Starting A Business: The Need For Preexisting Wealth

One of the suggestions some conservatives like to make when people complain about financial difficulties is that they should start their own business.  Often stated flippantly, as if this is something easy in itself or easy for the majority of people despite their circumstances, this idea is often believed alongside the idea that the core reason why many people are not as prosperous as corporate executives is because they lack drive, passion, or even intelligence (ironic since this is an irrational idea for many reasons).  Laziness is what plenty of conservatives assume is the most significant obstacle to personal wealth, which is itself a lazy and erroneous stance that someone could only embrace because of assumptions, and false assumptions at that.  It is money that people need to begin a business, even if rationality is necessary to understand how to handle finances.

Hiring employees if the business is not a sole proprietorship, buying inventory to sell or equipment to use, distributing marketing, and paying for whatever overhead costs might be present (like utilities) all require money.  That a person's business could generate a vast income once it gains its footing cannot do absolutely anything on its own to get a business started.  Yes, the potential revenue could attract investors, either in the formal sense or just friends willing and able to support the startup, hoping to have their investments repaid or exceeded if the business finds success, but not everyone has the connections or visibility to secure this kind of financial support.  Not even a bank loan is some guaranteed way to help someone start his or her business.

If they had the money, there would be no reason to get a loan for the business to begin with, and since the business has not been established yet, there is no company credit history or reputation to leverage in favor of the loan, so already having money is clearly the best and easiest way to start a business.  What about offering property as collateral to make a loan more likely?  Not everyone wants or can afford to offer up their vehicle or land or home just in case the business venture backfires, which would put them in a worse financial position than before they had ever attempted the startup, due to all the resources that had already been put into it.  Receiving a loan is not necessarily easy by any means because having money makes it far easier to make more money or secure loans.

The conservative belief that people with financial struggles should "just start their own business" is outright idiotic in light of all this!  It is impossible or extremely difficult to open a formal business unless there is already a sizeable amount of money one can rely on.  There is no way short of connections to people who already have wealth or business success, extreme luck, or theft to actually get the money for launching a business if one desperately needs to start a business to gain more money, and finding investors or loans could so easily be about luck more than almost any other factor.  Whether the money for starting a business is provided by external investors/lenders or by someone's current personal wealth, there is an inherent need for preexisting wealth to start a business.  Someone has to pay for the resources that the organization will use.

Current strains of conservative ideology hold that the sole or primary reason why people cannot easily amass money is just laziness or perhaps stupidity.  This is untrue because it does not logically follow from a person being financially desperate that there are either of these things, and there is also the fact that there are numerous factors far beyond a person's motivation or persistency that will determine how much money they make, as well as how they earn that money.  Starting a business is far from some universal possibility or something guaranteed to strengthen a person's finances even if they are able to actually get that business established.  As usual, conservativism's tenets are largely contrary to reason here.  Of course starting a thriving business would be helpful for so many.  It is just not easy to earn that kind of money without already having money!

The Internet Of Things

The word internet is more familiar to many than the phrase Internet of Things, but the concepts the latter refers to are distinct from the former in a way that parallels metaphysics far more foundational than technology could possibly be.  The internet is the collective of webpages and online services that so many devices connect with today, while every laptop, smartphone, gaming console, tablet, and "smart" home device (like a wifi-enabled thermostat) fall into the Internet of Things--the physical objects that connect with the internet.  Some people use the words physical and digital separately, and rightly so: a digital version of a product like a book or a video game is not made of matter.  It is a construct of the digital world.

The physical world is not the digital world, for the digital world is nonphysical despite having a seeming causal reliance on the physical world (though even perfect correlations like this cannot be proven to be anything more than just that, perception-based correlations).  It is impossible to grasp a webpage or a digital book because there is no solid page to touch, just the physical components of the hardware, which runs with its own immaterial software, that is used to either project or access the internet or digital products obtained through the internet.  The Internet of Things is what allows someone to take advantage of the virtual world and view items or text with no physical substance whatsoever.

Depending on how broad the scope of objects referred to is, the phrase Internet of Things could refer to the physical devices that project the internet so that other devices can use them, or to both the physical items that sustain (servers and routers) or connect (like smartphones) with the internet.  It could also reference objects that interact with Bluetooth, which is usually categorized separately from the likes of WiFi or LTE connections despite being extremely similar, with its inherent pairing of devices being the distinguishing characteristics.  Words only matter as a malleable way to communicate things, so the real issue is about the nature of the internet, the objects associated with it, and how this parallels or is unique compared to the metaphysics of other things.

Even if they think the opposite, everyone who speaks of some things as digital and some as physical is already talking as if it is true (and it is both true and provable) that the internet is immaterial, just like people who use different words for "me" and "my body."  This distinction between hardware technology and the nonphysical world that it can create parallels the differences between consciousness and matter, with matter including the body that a mind perceives.  In this context, the physical could create the immaterial and vice versa, and it is impossible to demonstrate whether it is physical particles contributing to objects that gave rise to nonphysical consciousness or conscious perception of an individual that creates and/or holds matter in existence.  In fact, proving that matter of any kind exists is far beyond the worldviews of most people, who tend to assume that there is an external world on the fallacies of epistemological faith, even most people who gravitate towards a fascination with the laws of nature.

It is unclear which brings the other into existence because sensory perceptions are not logical proofs.  Either of these causal relationships is logically possible in that there is no contradiction in them on their own, as mind and matter are still metaphysically distinct and epistemologically knowable through separate proofs.  With the Internet of Things and the internet itself, there is a very close parallel with the physical body and immateriality of consciousness although the causal relationship is not as significant as it is for the knowable existence of consciousness and matter.  The internet might not have the ability to perceive and grasp the laws of logic, but it is nonphysical just like consciousness (and the laws of logic, which also transcend the mind) and correlates to the status of physical objects that project it.  Moderners are surrounded by artificial parallels to the substance dualism of mind an body and might go a lifetime without realizing any of this!

Perception And Reality

There is a sense in which everyone who even thinks there is a distinction between perceptions and reality beyond those perceptions--even if the perceptions aligned with the latter perfectly, it would still by necessity be true that perceptions are not the thing being perceived, unless they are introspective perceptions--recognizes that perceptions must already be part of reality in order to even be experienced.  However, in a deeper sense, it might be rare for someone to focus on the fact that perceptions are part of reality, just as a part of someone's consciousness and its subjective experiences, which of course must exist in order to be perceived at all, whether or not the perceptions are disconnected from actual external objects or events.  Non-rationalists might even overlook this fact entirely or thoroughly misunderstand it.

Memories of past events, sensory perceptions of visual or auditory stimuli, and dreams are all examples of perception-based experiences that either have no connection with the truth of external events or objects (like dreams, even if many things in dreams are inspired by or borrowed from waking sensory perceptions) or that cannot be proven to correspond to anything beyond one's mind no matter how strongly it seems otherwise (memories and most sensory experiences).  The epistemological disconnect between most kinds of perception and things beyond those perceptions, however, would not make the perceptions themselves illusions, as they must exist within one's mind in order to be perceived to begin with.  Since one's own consciousness is still a part of objective reality despite the fact that it allows for subjective experience, all the contents of consciousness, even if its perceptions of a great many things could be illusory, are part of reality.

These perceptions are just a part of the reality of conscious experience as a being that is incapable of knowing many things.  Of course, the necessary truths of reason still dictate even things that cannot be proven, such as whether an object one visually perceives is actually there or not, but the truth of logical axioms, one's own existence, and other facts that logically follow from axioms or one's conscious experience can still be known.  Even for an omniscient being, the truth of logical axioms and the existence of its own consciousness would still be the only self-evident things, as literally any other knowledge, even of reason and its own mind, would hinge on this prior knowledge, with even knowledge of its consciousness hinging metaphysically and epistemologically on reason at the absolute core.

Additionally, even an omniscient bring would still have perceptions, but they would simply know all truths about how they do or do not match up with scientific laws, historical events, or moral obligations!  Logical truths would be relied on even by the omniscient because nothing else is possible.  Perception is but one part of reality, one that might or might not be aligned with truths beyond it, but even subjective perceptions can only exist because they are logically possible and can only be known because of reason.  The sole way to absolute certainty is to not make assumptions and to recognize the inherent truth of logical axioms, the unchanging starting point of all necessity and possibility.  Logic quite literally dictates, confines, and reveals reality.

When To Show Mercy

There is never a necessary time for mercy.  Something almost everyone wants and yet almost no one is willing to show in the same way they arrogantly expect it, mercy is inherently undeserved and often used as an excuse to tolerate stupidity while favoring some people over others on baseless grounds.  I myself do delight in showing mercy to fellow rationalists and to the (seemingly) genuinely repentant whenever I can, although I can be far harsher with non-rationalists in person than even the abrasive comments I make about them here testify to.  It is not irrational or immoral for a person to despise mercy, however, though they would be a hypocrite to always withhold it from others and yet demand or expect it when they need it.  Justice is deserved; mercy is not, and non-rationalists cannot deserve to be treated like they are the equals of rationalists.  The unfortunate truth is that irrationalists are common since irrationality is the norm of a person's life until they intentionally flee from it, having relied on logical axioms being true the whole time and yet never actually realizing or rightfully caring about this foundation of all things.

If anything about truth matters, there is indeed a merciful aspect to not structuring every interaction with non-rationalists who have given evidence of their emotionalism (or other error) so that it is not aimed at intimidating and psychologically brutalizing them into, at a minimum, fucking silence for as long as they believe in fallacies or contradictions; this would be emotionally harmful to many non-rationalists, but not only do their subjective feelings and self-esteem not matter in this regard whatsoever, but since all truth is dictated or shaped by the laws of logic and non-rationalists misunderstand or do not care about reason, non-rationalists cannot deserve to be treated otherwise, as if they are intelligent or thoroughly deep or intellectually or morally mature.  That reason is true irrespective of their feelings means the latter by necessity either is meaningless or has value only because it is logically possible or necessary for this to be the case.

Some people do come closer to deserving mercy than others, though, even though of course not a single person could deserve it no matter how minor their sins or how repentant they are.  These are people likely to be very personally impacted by mercy and driven to abandon errors and turn from wrongdoing because they are already rational or repentant without being shown mercy.  The most strategic and significant times to show mercy are always these kinds of situations: when someone is poised to seemingly turn from irrationality and other sin or a rationalist who has made a mistake and yet chooses to not be characterized by their error.  In certain instances, mercy can truly help motivate someone to embrace reason and live for truth and justice, forsaking their assumptions, emotionalism, or apathy about deep matters of reality.

It is just that only the people who act as if they are truly contrite, are willing to change, or are already changing for the better fall into this relatively small group of people for whom mercy will have this motivating impact.  Almost anyone else is more likely to just feign greater rationality or regret for their philosophical mistakes (of which moral mistakes are but one subcategory), only to continue believing or doing the exact same things, or perhaps they will not even understand what the problem is to begin with.  Pretending to want mercy just to appease confrontation would always be an easy way for non-rationalists who at least can seem authentic.  This is why actually talking with and observing them after mercy is shown will reveal to the greatest extent possible given human limitations if they were genuine.

Again, not even the repentant can deserve mercy; they just come closer to deserving it despite it being logically impossible to deserve to not be treated justly, with justice quite literally being what one deserves.  No one could possibly deserve the slightest mercy: not family members, not the superficial, not hypocrites or irrationalists of any kind.  There are plenty of evangelical Christians who will even say that they realize mercy is undeserved, only to then somehow think mercy is owed to every person as if they do deserve it, when they themselves do not even respond to mercy correctly!  They might show mercy to people based on arbitrary emotionalistic criteria that do not match up with the universal ability of fallen humans to accept God's mercy and the universally undeserved nature of mercy.  All mercy is arbitrary in one sense, yes, but people who think mercy is deserved by some and not by others, especially when they put no more thought into this than the minimal introspection it takes to see how they feel about it, have put themselves in a position where they would deserve the contempt of all beings that understand reason.

The Inherent Invalidity Of Statistical Inferences

To infer in the sense of believing irrationally is to succumb to the idiocy of thinking that non-necessary truths about one object, person, or other thing must also be true of another.  An example is the fallacies of thinking that because the last two times someone saw a dog, the dog attacked them, that all dogs or even all dogs of that breed will be savage.  Another example is thinking that just because one has not become sick after years of a careful diet, that one will continue to not be sick as long as the same diet is adhered to.  There are examples of a more grand kind--there is no way to prove that the sun will rise tomorrow through memories of it rising each morning in the past, or to prove that that gravity will not suddenly act differently on matter than it does now.  Someone who believes these things are knowable has made assumptions through inferences.  A rationalist might realize that it seems like a given thing is true in light of other perception-based, probabilistic evidences that all fall short of logical proof, which are often memories of past experiences, but he or she would not believe that these evidence-based probabilities are true.

Inferences, as one can find out from a few moments of rationalistic thought, are the very essence of almost all popular beliefs about statistics.  Statistics about various things are not necessary truths like logical axioms.  They are only correspond to logical possibilities for the many variables and events that do not contradict logical axioms, even if the actual nature of accurate statistics is not understood by many people.  For instance, if four out of a set of four men choose a career in the military, this has nothing to do with the false idea that men are naturally violent or callous, and there is also no way to know if it was individual personality or cultural pressures that led them to make this choice.  This is yet another limitation of statistics obvious to anyone open to not making assumptions: not only is it impossible to prove hearsay statistics or to validly extrapolate from them to another population or set, but even an accurate statistic, such as that expressed by "42% people like steak," would not demonstrate why the statistic is accurate.  Almost all statistics are just unverifiable hearsay or exaggerated, assumed ideas in the first place, but even accurate statistics would not prove causal connections between things, only correlations at best.

There are many logically possible reasons why whatever percentage of people actually like steak--not that I or any being with my epistemological limitations could possibly know that percentage--might enjoy this kind of food, so it is folly to pretend like it could only be one factor that is responsible.  Moreover, one generation of people might like it for one reason, to be replaced by another generation of which different statistics would be true.  Even accurate statistics about most miscellaneous things people like to cite statistics for could suddenly change because there is nothing logically necessary about the statistic remaining constant.  The percentage of animals in a population with a specific gene could change, the ratio of people within a demographic who say they like a specific genre of music could change, the percentage of American buyers who purchase a specific product could change, and there is no logical necessity in these fluctuations, as each of these changes would be a logical possibility that cannot be proven by prior events or percentages.

It is asinine to believe that 68% of American taxpayers have a certain political stance or that 90% of a certain organism will/must exhibit some happenstance behavioral characteristic that does not define the nature of the species.  Fools confuse random events, correlations, or arbitrary trends that do not by logical necessity prove anything more for proof of random ideas.  Ask five people if they are rational, and if three say yes, it does not mean that 60% of the give people truly are rational (they would have to be rationalists for that to be the case), nor does it mean that 60% of all people are rational even if this was true.  Just because four out of a specific group of 10 people said they would sacrifice free time for the sake of a career does not mean 40% of people care about careers more than free time.  When people extrapolate statistics that cannot be proven to begin with, this is exactly the kind of stupidity they indulge in!  They are compounding assumptions by extrapolating something that might or might not be true another thing that is irrelevant or unverifiable.

The Humanity Of Christ

Jesus was likely not born on December 25th out of all the days of the year, with the Bible's story of his birth not directly commenting on which day or month of any particular calendar system it occurred.  Nonetheless, the arbitrary affiliation of December with the birth of Jesus receives more attention than much more substantial matters pertaining to the incarnation and its ramifications, if it happened.  The logical possiblity of a divine being taking on a human body (though Jesus is not Yahweh and the Bible does not explicitly clarify whether Yahweh created him), as well as the moral necessities that follow if such a thing did happen, are of much greater philosophical depth and consequence than which random day of a standardized calendar Christ would have emerged from a human womb.

The Biblically unspecified issue of whether Jesus was literally brought into existence by Yahweh is of some relevance to the incarnation and death of Christ, for if the entity sometimes called "the Father" truly begot his "Son" in an ultimate sense, Jesus would not have existed past-eternally as would Yahweh.  For such a created pseudo-divine being to take upon a human body and eventually die would not be as strange as if it was truly a lone uncaused cause that did this, though Trinitarian theology is already logically impossible in itself and in how it relates to other Biblical events and doctrines.  If Jesus and Yahweh, along with the Holy Spirit, are all fully one and the same and yet still distinct (a contradiction and thus impossibility already), the death of one of them would be the death of them all, and yet there would then be no world for Jesus to be resurrected into since contingent things depend on Yahweh's existence according to Acts 17:28.

However, there is nothing logically impossible about a spiritual being that precedes the cosmos entering the universe in a physical form while still being fully divine to whatever extent it was before this incarnation.  For something to be impossible, it must contradict logical axioms, and contradicting other necessary truths that follow from axioms or contradicting itself would be subcategories of this, since all truths and possibilities by necessity cannot conflict with the intrinsic truths of axioms.  For Jesus to exist and not exist at once or for him to be only human and only divine simultaneously is impossible.  No divine power can sidestep logical necessity.  It is just that the incarnation itself is not something impossible, nor is it as difficult to grasp as some people think in spite of its layers.  Possibility alone does not mean something is true, but it does mean there is nothing metaphysically impossible about it, however bizarre it might seem.

The humanity of Christ is also of great importance in connecting with something that would already be clear from the Genesis creation account, which calls God's creations good (Genesis 1:31), and the moral details of Mosaic Law, which condemns adding to God's commands (Deuteronomy 4:2).  The human body might be susceptible to decay and eventual death on this side of Eden due to biological death being a foreshadowing of the cosmic death human sin deserves, and it can be used for irrational ends of many kinds, but it is not itself immoral.  Having a human body, celebrating the body, and enjoying the body's various pleasures in any way not condemned in Biblical commands, is something that is objectively nonsinful by true Christian standards, and if this was not the case, Jesus could not remain totally innocent after the incarnation simply by having a body.  That "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14) and that Jesus is supposed to be without sin (directly implied in John 8:46) would not even be possible if the body was sinful.

These are not exactly popular things to acknowledge aloud at Christmas even among most Christians.  The evangelical focus on irrelevant or assumed issues at this time of year is of course given to false or shallow ideas, for the most part.  Some of these truths even inherently exclude tenets of evangelicalism like conventional Trinitarianism and legalistic prudery.  Evangelicals sometimes prefer to dwell on idiotic things like the phrase "happy holidays," pagan traditions, or the cultural association of Jesus with December rather than the logical possibility of the incarnation, its moral ramifications, and other issues pertaining to an incorporeal, divine being that existed before the universe physically entering it.

The Utter Inadequacy Of The Golden Rule On Its Own

In Matthew 7:12, Jesus says to always practice treating others the way one would have them treat oneself.  What is almost universally overlooked is how he is not inviting a subjectivist, conscience-based moral epistemology that both contradicts the Bible and is logically invalid wholly apart from whatever the Bible says.  In that very verse, he mentions how this is when practiced correctly consistent with Mosaic Law, yet Yahweh's commands are far more precise than the "golden rule" of doing to others what one would hope for it the treatment was reversed.  It is absolutely impossible to know from the golden rule which actions are obligatory, which are evil, and whether morality exists at all.  On its own, the golden rule even could lead to outright sin on the Christian worldview in everything from casual interactions with other people to the most egregious human rights violations.

A key Biblical example would be the thief on the cross who according to Luke's account actually said he thought he deserved forced nudity, extreme physical torture, and a prolonged, sadistic execution because some tyrant had the power to use crucifixion to intimidate others.  Only a goddamn fool would think that any of this is allowed or prescribed in the same Mosaic Law that condemns more than 40 lashes, separates corporal and capital punishment, degrading someone in their physical or psychological treatment, and forbids discrimination against foreigners (Roman crucifixion was reserved for non-citizens); in fact, Roman crucifixion is perhaps the single most Biblically unjust legal punishment from all of recorded history [1], and the Bible itself says someone who was victimized by it though it was just.  Over the centuries, many Christians have in their almost endless stupidity and confusion over Biblical ethics agreed with the thief on the cross.  This is one way to apply the golden rule without rationality or justice behind it.

There is this side of the matter, that people might mistakenly think they deserve abuse, dehumanization, and disproportionate punishment (the Bible always has upper limits that are never to be transgressed for each of its physical and financial penalties), and then there is the fact that the golden rule on its own would mean that even someone who was being justly punished would be being mistreated as long as they did not want to be treated as they actually deserve.  If the golden rule is all that there is to morality, morality does not really exist and is a matter of subjective whim, for the person who does not wish to be treated even as they deserve would be right under the golden rule isolated from all other truths or ideas about justice.  People who like the golden rule almost never seem to realize this, but then again, no one who actually thinks the golden rule in a conceptual vacuum even gives a moral direction to go in are highly irrational already.

The golden rule is utterly, woefully inadequate at actually describing the many precise actions that are just, permissible, or sinful on the Christian worldview, and no Christian should have a difficult time accepting this.  What if someone would like to be murdered because they want to die but do not want to commit suicide?  What if someone does not want to be treated justly no matter how heinous their sins?  What if someone truly believes they deserve cruelties that are inherently unjust no matter who they are inflicted on?  The concept of the golden rule on its own, apart from the strict context of Mosaic Law's details, is only about subjective preferences and the empty emotionalism of believing something is morally good or obligatory because one feels good about it or wants it.

Jesus, an obvious Christian theonomist, would be contradicting almost everything else he says about God's commands in the Torah if this is what he was supporting.  That he says that the golden rule summarizes "the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 7:12) shows that this is not the foundation or clarity of Mosaic Law, but the other way around.  Mosaic Law with all of its specific prohibitions and punishments is the foundation of the golden rule!  Leave it to evangelicals to misunderstand the most fundamental, deep things about a Biblical issue, though.  There is not one thing about Christian theology or rationalistic philosophy, the truths of the latter being the intrinsic foundation of all things, that evangelicals will not misunderstand at least in part.  Assumptions, contradictions, and vagueness are the hallmarks of their philosophical ideas and beliefs.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/we-are-getting-what-our-deeds-deserve.html

Movie Review--The Ring Two (Unrated Edition)

"Evelyn wasn't well.  She had been having problems during the pregnancy: hallucinations, visions.  She believed some thing had come for her baby from the waters of the world beyond this one."

--Nun, The Ring Two

Japanese director Hideo Nakata helmed The Ring Two after he directed the original Japanese film Ring and after the American remake called The Ring was released under a different director.  While neither being a sequel nor having a director of a particular nationality making a movie for an audience halfway across the world by necessity damns a film to fall short of its potential, The Ring Two is by no means as well-crafted as The Ring.  Wooden or halfhearted acting (if some of the cast members cannot do better than this, then they are not cut out for acting), a more generic attempt to explore Samara, and dialogue that neither brings more philosophical weight nor reveals deep characterization all keep The Ring Two mediocre at best.  Not even the usually talented Naomi Watts saves this movie.  As for this review covering the unrated edition, a movie only has to not have an extended cut rated by the MPAA to have an unrated edition, yes, but the unrated version of a horror film is usually supposed to add more explicitly violent or macabre content, and there is no indication from just watching this edition of The Ring Two that anything belonging in these categories was added unless it is only a few second long.

Production Values

There was an (for me) almost surprising lack of effects needed to tell the story of this sequel, though putting the focus on the cast is not something that elevates the movie.  On the contrary, from Emily VanCamp, who became an MCU actress but whose younger self is in The Ring Two, to Naomi Watts herself, the actresses and actors here are mostly bland or needlessly detached in their performances.  With respect to Naomi Watts and how she is so much more expressive and well-realized in something like Peter Jackson's King Kong, Perhaps the difference is because of the respective directorial styles and input of Peter Jackson and Hideo Nakata.  In either case, though King Kong and The Ring Two both came out in 2005 and star Naomi Watts, the latter does not even come close to utilizing her as well.  Unfortunately, it does not utilize its other cast members well either--especially in a film with abysmal to mediocre acting, David Dorfman as Aidan Keller, the son of Naomi Watts' character, is pitiful compared to the child actors of several more modern horror movies like It.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A young girl named Emily is shown Samara's cursed videotape by a romantic interest desperate to pass on the death sentence before seven days have passed since he watched it, but Emily holds her hands up over her eyes after being told it is the scariest movie of all time.  Rachel Keller and her young son Aidan have moved to escape their traumatic confrontation with Samara, but Rachel sees the face of the boy and momentarily sees Samara grab her.  She enters the house where the death took place, takes the tape linked to Samara out of the VCR, and burns it.  Aidan nonetheless has a nightmare in which Samara emerges from a TV screen to grab him, after which he begins having an aversion to water and seeing Samara.  By burning the tape, Rachel had in a sense released Samara to try to take over Aidan's body to use as her own vessel.

Intellectual Content

In addition to wasting its cast and story, The Ring Two similarly wastes the few more explicitly epistemological or metaphysical issues raised throughout its runtime.  When Rachel is asked if her son's pictures of himself and a mirror that supposedly show Samara (the man asking her has not yet looked at them) prove a ghost is attaching itself to him, she says that "The proof is what will happen."  Of course, future events cannot be proven to be about to happen, as one can only prove that it seems like a specific event will take place out of all the logically possible future occurrences.  Even after such a thing happened, one would not be able to prove that it did occur because there is not a way to prove that one's memory of events is accurate and, more importantly, no event is true by necessity, for only logical axioms, what logically follows from them, and conceptual truths (which are logical truths pertaining to specific concepts beyond just the laws of logic) are inherently true and none of them are events.  Another idea that could have been explored more is a reference to how Samara's mother supposedly feared an afterlife of water and a sea demon affiliated with it--this also is relegated to a single scene, but the lore potential and hypothetical metaphysics held much promise.

Conclusion

Gore Verbinski's The Ring does an admirable job of adapting foreign source material to a Western style while maintaining a PG-13 rating.  The Ring Two loses most of what made the lore of the first one unique and does little to nothing with its characters.  Lead actress Naomi Watts is not at her best, and the script is weak.  Samara herself is both less mysterious (which is not always negative on its own) and far more generic than before.  There is no particular reason for there to actually be a sequel in the first place when the content and execution is so lackluster at best.  Moreover, even the unrated edition of The Ring Two has scarcely anything to make its mark as a horror film, as its horror elements are extremely weak in a thematic and presentational sense, and generic practically the whole way through.  The Ring series only went downhill after the first entry.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Blood comes out from under a door in one scene, but the majority of the content related to violence is just Samara grabbing a struggling victim or Rachel trying to force Samara underwater to drown her.

 2.  Profanity:  For a movie over two hours long and one that is unrated, there is not much profanity here.  Still, some profanity like a use of "fucking" is used.

Intangible Assets

At least some in the business world have realized that not all things a company can use to further its successes are physical.  No one can grasp or physically see employee morale, consumer brand recognition, and so on because they are objectively nonphysical.  The phrase intangible assets often specifically refers to such things like positive consumer attitudes, brand recognition, and intellectual property as opposed to something like a production facility or land.  This phrase is entrenched enough in business language for it to not be unfamiliar to people who have thoroughly scrutinized business terminology, but precise enough to not be a phrase or a concept that everyone interested in business would naturally think about.  All the same, there are a handful of ways that this phrase and the idea behind it connect with vital philosophical truths and issues.

To clarify, no one needs to think about examples of immateriality in business in order to think about, discover, and understand ideas pertaining to metaphysical immateriality and materiality and the epistemology of proving or disproving them.  However, the concept of intangible assets is also something that could be easily overlooked by businesspeople, some of them naturalists, who use the phrase without ever actually thinking about its actual veracity or ramifications.  Business transactions actually require some forms of intangible assets like consumer willingness to purchase or recognition of company brand, while a few intangible assets like software differ significantly from the ones I will focus on.  

Brand recognition, for instance, is just a reaction of familiarity, or a state of mind within a person's consciousness, and goodwill is just an attitude extended by one person to another, which also makes it a state of consciousness.  In other words, these particular intangible assets that have been identified by some in the business world are just situational aspects of consciousness.  Consciousness, as an immaterial thing that might or might not ultimately spring from a certain arrangement of matter [1]--and that might also be what matter is sustained by on a constant basis, not that any person with my limitations could prove either possibility--and specific mental states like familiarity with a company's work or logo are part of the the experiences specific people.

In other words, some intangible assets are qualities of an individual's consciousness, of something other than themselves, instead of separate things with their own immateriality.  They are neither physical things, for all physical things are tangible at least under certain circumstances, nor immaterial things with the same kind of metaphysical separateness as empty space, time, or the laws of logic, none of which are qualities of other things although there are logically necessary relationships between them and other things.  In the same way that emotions are immaterial despite potentially being accompanied by bodily reactions but could only possibly exist as part of a whole consciousness, the intangible assets like brand recognition or consumer appreciation are merely fragments of something more fundamental that is also immaterial.

In addition to the exact metaphysical nature of such intangible business assets, there is also the fact that there might be plenty of businesspeople who use the phrase intangible assets and knowingly accept the concept as true while simultaneously believing that everything is made of or causally reduces to physical matter.  Naturalists, like everyone except a perfectly consistent rationalist, are capable of not only making true or false assumptions, but of believing in contradictory, exclusive notions.  I do not mean these businesspeople necessarily embrace a strict metaphysical naturalism which would entail that nothing at all that is immaterial exists or could exist, which is already demonstrably false, but a more naturalistic approach to something like consciousness according to which an immaterial thing like a mind can is brought into existence by something material (the brain and/or extended nervous system).

Again, no one needs to specifically focus on the deeper metaphysics of intangible assets to understand immateriality, consciousness, or matter, but these other subjects do dictate the nature of this aspect of business although many in the business world might completely ignore it, as well as ignore the numerous other ways that business, which many pursue with practical intentions in mind, is inescapably intertwined with philosophy.  Not everything that a company can use to its benefit is physical because not everything is physical.  That some immaterial things exist is not purely speculative, but an objectively demonstrable fact, with consciousness being not only one of the immaterial things that can be proven to exist by logical necessity as long as there is any thought or perception, but also one of the only things that can be proven to exist in the first place.

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

The Nature Of Hearsay (Part 2)

Unless someone articulates logical truths that anyone could realize by looking directly to reason, there is no such thing as that person making claims that are truly knowable.  However, this would not involve claiming that any particular event of the last happened except for the logically necessary creation of the cosmos by the uncaused cause [1] happened because there is no way to demonstrate any other particular event has actually took place.  Current events and history alike have this epistemological barrier separating one from this aspect of reality.  There are numerous ways, though, that many non-rationalists cling to double standards when it comes to which events of the historical timeline or present day that they believe, despite how they never have proof of these conclusions, only subjective persuasion, consensus, or random assumptions to fallaciously hold onto.

In part one of this series, I addressed the epistemological stupidity of belief in hearsay, all hearsay, not just random, possible but unprovable events that a person one subjectively likes says happened, as well as the relationship of this fact to both how one should live in light of the abundance of hearsay about serious matters and to the evidence for Christianity.  Here, I will focus on the utter hypocrisy of almost everyone who believes in hearsay.  Believing or disbelieving hearsay is epistemologically irrational in itself, but most people who situationally acknowledge certain claims of personal or historical events as hearsay are quick to embrace others as true simply because they are slaves to the fallacies they share with their supposedly honest source.  This is why there are fools who think they can know Fox News is telling the truth as opposed to CNN or vice versa, to give just one example.

It is the idea knowingly or unknowingly expressed when someone says "I trust this news organization is telling me the truth, but not that one."  It is the idiotic notion that one can "know" one news story about logically possible foreign events is true as opposed to another based on subjective persuasion or an assumption (that is all anyone could base their belief it is true or false in), or that one can be justified in believing without absolute logical proof instead of mere words.  If one newspaper reports that a natural disaster struck a country on the other side of the world and another reports that the disaster never occurred, how could one possibly know which is correct?  Either one could be true or could have been true, but only one can be true at a time.  In no case can one simply know which is the case by hearing or reading the assertion.

Scientists, historians, journalists, news reporters, and everyday people openly talk and act as if they make such assumptions all the time, yet hearsay is epistemologically nothing more than unverifiable and unfalsifiable claims--any logically possible event might have happened, but there is no way to prove it did.  This is no less true of whether someone committed murder five days ago than it is about whether Jesus resurrected almost two thousand years ago.  Hearsay is universally incapable of establishing anything except that there is hearsay.  However, conservatives and liberals, people stupid enough to confuse scientific experiences and the laws of logic, and many other groups of people will hold to obvious double standards when they do believe in hearsay, and rarely does someone consider the evidence for or against an event having happened, distinguish between evidence and proof, and make no assumptions at all about the matter.

When someone thinks that it is impossible to know if a favorite public figure who was accused of murder is guilty but that they can know the accuser is wrong, or thinks that they can know one historian claiming to know the past (instead of just evidences and perceptions suggesting that certain past events happened) is correct and another is wrong, they have added hypocrisy to their irrationality of making even a single assumption in the first place.  What this does not mean that people are irrational to just be honest in stating that they remember certain events happening or that certain events are logically possible or impossible.  On the contrary, recognizing evidences supporting or leading away from various logically possible ideas is entirely compatible with rationalism unless it is mingled with assumptions.

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

The Pleasure Of Food

There are far more foundational and otherwise significant pleasures than food.  Before it is an opportunity for experimentation and pleasure, it is a means of survival first and foremost, and survival is objectively meaningless on its own, without any logical or moral significance.  Although which things people find pleasurable and the exact emotions or sensations they experience while eating or pursuing some other pleasure are subjective, even on a subjective level, food seems to rarely be the pleasure that people in general, given the opportunity to pursue other things, will build their life around.  There are still objective depths to other pleasures that food can never reach no matter what certain individuals or cultural groups feel or believe.

For example, sexuality has a far more abstract nature and far more extensive, precise ramifications, in addition to being more existentially personal, more nuanced, having more moral dimensions, and being more foundational to introspective life.  It is clearly more philosophically significant than food could possibly be since food is a practicality that can be used for reflection and self-exploration, while sexuality is a personal, abstract thing that happens to have practical uses that still never separate from its inherently philosophical nature (all things are philosophical, but some things are deeper than others, and sexuality is far deeper than food).  However, food is still a part of human experience and is still governed by the necessary truths of logic.

That food is not central except to the philosophically secondary practicalities of life does not mean there is no way to enjoy something as basic as food in an overtly rationalistic, existential way.  Food can be a source of great joy, a reminder that human life can have its pleasures even across a lifetime of trials.  Consuming food can be a very personal experience alone or when shared with friends.  Creating it can be an expression of genuine intelligence, emotion, and creativity, and devouring it is a pleasure unique among all others in the method by which it is experienced.  It is just that food is never foundational or significant in any way on its own, but only when it connects with other issues that are themselves foundational, personal, or abstract--except significant as a practical necessity to survival, yet even this is at best secondary to matters of deeper philosophy.

In the context of Christianity, consuming food is yet another experience that God would have prepared the body for so that the mind could appreciate it or even long for it.  The asceticism (an anti-pleasure ideology) of the general evangelical church is actually mistaken for a doctrine of Biblical Christianity when everything from food to sexuality to friendship are pleasures to enjoy within the much larger range of moral freedom than even lifelong Christians often realize the Bible grants--the most all-encompassing restriction is to not violate its actual commands or their logical extensions (see Deuteronomy 4:2).  The body, just as it was fashioned for sexual pleasure, is prepared for the sensory experiences that can be involved in merely eating, and Yahweh is not opposed to intentionally trying to spark or delight in pleasures of the tongue.

Food is still an example of a practical necessity that can be savored in a much deeper way than practicality alone could ever allow for or deserve.  The most foundational and/or highest pleasures all pertain to rationality, autonomy, introspective connection with one's own self, moral stability, deep friendship rooted in rationalism and thorough openness, and so on, the difference being that these are inherently core or existential things that can have practical benefits instead of the other way around, with all truths about them transcending mere convenience.  Food does not even begin to rival these things, and people who think of food as the deepest pleasure of life fail to understand the comparative triviality of something that has no metaphysical, moral, or epistemological primacy.  None of this negates that food is a legitimate pleasure that Christians can appreciate all the more as Christians.

True Egalitarianism

Plenty of people, including many conservatives and liberals, might say they care about treating people fairly, without any discriminatory favor or mistreatment on the basis of gender (or race, age, and so on).  There is no such thing as a rational conservative or liberal--though several ideas associated with each ideology are true--but almost all of them will talk as if and perhaps truly believe that they do not treat people in an arbitrary or inconsistent manner.  They like to think of themselves as rational, just, ideologically and morally consistent people.  However, if someone is a contemporary conservative or liberal all the way through, then they cannot possibly avoid beliefs or treatment of others that are inherently sexist, with the sole exception of someone who takes aspects of liberal gender egalitarianism and remains perfectly consistent with them.

When it comes to gender, many people like to pretend like fairness is expecting women to cover their bodies but not men (and if men were pressured to cover there bodies, this would be consistency in an erroneous direction), women to be affirmed for their beauty and sex appeal and men for their financial stability and physical strength, and men to not notice or care when they are abused by the opposite gender, among many other things.  Only an intellectual insect in the grip of irrational beliefs would ever think any of this could possibly be fair to men and women!  Still, even people who supposedly care about refuting and fighting gender stereotypes might really just care about benefiting only women or only men, which contradicts the entire nature of true egalitarianism.  They might be delusional enough to think some unfortunate personal experience with the opposite gender demonstrates that their gender is the oppressed one and the other gender is not.

Just as Christianity is not true or false or does not entail certain ideas because of one's upbringing or wider experiences, gender egalitarianism having to do with all men/boys and women/girls, recognizing the philosophically false ideas of all gender stereotypes, and liberating everyone from gender stereotypes does not depend on anyone's personal life experiences.  Gender egalitarianism is not about women or men, but about people and their individuality and shared humanity, and gender egalitarianism is demonstrably true, whether or not some man or woman has experienced victimization that, if they were not rationalistic, would motivate them to embrace assumptions, hypocrisies, and outright falsehoods.  The events of our lives do not make egalitarianism about just men or just women, as some pretend.

People who will not focus on the issues of egalitarianism themselves, which are grounded in and revealed by reason, without getting past their own personal background and preferences are goddamn fools, especially since it takes no more than a moment or two to fully understand why someone's gender and personal history have nothing to do with whether gender egalitarianism is philosophically true as opposed to misandry or misogyny--egalitarianism is not only opposed to one or the other.  The random experiences of people do not make egalitarianism true; it is true by logical necessity on its own (and I am not even talking about strictly moral egalitarianism, but metaphysical egalitarianism).  The trauma women and men have had forced upon them by an irrational, unjust society does not negate the destructive ideas and behaviors thrust upon the opposite gender.

True egalitarianism is not dictated by how one feels about one's own gender or the other one, or by as how one has been treated by one gender of the other.  People who think themselves egalitarians while they ignore or do not care about how issues like sexual consent or leadership are about both men and women are just as stupid, blind, and hypocritical as the idiot who thinks they understand Christianity while believing in evangelicalism or who thinks they are deeply rational without being a rationalist.  People who call or think themselves egalitarians while privately or outwardly favoring one gender over the other, when they reveal the evidence of this stupidity, can of course be refuted and mocked with pleasure, for personal humiliation and social ostracization might be the only things that grab the attention of the irrational.

A Teacher's Payment

There is no practical, personal, or, more foundationally, moral or otherwise explicitly philosophical reason to want to work professionally, except in rare cases where this kind of work provides an escape from extreme boredom, other than receiving payment or other benefits in exchange for time and effort.  Professional work is in itself nothing more than a means to the end of earning enough money to survive or finance a life of greater comfort, security, or luxury.  While there still could and would be tasks to do in the absence of professional work, there would be no reason at all for people to devote so much of their lives to companies if it was not out of necessity (necessity in the sense that if they do not want to survive via more direct means like personally growing their own food, walking around without personal transportation, and so on, they must earn money).

Some professions pay more than others, and not always in a way that reflects their comparative importance for the stability of society or for their usual lack of philosophical depth.  Athletes can be paid incredibly high amounts of money to primarily just perform roles in sports games that, aside from things like occasionally helping the poor escape poverty due to physical ability, are meaningless on their own despite the rabid obsession with them in many circles, while people doing far more objectively helpful or substantive things in their professional jobs might be paid far less.  The usefulness or depth to a job is of course the only valid kind of criteria for cultural norms to associate it with higher or lower compensation respectively.

In addition to having comparatively low pay for their true scope or philosophical significance or even just usefulness, some jobs or industries truly do involve workplace exploitation relating to compensation.  In the case of teaching for public schools (though this is not a philosophically important job in itself because logical truths are the only things that cannot be false and all people can access all knowable logical truths without education to prompt this awareness), the exploitation on the side of payment is sometimes greatly exaggerated.  Those who have to deal with school shootings or violence, sexual harassment from students they can hardly discipline, and so on certainly do have an actual reason to hope for better pay as they risk their lives, or health (physical or mental), but anyone who considers how many months of the year a standard teacher is actually required to work has what they need to understand why it is perfectly fair to give starting teachers a smaller starting salary than plenty of other year-round jobs.

For a profession that is meant to not have any work for practically an entire season of the year, teaching in public schools does have pay that can be very fair for the actual time of the year a teacher spends working, albeit not counting the additional hours some teachers might get pressured to work at some schools off the clock.  With summers free, they can pursue other paid work or choose to have the season off; in and of itself, the lower yearly pay is because teaching does not inherently involve working during all months of the year.  Teachers can indeed be expected to do more than their pay and contracts call for, but smaller annual pay for only working in the spring, fall, and part of the winter is not workplace exploitation.

There are legitimate problems about teaching as a job in America that need to be addressed for the sake of safety and fairness.  Paying less each year for less months/days of work a year is not among them.  Negotiating starting pay in light of previous experiences or special skills can help offset this at the beginning anyway, with eventual raises lessening the issue.  However, there is nothing irrational or unjust about simply paying someone less for fewer total months of work than people in almost every other profession regularly work on a yearly basis.  This is in no way the kind of workplace exploitation that teachers and those with other jobs do actually face.  Confusing things that are not problematic with what is irrational and exploitative is even one of the best ways to distract people from focusing on the graver issues of contemporary teaching.

Examples Of Linguistic Ambiguity

It is an easily demonstrable logical fact that there is no inherent meaning to words.  Whatever truths there are are true and every concept is the concept that it is no matter what symbols and sounds are assigned to them, but every linguistic system has intrinsically random starting points and even millennia of linguistic conventions do not change the fact that the only things words mean are what the user intends by them--if language is arbitrary, and inescapably so, then there is no such thing as a meaning of a sound or a set of characters that is fixed or inherent.  Words do have objective meaning: they objectively mean whatever the speaker or writer means by them!  Someone can use language inconsistently and thus be a horrible communicator in ways that might reflects their incoherent worldview, and not trying to match up one's intended meaning with what other people seem to mean by words hinders effective communication, but the words of others are ambiguous.

This goes far beyond what many people will ever realize regarding language, and still there are examples of just how ambiguous even casual language can be.  Not only are there sentences used by people all the time that lack the precision or completeness that some might think they have, all while somewhat conveying the right idea, but there are also sentences that actually lack practically any clarity about which of multiple things is being communicated.  Consider the following question: "Do you see the girl with the telescope?"  Anyone could mean anything by their words and you would never know exactly what the intended meaning of words are with absolute certainty unless they are your own words (or unless you are omniscient), but there are two specific things this sentence could mean within conventional English norms.  This question might be asking if someone used a telescope to see a girl or if someone has noticed a girl holding or using a telescope.  Which of these two options is correct or even more likely?

From this one sentence alone, it is utterly impossible to decipher which of the two is even probably meant.  If this was spoken in the context of two people interacting in person, there would be visual clues that could help point towards one intended meaning or the other, but in written form, it is literally impossible for either meaning to be more probable than the other.  Yes, people can use words to further explain their words.  This is always an option for anyone who can speak or write.  Words are all that humans have to at least try to communicate anything deeper or more abstract than outward behaviors.  In actuality, even stares, glances, gestures, and other physical actions rely on prior linguistic familiarity between people in many cases for them to even come to realize what the other person likely means by their motions or facial expressions.  Still, the words of others are hopelessly ambiguous to some extent universally and to a greater extent in particular sentences like the previous example.

Another example, though, is the sentence "She fed her cat food."  Is this referring to a woman feeding another female human cat food or feeding pet food to her own cat?  Again, you could never know just from the words themselves.  Unlike the previous example, this is a past tense statement rather than a present tense question, so there would be even fewer non-linguistic clues as to the meaning if this sentence came up in an in-person conversation.  One could not necessarily just point to or see the event being described unless it had just happened in view of the witnesses.  The gulf between minds also prevents someone from just knowing what other people intend by their words.  What a person means here, without further verbal elaboration or direct observation of the event in question, is hopelessly ambiguous, though of course the inability to know what other minds are specifically thinking prevents one from truly knowing what someone means even with these additional interpretive aids.

These two simple sentences alone show that the uncertainty of language is not something that only rationalists have to encounter; it is already present in everyday conversations and writings even if non-rationalists completely ignore it or assume that most uses of language are not really ambiguous.  Language is totally secondary at best to logic, concepts, introspection, and other things like morality and scientific laws that it can refer to, but the need to communicate far more precisely with others than gestures, looks, and actions could ever allow for makes language an integral part of social life.  Those who do not recognize the ambiguity of language used by other people are more likely to conflate words with the concepts and truths they refer to, misunderstand other people's statements (though one can never know for sure what other people mean by their words, everyone can know what they seem to mean, but this takes effort beyond what many are willing to invest), and ignore truths at the heart of the very nature of language.  Neither knowledge of truth nor usefulness comes from this.

Overbearing Parents

No matter what they say, it is as obvious as it could be from outward actions and the implications of professed beliefs that many parents, including Christian parents, enjoy the power of arbitrarily enforcing their own subjective whims on their children simply because they can.  They insist and might even truly believe that in being arbitrary, hypocritical, and emotionalistic, they are training their children for adulthood and to maybe become parents themselves.  In one sense, this is great "training" to encourage children to become just as philosophically inept and egoistic as many parents really are: most adults put on a facade of intellectual and emotional maturity, but in truth it is easy to get them to contradict themselves or to find pettiness and assumptions and selfishness in their worldviews.  Many adults are overt fools who appear to take the opportunity to exercise power as they subjectively wish to in order to feel existentially justified or to fit in with others.

Evangelical Christians generally excel at this, prohibiting their children from a whole range of Biblically innocent activities in complete violation of Biblical commands themselves all because of subjective conscience and church traditions or broader cultural norms (as is so often the case, Deuteronomy 4:2 refutes many evangelical moral ideas).  Secular parents also can easily excel at this in perhaps differing ways, pressuring their children to pursue academics or athletics to the point of burnout, depression, or being distracted from things like rationalism and friendship.  These are manifestations of the arrogance that drives most irrationalistic parents, the desire to twist a separate human being into an extension of their will.  Since most people are irrationalists, knowingly or unknowingly, most parents are by extension irrationalists of some kind.

The parents who mistakenly think that overwhelming their children with tasks in the name of impressing neighbors, satisfying extended family members, or gratifying their own often random desires for their children's future actually help their children might genuinely be very shocked when their children become shells of themselves, or ironically are too frightened or exhausted to realize their potential where it truly would matter.  With legalistic Christian parents, there is a similar intention to manipulate children into living up to their arbitrary whims, just in a religious moralistic sense rather than one of accomplishment through internships or school or some other achievement that is ultimately meaningless in itself--unless the latter is present alongside the legalism.  Either way, these two types of overbearing parenting already share similarities, as both kinds of parents want their child to appease baseless social expectations or live to please them as parents instead of living to understand reason for its own sake, which leads people to reject authoritarian parenting rather than embrace it.

Both of these parenting styles also can backfire when the child feels driven to do or become the very things that these parenting styles are meant to avoid.  Children burdened with expectations for the sake of reputation or perception by outsiders might yield to inactivity or despair when they are overwhelmed, and children who are pressured to partake in legalism might end up confusing legalism for Christian morality or rejecting Christianity because they do not like their parents.  Regardless of whether the direction they end up going in is positive or negative or what the parents did to "push" them that way, the child has full responsiblity for their own rationality, beliefs, and actions, so nothing they do, good or bad, is ultimately the parents' fault.  Legalism and overworking people are each irrational because of their own nature, not because of potential outcomes in how they impact people's lives, but it remains true that overbearing parents, Christian or not, are literally too stupid to realize how they are sabotaging some of their own parenting goals by clinging to these errors or arrogances.  Not only are these ideas either false by necessity or at the very least epistemologically invalid (no one could be justified in believing them anyway because they would be unprovable and only held to because of assumptions or preferences), but the likely consequences do not even align with the intended goals.

I have seen children and adults alike get overwhelmed by irrational, overbearing parents, parents who would deserve mockery and contempt for their philosophical idiocy and for expecting anything else to be the probable outcome of their parenting methods than the distress of their children.  However, no one needs examples to realize this, for it is a matter of logical necessity and proof that can be discovered without personally living under an egoistic, idiotic parent and without directly observing such parents in other families, though one will almost always be prompted to discover these logical truths by reflecting on some sort of general social experience.  Overbearing parents could at any time recognize their sheer folly, but that would put them in a situation where they would have to give up a way of life they are accustomed to, the false or assumed philosophical stances behind it, and perhaps feelings of power or importance they derive from that lifestyle.  Very few people are willing to do this no matter how invalid or even personally restricting the alternative is.

The Laziness Of Irrationalism

There is a very specific reason why irrationality is the default from which reason and rationality (with reason being the actual laws of logic and the truths grounded in them and rationality being someone's grasp of reason) must be voluntarily chosen.  Irrationality takes little to no effort, and rationality requires the effort to initially change, even if it can quickly become so familiar that it does not take any significant amount of effort to persist in afterward.  Since irrationality involves holding to assumptions or believing in contradictions or non sequiturs, it can be random, selective, driven by emotion, or so thoughtless that it only involves thought in the bare minimum sense that one cannot believe anything without some degree of conscious reflection, however shallow or false those beliefs might be.  If irrationality is the default for all who have not intentionally pursued the necessary truths and absolute certainty of reason, then it is obvious why there are far more irrational people than those who recognize and cherish reason as it is: it takes effort and depth to be rationalistic, and errors, ignorance, and emotionalism can be very comforting.

It is automatically more likely for most people to be irrational because it takes little to no effort at all to not avoid assumptions, to not care about transcendent necessary truths, to not be perfectly consistent, to not live in accordance with rationalistic knowledge, and to not look to reason to discover whatever precise, deep truths about reality that one can.  To be holistically rationalistic, one must be willing to put thorough effort into restructuring one's worldview to reflect the inherent truths of logic, to stay devoted to the truth even at great personal expense, and to orient one's thoughts, words, and actions, around these truths instead of selectively acknowledging them after they are discovered.  Very few are willing to even start the latter because of what it ultimately entails, while irrationality is the default, for until one has forsaken assumptions in favor of logical truths, the process of which is always a voluntary, conscious thing, one is a slave to assumptions, contradictions, apathy, or ignorance--or all four at once.

Although the worldviews and priorities of most or even all people could change all of the sudden, it is extremely improbable that this will occur, and, indeed, the vast majority of people across all of recorded human history never came anywhere close to rationalism.  At most, they happened to subjectively care about a given subject enough to make fewer assumptions, to think about it more directly, or to haphazardly end up at a certain true conclusion without actually knowing why, if this conclusion truly is knowable in the first place, this truth could not be any other way.  Even if a non-rationalist is right about something, they either do not know or do not cling to the inerrant truth of logical axioms that all things hinge on, so they are at best still highly irrational.  To ignore logical axioms that everything and everyone already relies on metaphysically and epistemologically, a person must in one sense try to avoid facing the inescapable core of reality.

But when someone does not discover or understand the inherent truth of logical axioms and what follows from them, he or she is not truly a rational person anyway.  The laziness of belief in irrationalism is not the most fundamental motivation behind it, as that would be stupidity, but philosophical laziness is indeed how many non-rationalists express their deluded priorities.  Of course, many of them are still desperate to be regarded and treated as if they actually are rational, which is a hypocrisy rationalists can exploit to humiliate them into silence.  Even manipulating them into silence by means of embarrassment will not likely lead to them giving up their intellectual laziness, though.  After all, it is inherently easier for a non-rationalist to put little effort or no effort at all into even thinking about deeper matters of reality at all, much less thought without assumptions.  Their laziness, selfishness, and irrationality nonetheless do not change the truth or knowability of logical axioms and what follows from them.  Their laziness just becomes such a comfortable expression of irrationality that they do not want to separate themselves from it.

Better Is Not Always Good

Murdering one person, if murder is immoral, is objectively far better than murdering nine people--but murdering anyone at all would not be good or excusable in the slightest if this is indeed the case.  Better is not always good, and less erroneous is not the same as true.  There are numerous ramifications of this spanning epistemology, ethics, art, politics, as well as the comparative qualities of individuals and companies.  Never once is being better than something else enough to make an idea true or a behavior or motivation good unless it is already true or good because of its own nature.  Unsurprisingly to any rationalist with a extensive experience conversing with others, many people are still perfectly content to at least say, even if they at least selectively realize why this cannot possibly make something logically or morally valid, that something being better than another thing makes it good in its own right.

Even though comparisons are not themselves invalid, many things could be misunderstood if a person makes assumptions or lets preferences dictate how they go about comparing things.  That one person is not as cruel as another does not make them righteous; the first person is still cruel and likely unwilling to change no matter what reason and justice demand, clinging to meaningless subjective preferences instead.  If America is in some ways a country with a superior quality of life to that of many other countries, this does not make America a good country, just one that is in some ways better, and perhaps even then one country is better than nother by accident.  That one false concept is not as foundational in its error as another or that one epistemologically invalid belief involves fewer assumptions than another cannot make either of the former things valid.  A lesser degree of error, stupidity, or evil is still error, stupidity, or evil.

There are many examples of ideologies, workplaces, nations, and individuals who are better than some other example from their own categories, and yet mere superiority does not mean something is true, rational, or good.  It only means one thing has less falsity or injustice than something else.  For people to sometimes seem to genuinely think that one thing is good only because it lacks some of another thing's negative qualities or has them to a lesser extent, they completely ignore the nature of something itself by focusing not on what it is actually like, but on what something else is like by comparison.  While irrational people could do this with everything from epistemologies to art and beyond, one of the most common specific contexts one might find this backwards priority on comparison in America would be politics.

The earlier example of America is one that might come up over and over as conservatives in particular assert that being better than a country like North Korea or China makes America a shining light on a hill, when being superior to some of the worst nations of the era does not mean America possesses its own genuinely positive qualities.  This means such conservatives are too lazy to try to even understand the country they claim to love or it means that they might be aware that there is little to wholeheartedly praise about America, but they are stupid enough to base that praise on meaningless subjective approval.  Politics in general is a great arena in which one can see this fallacy ensnare minds, since so many people allow political assumptions instead of more foundational philosophical truths to dictate their general philosophical stances, personal priorities, and treatment of others, just not the only one.

There are many ways that someone might fall into the fallacies of thinking that just because one thing is better than another, it is good in itself, and there are just as many ways that thorough rationalists will avoid this breed of error.  A rational person will never think highly of conscience-based moral epistemology just because it does not immediately contradict itself like relativism and anti-realism do (anti-realism would still have to be true, and if truth exists, it cannot be true that nothing at all exists).  A rational person will never think that a company is good just because the pay, conditions, and leaders are worse somewhere else, just better by comparison.  A rational person will never think an individual or a nation is righteous just because someone else is or could be more cruel, more hypocritical, more arrogant, more emotionalistic, or more apathetic towards truth.  Better is not always good, and when it comes to people, being better than others is not the goal of a rationalist; it is a byproduct of sincerely, consistently pursuing rationalistic and moral perfection.

The Misleading Phrase "Social Sciences"

Social sciences and social studies are phrases that get used as if they refer to genuinely separate issues, when one is at most a subset of the other, and the two are so clearly related that only the delusions of looking to linguistic phrases instead of concepts and truths themselves would lead someone to think they are actually distinct.  The words "social sciences" are further misleading because sociology, the investigation of how humans interact with each other on the level of miniscule communities or massive civilizations and every cultural size in between, is not itself concerned with science.  Laws of nature like gravity, unless scientific laws were to unexpectedly change (which is entire possible since only the laws of logic are true and fixed by necessity), will act the same on a certain inanimate object and environment, and even on the physical bodies of conscious beings.  I cannot prove and thus cannot know that a pencil or bottle will fall to the ground if I drop it just as I remember being the case before, since it is not logically necessary that scientific laws will remain static, but I can know with absolute certainty that if this kind of metaphysical change does not occur and nothing about a set of circumstances changes, the exact same initial physical events will lead to the exact same subsequent events.

People, however, are not inanimate objects, or at least I know with absolute certainty that I myself am conscious; other minds might or might not exist.  Within the mind, there is perception, intentionality, and the capacity to act or not act in various logically possible ways.  A person is not the same as a stone or mountain with no self-guided outward and seemingly no inner thoughts (while most sensory perceptions could be illusions, even if they were not, this would not prove whether or not fellow humans or animals have their own conciousness animating their bodies).  How people behave with each other is a matter of ideology, individualistic personality, and the extent to which they yield to whatever cultural variables are present.  Yes, people act within an environment where the laws of nature are active, but the sociological behaviors and cultural constructs that various societies feature are not scientific in origin.  They are a layer beyond the scientific, and not in the sense of the metaphysically supernatural transcending everything about the universe, but in the sense that they are not driven by scientific laws and that they are created or engaged with by choice.

Like how one must use sensory perceptions to observe weather for scientific purposes, one must use sensory perceptions to observe the outward actions of other people or even to listen to their spoken words, though, like with all things, it is the laws of logic that are epistemologically relied upon to even understand what perceptions are and what does and does not follow from them.  However, science has nothing to do with reflecting on and understanding how humans behave in terms of strictly social behaviors, for they are contingent on there being a culture to interact with and are shaped by factors like worldview and personality, not the laws of nature.  Geography, history, politics, economics, and linguistics are all within the domain of social studies/"sciences," none of which are epistemologically scientific in nature or foundationally grounded in science as opposed to reason.  Regarding the last three things in this list, political systems (not logical truths about political systems, but the actual social institutions themselves), economic systems (again, not logical truths about economics, but whether a country actually practices a certain kind of economic structure), and language are all social constructs, as with businesses and the many arbitrary social norms that span everything from meals to aesthetic trends.  Since science is about the laws of nature, not about arbitrary social constructs and norms--or even the individualistic psychology of how specific people introspectively react to their cultures--sociology is inherently, plainly separate from science.

There is still a connection between science and aspects of sociology, yes.  For instance, although logic is what truly governs both the metaphysical laws of nature and the epistemological scientific method, scientific phenomena dictate the nutritional content in food, which preparation methods result in which kinds of texture or taste, and so on.  What times of day a society pressures people to eat at, which types of food become normalized in a culture, and the economic cost of the physical resources required to obtain and prepare food are not decided by any law of nature.  They are chosen and structured by enough individuals to make them norms on at least smaller community levels, and these people could have ended up creating and practicing different norms.  Meals are a trivial example because they are nowhere near as foundational to the philosophical foundation of cultures as even political or linguistic factors, though there is a relationship between all of them: prices of food can be tied to some extent to politics and there are specific words people come to use in reference to particular food.  Indeed, everything is philosophical and everything that is true or knowable hinges on the abstract, necessary laws of logic, but something like matters like criminal and social justice are far more philosophically significant than what foods people in a society might tend to eat and when.  It is just that food is a great example of how scientific laws and the phenomena they produce are not at all the same as sociological trends.

People's lives are still confined by scientific laws or events such as those pertaining to gravitation, yes.  Within the limitations imposed by gravity, people still can structure a society in any logically possible way, and neither gravity nor any other scientific law can force them to make a culture capitalist or socialist, religious or secular, nationalistic or multicultural.  Sociology, which is the focus of social "science," is not science at all!  History and politics and economics are likewise not scientific subjects, but separate or broader philosophical subjects that themselves have to do with human nature, values, and a more holistic side of metaphysics than the laws of nature are.  Of course, all truth is dictated by reason and all knowledge is accessible because of reason, with science itself at most just presenting subjective sensory perceptions without even containing the means of proving there is a world of matter beyond one's mind to begin with.  It is not the natural world or human civilizations that are the core of all things, grounding the intrinsic truth that all other secondary or contingent things hinge on.  Not even the uncaused cause that directly or indirectly permitted the universe itself to come into existence and thus host human life is the absolute heart of all things.  Only reason holds that place, and by utter necessity; it could not have been any other way.

Producing A Child

With the decision to have children largely celebrated blindly in some communities (ideological or geographical) or condemned as morally heinous by anti-natalists, producing a child is something that there can be very irrational beliefs about.  Quiverfull evangelicals are another group with irrational stances on the issue: whereas anti-natalists are completely against having children and the majority of people who have children seem to only be doing so because socially expects it of them, quiverfull adherents think it is a moral obligation to have as many children as the can, as if the Bible ever so much as implies that is true!  None of these three kinds of incompetent thinkers are anywhere near to understand the real nature and weight of having children.  Philosophically apathetic or unthinking people are of course more likely to have children without proving any grand truths about children to themselves, quiverfull evangelicals are too enslaved to random traditions to distinguish between Christian theology and personal preference or church norms, and anti-natalists think that the mere presence of suffering by necessity means having children is morally wrong.

There is nothing but non-sequiturs for them to hold to, with the conclusion never logically following from the starting premise or the starting premise itself being false or unprovable, or at the very least only believed because of assumptions.  For instance, not only is anti-natalism impossible to believe except on an emotionalistic or assumption-based worldview, but there is the genuine logical possibility that the child's life will have far more happiness in it than suffering, not that emotional or otherwise consequence-based outcomes make something morally good or bad in the first place.  If something is obligatory or morally permissible, then it has that nature no matter how inconvenient or unwanted it is.  At the same time, in a life like this, anyone willing to produce a child who has not seriously thought about the economic conditions into which the child would be brought up, whether the child will become a rationalist, or whether the child will suffer--and made no assumptions along the way while coming to at least some provable truths about the matter--cannot deserve to have children no matter how much it would please them.

Anyone who has or plans to have a child just to appease their own personal desire to have descendants, moreover, is a goddamn fool who wants to bring a separate, seemingly conscious being into existence on a personal whim with no more weight than that.  It is not just people who do not have the resources to raise a child and yet intentionally have one are fools, or people who do not fully desire that their child would become a rationalist one day, and not just to fit in with family worldview (not that many parents are even close to being rationalistic anyway).  It is people who think that something as major as purposefully bringing another person into existence should be done because the parent(s) experience some sort of loneliness, desire to conform to blind social pressures to have children, or just a longing to have a child for the sake of having a child who are irrational as well.  Unless at a minimum humanity was literally about to go extinct and humans have moral value, rushing to produce another conscious (or seemingly conscious) person is absolutely irrational no matter what the motivation is.

No one can know if other minds exist because they perceive other people to act in ways that suggest they too are conscious.  They can, still, know their own consciousness, and when it comes to having children, it would be very easy for many people to suddenly forget about all of the many obstacles to flourishing that can be found in this world or the existential and moral aspects to creating another conscious being, especially in light of the fact that human preferences do not in any way morally legitimize something or make it evil.  Anti-natalists could not possibly know if they are correct in their central conclusion, but people like "quiverfull" evangelicals and those who would have children just because other people do are no less stupid in their assumptions, contradictions, and egoism.  Producing a child is either way a far more serious and nuanced matter than this trio of fools is intelligent enough to see.  It is something to be done, if done intentionally, with great rationalistic awareness, care, and stability.

The Real Immediate Context Of Isaiah's Virgin Birth Prophecy

It would likely shock almost all readers of Isaiah 7:14, the famous verse proclaiming that the "virgin will be with child" and that calls this child Immanuel, to find that the verses around it do not have any hint of a Messianic prophecy in their context.  Much later in the Bible, Matthew 1:18-23 says that Jesus was called Immanuel and born to the virgin Mary after a supernatural conception, citing Isaiah 7:14 specifically and stating that Jesus fulfilled this verse's prophecies.  Matthew does not quote Isaiah 7:15 and attribute temporary moral ignorance to Jesus, nor does it mention that Isaiah having sex with a prophetess who gave birth to a son in Isaiah 8:3-4 seems to be a fulfillment of the virgin birth prophecy as well.  The Bible uses Matthew to reveal that there is supposed to be another layer to the prophecy.

It is also true that in this case, there is absolutely no way to tell ahead of time that Isaiah 7:14 is supposed to be a Messianic prophecy, which is not at all an internal contradiction within Christian tenets.  From the start, the Old Testament prophecies that apply or seem to apply to Jesus are often either highly vague, moreso than general language typically is, or do not appear to refer to a Christological figure whatsoever in themselves.  Now, it is still logically possible for a text to have been intended to predict one thing but also to have been intended to refer to something else (or to happen to overlap with a second thing without someone initially knowing), so this is not a philosophical impossibility, but it does prove that there is little to no "obviousness" in Christ's fulfillment of prophecy within the Biblical narrative until his fulfillment of it is mentioned.

In fact, certain prophecies about the Second Coming made in the New Testament are far clearer, for even the famous passage about how a "virgin will be with child" says nothing about a supernatural virgin birth without a father and gives no indication that a distant coming of a Messiah is in view.  That Isaiah 7:15-16 even says that the boy born to this unspecified virgin woman (men can be virgins too, so it is idiotic to only use the term for one gender or the other as modern culture often has) will learn to know right and wrong, hardly the near-omniscience that Jesus is said to possess in the gospel accounts, and this would mean Jesus was not morally sound/aware until a certain time had passed!  Jesus is very plainly presented as not being omniscient before his death, specifically claiming to not know the hour of his return--which is one of the handful of very blatant Biblical clues that Jesus cannot literally be Yahweh, only a separate metaphysical entity--but never is Jesus said in the gospels to not know Yahweh's moral nature.

All of this is only problematic for evangelicalism due to its persistent, holistic deviation from the actual philosophical ideas taught in the Bible.  A fitheistic evangelical terrified to abandon theological stances they accepted because of tradition, peer pressure, and mere personal assumptions will find if they are willing to look past assumptions that Isaiah 7 is in no way some clear prophecy of Jesus; it is just that this aspect of what the text says has literally nothing to do with whether Jesus existed, had a divine nature, resurrected, or is accurately described in the four Biblical gospels.  Of course, just like scientific experiences and the seeming existence of other minds, historical evidences cannot be proven to be anything more than potential illusions anyway, so I am not saying that anyone can know the gospel accounts are accurate any more than they can know if a tree they are staring at really exists outside of their consciousness.  The truth or falsity of the gospels simply is not tied to whether or not there are clear Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament.

In the case of Isaiah's virgin birth prophecy, there is no indication in the text that anything other than the birth and growth of a human male is being predicted, and this is indeed what the beginning of Isaiah 8 suggests was a direct fulfillment of this, with the virgin just being a woman who had previously never had sex.  That Matthew 1:18-23 says Isaiah 7:14 also applies to Jesus does not contradict or supplant the context of the prophecy in Isaiah's own life, but it does reveal an additional ramification of the prophecy for which there is no evidence whatsoever in the book of Isaiah itself.  Messianic prophecy is often either nuanced or especially ambiguous to a much greater extent than is recognized in the church.  This does not change anything about the metaphysical or moral nature of Christ as put forth in Biblical theology, just pertaining to the level of clarity in even the more famous passages of the Old Testament that the New Testament claims Jesus fulfills.