Movie Review--Antlers

"I just have to feed him, and he'll love me."

--Lucas Weaver, Antlers

The artistically incredible Guillermo Del Toro does not direct Antlers, but he does produce this Scott Cooper-directed, slow burn horror tale that continues the trend of recent elevated horror as it mostly transcends jumpscares, shallow characterization, and undeveloped themes.  Antlers relies on a dark atmosphere with little that is strictly horror-related until closer to the end, and the buildup focuses on very personal ways that family, abuse, and trauma can intersect.  Although Antlers could have done more with its wendigo premise earlier on (the trailers and other promotional material gave the wendigo part away back in 2020 before the film was delayed), it does indeed succeed at reflecting the genuine brokenness that abuse brings as a child and adult with lives shattered by predatory family members live their own lives, interact, and are drawn into a seeming Native American myth.  The monsters, at first, are poverty, the emotional suffering that can long outlast abuse, and an air of hopelessness, and it is in this context that the actual creature of the story is revealed.

Production Values

The monster of the film is actually not on the screen very much, which sidesteps the need for a high reliance on either CGI or practical creature effects.  Scott Cooper shows consistent restraint, leaving the wendigo almost never fully onscreen until the very end--parts of it like its limbs or antlers are shown otherwise.  This leaves the creature more visually mysterious for a longer period in addition to reducing the need for practical or digital effects.  The movie could have benefited from the wendigo playing a bigger role between the opening and the climax as well as from the wendigo getting more of an explanation than the single scene of dialogue over it offers, but the wendigo, when directly exposed to the camera, looks rather distinct from other culturally visible examples of wendigos in entertainment (like the ones in the video game Until Dawn).

Human drama is the focus leading up to and during the climax.  The two main characters are a young boy named Lucas and his teacher, a woman played by Keri Russell.  Keri Russel's Julia is a shining example of a positive teacher character in an entertainment landscape that tends to get more out of negative teacher characters--though both are needed, of course.  Russel lets viewers see how the abuse of Julia's childhood has reshaped her life with everything from her conflicted glances at alcohol in a store to her clever way of getting Lucas to open up after buying him ice cream.  Lucas himself is portrayed by Jeremy T. Thomas in a child performance that is at least on par with those of It: Chapter One.

Jesse Plemons (Judas and the Black Messiah) might not be as central a character as Julia and Lucas, but, playing Julia's brother, he delivers the solemnity of a traumatized abuse victim well, especially in one particular scene with him and Keri Russell.  Despite his smaller role, he, Russel, and Thomas are the key intersection of the themes of Antlers and its characters.  It is unfortunate that Graham Greene, the Native American actor who plays a character familiar with Algonquin stories, does not have a larger role in a movie about an Algonquin cryptid, but at least his grim delivery and description of wendigos is not given in vain.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A mysterious entity attacks two men in a mine, one of which is revealed to have gone back to his home and children only to succumb to a strange condition, reduced to a state of ravenous hunger and aggression.  His son Lucas draws the attention of his teacher Julia when she recognizes signs of possible abuse at home, recalling her own abuse at the hands of the father.  Lucas brings his own father fresh meat as the latter behaves more and more like a non-human animal, eventually sprouting antlers and shedding his human form for a much more foreign body.

Intellectual Content

In the background of Antlers, there is a cautionary tale about exploitation of the physical world, something mentioned at the beginning when it is said that the wendigo is unleashed as a reaction to humanity's gratuitous plundering of nature.  However, this is not developed very much after the opening scene, as abuse and the potentially complicated nature of family are given almost all of the focus after this point.  The two main characters Julia and Lucas are examined as they grapple with different kinds of harmful family dynamics, which is made more nuanced with the fact that Lucas's father is not even dangerous to him until the wendigo inhabits his body.  It is actually Julia's brother, although he is a comparatively secondary character, who helps communicate specific truths about abuse.  We see Julia have a flashback to the sexual abuse her father inflicted on her, but nothing is shown and little is said of her brother's past, leading to a moment where she speaks to him as if her abuse from their father was worse than his.

"You have no idea what he did to me," he tells Julia.  With this single line, Julia's brother conveys the piercing truth that not every person who does not speak of facing past abuse has gone through life without actually facing it.  Moreover, the circumstance of this character being a brother instead of a sister helps normalize recognizing male victims of abuse in cinema as not necessarily having been abused less just just because they are male.  There is also the more nuanced portrayal of Lucas's father not being abusive or neglectful until the wendigo possesses him: even after he is first possessed by the ravenous spirit, he actually sets up multiple locks on his door to separate himself from his children, something that a malicious parent would not do.  More could have come from some of these themes and plot points, but Antlers takes abuse very seriously while still managing to depict the shared, fractured humanity in victims and abusers alike.

Conclusion

Like Hereditary, The Witch, The Monster, and other such excellent horror films of recent years that focus on the ways a family can collapse, Antlers does not hesitate to show the grief and danger that family can be the source of.  It really is more of a character story than a horror tale about a wendigo, but that is not necessarily a problem for a movie like this.  Just do not expect any of the comedy that has even become standard in horror, for there is not so much as a smile or joke to be found in any scene that I can think of.  Antlers does not try to water down the gravity of its subject matter.  In a film market flooded with both clever and unneeded attempts at humor, this film has the chance to stand out all the more.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  A handful of characters are killed by a wendigo onscreen or offscreen.  In one case, a man possessed by the wendigo spirit bites a living person shortly before antlers emerge from his throat.  His corpse is found burst open later on.

 2.  Profanity:  Occasionally, words like "shit" are used.

The Prophet Nathan's Story

2 Samuel 11 describes David, the ruler of Israel, commit adultery with Bathsheba and attempt to manipulate her husband Uriah into having sex with her to conceal his involvement in a potential pregnancy.  When Uriah refuses to go home and sleep with his wife after being temporarily recalled to Jerusalem from active warfare, even after David gets him drunk (though that would mean his wife would have exploited him if she was not drunk, not that most people are anything more than sexist hypocrites when it comes to the morality of sex under the influence of drugs or alcohol), David arranges to have him abandoned on the battlefield to be killed by the enemy, tossing aside a righteous man and a seemingly competent soldier to hide his lack of self-control.  Bathsheba mourns her husband, and David marries her--but the final verse of chapter 11 states that David had morally erred even though he made a solid attempt at hiding his sin.

At the very beginning of 2 Samuel 12, immediately after this, the prophet Nathan is said to have approached David with a story.  This story features a rich man and a poor man, the latter of which has a cherished lamb.  The poor man also has children, possibly a wife, food, and a cup, but the text says he had "nothing" else besides this lamb--hyperbole either way, but the point is that he and his family do not have numerous possessions.  In contrast, the rich man has many sheep and cattle, yet when a traveler comes to him, he takes the poor man's lamb and kills it to feed the visitor.  Upon hearing this, perhaps without even knowing if the story is supposed to have actually happened or not, David burns with anger (2 Samuel 12:5) and calls for contradictory things: he wants the death of the rich man, even though monetary punishments or restitution are prescribed for theft of animals by God instead of execution in Exodus 21, and for the rich man to repay the poor man four times over.  Thus far, there is no textual evidence that David was even thinking about how he had used Bathsheba and Uriah like pawns of his personal whims right then, though he was willing to show fury after a story about a far less severe sin.

It is here where Nathan tells David that he is in a sense the very man whom his anger is directed toward (12:7).  The point of Nathan's story is not to retell an identical version of what David had just committed, but to hold up a mirror and let David himself look into it.  The lengths a hypocrite might go to in order to believe they are not an irrational, inconsistent, selfish fool are so great that they genuinely might not think clearly and accurately enough to see that they are the very thing they condemn or hate in others.  Whatever its exact form, a trap often needs to be laid, or else the hypocrite will likely never confront their stupidity, much less admit that they were asinine and inconsistent.  One of the best ways to trap someone like this is by simply getting them to see or admit anything at all that sets up the "killing" strike: verbally pointing out their flaws in a way that is direct and perhaps even public, and then not allowing them to just dismiss the issue and change or misunderstand the charge.

In the case of Nathan's confrontation, David is subtly manipulated into calling for the death of someone for stealing and killing a poor man's lamb, something which is already an unjust reaction according to Exodus 21 and thus the product of emotionalism (when he literally erupts into calling for an unbiblical punishment despite being Yahweh's monarch, he would plainly be an emotionalist).  This kind of anger at the rich man over the loss of a cherished lamb and the need for Nathan to literally tell him "You are that man!" strongly suggest that David did not yet actually realize the folly of wishing death upon someone for a non-capital sin when he has committed two capital offenses.  He committed adultery, arranged for someone to be killed unjustly, and then took the deceased man's wife as his own as if she was a mere object to take and use and not a person with her own marriage and life.

Nathan cleverly changes the events of his story enough for David to lower his guard or seemingly not even suspect anything at all, only to pounce when David reacts out of subjective conscience in an unjust way to a sin that is in some ways trivial compared to his.  David condemns himself by reacting with outrage, only to have Nathan tell him that he is like the man who stole his neighbor's sheep.  In David's case, he has done worse than this fictional man whom he wanted to execute for exploiting the poor like this.  Though he might have struggled inwardly to even realize the enormity of his stupidity and hypocrisy, by verse 13 he openly acknowledges that he has sinned.  If only every hypocrite would come to forsake their double standards and irrationalism this easily!

As long as a person understands the actual commands of the Bible, they do not need any sort of prompting from other people to understand exactly how they have sinned according to Biblical standards in every case where they violate Yahweh's commands.  The way that intentionally relying on other people to point out such obvious, vital things is generally unecessary and irrational is one thing that always needs to be emphasized, but especially in the context of analyzing 2 Samuel 12 in light of how it takes a story crafted by a prophet to penetrate David's layers of self-imposed delusion.  David would never actually need Nathan's story to realize that he had committed major sins by the standards of the Mosaic Law he enforced as a monarch.  He simply avoided the truth until someone else forced him to acknowledge it by giving him the opportunity to condemn himself.

A Philosophically Illegitimate Reason To Oppose Homosexuality

The driving force behind the cultural conflict on the issue of homosexuality is emotionalism on both the conservative and liberal side of the political divide.  Biblical passages that address the subject are taken out of context by both sides or twisted with assumptions in order to subjectively persuade people, logical fallacies are embraced, and personal preferences are treated as moral revelations.  The fact that the Bible does indeed condemn homosexual acts does not mean that the philosophical basis that some Christians who oppose homosexuality use is legitimate.  This issue, like many others, is nuanced beyond what many people, regardless of the positions they allegedly believe, are willing to understand.

Yes, the Bible does condemn homosexual acts and it does prescribe execution for homosexual sex (Leviticus 20:11); yes, whether this is morally good has nothing to do with whether people feel comfortable with it or with how drastically some people would need to change their lives accordingly.  No truth is changed or made true by anyone's preferences.  This means no idea that theological and political conservatives or theological and political liberals would relish is true because it is convenient for their assumptions or preferences.  Whether the full Bible is actually true or not and whether people like it or not, the Bible does oppose homosexual behaviors in multiple passages, even though homosexual acts are far from the most grievous sexual sins (that would be sexual abuse).

At the same time, there are plenty of Christians who seem to just use the Biblical condemnation of homosexual acts, not involuntary or natural homosexual desires, as a smokescreen to hide the fact that they would oppose and despise homosexual behaviors (and in their case, probably the orientation too) out of sheer subjective disgust that ultimately guides their beliefs on the matter rather than reason and the Bible.  The Bible and rationalistic philosophy--one inescapable tenet of which is how feelings do not validate or invalidate an idea--are at best selectively appealed in order to make the primary focus on personal emotions seem sophisticated or epistemologically valid.

These Christians are not ultimately concerned with being rational in their non-Biblical philosophical stances and in their Biblical theology by not making assumptions.  They are instead eager to look down on people with a homosexual orientation because of the epistemological subjectivity of conscience, not because of Biblical teachings.  One evidence for this is how they rarely if ever distinguish between homosexual feelings that might not be wanted and homosexual behaviors that anyone could commit regardless of sexual orientation; the Bible only condemns the latter.  Another evidence for this is how they talk and act as if they would think homosexual behaviors are probably wrong with or without a theistic moral system.

No moral obligation is revealed by the natural world, conscience, consensus, or laws arbitrarily contrived by humans.  Neither homosexual activities nor murder, kidnapping, rape, or any other deed is proven to be obligatory or unjust because of anyone's comfort with it.  Anyone who believes that something is morally right or wrong because of these methods is a fool.  In an ultimate sense, whether moral obligations exist is unprovable and unfalsifiable, but believing in moral obligations because of things like conscience and societal trends is especially asinine.  Ideas about the morality of homosexuality are held to by conservatives and liberals alike on exactly these grounds, though: personal feelings and cultural pressures.

An Unexpected Subject Of Pushback

The ideas that various people reject or cling to, whether they are true or probable or unprovable or demonstrably false, are often in conflict with themselves or the other ideas held to by non-rationalists.  Many of these ideas might even be almost totally ignored by the very people who fallaciously believe them or taken for granted.  This is usually the case with Trinitarianism.  What many people believe about Trinitarianism is unbiblical and more importantly logically impossible inside or outside the context of Christianity, and they seem to casually mention the Trinity here or there without even focusing directly on it for very long, which only means they will not examine their obvious assumptions and contradictions.  Still, the ordinary Trinitarianism with all of its Biblical and even purely logical flaws can be one of the false concepts that is defended the most by people I have met.

Not everyone who has done this even identifies with or believed in many tenets of evangelicalism, however.  As strange as it is, some people I have talked to have pushed back far more against a non-traditional but both logically possible and Biblically valid version of Trinitarianism while not doing the same with everything from the actual Biblical position on erotic media to capital punishments (for more than just murder) to epistemology (it prescribes commitment rather than belief in the unproven).  Even though these other things that they accepted or did not oppose have more to objectively do with how we live and what a person believes about more foundational philosophical issues, for the most part, Trinitarianism was the one they would not easily understand or accept.  This is especially ironic given that the Trinity is not even an idea that has almost any impact on anything about one's worldview or life.

The only issue of utmost importance about the Trinity is realizing that any version of it that is logically impossible is false no matter what the Bible says.  This issue has two main components.  The first of these two things that are of great philosophical significance here is that logical axioms are inherently true regardless of what else is and it is axioms and what follows from them that shape possiblity and necessity, as opposed to anything else, which means anything that contradicts logical axioms like conventional Trinitarianism does is false by default; the second of these two things is that the Bible would be false to some extent if it actually taught Trinitarianism as described by typical evangelicals.  The Bible does not teach Trinitarianism as many people conceive of it, and what it does teach about the distinct beings of Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is logically possible so that even if the Bible was false, what it says about the "Trinity" could have been true.

In spite of all of this, it really is a challenging thing for some people to just give up one of the least foundational or life-impacting parts of evangelical theology that is not even ultimately part of truly Biblical theology at all.  Indeed, the only reason Trinitarianism is anything more than loosely connected to the foundations of philosophy in the way that everything is, as logical axioms govern all things, is that logical axioms and traditional Trinitarianism cannot both be true, and thus the self-evident veracity of logical axioms excludes this kind of Trinitarianism even from being merely possible.  There is nothing about Trinitarianism that is unrelated to this which actually had anything to do with the very heart of rationalistic philosophy, Christian theology, or even the more practical aspects of living in light of each of these.

Trinitarianism is hardly the supremely important topic that evangelicals love to treat it as.  Only an irrationalist of the caliber of a mainstream evangelical would confuse something so vague and trivial except for its connections to other issues, something that has at best a minimal impact on how one lives compared to almost any other philosophical subject at all, for something grand and utterly foundational.  It also takes an irrationalist of this caliber to actually think the Bible clearly teaches conventional Trinitarianism, when it not only teaches the metaphysical distinction between the three members of the "Godhead," but classical Trinitarianism would also not be a doctrine that is clearly put forth anywhere in the entire Bible if its current contents did somehow teach it.  Its adherents search for something never found in the Bible as they claim it is both there and "evident"--though most of them can hardly even remember a single chapter of the entire Bible that supposedly supports their assumed conclusion.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

Epistemology In Business

Anyone with human limitations, including consumers or members of a business catering to the consumers, does not have the ability to prove which of any logically possible events will happen in the future.  Anything that is possible could happen, regardless of how much or little real or imagined evidence there was for any specific event.  Business is no less subject to this epistemological (and metaphysical) truth than everything else in the spectrum of occurrences.  While there are moments where both businesspeople and consumers seem to truly grasp the objective fact that they cannot respectively know if their market contribution will succeed or if their purchase will be one they will not regret, they speak and act as if they no longer believe this in other situations, meaning they look to mere perceptions and situations instead of to reason in their doomed attempt to understand business apart from the truths of rationalism.

Cryptocurrency, the stock market, the popularity of a new product or service, and the approval of the public or other stakeholders on the businessperson side have this in common with the quality of a product, the long-term appeal it will have, and so on with the consumer side: nothing but possibilities and probabilities and what will happen if certain events occur are all that one can prove ahead of time.  In other words, no one can prove anything about the future except that logical truths will remain true by necessity and that some possibilities seem more likely than others.  There is no way to know that an investment will pay off even when all signs suggest that it will, and there is no way to know that a product will genuinely have the quality one might hope for when making a purchase.  Uncertainty permeates the business world even though some executives, employees, and consumers think they are rational or safe to believe otherwise.

This is just another side of how non-rationalists might complain about not knowing something they cannot possibly know and then refuse the epistemological truth of the matter at the same time.  They might complain about one positive online product review on the basis of epistemological uncertainty even if they would not call it that, but then accept the next positive online or word of mouth review on faith.  They might also lament the unverifiability of an investment's return in one situation and pretend to actually know another investment will give them what they want.  Like all non-rationalists, such people are to varying degrees adrift in their own delusions about even something like business that is on the more practical side of philosophy/reality.  What they believe is on the basis of momentary persuasion or subjective preferences instead of logical proof--not consensus, scientific hearsay, inductive reasoning, or mere perceptions, but logical proof.

It can be deeply amusing to see people fall for something in one scenario or in one aspect of their worldview what they might try to avoid in another.  Someone who realizes the unknowability of one future event might still believe that another event will or must happen despite both of them being unprovable.  One might see family members or strangers do this routinely, acting as if they know something that cannot be proven by past trends, intuition, collective agreement, or appeals to authority.  Of course, businesses and those who buy from them must still operate despite this uncertainty.  The solution is simply not assumptions.  Although different assumptions might be appealing to various non-rationalists, the certainty of identifying assumptions to sidestep them while recognizing the self-verifying nature of reason is the key to handling business transactions rationally.

Moreover, that there is no way to prove the durability of a purchased item, the level of satisfaction one will have even five minutes after buying something, the eventual payoff of hiring a new employee, and so on does not mean that possibilities and probabilities are not knowable.  Yes, no amount of mere perception-based evidence proves that a large or small part of the business world will see any particular change, but there are still objective truths, possibilities, and likelihoods that pertain to business specifically.  Anyone who approaches general business as if the profitability or satisfaction of an endeavor is certain beyond this has set themselves up for failure and disappointment if a career or product does not turn out as they would wish, besides it merely being irrational to believe in that which cannot be proven.  Relinquishing favorable assumptions in business, like in all other areas of life, is both rational and far better at preparing someone for the needless personal complications they will probably face if they try to treat an idea contrary to reality as true.

Game Review--Crysis 3 Remastered (Switch)

"When they came to me with the nanosuit, I sacrificed Laurence Barnes, the man I was, to become Prophet.  When my own flesh and blood held me back, I sacrificed that too, replaced it, like a spare part.  Victory costs.  Every time, you pay a little more."

--Prophet, Crysis 3 Remastered

The opening scene of Crysis 3 finally sees the series reach a introspective depth of characterization and tease a (mild) cosmic horror that I have seen some people greatly exaggerate with regard to the first games--the first cinematic is already more personal and Lovecraftian than the entirety of the preceding two games, even though Lovecraftian horror is not the only kind of cosmic horror.  At the same time, this progress comes in the game with the smallest number of levels in the trilogy: a mere seven levels, the first of which is less than half an hour, await players.  Compared to some other games that are relatively short but not structured in levels, like God of War: Chains of Olympus, the actual length of the game in hours is not totally abnormal, but the miniscule level count is an odd choice for the finale of a trilogy like this, especially since Crysis 2 had almost 20 missions.  It is nonetheless a triumph of sorts that the storytelling and lore are enhanced across these levels for once.

Production Values

The graphics are still some of the best among the Switch ports of old yet then-groundbreaking shooters, just like the graphics of the other two Crysis Switch ports.  The problems with the game and its series do not have to do with the visual quality of the games.  While the writing and storytelling is much better in this case, as characters are actually developed and there are plot twists beyond discovering the presence of ancient extraterrestrials on Earth or being betrayed by a powerful figure, the fact that Crysis and Crysis 2 go in directions that are mostly random compared to those of the other two games in the trilogy.  In spite of this, the Alpha Ceph entity both is visually evocative of a Lovecraftian-style alien and serves as a better ultimate antagonist than the earlier Ceph.  Starting in the same video the Alpha Ceph is first mentioned in, the voice acting also establishes the individual humanity of the protagonist, sets up the scope of the looming threat, and shows that the writing is also dramatically improved here over the lines of the prior games.  Prophet is developed as a character far beyond his small but pivotal moments in Crysis 2 (which that game did certainly make the most of) even as other characters get to show more emotion or more complicated motives than the franchise is otherwise known for.

Gameplay

To some degree, the gameplay of Crysis 3 is identical to that of what came before in the series.  The nanosuit still has its iconic stealth and armor functions.  You can still lift objects and enemies to hurl them away.  There are still sections where vehicles can be used.  Finally, there are still both human and alien enemies, the latter of which are revealed to be connected to the Alpha Ceph, a tentacled-creature that unites the Ceph under a hive mind.  The additions come in the form of a new weapon, the ability to sprint without draining the nanosuit's power supply, and revamped suit upgrades.  The most obvious of the new combat features is the bow and its variety of arrowheads that can be switched out for different purposes.  Out of all of them, the standard arrow type is the one best paired with the stealth function of the nanosuit.  Players can silently kill some enemies with a single shot without ever giving any visual indicator's of one's presence besides the dead body, but unless you are fine with running out of arrows quickly, reclaiming them from corpses or the environment if they missed their targets is necessary.  The ability to hack turrets, computers, and even landmines also gets added to the nanosuit's capabilities.  Slowly, Crysis expands the suit's usefulness and capabilities until the third game has by far the most tactical and combat options.  You can also now upgrade the nanosuit upgrades themselves by completing challenges related to each upgrade, with one example being that the regeneration of 5,000 units of suit energy will improve the energy recharge rate.  One of the differences here is that the basic nanosuit upgrade points that unlock a special passive ability (so that it can be further upgraded) are obtained through kits instead of dropped by Ceph aliens upon death.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Years after Prophet dies and Alcatraz bonds with his nanosuit, the latter, now immersed in Prophet's personality, is pulled out of a cryogenic stasis to help thwart the CELL corporation that has taken over the world.  The organization's success turns out to be linked to a creature called the Alpha Ceph, a Ceph that Prophet has visions of, seeing its power and arrival to Earth.  Alcatraz and Prophet's AI-duplicated voice and memories struggle to deliver humanity from extinction with the threat of the Alpha Ceph on the horizon.

Intellectual Content

Prophet lives up to his name as he deals with seeming foresight of a grand extraterrestrial entity that could destroy life on Earth, with Crysis 3 focusing on his personal journey as a soldier who gave more of himself for humanity than many others would if they had the same opportunities.  What storytelling and broader philosophical depth Crysis 3 actually does have comes more from this than it does from an exploration of something like extraterrestrial life or transhumanism (which the nanosuits are a great fit for tackling).  If only the earlier games had take even this approach to more characters, by this point they could have been directly grappling with the existential, epistemological, and metaphysical ramifications of something like the Alpha Ceph existing.  It is in one sense an unexpected gift that Crysis 3 turned out to have more substance beyond the gameplay and graphics for the first time in the trilogy. 

Conclusion

Crysis 3 is still overall a better shooter than it is a storytelling device, but this time the story is at least more personal and focuses more on just how foreign the Ceph are to Earth's normal life forms.  One of the biggest wasted opportunities of Crysis 3 is simply that the earlier games do little to nothing to consistently lead to the story and thematic components of this final installment in the trilogy.  Like the sequel Star Wars film trilogy, the main Crysis games have little to do with each other besides a very loosely connected timeline, setting up or picking up from plot points that have only minimal connections to the previous or next games in the trilogy.  If the first two games at least had more abstract themes or more emotional character moments, then the philosophical and narrative context of Crysis 3 Remastered (or just the original release) would be the conclusion, up until the fourth game was planned, of a far better series.  As it stands, only the third game amounts to more than a shooter with great combat and visuals.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Shooting enemies with arrows is bloodless, but stabbing or using ordinary firearms to kill human foes involves quick, small sprays of blood.

 2.  Profanity:  "Shit," "fuck," and "bastard" are used.

The Myth Of Total Simplicity

To wish for reality to be simple is not irrational in itself.  This is because some preferences are involuntary and having preferences does not mean a person will believe things on that basis as opposed to the basis of logical proof.  Moreover, many people, in different ways, would love for some aspect of reality to be simpler than it is for the ease of knowledge and living that might come about from this.  This is not and never is epistemologically or morally problematic on its own.  The same is not true of allowing a desire for simplicity to dictate one's beliefs, actions, and capacity for abstract reasoning.  At this point, someone deviates from reason and prizes their petty preferences above reality itself, even though almost nothing about reality is changed by sheer preference.

While there are simpler and more precise, complicated, or nuanced aspects of any philosophical truth or idea--and every truth or idea is inherently philosophical--pure simplicity is a myth.  Whether on the level of how logical facts or ideas relate to each other, how much effort must be put in towards abandoning fallacies and assumptions, or some other side of rationalistic truths and the pursuit of them, there is never pure simplicity.  At best, there is comparative or partial simplicity, but even the only self-evident truths (logical axioms themselves, not even what follows from them or how they govern all other things), literally the most "basic" truths despite still being so abstract, are not simple except when it comes to some sides of them.

Some things are more or less simple than others, but simplicity itself is at most one attribute out of several that is possessed by something at least complex enough to not only have one aspect (nothing truly does have only one aspect, even if the one thing anything has in common with everything else is that everything is either logically necessary, logically possible, or logically impossible and is thus at least consistent with or excluded from possibility by necessary truths).  Nothing is purely simple, and nothing is purely complex.  Total simplicity is a myth, a logical impossibility, just like total complexity.  Everything has simple and more nuanced aspects that are often thoroughly intertwined.  Even the fundamental fact that nothing can violate the laws of logic has both its simple and extremely complex facets.

It is true, yes, that logical truths and a person's understanding of logical truths can have a distinct simplicity.  After all, recognizing some truths as self-evident and all others as hinging on them can simplify a great deal, as does looking to reason and not to the conflicting words of random people one respects.  All the same, to even grasp this much, one must look to the very core of all reality, which is not God, nature, society, or even one's own self-evident consciousness, but the laws of logic, which requires that one intentionally forsake assumptions and reason out actual necessary truths in their place, some of which are more nuanced than others and all of which transcend mere practicality.  Aside from the potential complexity of these truths and how they intersect, the personal process of letting go of stupid or unproven ideas can also be very emotionally complicated.  Then there are also far more hyper-precise or complex logical truths that even knowing logical axioms very thoroughly and directly will not reveal on its own.  Simplicity can be discovered in small degrees, but it does not reveal reality. 

People who want simplicity but do not have the willingness to not believe that reality is the how they want it to be just because they want it to be that way are goddamn fools, but always for one of two reasons if not both: they are too inept, or stupid, to understand even the more simple philosophical truths (such as that reality is not determined by preference), too shallow and self-absorbed to care, or both of these pathetic things all at once.  Someone too frightened or irrational to even take the first steps of rationalism are the inferiors of rationalists, mere intellectual insects by comparison to the small minority of people who have submitted themselves to reason.  Simplicity is what they want because they are too simplistic at present to even forsake the most obvious fallacies for reasons beyond preference.

An Inconsistent Interpretation Of Matthew 5

Of all the misrepresented passages where Jesus expresses moral ideas, one of the places in the Bible where the greatest number of misunderstood claims are found all together is Matthew 5.  There are already a host of popular errors about what Jesus says concerning murder and anger, adultery and lust, and Lex Talionis in this chapter.  Some add to these errors by interpreting what Jesus says by the time he gets to the subject of Lex Talionis differently than they interpret what he says on the prior topics--even though he uses the same phrases in an identical way!  No, Jesus is not setting Lex Talionis aside in favor of something new, not that "eye for eye" ever Biblically had the scope that most people assume [1], yet that is exactly what many people think he says even though they interpret the earlier verses of the chapter differently.

Consider Matthew 5:21-22.  Contrasting what people of his day had heard with something they seem to have ignored or never thought about, Jesus references the command to not murder and then touches upon unjust anger.  Jesus is not saying that murder is no longer sinful and that avoiding anger without cause is now the replacement moral obligation to not murdering people.  He is very plainly elaborating on the implications of the command to not murder and remaining consistent with the obligation described in the original command.  Only a fool would read this and actually think Jesus is unbinding people from one obligation and giving them a new one.  In actuality, he is describing something that is not contrary to the command to not murder in any way.  Likewise, in saying "You have heard that it was said 'You shall not commit adultery'" in Matthew 5:27, Jesus is not nullifying a core command of Mosaic Law and replacing it with the obligation to not lust.

The vital issues of how Matthew 5:28, the very next verse, is misunderstood to mean that men are more sexually inclined or depraved than women and how lust is just coveting (and not sexual attraction, which is sometimes involuntary, or intentional sexual fantasies) aside, Jesus is not "correcting" or abandoning Mosaic Law's condemnation of adultery.  He is clarifying that wishing to take someone's spouse for oneself, or coveting their spouse, is immoral if the act of adultery is morally wrong.  In fact, coveting is also prohibited in Mosaic Law, so while the link between the two is addressed very directly here, the link was already there in the Old Testament, and the conceptual link would have been there even if coveting was not mentioned in the Old Testament.  Nothing he is saying requires some special additions to the Old Testament to realize them, and Jesus is not contradicting, trivializing, or departing from Mosaic Law in any way.

When evangelicals read Matthew 5:38-42 and see a reference to Lex Talionis, which never had anything to do with the punishments for most Biblical crimes as it is and is thus irrelevant to punishments for things like rape [1], they suddenly think that Jesus uses the phrases "You have heard that it was said" and "But I tell you" to mean that the Lex Talionis command of God was flawed or now outdated.  However, why would this phrasing all of the sudden mean that what Jesus quotes from Mosaic Law is evil or subpar when it did not mean this in the previous examples given in the exact same chapter?  There is no hint of evidence that one part of Matthew 5 using these phrases is meant to be understood differently than the others.

In one way or another, most readers of the Bible make easily avoidable assumptions for the sake of some preconceived bias for or against an idea.  The vast majority of what theological conservatives and liberals alike claim the Bible teaches are contradicted by the texts they allegedly stand on.  When they do get something right about Christian theology, it is often by accident, arrived at through sheer selective bursts of rationality or even at the expense of everything but correctness on a single isolated point.  Matthew 5 is just one of many places in the Bible that they distort for the sake of traditions and preferences.  The words of Jesus as presented in the Bible are rarely sought in order to identify what the Bible actually says.  It is far more common for people in general to seek a superficially misleading kind of "affirmation" of what they already assumed the Bible teaches.

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

Transgenderism And Gender Stereotypes

Liberals are hypocritical (and irrational even if they were being consistent) to endorse gender stereotypes at all, and conservatives are idiotic to want to continue belief in the lies of gender stereotypes while ignoring one very major possible consequence of them: people thinking they are not a man or woman based on how their personalities and talents match up with the irrational social constructs of masculinity and femininity.  Liberals tend to instead selectively oppose whatever arbitrary, false stereotypes are culturally popular to oppose while pretending that sheer individualism is not at the heart of rejecting stereotypes, while conservatives tend to dislike problems, real or imagined, that would not exist if people did not make the same erroneous philosophical assumptions they make.  Both of these ideological groups contribute to the asinine misunderstandings of many individuals on these issues--not that any individual could not just reason the truth out with reason and introspective reactions to social experiences alone.

Trangenderism is ultimately a separate issue, just one that has been so conflated with the topic of gender stereotypes, which are epistemologically unjustified and wholly refutable all at once, that few people might recognize the irrelevance easily.  Liberals and conservatives literally have very similar stances on the issue except when it comes to things like the actual matter of transgender surgeries.  Both, unless someone is a liberal or conservative who denies the standard party tenets, falsely think that there is such a thing as masculine traits, or nonphysical traits men supposedly have, and femininity, or nonphysical traits women supposedly have.  They then think someone is truly a man or woman not only based on the body they have, but also on the personality traits they have or behaviors they exhibit.

Not every possible reason for someone wanting to become transgender is rooted in stereotypes, as some people might randomly desire to just have the body of the opposite gender.  However, the philosophies of both liberalism and conservatism lend themselves to some aspects of transgender ideology and popularity.  These fools on the political left and right cannot see that the only things that separate the core of their ideologies are slight foundational differences.  This is not even to object to the concept of transgender surgeries at all in itself.  As already stated, that might have nothing to do with someone erroneously thinking they must actually be the other gender because of some stereotype that led them to believe men and women have gender-based personalities.  It is just true that both major political factions, with somewhat different ways of embracing sexism, have directly created the social circumstances that make transgenderism such a mainstream trend to some extent.

Conservatives and liberals both directly sustain problems they complain about and criticize the other party for by continually supporting these gender stereotypes.  People from either party might pretend that they do not relentlessly stereotype people and then compound their lies beyond that, but the ideologies of many liberals and conservatives have a great deal to do with supporting stereotypes while sometimes pretending not to.  Liberals generally criticize gender stereotypes but then pretend like masculinity and femininity exist and think this somehow means someone could be a "female man" or a "male woman," based on what stereotypical traits a person with certain genitalia has; conservatives pretend like having psychological traits literally makes someone a "real man" or "real woman" and then are shocked when liberals both realize where this false idea actually leads: believing that gender and sex are distinct (as opposed to sex/gender and false, arbitrary gender stereotypes being distinct).

At the heart of many ideas in modern conservatism and liberalism, not just one or the other, is the pathetic error holding that personality and character traits beyond the structure of the body make someone a man or woman.  They both might thoroughly despise the thought that what they have in common can actually outweigh their differences in some areas, but it is true all the same, and they are only too irrational and arrogant to come to this truth.  When it comes to gender stereotypes, both of them, in their own ways, are delusional enough to believe that someone is not a man or woman for simply having a male or female body.  There might be different attitudes and motivations behind this, of course, yet they still have an identical belief in common that happens to be easily disproven with pure logic, even without ever interacting with specific men and women whose behaviors already disprove these stereotypes.

Movie Review--Thor: Love And Thunder

"The gods will use you, but they will not help you.  There is no eternal reward for us."

--Gorr, Thor: Love and Thunder

Taika Waititi actually pulled a reverse Jon Favreau--the latter directed the excellent Iron Man and then directed the abysmal sequel Iron Man 2, but Waititi went from directing a generally terrible Thor movie in Ragnarok to helming Love and Thunder, which corrects almost every one of Ragnarok's major problems.  As is usual for Marvel movies, the villain gets minimal screentime yet again, but this time the villain has more depth than Cate Blanchett's Hela despite his utterly idiotic worldview, and this time the humor does not smother out the genuinely existential themes and emotional weight.  Love and Thunder embodies how comedy does not require the absence of greater substance to be woven into a film.  It does not have to clash with themes, characterization, and drama.  Sometimes that means keeping dramatic and abstract aspects unpolluted by humor, and sometimes that means simply making sure the humor is not intrusive even if all of these things are present together in the same scene.  Love and Thunder does a much better job with this than the entry it follows up.  This is even the best Thor movie out of the four.

Production Values

From the first scene with its montage of Thor's life since Endgame to the multiple fights with Gorr, Love and Thunder has a very strong, consistent, and more experimental visual style than most, if not all, other MCU projects.  There are many examples that will probably stand out even to casual viewers: opening shots of Thor by a tree, a scene with space dolphins (which is all I will mention about that scene here), or the black and white coloring of the shadow realm Gorr hides have some of the best aesthetic creativity in the entire MCU.  In fact, when Gorr comes out of the shadows, he actually would be right at home in some sort of horror film, so stark is the contrast between his orangish eyes and the otherwise greyish coloring of his preferred dimension.  Thankfully, the effects and visual style is finally merged with very sincere characterization that is actually not overwhelmed by the humor.  

Even Korg's  narration has a very distinct emphasis on how Thor has grappled with attachment, loss, and despair across his many years of life.  Thor is not relegated to being almost exclusively a simple joke-machine like in Endgame and Ragnarok.  The very sincere development of his character starts in the opening and continues all the way to the end.  Chris Hemsworth balances the comedy and serious character moments better than ever, and Natalie Portman does the same as The Mighty Thor, whose connection to Mjolnir is tied to devastating life circumstances that get explored very well for the relatively small runtime of the film.  Natalie Portman helps anchor the emotional and existential cores of Love and Thunder by doing much more with her character than she ever was able to in the first two Thor movies.  Christian Bale has far less time on the sceen as Gorr than either Hemsworth or Portman, which is one of the gravest artistic flaws of the entire film, as Marvel production still ends up sidelining or killing almost every villain.  What Bale does with his performance and what the art direction does for his scenes, though, are spectacular and deserved more time.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

An extraterrestrial named Gorr discovers that a pseudo-deity he devoted his life to does not actually care about his species at all except for occasional amusement, and so he wields the Necrosword of a dead being that could use it to kill gods.  Gorr vows to end the life of every god he can even if the Necrosword slowly drains him of his own life.  As he travels the galaxy slaying "deities" (the only being shown in the MCU who might be a literal god is Arishem in Eternals, and even then he might be a created being and not an uncaused cause), Thor notices a distress call from his friend Lady Sif, who tells him Gorr is coming to destroy New Asgard.  When Thor does indeed find Gorr using shadow creatures summoned by the Necrosword to attack his fellow Asgardians, another Thor shows up--his former girlfriend Jane Foster now has his old reconstructed hammer.  The contrast between Jane and Gorr brings Thor to decide how to react to the savagery of Gorr and some of the gods this new butcher would seek to kill.

Intellectual Content

Gore's intended antitheism is not actually aimed at any true gods, for none of the Olympian or Asgardian beings he hates or kills are uncaused causes.  They are all superhuman but created beings, and ironically, even the being Eternity whom he seeks to grant his wish is at minimum closer to being a true deity than any of the humanoid beings he kills.  I cannot know if this was intended to put Gorr's emotionalistic hypocrisy on display, but for him to consult something like Eternity in a killing spree of pseudo-deities is hypocritical.  If anything, Eternity seems to have far more power than the Asgardians Gorr hopes to slaughter, and yet Eternity is even less active than them in helping suffering mortals.  There are other ways that Love and Thunder ends up refuting or challenging Gorr, even if only incidentally.  The second credits scene showing Jane enter Valhalla also would mean that Gorr was, as usual, just assuming things when he believed that there was no afterlife, no possibility of eternal reward for how one lives.  There is also the fact that just because one "god" is malicious does not necessarily make other deities or pseudo-deities selfish, apathetic, or malicious, but it also would not mean the even a true uncaused cause is evil for being cruel.  Only if the uncaused cause has a moral nature could anything possibly be morally good or evil in the first place, and if God's nature is such that cruelty is good, or even even obligatory, then the perceptions and preferences of all beings, humans included, are irrelevant.  Gorr never once gives any indication that he is even thinking about how he has assumed stereotypes and the validity of his conscience in moral epistemology--either that or he does not care to know or live out the truth.

As for Thor's own philosophical errors or assumptions, he oscillates back and forth between priorities as his whims change in the moment with no regard for how logical truths do not change at all with emotions and other circumstances.  Contrary to what he says when he finally gets the chance to reunite with Jane for the rest of her lifetime, love is not all that we need or want, and love could not even be possible or knowable if it was not consistent with the logical axioms that govern all things.  While Gorr was not motivated by reason, by justice, or by love, it is nonetheless love that at the end of his life made him reconsider what he would spend his one wish on.  It suggested by one of the protagonists that upon finding Eternity, he would wish for the death of the MCU's pseudo-gods, and perhaps by extension the nonexistence of the real uncaused cause.  How Arishem the Judge would fit into this also has yet to be clarified, though the MCU is becoming more and more theologically inclined in some of its best recent entries, even if what most of the characters mean by the word gods does not refer to an actual deity at all.  Even not fully addressing the exact relationship of some of these metaphysical beings like Arishem, Eternity, the Egyptian pseudo-deities of Moon Knight, He Who Remains of Loki, and the likes of Zeus and the others seen at Omnipotence City, however, is superior to avoiding all deep metaphysical and moral issues altogether as Ragnarok practically did.

Conclusion

It is ionic that one of the most serious MCU films thus far and the sequel to one that most reflected the worst of the MCU's comedy, Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder respectively, are some of its best despite being very controversial films set within the already divisive Phase 4, but in their own ways, they are the two most existential entries in the MCU at this time.  More than just being a largely great movie in its own right, Love and Thunder has two credits scenes that are not trivial in their worldbuilding or used for unecessary comedy.  Both of them are actually used with a serious tone to either introduce new plot threads for future projects or to provide an epilogue for a certain character--it is unclear which of these one of the credits scenes is doing.  Very rarely does the same director follow up such a thematically diastrous film like Ragnarok with a sequel that not only outdoes it, but really does avoid many of the pitfalls from before.  For this on its own, Love and Thunder is noteworthy, with the very distinctive visuals and the handful of deeper philosophical issues significantly elevating the film.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Golden blood is spilled from some beings, and and the dismemberment of shadow monsters sometimes involves what could have been fairly graphic imagery if it had the DCEU's aesthetic instead of the MCU's.

 2.  Profanity:  "Shit" is used throughout.

 3.  Nudity:  Thor is briefly seen naked from behind.

How Some Rationalists Might Regard Themselves And Others

The differences in how people perceive or enjoy things brings an inevitable layer of subjectivity that someone could become lost in if they will not intentionally seek out the light of reason.  For anyone who is willing, this subjectivity does not have to be anything more than a layer of experience that can be fully identified, understood, and not allowed to serve as the basis of one's worldview.  Indeed, one must rely on reason to even understand subjectivity.  Rationalistic liberation and certainty might still not change everything about how a person feels about himself or herself.  Ultimately, someone could still feel as though they are something less than a rationalist whose beliefs, behaviors, and relationships all revolve around this.

For some people, rationality, autonomy, kindness, loyalty, and practical competence (as opposed to competence with grasping the more abstract sides of life and philosophy) can seem far more impressive in other people even when there is no difference in the extent or openness of these qualities.  Certain people might think highly of another person for how they possess or express some of these characteristics, only to not hold the same high regard for themselves even when they do have them as well.  Moreover, they might not do so out of a lack of self-awareness and rationality; they might just not have the same attitude towards themselves that they would towards others who are rational and compassionate, despite not having any false beliefs or assumptions about themselves.

It might indeed not be because they are actually ignorant of how they themselves are also rational, independent, compassionate (in a non-emotionalistic way), and so on.  Someone could realize with the absolute certainty of rationalistic introspection that they do have the exact same traits they admire in others and still not be particularly impressed or content with himself or herself.  The difference comes down to the fact that the direct admiration is simply for others.  As long as they do not begin to believe hypocritical or otherwise irrational things about themselves, such as disbelieving that they are rational when they avoid assumptions or look to deductive reasoning or that they are kind when they serve others, this attitude is not irrational.

Attitudes, after all, are not always subject to the will.  They can be developed or resisted on the level of belief or action, yes, but not everyone's emotions or more lasting attitudes can truly be willed to change.  Sometimes the best a person like this can do is just to not forsake reason, understand their own worldview, philosophical competence, and behaviors, and accept the fact that they have trouble regarding themselves as highly as others for the same qualities.  It remains unfortunate that someone might not be as satisfied with their own rationality, philosophical discoveries, aptitude at handling relationships, endurance of trials, or compassion as they would be if others had these things, yet they can still always be perfectly self-aware.

I myself have seen this tendency in several other rationalists that I have the honor of knowing personally, having been at their side for up to seven years in one case.  Without seeming to actually mistake their lack of intense admiration for their true nature and accomplishments for them being irrational, they are more likely to say positive things about others who show rationality and its many subtraits than they are to listen to me praise them without almost pushing back.  It would still be erroneous to trivialize their accomplishments as rationalists no matter what they feel towards their own selves, and in such cases, firm and sincere, honest encouragement can bring focus to what they would hopefully already know in full.

History's Last Stands

History's last stands are especially popular thanks to how some people take the ideological side of the smaller force that held out as long as it could before being defeated by a comparatively enormous faction.  The longer they resisted and the greater the size of the opposing army or empire, the more praise they are given, even when the person praising them has probably never thought about what the smaller group was supposed to be fighting for.  A blind desire to show support, albeit centuries or millennia later, for the "underdog" faction has manifested itself across many people in different eras.  The allure of retrospectively assuming that the last stand validates whatever cause the smaller group died for is too strong for some people to immediately see through such stupidity.

What might some historical examples be (though one would not need any examples to realize the error of the aforementioned approach to conflicts between small and great forces)?  The Spartans and Persians at Thermopylae in the Second Persian Invasion of Greece in 480 BC, the last of the samurai and the Imperial Japanese at Shiroyama in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, and the Texians and Mexicans at the Alamo in the Texas Revolution (with the battle reportedly occurring in early 1836) are all examples of two groups that fought according to various historical evidences, with the former side being dramatically outnumbered by their opponents.  Both sides might have had their moral hypocrisies, assumptions, and other kinds of irrationality, but the sides making a last stand have had theirs get almost totally forgotten or denied by the masses.

The Spartans targeted men in sexist ways, starting with the discarding of male babies with birth defects, brutally forcing them to train as soldiers, and then manipulating them into a life of militaristic arrogance in the name of Spartan glory.  The last samurai were content to lead a rebellion over their increasing lack of relevance to then-contempory Japan and some of them engaged in acts of torture.  The Texians of the Texas Revolution resisted Mexico's abolition of the kind of race-based slavery condemned by the Bible, with this literally being a factor in why they fought the Mexican army at the Alamo, and yet many American Christians probably would speak highly of them.  Some of these acts are severe enough that the Bible openly calls for the execution of those who practice them--though, again, many Christians might praise the losing sides here for arbitrary reasons.

These last stands were the final actions of fools who thought their preferences mattered and legitimized their entire existence and various causes.  What they would not be is a grand example of how to live for reason or anything else that transcends mere preferences and assumptions.  While it is not automatically irrational to have the desire to extend support to a faction because it is extremely outnumbered, truth, certainty, and justice are not determined by the minority any more than they are not determined by the majority.  The size of a group or the impact of its last stand are at best irrelevant to whether it is true that it deserved to exist in the first place, much less how it could be proven that it did.

It is rather easy for those who have never intentionally, holistically pursued truth and inspected their motives, beliefs, and the correspondence of those beliefs to reason to fall into the same random errors as others with the same philosophical shortcomings.  Taking anyone's side without knowing what they believe or have done (or hope to do) is irrational by default, as is thinking that facing a stronger enemy somehow makes a person's ideology true and their behaviors just.  Perhaps some moderners identify with those who made a last stand and hope they their own real or imagined last stands in life will unthinkingly be remembered positively.  Perhaps they are content to make assumptions about history like they do about other things, rather than embrace rationalism.  Whatever the reason, this idiotic bias remains pathetic.

The Old Testament And New Testament

If the Old Testament and New Testament truly were in conflict, the New Testament would be false by default because it already affirms the Old Testament, meaning it would contradict itself and the Old Testament it claims to build off of.  It would still be logically possible even if they did conflict that the Old Testament is true, though.  Its veracity, real or hypothetical, does not philosophically depend on the potential truth of the New Testament, but the opposite is not true: the New Testament cannot be true unless the Old Testament is.  There is no assumption here that either Testament is true, only the fact that the part of the Bible on which the other hangs is not the one most people subjectively like.  It is this dislike that stops so many from realizing this about Christianity.

It is indeed the case that both the Old Testament and New Testament each illuminate certain aspects of Christian theology that the other scarcely touches.  Without the Old Testament, without Mosaic Law more specifically, the Bible would be left with nothing but mostly unhelpful, utterly unclear commands to love, be just, or avoid evil without ever mentioning almost anything specific beyond this.  As any rational person could quickly see here, this would undercut almost everything about the clarity and accessibility of Biblical commands.  No one at all, no matter how thorough a reader or intelligent they are, could possibly realize what the Bible would mean by many of these vague commands of the New Testament with the Old Testament missing.

Likewise, issues like hell and salvation are much more clearly described in the New Testament, to be sure.  The Messianic figure of Christ is only hinted at in mostly vague ways in the Old Testament, though this of course pertains to salvation as well.  The Old Testament clearly describes that the wicked will literally cease to exist (Psalm 73, Ezekiel 18:4), but the New Testament is what actually clarifies the nature of hell as a realm of punishment for unsaved beings.  General soteriology is also given much more detailed attention in the words of Jesus and the apostles than by anything in the Old Testament.  Yes, there are vital things in both Testaments that are given far more precise elaboration in one and not the other!

Even so, it is true that the Old Testament can stand as a set of documents with claims that are philosophically true or at least possible without the New Testament, but the veracity of the New Testament is not even logically possible if it truly contradicted the Old Testament that it so obviously stands on.  In a desperate attempt to protect the popular but glaring misrepresentations of both the Old Testament and New Testament, evangelicals try to pit the latter against the former and side with the latter despite the former being more foundational and thus more theologically important.  They are frightened by the explicit theonomy that the Old Testament plainly teaches and that the new Testament only affirms, but they then embrace heresies with even harsher aspects than legitimately Biblical theonomy, such as eternal conscious torment for all the unsaved.

Shallow Christians and shallow outside analyzers of Christianity merely mistake things for being the other way around.  When most people only assess any worldview, from rationalism to Islam to feminism to Christianity, through the pathetic lens of random person or cultural assumptions, they will always fail to understand an idea and its ramifications except in random bursts and by accident.  Backwards, blatantly false priorities regarding the Old Testament and New Testament have become so normalized in this way that they are mistaken for the true way of understanding the Bible.  Like the fool who thinks they can understand Islam without reading the Quran, making no assumptions, and intentionally reasoning out the claims and ramifications of the actual text, the fool who thinks they can understand the Bible without doing the same perpetuates their own stupidity.

Loyalty To True Ideas Instead Of Irrational People

Loyalty to people as long as they are themselves loyal to true ideas is the most sincere, stable, and rational kind of loyalty.  Indeed, it is the only valid type of loyalty, for other kinds are arbitrary, unearned, emotionalistic, or contradictory.  Loyalty is praised and supported more often than not out of a subjective desire for self-gratification than anything else, as many people will directly or indirectly admit when they might not even realize someone else is probing this side of them.  When irrationalistic loyalty is embraced, betrayal of almost any kind might be seen as an ultimate sin, but even those who blindly praise loyalty for the sake of loyalty, which is already idiotic at the start, will almost inevitably contradict themselves at some point.

Do white supremacists (or any other kind of racial supremacists) deserve loyalty from family members or friends who see right through their asinine fallacies?  Do misandrists or misogynists?  What about people who on every philosophical and personal level amount to utter hypocrites, selfish, stupid, and inconsistent?  How could irrationalists possibly deserve loyalty when irrationalism is at the heart of all stupidity, assumptions, hypocrisy, emotionalism, apathy towards truth, and every other destructive attitude or false idea?  Loyalty to them in the sense of protecting them from valid criticism or just blindly caring for them based on emotionalism are betrayals of reason and reality.

Almost no one who condemns betrayal really thinks all betrayal is evil when it gets down to it.  They just emotionalistically react to the thought of betrayal in some cases or simultaneously believe that all betrayal is evil while supporting those who break away from certain factions or allegiances.  They would probably not condemn the likes of Nazi defectors or similar people, for example, even though they supposedly condemn all betrayal.  Each time they endorse a whistleblower who exposed corporate exploitation or an abuse victim who stops defending their abuser, they would deviate from their own ideas!  It is as if they forget their own beliefs that would be easy to introspectively recognize the moment it becomes inconvenient for them, or as if they are so desperate to hide their stupidity that they just pretend this contradiction is not there.

How could the mere ideological betrayal of irrational people be irrational or the breaking away from evil ideologies or people be evil itself?  Such things would be impossible!  It takes a great deal of avoidable irrationality to confuse the betrayal of something like an affair or an abusive action towards a loved one for general betrayal.  Just because some forms of betrayal are irrational or sinful does not mean others are.  The emotionalistic fervor around the word betrayal and/or the idea behind it has driven some people to think of all betrayal as the same without identifying the glaring differences.  Without emotionally or socially ignited reactions, it would be easy for almost anyone to understand this objective fact.

There is a very simple way to not be delusional on the subject of betrayal: do not believe that all betrayal is wrong while believing that there are exceptions or that some cases of betrayal are not really betrayal at all.  Any change in allegiance either is or has the potential to become a betrayal of sorts, even if it is not a situation where most people would think of the word itself.  Someone who goes from irrationalism to rationalism has betrayed irrationality, but this cannot possibly be irrational.  Someone who turns their allegiance away from evil people has betrayed the former relationship they had, but this could not possibly be evil.  Why would people so blindly pretend like the opposite is true?

Revering C.S. Lewis

Some of the writings of C.S. Lewis and especially Mere Christianity are widely revered in evangelical circles, sometimes almost as if C.S. Lewis contributed to the Bible itself.  Aside from the fact that C.S. Lewis was guilty of many Biblical and more foundational philosophical errors, there is the fact that many Christians who praise him might not even have read some of his claims that would not at all be welcome in the American church at large (such as his correct belief that there is no such thing as a Biblical moral obligation to cover a certain amount of the body [1]), and then there is the additional fact that he is still sometimes elevated almost to the level of a Biblical author by some evangelicals one way or another.  For whatever reason, a mostly incompetent philosopher has become the functional representative of a religion he scarcely understood.

The strange evangelical fixation on random Christian figures further separates their distortions of Christianity from Christianity itself.  Presuppositionalist apologetics, complementarianism, conscience-based moral epistemology (which relates back to his general presuppositionalism when it comes to his worldview's real foundations), and other objective errors, with each of these examples being both false in the rationalistic sense of being logically incapable of being true and in the sense of even being contrary to the Bible, consistently show up in the ideologies of Lewis.  There is litte that is rational about his conclusions or the reasons he says he embraces them.  There is even little that is truly Biblical about his assertions, which are commonly reflected in the ideas of the mainstream crowd identifying as Christians.

Evangelical protestants love to claim that they base their theology on the actual contents of the Bible, when almost everything they say they believe--from their elevation of salvation over morality to their condemnation of that which the Bible permits (profanity, nudity, opposite gender friendships, and so on) to their potential insistence that it is rational to not be a rationalist--outright contradicts the Bible.  They cannot demonstrate that the Bible teaches their dishonest or superficial claims because it does not, just as typical protestants cannot demonstrate that most of their extrabiblical philosophical stances are correct because these beliefs are demonstrably false or unprovable.  Since they cannot demonstrate their philosophical and theological ideas from reason or the Bible, they just default to the fallacies of faith in the claims of revered figures.

C.S. Lewis, like Tolkien, has become one of these revered figures not because the ordinary kind of Christian is thoughtful, deep, rationalistic, and found Lewis and Tolkien to be the same.  It is because Lewis and those like him appeal to their mere presuppositions about the Bible and broader philosophy.  Of course, most evangelical Christians will not even read the Bible very thoroughly, so it should not be totally shocking that they rarely read the more philosophically direct works of Lewis, like Mere Christianity, very thoroughly.  If they did, they would find that one of their undeserving heroes does not support some of their favorite fallacies at all and that he embraces total errors in other places.  One of the only consistent things about the philosophy of Lewis is his utter lack of rationalistic awareness.

Even aside from all of his errors and assumptions, it is odd in one sense that evangelical protestants are so quick to hold up someone like Lewis as if they must be agreed with personally (as opposed to sharing whatever particular rational ideas Lewis sporadically had because they are rational and not out of interest in Lewis to begin with) when they very explicitly condemn relying on any sort of extrabiblical tradition the Bible in the first place.  Their whole alleged approach to philosophy, of which theology is merely a subset, is one of rejecting church traditions in favor of Biblical teachings--but this is often forgotten the moment they are not thinking specifically about asinine traditions associated with Catholicism.  C.S. Lewis is one of the comforting voices they like to listen to in order to feel justified in believing things they would probably believe on the basis of preferences and assumptions anyway.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-errors-of-mere-christianity-part-7.html

The Only Way To Thwart Deception

The truth is accessible to everyone willing to forsake assumptions and align with reason: the intentional withholding of belief from anything that cannot be logically proven, which excludes things that are merely subjectively persuasive or that are consistent with various evidences like hearsay which do not actually prove them, is the only way to avoid all deception.  The deception of thinking one can know the contents of other minds beyond necessary truths (such as how if other minds exist, they are their own nonphysical consciousnesses), possibilities (this person might be lying to me), or probabilities (this person seems to be sad because of their facial expression) is one that many fall for.  At the same time, non-rationalists are often quick to both want to not be deceived and to believe people on the basis of hearsay or mere persuasion.

When it comes to politics, non-rationalists rush to one news source or another, as if current events are the heart of reality and as if the hearsay from any news organization actually proves that an event even happened.  When it comes to science, non-rationalists are quick to fallaciously embrace some claims or reported discoveries, none of which they can prove unless they are claims about the philosophical nature of science as opposed to actual empirical phenomena.  When it comes to everyday relationships, non-rationalists tend to believe what at least certain people tell them until counter-evidence arises, as if many things people tell each other (like "I am feeling happy" or "the food is in the next room") can be proven by words anyway.

It is hardly difficult to see how non-rationalists fall prey to their own stupidity, which in turn feeds into the stupidity of other non-rationalists and makes it even more unlikely that any of them will stop.  They even usually think that it is the rationalists, who alone make no assumptions and are willing to forsake contradictions and unproven beliefs, that are somehow the stupid ones when their own errors and thoughtlessness are exposed!  All the while, they might complain about how supposedly hard it is to "know" which news sources are accurate, although logic proves that no hearsay at all establishes anything except that there is hearsay and that perhaps some reported events are probable.

Affirm the objective fact that one cannot truly know if an event is happening because of a news source or if someone else is lying about their mental states, however, and non-rationalists will almost invariably panic or misunderstand to the point of rejecting what is logically true in favor of comforting or subjectively persuasive assumptions.  They are not really interested in truth, or else they would not remain non-rationalists for long either because of their own rationality or help from rationalists.  Instead, despite the fact that there is no such thing as a claim that a historical event (other than the beginning of time and the universe) or someone else's emotional state that can actually be demonstrated to be true, non-rationalists will believe some people and dismiss others at random, at best with arbitrary criteria that have nothing to do with the truth or proof of the ideas they accept or deny.

Anyone who wants to avoid believing what is false or unknowable and yet hinges their entire worldviews and lives on any core thing at all but the laws of logic is a goddamn fool.  There is more to deception, though, than just one person lying to another or ignorantly, thoughtlessly communicating false ideas.  After all, one must shed self-deception of personal assumptions, not just social conditioning, to become a thorough rationalist.  Political, scientific, historical, and broader philosophical deception can never have any power unless someone makes assumptions, but rationalists--and all people can become rationalists--can avoid all assumptions and replace unproven or blind beliefs with those established by absolute logical certainty.  Many beliefs will not survive such an analysis, yet the ones that do will have not a trace of errors or epistemological assumptions in them.