Sexual Pleasure

Sexuality is one of the most powerful, personal, and diverse avenues to pleasure in all of human existence.  There are certainly pleasures even more foundational and important than this, including pleasure in reason, God, or friendship, but as far as sensuality goes, there is nothing else that is so thoroughly existential and yet so pleasurable when it comes to the unity of sensory perception and psychological, even introspective experience.  Pleasure is experienced subjectively, so this is not to say that everyone will or must have the same kinds of sexual feelings, or the same sexual reactions to stimuli.  It is still true that sexuality is an inherently far more philosophically important issue than, say, the capacity to eat and enjoy food--on an introspective, individualistic, moral, and general metaphysical sense.

There are many ways that sexuality can be acted upon and pursued in accordance with personal desires and attractions that are Biblically innocent.  Among these are dwelling on sexual feelings for someone of the opposite gender, sexual flirtation regardless of one's marital status, and masturbation, including masturbation to any nonsinful thoughts or imagery.  Deuteronomy 4:2 makes it clear that there is no such thing as subjective conscience or cultural tradition revealing Biblical ethics, as desperately as many Christians would hope otherwise--and the irrelevance of feelings and traditions to morality is knowable apart from Biblical prompting.  Sexuality is one of the most delightful, potentially intoxicating areas where legalism's invalidity is liberating, for the Bible condemns none of these things as it explicitly establishes the freedom to do any nonsinful thing.

Existing as a sexual being and embracing sexuality is not irrationalistic or unbiblical for a host of reasons.  What is irrational is to think that sexuality is good because one likes it and that whatever thought or action one wants to participate in must be morally permissible, all because one's conscience or convenience are not offended.  Like in all matters, emotionalistic appeal and personal preference or perception are not what grounds logical truths, and of course this is true of sexuality as well.  The subjectivity of sexual feelings means it is possible for one person to long for what another person would be repulsed by.  However, when it comes to what a given person wants to do, the emotionalists of the world act as they please regardless of their supposed worldview.

Often too stupid and too insincere to even stop themselves from enacting sexual things they condemn in others, many non-rationalists are unsure of how to actually live as sexual beings without allowing random and perhaps immoral impulses (though having a desire is not automatically wrong, even though believing things about it or acting on it could be).  Rape, bestiality (which is just rape directed towards a non-human species), homosexual behaviors, promiscuity, adultery, and incest are the majority of what the Bible prohibits as far as deeds are concerned, and yet many (non-rationalist) Christians seem to gravitate towards at least one or two of these.  They might at a minimum act on these desires if they simply had the chance.  In no circumstances, though, do their emotions or longings make something rational or irrational, good/permissible or evil.

The depth and theological significance of sexuality as something positive or neutral, even aside from rationalistic truths that are independent of whether the Bible aligned with them, is seldom understood by Christians.  They instead tend to share the sexual emotionalism of a good part of secular people.  Inside or outside of marriage, they might do things that they rightly or wrongly think are Biblically wrong, all while their secular counterparts dive into the belief that whatever their emotions or the emotions of their community desire is true and morally acceptable, at least until someone else living by the same irrationalistic philosophy offends them!  Whether the Bible is actually true or not is not the primary truth in view here.  Sexuality is an incredibly deep, existential thing to be savored and emotionalism is just as erroneous here as it is in any other case.  Rarely does someone know and celebrate both truths.

Political Language

There is no excuse for not discovering and understanding things like logical axioms, introspective epistemology, the basic existence of consciousness (in the sense of realizing that it is an objectively existing, absolutely certain thing and not in the sense of passively experiencing consciousness while never realizing these truths about it) no matter what words one is familiar with or whether one even knows words at all.  No one needs to know words like logic, truth, consciousness, and knowledge to actually know what each of these things is.  They are already relying on them even if they do not recognize it.  For other matters, though, social experience will likely be needed to prompt awareness of the topics so that logical truths about them can be identified, but some people, especially in arenas like politics, might conflate words with ideas and thus misunderstand both.

Liberals can be among the absolute most stupid people when it comes to naming concepts, regularly giving objectively misleading names to philosophical ideas that their opponents will rage against even when, in select cases, they might actually agree.  People who are too irrationalistic to themselves distinguish words, their perceptions of words, and the ideas behind them are of course fools, but to intentionally or neglectfully continue to assign words that seem to be communicating something other than the intended concepts is also idiotic.  There are times where the proposed definition of something as described by certain liberals might be invalid, such as when they say that stereotyping or singling out men for mistreatment is not sexism (when even the slightest stereotyping of anyone on the basis of gender is sexism, no matter who they are), but in such cases, the words might not be problematic at all--sexism suggests that it is dealing with all gender-based discrimination as opposed to just that directed towards women.

For words that are misleading as oppose to just commonly misunderstood, like sexism, one would be able to find multiple examples from the past few years alone.  What at least the less irrational liberals mean by "defund the police," a phrase popularized in 2020, is not to remove all funding from the police so that there are no more active police officers, but to lessen their funding so that more resources can go towards other measures that might more directly help people.  On its own, the phrase is unclear as to whether it refers to total defunding or just a shift of emphasis to other services to help communities, which would only entail a lesser defunding.  Another example is how some liberals might be proponents of anti-work philosophy, which sounds like it is a philosophy of the literal glorification of laziness even when the phrase is only being used to refer to something else: opposition to contemporary American capitalism with all of its problems.

However, the same conservatives who might laugh or become enraged at a word like "anti-work" might complain about how their boss underappreciates them or does not pay them in a way that matches their tenure or skill.  In one context they might lash out at the words to make themselves look "conservative enough" in public just because a liberal uttered them, and in another context they might understand or embrace some of the same concepts, such as workplace reform throughout America.  Like plenty of liberals, plenty of conservatives are too irrational to look past words to the ideas that are true or false no matter.  They look for trigger words or phrases in accordance to what other conservatives warn them about and then pounce.  Either they are making assumptions about concepts based upon the arbitrary words assigned to them or they are emotionalistically ignoring what they have already realized for the sake of political or personal zeal.

All of these examples are only from the political subcategory of language, part of a broader trend where non-rationalists look to words instead of directly to reason and the concepts reason governs.  Words are random constructs to communicate these things, not the things themselves.  Words can seem strange even when the thing they refer to is intimately familiar or accessible to all people.  Politics is not the very foundation of all things despite being treated as it was by many people, and in their emotionalistic haste and stupor, they sometimes make the most asinine kind of mistakes when it comes to confusing words for ideas and only using words to inflame someone against another group of people that is also doing the same thing.  Conservatives and liberals have lots of the same types of irrationalism in common.  Their use of language exemplifies this as do many other things.

A Fear Of Death

Death might not be feared by all people, but anything other than a vague, irreducible fear of death (irreducible in that there are no more foundational desires or fears here) is always really one of two things.  It is a fear of nonexistence or a fear of a hypothetical afterlife, which is in turn terror at an afterlife existing at all or at whether an afterlife would be full of agony.  There is literally no other reason why someone would fear death unless they simply dread it just because they happen to subjectively dread it.  There is not an infinite chain of desires or fears lurking beneath a given fear, or else it would be impossible to actually experience any of them at all, but there is only a very limited number of more specific motivations behind a genuine fear of dying.

A terror of nonexistence can itself have several different manifestations, such as a personal reluctance to not exist because one wants to continue having conscious experiences or sadness over an inability to help surviving friends or family members.  Even so, all of these are ultimately just variations of fearing nonexistence itself or what would follow from one's nonexistence as a conscious being.  Fear is indeed subjective.  Not everyone fears the idea of their consciousness coming to an end regardless of the metaphysical ramifications (for instance, permanent nonexistence of consciousness means there is no possibility of experiencing pleasure or fulfillment in any form) or because of what life will be like for those still living.

There is still much to the nature of having and then forever losing consciousness that people might fear, for to live a fairly short life when death could spring upon you at any moment and forever claim you is something with massive metaphysical and personal implications.  For some people, though, the fear of death could be about the opposite: rather than nonexistence, existing forever or even for a limited time after the death of the body is a terrifying concept.  The reasons could range from a morally apathetic person hoping there is no such thing as a deity with a moral nature waiting for them to die (though even an amoral deity could contrive an unwanted afterlife) to someone who has experienced great suffering hoping for an eternal lack of pain.

Non-rationalists, in some ways, have more to fear about a hypothetical afterlife or lack of it precisely because they are so irrational, either failing to reason out logical truths about the notion of an afterlife (such as that it is logically possible for there to be an afterlife, that it might be undesirable, or that there might not be one at all) or feeling afraid because they have assumed something about whether there is or is not an afterlife, or perhaps about what it is/would be like.  Rationalists, still, might have their own deeper motivations for fearing an afterlife or lack of one.  It is possible that there is an afterlife of misery for all people even if there are no moral obligations and thus no justice for a deity to uphold; it is possible that even though there is an uncaused cause, there is no afterlife despite there being nothing logically impossible about one existing.

Regardless of whether human consciousness persists after bodily death or which of the many logically possible forms an afterlife could take (anything that does not contradict itself and necessary truths is possible, after all), not everyone fears death, what comes or could come next, or eternal life or death.  Some people might experience fear or its absence for idiotic reasons, as they have made assumptions or chosen a philosophical apathy that influence their emotions regarding the issue.  Others might fear death or its absence because they desperately want reality to feature moral obligations and for deeds to direct people to an afterlife of peace or punishment accordingly.  The logical possibilities for an afterlife, the necessary or contingent relationships between an afterlife and separate, verifiable metaphysics, and one's personal feelings and preferences about the matter are knowable even if the existence of an afterlife is not, and these truths could easily spark or calm fear depending on one's subjective emotions.

Power In Business (Part 1): Employers

There are four different general categories in which people have power regarding business: employers, employees, consumers/clients, and unions.  Of these four, only the first three are necessary in order to have a functioning business, for even if someone runs a self-employed sole proprietorship in the strictest sense, they are simply taking the role of employer and employer all at once, and without consumers, there is nothing to start or run a business for.  Unions, unlike these other roles, might not be logical prerequisites to having a business, but they are necessary if workers are to have bargaining power that exceeds what one employee could ever hold alone.  This series will address each of the four groups one by one, exploring what grants each one its respective, unique kind of power in business and how each of them could be misused.

Employers have one of the most prominent forms of power in business.  Without employers, there is no one to provide work to employees or to start/oversee the product or service to be sold to consumers, and thus employers have a pivotal status in business.  All the same, they are just one pillar of business power out of several, and they, like the other kinds, could not have their power without other groups of people being in positions where they have their own.  For a self-employed person with no employees, there is one less group to have power over or that has power over them, but there is still the inherent need for clients, without which there is nothing to provide the revenue to preserve even this dual status of employer and employee.  Indeed, each of these groups needs at least one or more of the others active in a business environment to even have any basis of power for themselves.

It is employers, though, in conventional business structures, who provide work and compensation (along with additional benefits where applicable), which workers need in order to live within the way Western society is set up.  In some industries or times more than others, this means that employers are something that employees need even if the latter simultaneously loathes the former, justly or unjustly.  This does give employers a degree of power, though not only is there power on the employee end as well, but it is also true that this power of employers is not by default misused or handled ethically; that depends on the employers worldview and motivations.  Employers nonetheless could lie to, underpay, illicitly discriminate against, or otherwise mistreat their employees, perhaps by firing them on a whim, by withholding implied or promised promotions and raises, or by showing favoritism on the basis of gender or race (in any direction, not just to men over women or white people over people of color).

Employers have to varying extents the power to jettison employees into starvation and homelessness by firing them when they are at their most vulnerable, to refuse to increase pay in accordance with merit or with the cost of living even when they have no financial obstacles to doing so, to poison the reputation of employees so that getting hired elsewhere in the same industry is almost impossible, or to tolerate or contribute to all sorts of other oppressive things like sexual harassment or hostility to mental illness.  At the same time, this power could be used instead to protect workers from injustices inflicted by management, other employees, or consumers, as well as to reward productivity and provide an environment conducive to flourishing of all members of the company.  It is also still true that just having the power to reign over a company from a very high position on the hierarchy does not mean employers have a monopoly on power in business.

Even aside from the separate but interconnected power of employees, consumers, and unions (for one can only have power if the others are present, and the others cannot be present without having some form of realized or potential power), employers cannot control other factors like the actions of competitors, weather, or political or military upheaval that interferes with business, rendering their power over circumstances limited at best.  It is also true that abusive employers do not use their power cruelly just because they are employers.  The worldviews, motivations, and resolve of various individuals with power decides what they believe about it and hell they express it, employers included.  The very reason why some of the selfish and cruel employers might exercise their power in an exploitative manner, in fact, could be that they fear the legitimate power of the other groups present for a business to exist.  If it was logically impossible for employees, consumers, and unions to have significant power, egoistic employers could never be threatened by them!

Secrets And Openness

One person might be fully comfortable sharing a very personal or unusual part of themselves that another person might be terrified of ever verbalizing to others.  Whether or not you yourself are naturally transparent or reluctant to open up, or any more complicated mixture of the two, it could have been the case that you would have had a different disposition towards secrets and openness.  A person might even wish they were prone to openness while finding it challenging to share especially secret or precise things about themselves, while someone else might long to be prone to restraint even as they continue to share things they regret disclosing.  The way someone feels about this is subjective, though of course the deepest of relationships require some sort of openness no matter how the participants feel about it.

Indeed, despite the obvious personal and relational power of openness, there is little control a person might have over which of these psychological tendencies regarding honesty, vulnerability, and transparency they gravitate more to.  Again, some people might even wish they had a different level of willingness to share their souls with others, even with their closest friends or their romantic partners.  What non-rationalists will likely never discover about this issue is that the most sincere openness still cannot permit the other party to know a truth about their psychology or past.  It is the epistemological disconnect between minds, rooted in the metaphysical distinction between one's own mind and whatever other minds exist, that prevents this kind of knowledge.  Unless someone was omniscient or telepathic and able to know their telepathy is not an illusion, the only mind they can know is their own.

All one person can offer another to share their secrets is words, and as far as bringing actual proof to mind, the most those words can appeal to the logical fact that a given secret about someone's personality or past does not contradict logical axioms and is thus possible.  There is no amount of words that could prove what specific events did or did not happen in someone else's life, and even an emotion or desire they have in the present cannot be proven to an outside mind by making the claim that it is there.  Someone else could share a relatively secret part of himself or herself with you, yet you cannot know if they are indeed telling the truth.  One's own secrets, at least as far as mental characteristics and memories of events go, are directly knowable through rationalistic introspection, but that is all.  Does this remove all basis for human communication of such things?

No, for the rational way to go about this neither disregards any truth nor deters relational closeness.  Communication about such things can be about the pursuit of intimacy between people who cannot actually see into each other's minds to verify secrets yet, without making any assumptions one way or another, still care about each other enough to seek as much openness as can be expressed with words.  In this context, sharing very personal and perhaps painful or abnormal things is by no means pointless.  It is an empowering, bonding, or cathartic thing, something that the other person does not need to be able to prove in order to understand what is being conveyed and to reciprocate openness.  Openness can reveal a lot about a person whether or not they have taken it seriously enough to understand it and pursue it anyway.  For rationalists, it can be about the absolute certainty of logic and introspection even as it brings emotional relief--or emotional challenges.

Movie Review--Gravity

". . . I'm gonna die, Aningaaq.  I know, we're all gonna die.  Everybody knows that.  But I'm gonna die today.  Funny, that.  You know, to know . . . But the thing is, it's that I'm still scared.  I'm really scared.  Nobody will mourn for me, no one will pray for my soul."

--Ryan Stone, Gravity

Deeply personal characterization and an elegant simplicity, like the original Alien without the horror elements, unite in Gravity, a masterful 2013 film about an astronaut who survives a debris cloud that demolishes her shuttle.  The power of everything from prolonged shots with the camera to the layers of the human heart is given a grand stage, and the very beginning perfectly sets up the tone and story: an absolutely incredible, unbroken 13 minute opening shot with natural dialogue, a shifting perspective of Earth and astronauts, and no sound at all besides voices over comms even as a catastrophe tears a spacecraft apart make for a hell of an introduction.  Gravity is a masterpiece of storytelling that focuses on a very small cast, the existential weight of being an emotional being, and the sheer vulnerability of humans in outer space.  Strong characterization, excellent acting, a flawless narrative focus, and an exploration of survival, grief, and even spirituality make this essential viewing for lovers of artistic competence.  Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron helmed one of the greatest movies of the past few decades with this title.

Production Values

Perhaps no film from the last 20 years does a better job of illustrating how aesthetically intoxicating and yet dangerous outer space can be.  The camera and the space stations and planetary view it focuses on are immense assets, core pillars of a very sound structure.  While the shot at the beginning is the longest, long shots are the norm in this film, and this is one of the most artistically striking and effective choices I have ever seen in not just science fiction, but cinema as a whole.  At times, the CGI does look very distinctly like CGI as opposed to the more enduring, realistic look of practical effects, but it is not as if it is easy to go film in outer space for the truest practical effects for a story like this!  The human drama and the pairing of uniqueness and thoughtful cinematography more than make up for this.  As shots of astronauts making a trek through the minimal gravity of space, it is actually the way the dialogue builds from its own foundation, the character of Sandra Bullock's Ryan Stone, and, when he is onscreen, George Clooney as a fellow astronaut that make the movie theirs.  The right cast and enough character development are enough to carry a film on their own, and although Gravity does have more pillars than just casting and performances, the characters and Sandra Bullock in particular (she is the only character for most of the runtime) elevate the movie to extreme heights.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Astronauts repairing a communication card on a shuttle are warned of a debris cloud created when a missile destroys a Russian satellite.  Within minutes, the particles reach the astronauts, two of whom survive as the shuttle they try to reach other space vessels and make their way back to Earth.  It is during this endeavor that the dark past of Dr. Ryan Stone comes out, as she lost her daughter in a sudden, unexpected, random accident before she even reached five years of age.  Her struggle to summon the desire to live in the cold vastness of space brings her to celebrate life amidst the fact that trials and tribulations that are almost inescapably a part of it. 

Intellectual Content

Gravity reflects how things like outer space and the threat of death can so easily force people to directly contemplate the nature of life, values, knowledge, and their own individual personhood as humans, even if they are not the thoroughly rationalistic thinkers that everyone has the potential to be.  The imagery itself is used to periodically capture Ryan's initially conflicted longing to survive, such as when she resembles a fetus in the womb as she curls into a ball, floating in a space station with a cord behind her that resembles an umbilical cord.  A seeming hallucination of the returning Kowalski (Clooney's character), who had sacrificed himself to give Ryan a better chance of survival earlier, asks her about the "point of living" in light of tragedies and suffering, and it is after this that Ryan finds the renewed motivation to pursue life after outliving not only her young daughter, but also of a companion who did not hesitate to endanger himself for her.  A moment where she listens to a person on Earth as she cries while still in orbit and talks to herself about how no one ever taught her how to pray, wondering if it is too late to try, even brings a kind of desperate, subtle spirituality into the film.  In fact, this movie is a key example of how entertainment can broach topics and still be incredibly deep in one sense without actually addressing what can or cannot be known about them, or issues like how logical axioms are the utter, intrinsic core of all things or how it is logically necessary for there to be an uncaused cause if there is a physical world.  Sandra Bullock's character does not even come close to discovering these facts or many others, but her story remains so very personal and existential in ways that could prompt viewers to genuinely think about the nature of existence.

Conclusion

Gravity does not even need more than a simple premise to stand proudly as a highly existential work alongside later science fiction films of a very philosophical nature like Interstellar, Alien: Covenant, and Marvel's Eternals.  Never sacrificing artistic merit for thematic depth or vice versa, it accomplishes what so many other films are created to avoid: a unity of vision, emotional depth, and the potential to naturally prompt even more contemplation about the nature of human existence and the parts of reality that transcend us as individuals and as a species.  Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, despite the latter having far more limited screen time, give apex level performances.  The cinematography and imagery is consistently used to establish the isolation, awe, and perseverance of the lead.  Other than some aging CGI that does not necessarily reflect a poor quality by the standards of 2013, Gravity is legitimately a perfect movie--perfection in art does not mean that no aspect could not have been even deeper or better in some way, but that there are no actual flaws.  There is indeed nothing bad about the only things in Gravity anchored to standards of quality that do not change with evolving technological capabilities, those being the human presence, the aesthetics, and the willingness to show how even for non-rationalists, things like outer space and personal trauma, like practically anything a person sincerely dwells on, can provoke philosophical realizations, desires, and feelings that connect with what transcends humanity.  An individual person can have penetrating experiences pertaining to this even without rightly understand the heart of reality.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  A dead astronaut is shown after an object hurtled through his skull in outer space.

 2.  Profanity:  "Fuck" is uttered twice, and words like "shit" are used more frequently.

The Nature Of Revenge

The commonly stated reasons why people are philosophically opposed to revenge are almost inevitably irrelevant to the real nature of the issue: the popular stances on how revenge will not change the past or how it might not make the one seeking vengeance feel better have nothing to do with whether or why revenge is morally invalid.  As is so typical of the ideas of non-rationalists, these ideas are the culturally dominant ones, and then in Christian circles, there is the contradictory set of notions that Lex Talionis is divinely authorized because it is just and that Jesus overturned Lex Talionis because it is nothing but revenge.  In addition to all these, there is the erroneous secular and evangelical idea that governmental legal authority is just no matter what its laws entail.  It does not take long before the assumptions and contradictions can be easily identified in what most people say they believe about vengeance.  Is it even possible for revenge and justice to be the same?  Is Lex Talionis applicable to sins like sexual assault?  Do not expect any goddamn evangelical or secular non-rationalist to be intelligent enough to come anywhere near these questions and their correct answers as long as they are holding onto their fallacies!

As I have so frequently addressed, conscience and human laws neither mean that moral obligations exist nor prove what those obligations would be if they do exist, yet these things and consensus or traditions are what so many people think justifies their beliefs about morality one way or another.  Since most beliefs about vengeance and justice stem from these false ideas, they are automatically false or unverifiable and only held to because of sheer stupidity.  That has never stopped plenty of non-rationalists from believing and doing whatever they subjectively found persuasive even as their persuasions contradict each other so that they cannot possibly all be true at once.  Secular people just assume that their personal moral feelings verify whatever moral obligations they want to exist, ignoring the fact that there can be no morality, as opposed to moral feelings or preferences, without a deity with a moral nature, and theists tend to still assume two things--that God has a moral nature and that their conscience actually matches up with this nature.  Despite subjectivity intrinsically rendering conscience a part of one's consciousness rather than an indicator of actual moral obligations, it is all desperate non-rationalists have to cling to so they can feel secure in their petty, arbitrary, often conflicting moral beliefs.

Even many Christians hold ideas about justice and revenge that contradict the Bible and/or logic itself, confusing the sharp differences between them and then endorsing either true justice or vengeance as they prefer at the moment.  Now, what is an example of something Biblically just and something that is mere revenge?  The Bible says to execute people for murder (Exodus 21:12).  If a person loses a loved one to murder and wishes to murder the offender in a non-torturous way, then what they want to do happens to align with what the Bible commands to be done to the murderer, but they are still not enacting justice, for they are committing murder themselves if they were to carry out their wishes rather than executing the murderer after a trial upon the testimony of two or three honest witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15).  They are not interested in any sort of philosophical certainty, consistency, or moral validity, but they are instead bent on doing whatever satisfies their subjective feelings, which are meaningless when it comes to illuminating moral matters or the veracity or knowability of anything at all beyond the presence of emotion.  Even someone who killed a murderer without abusing them in the process would still be unjust.  That the deserved penalty is killing the murderer does not mean that murder is suddenly permissible because it benefits someone's desires for vengeance, nor would this person be concerned with anything more than emotional gratification of conscience or perhaps not even conscience, just blind rage.

Other examples of vengeance have more factors than just these.  Raping a rapist contradicts even the Biblical Lex Talionis ("eye for eye") because it only applies to permanent non-sexual physical injuries and nothing more [1].  Rape is inherently evil whether it is done to a rapist or done with approval from a human legal body and is always given the death penalty, regardless of the gender of either party or the motivations behind the act (Deuteronomy 22:25-27).  Sexual assaults, but especially rape, are unjust no matter what, whereas killing people is just or unjust based on a variety of factors, so that even the very same act of killing could be justice or vengeance depending on the context or the motivation, as described with the example of justly executing a murder or murdering them.  People who actually care about justice will either realize these things or be open to others who rightly explain them, while someone in favor of revenge has only the ultimate goal of emotionalistic indulgence.  Vengeance is about satisfying one's own desires.  Whether what one wishes to happen to another person is just is a not a matter of whether one approves of those things, and even then, doing what would be the right thing for emotionalistic reasons or without the investigative and trial functions of a court organized under Mosaic Law is contrary to justice.

This is one reason why vengeance drives so many people to utter hypocrisy, partaking in the same cruelties that they would morally object to if done to them.  In some cases, they might even do or intend to carry out the very thing that was done to them as they confuse the concepts of vengeance and justice.  Such people might actually be worse than the initial offender they want to hurt, for the person seeking revenge almost always thinks they are doing that which is just, and thus they participate in hypocrisy or cruelty while thinking they are morally right, while the person they want to inflict vengeance on might not have even had the illusion of thinking what they did was rational or just.  If someone contradicts themself ideologically or behaviorally and neither realizes this with an independent grasp of reason or when others correct them, they have betrayed by their response that they do not care about morality or reason.  When they or someone they love is victimized, they are completely willing to just assume that they were morally mistreated because they feel a certain way, but when they react to this real or alleged offense--and it is not as if anyone beyond a handful of rationalists does not just make selective assumptions about moral epistemology to begin with--they are willing to pretend like the moral ideas they think validate their vengeful response suddenly would not apply to their own actions.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

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

Political Fixation

In order to feel more united with fellow conservatives or liberals, the many pathetic people in either philosophical group (for politics is, like all things, philosophical, and the truth about metaphysics and epistemology determines the truth about politics, not the other way around) will embrace whatever fiction or assumption their fellow party members propose.  Enraging the other party, ignoring the times they are right even by accident, and feeling personally validated or in unity with their political faction are the true goals of conservatives and liberals.  This is especially the case now that they become increasingly overt in their emotionalism thanks to social media and the almost satirical things their ideological companions say in reaction to the stupidity of the other side.  When non-rationalists are hell-bent on believing, saying, or doing whatever it takes to oppose someone else, there are only two possible outcomes: either one or both people will eventually realize how asinine they are, and become at least somewhat more rational, or they will only become more and more slaves to contradictions and assumptions, and thus enemies of truth.

This is how the adherents of the two predominant political worldviews have made it clear they are acting.  They are locked in a desperate struggle to misrepresent, exaggerate, and take hypocritical or unverifiable stances on almost everything as long as it will only make someone from the other party look bad or make them feel elated in the moment.  There is no concern for logical axioms, logical necessity and possibility, and epistemological proof, for these truths would only inconvenience the many people who think that they have a right to believe whatever they want, unaware of the fact that it is literlly impossible for people to have a right to believe or say or do whatever they wish.  If truth does not morally matter, then truth is still true, and some truths are still metaphysically or epistemologically foundational, but no one has a right to anything because there is no obligation, and thus no rights.  If truth does morally matter, then no one has a right to whatever brings them happiness or whatever subjectively appeases them, for they are morally in the wrong when they are anything but perfectly rationalistic.

It would not be anywhere near so utterly uncommon for people to realize these things if more of them were actually trying to discover and live for the truth, in politics and other aspects of life alike.  Instead of even just being milder idiots, conservatives and liberals are so fixated on just outperforming each other in votes or feeling justified in embracing ideas they have not even tried to prove that they have provoked each other into becoming more vehement, more outwardly hypocritical, more emotionalistic, and more arrogant versions of themselves.  One of many ways this is expressed is in how they respond to news publications/sources that, already driven largely by irrationalism, motivate them to more fiercely cling to assumptions and contradictions to fight other people doing the same thing for different philosophical positions.  If they approve of what a news figure says or want it to be true, they will believe and cite it as if any sort of hearsay could possibly be proven by words.  If it could be proven, news would not be hearsay at all, but logical proofs that could be articulated with words! 

Words, feelings, reputations, perceptions, persuasion, and reactionary worldviews are the focus; truth, proof, and the laws of logic that ground both of them are ignored.  There are many ways to tell someone is not a rationalist, but one of them is just giving them the chance to deny rationalistic skepticism of events.  If they say they believe that current or historical events--not philosophical ideas that motivate people in events, but the mere happenstance occurrence or non-occurrence of a given event--happened because of hearsay, which all news of events reduces down to, they believe based on assumptions and betray reason.  Give them the chance to recant of the idiotic belief that hearsay proves that events are happening, and if they do not say they misworded something or realize they had only made assumptions or thought contradictions could be true, they are not rationalists, or at least are not rationalists with regard to the issue at hand.

With politics and beyond, a rationalist often only needs to hand someone the rope to hang themselves and they tend to quickly do it without even realizing what they are doing or clearly thinking about it until they have already put the noose around their own neck.  From the person who denies the necessary truth of logical axioms that transcend all other things to the person who thinks political convenience is what dictates the truth about reason, morality, epistemology, and more, non-rationalists are the great scourge of humanity. Someone can be a non-rationalist without being a conservative or liberal, but it is impossible to be a conservative or liberal without being a non-rationalist.  Their worsening political fixation has only further exposed how captivated they are by mere emotionalistic satisfaction.  Eager to react to the other side, they leap from error to error and hypocrisy to hypocrisy, reflecting many of the same qualities they hate in others as they choose not to reach for rationalism instead.

A Way Complementarianism Encourages Male Laziness

One of the ways complementarianism encourages entitlement and selfishness in people--and it does this in men and women in extremely dehumanizing, hypocritical, destructive ways no matter how liberals sometimes pretend women are exempt--has to do with bodily appearance.  A certain kind of man, with or without social pressures, just wants to enjoy female beauty without ever thinking of two things: that women want to reciprocate and relish male beauty, and that men and women should both strive to be attractive for their partners in general circumstances.  Even as it degrades men by discouraging them from taking their own appearance and body image seriously and degrades women by pressuring them to be the only ones to prioritize their beauty, it makes it easy for a specific type of man to put little to no effort into his own beauty while demanding the opposite of women.

Complementarianism in its predominant religious or secular forms, the first being nothing but an obvious distortion of what the Bible actually teaches when it is in a Christian context, gives many men and women the socially expected excuse to be lazy and egoistic.  For women, one way laziness is encouraged is when it comes to finances, for men are often financially objectified by complementarians to work themselves to death and women to merely watch it happen.  For men, one way laziness is encouraged is in how women are routinely evaluated and even morally judged on their appearance in one way or another, and the same kind of wholehearted complementarian man who expects this would seldom lift a finger to preserve or enhance his own physical appearance for his significant other.

Men are no less than women beings that can have deep desires to be physically attractive in a platonic or sexual sense.  While it is not as severe as how the common form of complementarianism dismisses sexual and general violence against men, that men have this denied about them and are not encouraged to be open about it is a devastating thing in itself.  However, no matter how much or how little they see their own desire to be attractive mocked or ignored, some men take advantage of the complementarian emphasis on female beauty to the detriment of everyone.  They do not care about how much women might want to enjoy a male body that is taken care of.  They do not care about how much stress or exhaustion women might experience as they try to appease their partners with their appearance, or even society as a whole.

This kind of man is entrenched in utter laziness of a hypocritical kind.  Going as far as to maybe threaten divorce or abuse if a woman does not put an unnecessary amount of effort into her appearance, he would probably be confused if someone was to expect half the same effort from him.  All the more idiotic is that this complementarian man is likely desperate to always be in a romantic relationship and yet remains unwilling to maximize their own beauty for the own sake and the sake of a female partner.  Not every complementarian man necessarily sinks into this as much as others, and some might happen to avoid this tendency altogether despite not being philosophically egalitarian.  Furthering their own oppression and the oppression of women at the same time, the complementarian man who does descend into this is unworthy of the kind of partner who would prioritize her beauty for him.

The Benefit Of The Sabbath

Almost everyone needs to work to some extent just to survive, even if only by hunting or collecting food out in nature and storing water.  With or without professional work in any historical or contemporary sense, there is still a need to labor in order to live unless someone else can labor on your behalf, or unless the correlative connections between nature, food, water, and energy change--both of which are rather unlikely.  The increasing intensity and disparities of the modern workplace might prompt some to reflect on how to restructure society so that so much of the normal human's life is not spent on just working for pay or for other resources necessary to live.

Some call for a four day workweek to replace the traditional five days workweek, while others might wish to abolish the societal need to professionally work altogether.  There might even be people who would work every day of the week to provide themselves with better financial security who would eagerly give up as many days of work as they could if they realized they could survive without them.  In this cultural context, it is actually idiotic for such people to oppose the idea of having at least one day a week where one does not engage in any unecessary physical labor, whether for pay or for some other reason (and idiotic otherwise because there would only be assumptions and personal preferences to stand on).

The entire point of the Biblical Sabbath, which as with so many other parts of Christian theology has been misunderstood by Christians and non-Christians alike, reduces down to this, to ensuring everyone has time for leisure, recovery, and more direct reflection.  This day--not necessarily a specific recurring day of the week but a single day out of every seven that one devotes to abstaining from work, and not necessarily excluding literally all physical or mental effort, or else no one could do anything at all on the Sabbath, not even think or walk around or heal others as Jesus did (Matthew 12:9-14)--is something that springs very naturally from the idea that there is more to humanity and life than the physical professional labor that for so much of the historical record has been a practical necessity.

The benefit of the Sabbath is something that almost everyone wants but the Sabbath law in the Torah is something almost everyone subjectively finds repulsive.  The latter part is likely because working on the Sabbath is assigned capital punishment (Exodus 35:2), though not working does not mean engaging in no activity of a physical or mental kind and there are both Biblical and logically necessary exemptions (which I have addressed previously to some extent and will do again).  Of course, it is not as if the strictness of the death penalty for Sabbath violation or the convenience and deep personal freedom of not having to work at least one day a week are what make the Sabbath laws philosophically invalid or valid.  That would have to do with whether Christianity is actually true in part or in full, which is not a matter of anyone's preferences or longings.

Moral obligation is not about pragmatism, but about doing whatever one is obligated to do because one should do so rather than because it is convenient.  Either morality objectively does not exist or there are obligations that are objectively binding no matter the annoyance or personal dislike one might harbor.  If the Bible is true, then execution for doing unjustified work on the Sabbath is just, yet the core idea behind the Sabbath not only aligns with something many already subjectively want today even if only for arbitrary emotionalistic reasons, but also is ultimately about human freedom to do more than work for a living or struggle to survive (though saving one's own life, the lives of others, or the lives of even animals is a Biblical exemption on the Sabbath).  The benefit of the Sabbath is something few could have a comfortable life without even on a subjective or practical level.

Movie Review--Hercules (2014) [Extended Cut]

 "My father is most unfortunate.  He battles a warlord, Rhesus.  Our land is torn by civil war.  Every day, villages are destroyed, crops ruined, innocents slaughtered."

--Ergenia, Hercules

"You know how a rumor spreads.  How a legend grows.  Hercules' deeds were so incredible, they could not possibly have been performed by a mere mortal.  So we played along."
--Autolycus, Hercules


Hercules is far more intelligently crafted than a film of this name starring Dwayne Johnson as the legendary son of Zeus might sound at first.  Not only are the acting, (general) writing, and storytelling actually of high quality, but Hercules is about how a large and powerful but still very seemingly human warrior and his followers exaggerate his origins, hoping to profit from his reputation, which makes for a very unique approach to the story of the famous demigod.  An ensemble of excellent cast members that includes Rebecca Ferguson, Ian McShane, and John Hurt certainly helps, though there are plenty of characters that receive almost no attention, such as the characters played by then-current/eventual SI Swimsuit and Victoria's Secret models Irina Shayk and Barbara Palvin in their simultaneous film debuts.  It also helps that the creators did not shy away from actually utilizing the PG-13 rating by adding things like blood while never indulging in superficial mistakes like trying make the movie dark simply for the sake of making it dark.  If only more modern films would avoid one of these errors of the other!

Production Values

The CGI on display is not always the best, but anyone expecting an onslaught of creatures from Greek mythology would find that there is very little of that kind of need for CGI here.  The handful of battles and other action sequences of Hercules are shot and choreographed well despite not needing to feature extensive creatures from ancient Greek tales.  For most of the movie, characters drive the scenes, and this is one of the better performances Dwayne Johnson has ever given.  He shows more versatility as an actor here than he does in most of his other works from the past 10 years despite still having a role where he relies on his physicality.  As he needed to in a film like this, he gets plenty of screen time, and thematically relevant revelations about his character and backstory are given up to almost the very end of the movie.

Less dramatic revelations are there for his fellow warriors Atalanta the Amazon, played by Ingrid Bolso Berdal, and the seer Amphiaraus, played by Ian McShane, among other characters, all but one receiving some vital character development or at least enough time to reveal their core histories and personalities.  The very talented Rebecca Ferguson (she was amazing in Doctor Sleep), John Hurt, and Joseph Fiennes also get the chance to both show their skill and bring secret motivations to light.  It is the other characters past this that tend to suffer.  Barbara Palvin, one of the two models who first acted in this movie, only has one scene that I noticed, and merely her head is scarcely visible in the foreground for a brief shot; the other SI Swimsuit model Irina Shayk is onscreen for less than a minute or two combined and barely speaks.  Thankfully, this is not the fate of the characters that make up the circle of friends Hercules has acquired over the years.  The characters who do get more time to unveil themselves do so in a way that naturally contributes to the ideas the story tackles.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Legends about the feats and seeming invincibility of Hercules compel Ergenia, the daughter of a king whose region faces destruction by the vicious Rhesus, to seek him out.  Hercules travels with a small group of warriors and a storyteller that represent the Amazons and various city-states of Greece, like Sparta and Athens.  With his immense size and an even larger reputation, Hercules accepts the task of protecting the kingdom for mercenary pay, as in truth he has allowed this false reputation to spread as a way to generate income for him and his companions.  Rhesus, however, is said to be a centaur sorcerer whose own reputation threatens the dismissal of some who have learned of the embellishments about Hercules himself.

Intellectual Content

This is about as complicated and yet still benevolent a Hercules as one could find in cinema, far more emotionally and philosophically complex than the straightforward person of strength many people think of the demigod as but never as malevolent in his strength as the Hercules from the video game God of War III.  Even his willingness to exploit the assumptions and exaggerations of others for money never comes with any evidence of desire to belittle them.  He does not even always outright lie to people, such as when he tells Lord Cotys that his reputation depends on part on his band of followers--he just literally meant that his very exaggerated reputation as a demigod rather than an incredibly strong human would not would not exist without them, not that they are aids to an actual son of Zeus--though one of his companions is openly agnostic about whether he truly is the son of an Olympian.  At the very least, this group of mercenaries still talks like they believe in the Olympian pseudo-deities or find their existence probable despite no direct evidence that they are present.  One of them is even said to be Amazon as others comment on her combat ability.

Regardless of the veracity of the Olympian stories in this world--and the Olympians could neither be proven to exist by ordinary humans because they do not exist by necessity like the uncaused cause nor disproven because they are indeed logically possible beings--Hercules only seeks money in taking advantage of as a means to the end of survival and personal flourishing.  Before a tragedy befell his family, Hercules said, "I only want to be a husband and a father," and another character calls him dangerous precisely because he does not want power and money for their own sake, as money will not persuade him to do that which he thinks is unjust.  That a person who does not seek political and social ambition might be immune to even the desire for bribery is actually a far more pivotal aspect of the story than might initially seem to be the case, and the ultimate villains are rather realistic in light of this in a movie where it is not a rogue or malevolent Olympian who is the antagonist, but a person just as mortal as Hercules.

Conclusion

Hercules is an excellent movie that makes its fitting PG-13 rating, which is neither too restrictive nor too casual, its superb cast, the originality of the story, and its exploration of legends work in its favor.  Brilliantly pulling from elements of the Greek myths about Hercules only to invert many of them, this is unlike any other movie about Hercules I have seen or heard of.  If it was not for some of the sidelined characters, the sometimes weak CGI, and the very occasional subpar line, this would actually be a almost perfect movie for what it needed to be.  Films about ancient Greece like 300 and Troy are better than Hercules only because of factors like their deeper characterization across the main cast.  All three actually have very clever philosophical themes that draw from ideas associated with ancient Greece even if the characters themselves might say things that are epistemologically unverifiable or false by logical necessity.  For Hercules to be closer in some ways to resembling them than not is an accomplishment some might not at all expect from a Dwayne Johnson-led movie about the classical demigod.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  There is actually blood in the fights drawn with every blow that would likely draw blood in real life, not to mention shots that dwell on events like a vulture eating from a severed head propped up as a warning.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "shit" and "fucking" are rarely used.

 3.  Nudity:  Megara is very briefly seen (literally for less than a moment or two) from behind as she drops transparent cloth and more directly exposes her nude body, buttocks visible.

Kant's Ironic Utilitarianism

History and literature are completely unnecessary to begin thinking about and discovering logical truths about conscience, morality, and human behavior (none of these things are the same thing, despite getting conflated by non-rationalists frequently), but Immanuel Kant is one of the most historically renowned philosophers to posit what is sometimes called moral deontology, or the idea that there are moral obligations that not only exist, but are universally binding, with no individual's circumstances justifying the slightest deviance from obeying these moral laws (not legal customs or personal preferences).  At least Kant acknowledged the inherent connection between moral obligations, if they exist, and the nature of God, but although he was opposed to utilitarianism, he wound up embracing it.

To clarify, Kant was a theist rather than someone who seems to have been a direct Christian.  If he had been a Christian, some of his positions would conflict with certain aspects of the degrees of evil in various sins.  For example, a popular application of Kant's moral framework is that no one should lie to a murderer even when he/she is asking where their next potential victim is.  There are two cases of Old Testament figures lying and having done the right thing, but only in the sense of avoiding a greater sin in the process (the Israelite midwives in the book of Exodus who protected male babies and Rahab of Jericho, to be specific).  That all lying is immoral does not mean that there is no possible scenario where one will sin regardless of action or inaction or where there is a lesser evil and a more insidious one to be selected.  Now, Biblical ethics is in no way utilitarian: it is just that the nuance to degrees of sin and the simultaneous evil of all sin would deviate from Kant's ideas in one sense.

However, his renowned argument for deontological ethics, ironically, is utilitarian at its core!  It is true by logical necessity that if something is morally wrong, it is wrong no matter how convenient or beneficial it would be to do otherwise.  Evil is that which should not be done.  Unless one happens to end up in a situation where, like Jephthah in Judges 11, one will sin no matter what course of action is chosen and the lesser evil is chosen, there is never any excuse for doing something immoral.  Kant, for all of his outward sincerity in deontology, argues that one should not perform certain actions (like theft or murder) because society would not be able to function in a stable way if everyone indulged in them.  A significant part of his moral philosophy is that a person needs to evaluate what the outcome would be if everyone was to practice the action in consideration.  If everyone stole from or murdered others, the entire purpose of doing so might be jeopardized, as there would be no peaceful or just status quo to fall back into and society would be extremely chaotic.

That something would devastate society would not make it evil unless there is a moral obligation, which would be based on the nature of the act itself and not its consequences, and of course there is still the glaring epistemological issue of how people cannot just know what whether morality even exists by introspection.  One could know one's moral feelings or preferences through introspection, which is still epistemologically dependent on reason, and one could discover what would logically follow if everyone was to act in a certain way, but neither feelings nor outcomes logically necessitates that something is evil as opposed to just subjectively undesired or objectively harmful.  Kant, like every other being with human limitations, could not possibly have known from conscience, a mere set of arbitrary, malleable, subjective emotions that have neither metaphysical nor epistemological connection to any moral obligations that exist, what is or is not morally obligatory, good, neutral, or wrong.

He also leaps into the very utilitarianism he was trying to flee from.  While he presents his moral system as if it is about avoiding immoral actions simply because they are immoral, his ethical framework is nothing but repackaged utilitarianism.  Kant was a hypocrite who is mistakenly held up as a champion of deontological ethics.  It is hardly uncommon for historical philosophers to be understood correctly or for the extent of their stupidity to be recognized, but the masses, if they directly think about philosophy at all, are too stupid or frightened to look right to reason instead of to books, assertions, assumptions, cultural norms, and personal perception in its various forms.  Kant, in spite of his hypocrisy that he might not have even realized, is still sometimes revered for his allegedly consistent version of deontology.  The contradiction in the very foundation of his moral ideology is seemingly unnoticed by many who obsess over texts, history (though these events and their figures cannot even be proven), and people instead of the laws of logic, but the different sides of Kant's ethical philosophy cannot possible all be true at the same time.

The Greatest Form Of Productivity

In America, productivity in the workplace and even in free time is often regarded as morally right, receiving praise not just for the accomplishments, but also because someone chose activity over something more leisurely.  The irrationalistic worship of productivity even where it is needless, sought out to a harmful extent, or done only for the sake of emotionalism has infiltrated the worldviews of many evangelical Christians.  Inside or outside of evangelical circles, the most foundational and important kind of productivity is actually dismissed or outright opposed in spite of all this, for none but a few are rationalists.  Seeking out and relishing the necessary truths of reason can require more initial effort than almost any other endeavor because of how terrifying or foreign it can be, and it is more fundamental than physical labor because reason, which rationalistic thinking is in alignment with, is the one thing that cannot not be true.

A person could be completely physically disabled, unable to move as much as their fingers in the service of a company or even household chores, and they could participate in this greatest form of productivity: the discovery, celebration, and revisiting of logical axioms, what follows from them, and the truths they necessitate about other existents and issues.  On the level of bodily activity, especially that aimed at financial ends, they cannot be productive, but they are highly productive nonetheless.  This kind of productivity and the potential for it cannot be snatched away by anything short of the total nonexistence of the mind.  As long as a person is conscious, they are epistemologically relying on reason just as they metaphysically rely on it whether conscious or not (they could not even exist if it was not logically possible), and any willing person can at a minimum grasp the self-evident, necessary nature of axioms.

Reason is already being relied on as people labor professionally, engage in practical tasks like cooking and cleaning, or engage in miscellaneous other tasks to feel a sense of achievement, even if its inherent truth and universal scope (metaphysically and epistemologically) is unrecognized or is not being focused on.  It is possible to be philosophically alert and active on a constant basis regardless of what they are or are not doing physically.  Acting as if this is not true, there are a great many people who might mistake physical relaxation as an indicator of a lack of intellectual, psychological thriving at that very moment.  Yes, even some rationalists might appreciate periods of mental respite (though they would not likely pursue these for anything more than fairly brief respite before focusing on abstract truths once more), yet what they are doing outwardly is not what dictates or reveals this.

This is the inverse side of the idea that physical labor excludes philosophical contemplation.  Even when in the jaws of physical or mental labor in the workplace, someone can still grasp reason directly and dwell on matters simultaneously far deeper and higher than mere professional work, though it might be more difficult for some than others to do so.  Still, it does not logically follow from the absence of professional or personal labor with the body that there is not a more abstract, significant kind of productivity being pursued.  Corporate productivity pales in comparison to something as grand and deep as the laws of logic and the truths they govern about other things.  It does not matter which kind of productivity is most popular or preferred by a given person or society.  Philosophical productivity, accessible as long as a person is conscious, is the intrinsically supreme form of activity.

Enjoying Sexuality

Evangelicalism's simultaneous deep fear of sexuality, fairly constant fixation on it, and legalistic tendencies do not exactly make for an accurate way of representing the Bible's teachings on sexuality.  Though evangelicals might persistently hyper-focus on matters sexuality and even repeatedly do things that they admit they think are sexual sins, which only sometimes truly are sins by Biblical standards (see Deuteronomy 4:2 and identify the sexual acts or thoughts the Bible does not condemn), the prudery they cling to at the same time prevents them from enjoying sexuality even in marriage.  Personal discomfort, gender stereotypes, misinterpretations of Christian sexual ethics, and a general evangelical subculture of intense prudery make it far more difficult to find peace and thorough excitement in the most basic forms of sexual expression not condemned by the Bible.

Enjoying sexuality is of course something that comes naturally to most non-asexuals who are Christians if they do not believe in the illusions of sexual legalism or gender stereotypes.  Only someone who has never read the Bible, made assumptions while reading the Bible, or wants to fit into evangelical or certain anti-Christian groups would be so stupid as to think Christianity is compatible with ideological prudery.  On the contrary, actual Biblical philosophy is very supportive of sexual expression while never prescribing that any man or woman commit a sexual act against their will just to fit in with others.  The Biblical stance goes far beyond treating marital sexual expression that is consensual as worthy of joy, celebration, and private or public affirmation, but any sexual intention or act that is not sinful, which leaves masturbation, extramarital attraction, extramarital sexual flirtation, and public nudity with sexual intentions all in the same category as marital sexual behaviors in this regard.

The Christians who have had decades to read the Bible and discover what actually logically follows from its claims and doctrines have no excuse for misunderstanding it to be a book that declares prudery righteous, not that Christians or non-Christians are ever justified in making assumptions either way.  There are very personal and pragmatic benefits to evangelicals awakening to these truths other than just the more crucial matter of understanding truth.  Ultimately, if someone holds to erroneous or assumed ideas about sexuality outside of marriage, they are likely to only deprive themselves of psychological security, peace, and pleasure in marital sexual expression as well, but even then, the greater issue is simply that assumptions are always epistemologically invalid and that truth, which is both grounded in and revealed by reason, supercedes every being's preferences about sexuality.  Enjoying sexual as a married Christian or even just a married person is in some ways contingent on whether one is already irrational in one's beliefs about the nature of sexuality and whether one holds to inconsistent ideas about sexuality.

Enjoying sexuality does not even have to involve looking at the opposite gender or performing interpersonal acts with a spouse, though.  One's own mind and body are enough to explore one's sexuality without the need for a partner, but for those who have committed partners, sexual expression has more potential avenues and can be amplified in certain ways.  Married or unmarried, Christians are free to enjoy and practice anything sexual that does not specifically fall into categories like promiscuity, rape, prostitution, homosexual behaviors, incest, and so on.  There are far more things permitted here by the Bible, including masturbation with or without sensual imagery and sexually charged flirtation, than there are things condemned.  Marriage alone will not destroy the grip of prudery and make understanding, accepting, and living in light of one's sexuality any easier.  Reason, introspection, and accurate Biblical positions on sexuality can. 

If A Rationalist Was To Falter

The necessary truths of logic are true no matter how people behave, think, perceive, or believe.  Moreover, no one can even have experiences that contradict reason, nor can they truly escape logical axioms and their ramifications.  At most, they can believe things to the contrary as everything else about reality is unaffected.  If something if impossible, it is not impossible because of anything other than the fact that it contradicts logical axioms.  If something is true, it is either inherently true, like logical axioms, or rooted in something else that is true.  Only logic proves things; if something does not logically follows from another thing, it is either untrue or unknowable, though even truths that are unknowable because of human limitations are not beyond the necessary truths of reason and people can still nonetheless choose to believe the impossible or unprovable.

People who look to reason and not misconceptions about reason or some inferior substitute like emotionalism, social consensus, or subjective perceptions are the genuine rationalists, and everyone else is either an anti-rationalist or a non-rationalist --the only non-rationalists who are not fools are the extremely young and those with special psychological conditions that interfere with abstract realizations.  For all other non-rationalists, a failure to abstain from assumptions, recognize the self-evident nature of axioms, live for truth above all else, and live without disregarding what they do know of reality for the sake of convenience is a failure to be intelligent and worthy of being treated as anything more than an intellectual insect.  What if a rationalist was to have a legitimate failing, though?  It will almost certainly be more of a failure to live out what they already know and believe than a failure to avoid contradictions and assumptions, recognize the basic intrinsic, universal truth of logical axioms, desire to understand the truth, and honor whatever moral obligations they have.

If a rationalist suddenly lapses into assumptions, contradictory beliefs, or hypocritical actions, he or she is doing so out of a failure to be consistent with the rationality that characterizes the rest of their worldview and behaviors.  It is not that their irrationality or injustice is justified, for such a thing is impossible, nor is it trivial, for such a thing is also impossible, but it is likely trivial compared to the errors of non-rationalists because it is a potentially small lapse in a general lifestyle of consistency in the truth, alignment with reason, and desire to do that which is just.  The rationalist understands reason, their intellect, and the demands of consistency, or at least he or she can perfectly understand them.  Perhaps they had a moment where they yielded to weakness or for some reason struggled more than usual to not deviate from reason in belief or deed (which is just living in light of logical, metaphysical, and epistemological truths).

Unlike a rationalist, a non-rationalist is characterized by stupidity, hypocrisy, emotionalism, apathy, and/or enough terror, self-imposed ignorance, or disinterest in the logically necessary and deep aspects of reality that he or she will either avoid rationalism altogether or only selectively or haphazardly avoid assumptions, all without having even rightly grasped the logical axioms at the heart of all things.  Whereas a rationalist might, if they choose to, fail to be rational in some specific way or another as they always or almost always otherwise avoid this, a non-rationalist might randomly be more rational than usual in one instance without having the correct foundation for this or without even realizing it, as they believe and live without aligning with the necessary truths of reason that are true regardless of their beliefs.

A non-rationalist might think of this as hypocrisy, but it is actually the non-rationalist who believes anything whatsoever on a basis without logical proof--not scientific perceptions, hearsay, assumptions, emotional persuasion, or preferences, but truths that necessarily follows from either self-verifying logical axioms or some other necessary truth--without recognizing the inherent irrationality of assumptions and impossibility of contradictions that is the hypocrite.  From error, errors spring; from hypocrisy, more hypocrisy might follow; from one default worldview or habit of emotionalism, more are almost bound to follow unless someone is rationalistic and briefly failed to perfectly align with reason.  Non-rationalists cannot even understand things like necessity, proof, absolute certainty, and fairness to begin with since they are in the grip of assumptions, leaving them in no position to believe that regarding rationalists more highly even in their failings than non-rationalists are regarded even in their occasional bouts of greater rationality.  Even if they were right, and it is is impossible for irrationalism to be valid and irrationalists to be equal to rationalists, they would not and could not even know!

The Quranic Parallel To Deuteronomy 4:2

One of the most important verses in the entire Bible is Deuteronomy 4:2, which is so inescapably central in finding the Bible's direct affirmation that the ongoing commands of God are inflexible, and that nothing beyond what he condemns is evil and that nothing he does not prescribe is obligatory.  The commands of God, within Christianity, are the way these obligations are expressed to humans, and though there are logically necessary ramifications of some commands that apply to things not mentioned in the text (such as alcohol abuse being condemned logically necessitating that the same would be true of drug abuse), things that are not condemned by name or by logical extension are not sinful in Christianity.

Thinking that something is evil that is not contrary to God's nature or that something is good that does not correspond to God's nature is the heresy of legalism, which misrepresents the character of the Christian deity and the moral obligations grounded in him within this philosophy.  Legalism is not something only idiotic Christians believe in and practice, though.  Like the ancient (and modern) ideological Jews who so often believe that moral ideas and traditions beyond or contrary to the Torah are prescribed in the text, and like the Christians who let evangelicalism or Catholicism poison them with delusions, many Muslims believe that Islam entails commands that it does not or that it condemns certain things that it does not.

The Quran even has its own version of Deuteronomy 4:2, though on Islam, the Torah is already supposed to be valid, even though the Quranic criminal punishments very sharply contradict those of the Torah.  "'Do not add to my commands or subtract from them,'" says Deuteronomy 4:2.  "Do not say falsely, 'This is lawful and that is forbidden,' inventing a lie about God," says Surah 16:116.  The philosophical overlap is obvious upon reading or recalling both!  Christianity and Islam are very overtly theonomist in their moral epistemologies and overall frameworks, and this is another similarity that is rooted in how it is not human traditions, personal convenience, or subjective conscience that make something good or evil or reveal which, if either, it is.  Legalism is antithetical to Islam as well as Christianity.

What might be some examples of the legalistic things either commonly assumed to be condemned in the Quran (by people who have not read it) or even assumed to be sinful within Islam by Muslims who confuse various cultural or legalistic traditions with Quranic/Allah's commands?  As is the case with Christianity and Biblical ethics, nothing in the Quran actually prohibits the likes of profanity, bikinis, opposite gender friendships, video games, metal music, and so on, yet plenty of Muslims, almost inevitably the conservative kind, think it is the other way around, that they are evil.  Since they join evangelicals in embracing tradition and conscience as either of them has any epistemological validity, they ironically end up betraying the actual philosophical ideas of the Quran by ignoring Surah 16:116.

It is not that Islam is true or even logically possible except in isolated parts, for the Quran conflicts with the very Torah on moral matters of justice, and crucial issues of just punishment at that, all as it states it is the revelation of the same God who provided Mosaic Law to the Israelites.  This disparity means Islam is false whether or not the Torah is true.  None of this is affected by how many things condemned by Muslims or assumed to be condemned by the Quran are not actually prohibited by it.  One of the most significant parts of Islamic legalism is instead the fact that Islam's genuine similarities to Christianity are sometimes distorted by Muslims in the same way actual Christian morality, rather than the moral feelings and traditions most Christians submit to, is commonly distorted by Christians.  Another ramification is that even the opponents of Islam as a philosophical system of theology and ethics might often be misunderstanding how Muslims believing, saying, or practicing something does not make it a component of Islam.

Game Review--Army Corps Of Hell (PS Vita)

"I am the King of Kings!  The Lord of All!"

--The King of Hell, Army Corps of Hell

Sometimes experience with and reflection on entertainment of low or mixed quality can help one appreciate entertainment of high philosophical and artistic quality all the more.  In this way, even wholly mediocre or abysmal entertainment can accomplish something besides displaying the laziness or incompetence of its creators.  Army Corps of Hell is example of such a work that at best straddles the line between the two back and forth.  Whether someone enjoys it will depend on their personal tolerance of or pleasure found in extreme repetition in gameplay, but Army Corps of Hell is lackluster in its "variety" of environments and attacks, utterly shallow in its story, and awful at representing the graphical power of the PS Vita.  It does almost nothing with what could have actually been the basis of a lore-rich, diverse gameplay experience.

Production Values

From the visuals to the sound, Army Corps of Hell is relentlessly repetitive, and not repetitive in qualities that are good.  The graphics look like they were from a generation of handheld game systems from before the Vita, blurry, lacking in detail, and only getting utilized to show a series of very similar floating landscapes of hell one after the other.  Of course, graphics alone do not make a game excellent, and even games with stellar visuals for their time and system of release can become worse by comparison to later games.  It is just that these graphics were never good by the Vita's standards even when the system and the game were first released very close to each other.  The soundtrack itself is also hyper-repetitive, playing a few metal/rock songs over and over, all without any audio dialogue in between.  Otherwise, only things like the grunts made by the goblin underlings and the sounds of combat greet one's ears while playing this game.

Gameplay

Matching the visuals and story, the gameplay of Army Corps of Hell is at best blandly monotonous and of a distinctly low quality compared to both the system's capabilities and the potential of the game itself.  The limited three different kinds of goblins that can be equipped with different elemental gear or gear with higher or lower characteristics of the same few categories are thrown at enemies--or just launch elemental bolts at them in the case of magi--are launched with little to no variation at various monstrosities as they fight through hell.  The boss fights, like the level design and general game mechanics, are also used more than once in some cases with just the color of the boss or the number of them changed (some bosses appear in pairs).  That a game on a platform like the Vita could squander the chance to portray combat between mystical beings in hell and make it so mundane is an artistic travesty of sorts!

Story

Some spoilers are below.

An unnamed demonic entity is cast down from his station in hell, enraged by his loss and eager to forcefully claim his desired status of the ruler of all hell.  He uses an increasingly well-equipped army of goblins divided into soldiers with swords, spearmen, and magi, with whom he attacks the many creatures of hell that could threaten him or stand in the way of total dominion over the realm, some of them being demonic creatures that far exceed him in size.

Intellectual Content

Expect nothing of philosophical substance with this game.  Sadly, what could have been a glorious premise for a game, with a demon king that explores the nature of power much more thoughtfully and deeply, is not utilized for its conceptual depth at all.  Even the King's own motivations are never explored beyond brief, mostly still-frame cutscenes where he repeatedly talks about his subjective infatuation with power and dominance.  In fact, as far as the story goes is just the King of Hell irately observing possible threats to his planned reign and occasionally having brief conversations, all communicated by subtitles, with the goblins he only cares about as a tool by which he can secure unfiltered power.  When the gameplay itself is so undeveloped and not even the lore and production values are strong, what a waste it is for a game to be philosophically shallow to this degree!

Conclusion

The PlayStation Vita could have been handled much better than Sony treated it, and it also called for a much better kind of game to showcase its strengths and even just the components of a quality video game.  Uncharted: Golden Abyss was a far superior launch title for the Vita at its worst than Army Corps of Hell is at its best.  However, not to trivialize the mostly excellent Golden Abyss in any way, but anything with more than the most minimalist kind of story and the barest level of characterization already towers above Army Corps of Hell.  This game would have benefitted from making it seem more like a title at home on the Vita instead of one that seems almost like it might have been initially intended for the PSP and happened to be released for the Vita later on.  Even then, the PSP had far better system exclusives (at the time) and multiplatform games than this.  Army Corps of Hell is a perfect example of nothing more than superficiality.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  At least the violence is something the developers put effort into.  Especially when special group attacks are used and enormous amounts of blood are thrown out as enemies burst, this is a very violent game.