything I said before this is still true by necessity.  No one can prove by logical necessity that the universe will end as is the case with it having a beginning, and no one would be able to prove when it would happen anyway no matter what scientific evidence or the Bible suggests.  The beginning is more philosophically knowable and metaphysically important than the end.  However, according to Ecclesiastes, there is something special about the end of a sequence that can be better than the beginning.  Perhaps the only way this obviously relates to eschatology is obvious at this point: the ultimate destiny of the saved within Christian theology is better than the start of human history.  The eternal state of the saved, provided that there is no later deviation from God's moral nature in New Jerusalem, is weightier on this side of theological events than eternal contentment in Eden could have been.

How ironic it is that a verse of the Bible suggests that the end of something is better than its beginning, a verse from the most overtly existentialist book of the Bible, no less, and yet eschatology is commonly sidestepped completely or butchered by evangelicals!  Yes, evangelicals talk about the ultimate eternal state (while misrepresenting almost everything about human destiny in hell according to the Bible [2]) with an adoration they almost never speak of Eden with.  In a more limited sense that has little to do with the events of the last days themselves, the subjects of New Jerusalem and hell deal with eschatology.  It is beyond this where some Christians come up with and defend ideas like that of us being in the final generation before Christ's return.

Eschatology is neither of no importance nor the utmost importance when it comes to philosophy and its subcategory of theology.  When a Christian believes something other than this, they are more likely to make other errors, including ones that completely sideline eschatology from their attention or elevate it higher than issues of epistemology and morality, things of much more significance than the details of the last days and what follows.  Only by avoiding both pitfalls can one understand how eschatological events could be better than the beginning of human existence without contradicting the higher philosophical importance of the uncaused cause creating things in the first place.

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

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

The Intellect And The Senses

Reason, the set of necessary truths at the heart of all things and without which nothing could be true or knowable, is grasped by the intellect.  A deduction without assumptions and the logical axioms that cannot be rejected without contradiction make certain things true by necessity.  In contrast, the senses largely perceive things that cannot be proven to exist or be true; one simply either perceives them or does not.  These distinctions are at the core of valid epistemology, and they alone could be analyzed and savored for a lengthy time because of their sheer importance.  There is actually more that could be discovered or contemplated, including the metaphysical nature of reason that goes beyond its base epistemological nature.

One such fact is that reason is a set of necessary truths that exist independent of all other things--including the cosmos and the uncaused cause.  The laws of logic are not part of the nature of other things like God, human perception, or the physical world, but instead these necessary truths precede, underpin, and govern all other things.  Other things can only exist or be true if it is logically possible for them to be part of reality in the first place.  Even if all else ceased to exist, the laws of logic would persist by sheer necessity, for it could never be any other way.

The laws of logic exist independent of and therefore outside of all minds.  Then, if the intellect that grasps reason is ultimately aware of something outside of itself, and the senses perceive outward objects and environments that are or at least seem to be outside of one's mind, is the intellect a member of the human senses along with the sense of touch or hearing?  In the broadest rational scope of the concept, the intellect is indeed a sense.  It just is not a sense that seemingly or really corresponds to an external thing that is physical.  Ironically, while one can prove directly that the laws of logic cannot not exist and thus must exist outside of one's consciousness, senses like that of hearing, taste, or sight have no logically necessary

The conventional senses, while they could perceive immaterial things--after all, a person who hypothetically sees a spirit would still be using their sense of sight--perceive things that are made of matter, at least supposedly.  There is no way to prove that the sense of sight, for example, corresponds to anything outside of one's mind.  However, the immateriality of the laws of logic mean that the intellect only grasps that which is immaterial, which in turn enables a person to understand experiences and concepts related to the material world.

The intellect is a "sense" in one way but objectively distinct from the others all the same.  It is the supreme sense without which no knowledge, either from abstract reasoning or immediate introspective or sensory experience, could be possible.  Just as there would be no truths to know apart from the laws of logic making some truths necessary, there would be no way to grasp these truths without the intellect that is capable of understanding reason.  This supreme sense is what allows one, if one is willing, to develop a rationalistic worldview of recognized logical truths, all of which are consistent and all of which are absolutely certain.

The Freedom Of Forsaking Gratuitous Kindness

A lack of kindness is not cruelty.  Shallow fools who feel entitled to the kindness of strangers might be offended by this, emotionalistically enslaved to assumptions.  Their stupidity is evident to anyone who is willing to look for it, and it is because of people like them that so many false ideas about the concept of kindness are so prevalent in Western culture.  As with almost everything, the typical unthinking person expects to be treated with a level of kindness they have neither proof nor evidence ready to demonstrate such an obligation exists.  Kindness is comparatively unimportant next to almost literally every aspect of reality that one could ponder, and yet it is clung to more openly and vehemently than other things in many cases.

Even someone who comes to realize all of this, understanding that only justice can be obligatory and that kindness rarely overlaps with the concept of justice, they might still feel a desire to be kind in spite of the futility (for kindness will only rarely help influence people to turn from error to reason, and no one needs kindness to do so).  This desire can drive people to intentionally perform acts of kindness where there is not any obligation inside or outside of the Christian worldview.  For some, kindness is simply meant to make their own selves feel better; for others, kindness is mistaken for some integral part of Biblical morality or something all people should display indiscriminately by default.

If one can manage to do so, shedding the desire to be kind to those who are not friends, ideological allies in the truth, neutral, or useful imbeciles can be one of the most liberating experiences of one's life.  No longer is such a person compelled by emotion to show kindness just for the sake of showing kindness.  Instead of relying on pleasing others or whether or not one treats other people in some non-obligatory way, looking to reason and exploring moral concepts as they are can provide all the empowerment one needs.  One is at last free to examine concepts and moral epistemology without a care for something as ultimately insignificant as the subjective pangs of conscience getting in the way.

Again, a lack of kindness is not cruelty.  There are some who will almost certainly think I somehow have endorsed cruelty.  Even if I had, unless a person has philosophically verifiable grounds for their objection and not personal preference or offence, he or she has only been a fool to believe that kindness would be obligatory just because people generally want to be treated kindly.  Kindness is a distraction from moral epistemology just as it is a distraction from understanding logical axioms, the existence of the uncaused cause, and most other issues of foundational significance.  Becoming free from the subjective desire to show kindness even when it makes one vulnerable to exploitation, emotionally distracts one from rationalism, or contradicts the notion of justice is thus something everyone with this desire could benefit from.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

Outsourcing Worldview Development To Books And The Internet: Identical Epistemological Flaws

Writing is writing, regardless of the exact medium.  It might be accessed digitally or held on a physical page in one's hand, but the epistemological nature of writing is the same in all cases.  One can be absolutely certain that one is having the experience of reading, yes, but only claims such as about logic itself, the nature of something like introspection and conscious experience, and the fallacies of mistaken epistemological ideas can actually be proven conceptually by the arguments put into writing.  Of course, most written claims are about matters of science and history, two things mostly locked behind epistemological limitations and mostly irrelevant to core philosophy.  These are still the very things for which the average person looks to writing for epistemological deliverance.

Ironically, there are people who rush to books in a futile effort to "prove" the scientific or historical claims they read online, and there are people who rush to the internet thinking they can truly prove the scientific and historical information they read in books.  Being the dimwitted epistemologists that they are, they might genuinely fail to see that both books and the internet have the same epistemological limitations: asserting something does not make it true and claims other than ones pertaining strictly to logic, phenomenology, and core metaphysics and epistemology cannot be proven by the claims of an author.  The folly of the moderners eager to "prove" reports and hearsay using written mediums, whether online or in books or newspapers, is that they want the impossible.

The difference between written claims about logic (and truths logic illuminates directly) and written claims about science or history is that books and the internet are not necessary for a person to think about or understand logical truths, and anyone writing about them without thinking otherwise is actually writing about the only things that can be communicated in writing and immediately confirmed by readers.  The most foundational, all-encompassing, and important truths--and the only ones both absolutely certain and immediately accessible to literally anyone who mentally pursues them with or without written prompting--are the only ones writing can contain genuine proofs for, given that the author described true ideas about reason.

One of the many delusions of modern society is the idea that one written publication about empirical or historical events can be objectively disproven by another publication, for only logically necessary truths about concept clarification and what does and does not follow from the evidences for these events can be immediately proven.  There is no way in hell for a human to know that anything is true just because they hear or read it.  Even if a written document elaborates on rationalistic truths, and even though a person could certainly discover or reflect on logical truths without ever reading anything, he or she would be still forced to look to reason to verify the claims in the text.  No matter what, the only true knowledge that can be possessed is always grounded in reason and not in online and physical writings.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

The Consequences Of Denying Substance Dualism

Without substance dualism, it is idiotic to distinguish between things like psychological and physical abuse, sexual feelings and actions, mental and physical health, emotional life and bodily vitality, and so on.  If the basic, philosophically obvious distinction between self-awareness, perception, and thought on one hand and physical limbs and organs on the other hand is truly too difficult for non-rationalists to grasp, then perhaps the difference between things like psychological and physical abuse will be sufficient to break the fog of stupidity within their minds.  What person would reveal such great stupidity so as to truly equate these things?

The fact that people talk of their mental experiences and "their" bodies (that is, the bodies their conscious selves experience), which spans both mental and physical health, shows that they are on at least some level unable to sincerely conflate their thoughts and stream of perception with the bodies they perceive their minds to reside in.  Moreover, who has ever claimed that mental health is physical health--not in the sense that altering aspects of the body's nervous system can alter mental states, but in the sense that there is no difference at all between the two?  A consistent, thoughtful reductionist would eventually do so, but there is no such thing as a deeply thoughtful reductionist because reason would never bring them to reductionism of any kind.

What of sexuality?  Almost every adult is likely to understand or at least be capable of understanding that the ability of the body to become sexually aroused does not necessitate that the mind is eager, willing, or ready to engage in a sexual act.  Again, what fool has ever said that there is no difference between the mental and physical components of sexuality?  In fact, if a person denied this objective difference, they have knowingly or unknowingly denied the only basis for rape being what it is: a nonconsensual sexual act in which one person forces another person with an unwilling mind into a physical behavior they are partaking in while desiring not to.

All of this is already enough to demonstrate to anyone willing to forgo assumptions and biases that the mind is not the same as the body despite the intimate relationship between them.  The example of psychological and physical abuse differing would also prove the distinction between mind and body on its own, and thus everyone who rightly differentiates between the former two while conflating the latter two has done so out of irrationality and inconsistency.  However, there are consequences to denying substance dualism.  A person who does so has rejected the basis for correctly distinguishing between all mental events like mental illness and sexual arousal of the mind and physical events like bodily illness and arousal of the genitals.

The bias against substance dualism will likely persist even if everyone thought of or was told of these examples, though.  Some people pretend like substance dualism entails "magic" of some kind and will decry it on these fallacious grounds.  The utterly vague and often undefined nature of whatever they mean by magic aside, this is just another asinine misrepresentation accepted by fools.  First of all, it is not as if an afterlife or out of body experience, if this is what they mean, is logically impossible even if there is no way for someone not experiencing them to know if they are genuine parts of reality.  Second, the mind and body, regardless of which precedes the other, are neither conceptually nor metaphysically identical.  Just as the tongue is not the experience of taste and a radio is not music, the body is not the mind that animates it.  This fact is right before everyone and the truth is that anyone can realize this with or without help.