On Artistic Inspiration

Unlike the discovery of strictly logical truths, which are the heart of all things and thus do not rely on anything more foundational than themselves, thinking of storytelling concepts is often prompted by experience, though even this cannot be understood apart from reason.  There is nothing logically necessary, other than a few basic aspects, that a story must have.  It can have heroes and villains or just one protagonist.  It can delve into comedy, horror, drama, or action.  It might or might not combine genres and subgenres.  In an experiential vacuum, there is little to nothing to specifically inspire a story, even when logical axioms and their ramifications could be discovered and perfectly understood in an absence of sensory experiences.  Without something to prompt a storyteller to think of a particular fictional narrative, whether a personal experience or another story was the muse, it would be highly difficult to realize how truths, ideas, and events can all come together to form precise stories (yes, logical truths and philophical concepts can inspire art as well, but logical truths alone would likely not bring someone to think of events in narratives as opposed to necessary truths).

One kind of art can even inspire new works in different mediums, as is exemplified in the way the first Alien movie inspired the game Metroid, down to the name of Samus Aran's franchise nemesis Ridley being named after director Ridley Scott, whose film Alien will be mentioned again shortly.  Both feature female protagonists in a hostile science fiction world at a time when it would have been even more groundbreaking to defy the norm of male protagonists in entertainment.  Both feature extraterrestrial creatures the heroine must defeat (or in the case of Alien, one extraterrestrial creature).  Of course, they have their differences, even as the similarities extend to the Weyland Corporation and the Galactic Federation respectively trying to capture, study, and experiment upon the titular alien of each franchise.  

The influence of those who worked on Alien does not stop with Metroid!  Far from it.  Lovecraft's writings, the artwork of H.R. Giger (who also was involved with the creature and set design of Alien), and the film Eyes Wide Shut all inspired the erotic cosmic horror game Lust for Darkness, which combines the eldritch horror of Lovecraftian fiction with sexually evocative environments and even one of the lines from Eyes Wide Shut--just in a very different context.  Cosmic horror is here used as to emphasize the destructiveness of hedonism, which takes this horror subgenre in an unconventional direction while still holding onto some of the norms of Lovecraftian fiction.  It is unfortunate that the production values and gameplay do not live up to the absolutely genius philosophical narrative that the game explores.

Many other examples can be found, such as how Tolkien's Lord of the Rings provoked George R.R. Martin to write his A Song of Ice and Fire books to correct the simplicity of the former.  There is the way the psychological horror video game series Silent Hill inspired Stranger Things, with the Otherworld of the former (an alternate dimension where ordinary laws of physics do not apply) pushing the Duffer brothers to conceive of the Upside Down for the latter.  It is not always art, though, that inspires art.  Author Stephen King says he has found inspiration for some of his most renowned works in random personal experiences throughout his life, such as how his stay at a hotel in Colorado gave him ideas for The Shining.  Lovecraft himself, whose works inspired Stephen King (stories like It definitely veer into cosmic horror territory at points), was inspired by a dream to write the short story The Call of Cthulhu.

Strictly logical truths and personal experiences, though of the two, only the first can be known without prompting from the latter, can inspire incredible artistic narratives that reflect at least something of reality; it is impossible for fiction to ever escape the necessary truths of logical axioms, as that which is truly logically necessary cannot even be contradicted within fiction--it is logically impossible!  For many aspects of entertainment, it would nonetheless be very difficult or impossible to think of the ideas without experience providing psychological material to draw from.  Sometimes these experiences are encounters with someone else's art, and sometimes they are introspective or sensory experiences that have nothing to do with entertainment.  Either way, there is even now, after so many works of entertainment in various mediums that have been responses to other works of entertainment, a plethora of ways to combine themes, genres, and narrative structures to make them original in the sense of novelty, and sometimes this originality is ironically sparked by familiarity with other art.

How To Manipulate Non-Rationalists

What are some ways a rationalist can manipulate non-rationalists?  One is to allow them to reveal what appears to be their true self, including any preferences that they directly or indirectly admit they look to for their worldview, such as psychological fulfillment or a desire to fit in with other people, rather than believing a worldview solely dictated by logical necessity (through epistemological recognition of logical truths).  Without lying or in any way truly misrepresenting one's rationalistic worldview or motivations, be inviting enough that they volunteer information about their philosophy, personality, and lifestyle even if you have no genuine interest in deep friendship with them, but be firm and honest enough that they can see, though they do not really understand it, that you are a rationalist who cares nothing for beliefs borne out of emotion, unverifiable perception, preference, societal pressures, or personal/utilitarian convenience.

This way, you will never have actually been dishonest even if they are still somehow surprised when you twist the knife by using their words against them when it will rightfully pain them the most.  Depending on one's intentions and on how one goes about this, genuinely toying with them in part to entertain oneself, since they are already irrational regardless of how you interact with them, can be done without malice, slander, dehumanization, and so on.  Such manipulation can also be conducted as a way to force them to more directly grapple with the nature of reality, which they will inevitably, as a non-rationalist, have believed in on the basis of assumptions or preferences that they simply find personally persuasive or emotionally appealing.  You can still regard them as full persons while not trivializing or overlooking how irrationalism taints the whole person to the extent it is allowed to--and while manipulating them as lesser beings.

One can even enjoy the anticipation or experience of laying psychological and verbal traps for them or bringing up their errors with the potential motivation of making them feel as stupid as they are, maybe in front of both them and people they desperately want to love or approve of them.  If they are fitheists, give them the chance to verbalize this and then, in their presence, speak disparagingly about fitheists for a different religion or kind of theism.  If they believe in conscience having epistemological validity, as most people do one way or another, organically, casually bring up how your own conscience would have you live--if you submitted to it like a damn emotionalist--in ways that they would find hurtful, shocking, or intimidating.  Revel in your own happenstance moral preferences while making it clear that you can have them without actually basing any ideological stances on them, no matter how frightening or upsetting someone else might subjectively perceived them to be (anyone who really thinks everyone would have the same moral "intuitions" or feelings is idiotic).

When they unrepentantly say something irrational, perhaps you can talk about it later on within their indirect earshot to someone else in a way that mocks or validly belittles both the philosophical idea and anyone who would believe it, at least without giving it up once confronted even if they did not realize its falsity or unverifiability left to themselves.  They should both realize from this, if they are attempting to shed assumptions, that the idea in question is wrong and that you are a friend of the truth before you are an ally to any mere person.  If they refuse to reject their contradictions or assumptions or emotionalism, it is not as if they deserve to be treated as rational, morally upright people.  They are slaves to practically anything but reason.  Since their ideas are demonstrably false or can only be epistemologically assumed, they would be as irrational as their worldviews, and if it is rational or just to hate or mock the broad philosophy of irrationalism, how could it be different with the irrationalists themselves?

It is not that manipulating non-rationalists can only be driven by a selfish desire to mistreat someone as long as one derives pleasure from it, and Biblically, this is not necessarily mistreatment at all as long as one's motive is not to be degrading.  Being loving is the same as doing what the justice of Mosaic Law prescribes (Matthew 22:37-40), and if justice sometimes entails killing people no matter their own objections or feelings (such as with Exodus 22:18-20), then fittingly harsh words in acknowledgement of the truth cannot be erroneous, for to the extent that someone flees from the truth, they have chosen delusion and do not deserve the special affection that a rational, righteous person would.  If truth does not matter, although every logical fact would still be necessarily true and of the utmost foundationality, people cannot matter, for it would have to be true that they have special value.  If truth does matter, forsaking or neglecting it would mean a person has less value than a devoted rationalist while still having whatever baseline human worth there is.  Inside or outside of the Christian worldview, there is no valid objection to the manipulation of non-rationalists in the aforementioned ways.

As a non-rationalist, they have ignored or betrayed the necessary truths like axioms that are true independent of all else and that all other things hinge on, from the real nature of morality and religion and science and their own lives.  They have lived for something that is meaningless either way: their assumptions and preferences.  Whether they like it or not or realize it, rationalists are their superiors, and yet still whatever human rights exist would still be theirs.  A thorough rationalist would never try to make it more difficult for a finally willing person to embrace the truth, though it might have taken emotional brutality for them to finally be struck by the stupidity of their assumptions and the unverifiability of their subjective perceptions, and they would never seek to mistreat them along the way.  A rational Christian would never penalize someone for their repentance, which can only occur if errors and wrongdoing were pursued beforehand, no matter how worthy of hatred or belittling manipulation someone was before.  Anyone who is not turning from assumptions and falsities to logical truths, however, could not deserve this type of respite.

Navigating Multiple Jobs

All it would take for many workplace problems to end is for employers starting a new business to not go forward without paying their employees a livable wage/salary that allows security (meaning it ultimately has to be more than enough to barely survive on).  Established employers would also need to adjust their compensation for all present workers and give up some of their own surplus earnings if required.  Until that happens, a plethora of workers would continue to severely struggle against the urgency of various personal goals requiring money and the higher and higher costs of living.  That workplace oppression is so normal in some countries does not mean that it cannot come to a stop, but it is unlikely that it will happen anytime soon, at the very least.

In the meantime, how are many people to survive while recognizing the inherent irrationality of plenty of concepts, practices, and intentions associated with the general workplaces of countries like America or India?  They might, for the right reasons (that is, by discovering and embracing logical necessities while avoiding all assumptions, which almost no one actually does), come to reject the philosophical errors of exalting professional labor over all else.  They could flee from the pretense that it is anything more on its own than a social construct and a means to an end that could be altered if their society was restructured, and still they will almost certainly have to work simply to survive in a society that often uses work to express irrationalistic, abusive, or selfish tendencies.

Low wages/salaries, haphazard benefits beyond compensation, insufficient working hours, or harmful workplace conditions, not to mention the typical corporate pettiness, could easily make any single job a kind of hell for workers just trying to get by while perhaps saving money for major goals or spending money on uplifting, nonsinful non-necessities.  When their job is not enough to help them achieve these ends, they can search for a new job to replace the current one, which has its own dangers of giving up any advantages of seniority and possibly taking a lot of time, effort, and luck to bring about.  Another option is to, as frustrating as it is, secure a second job, maybe even a handful of secondary, smaller jobs.

On a pragmatic level, for a time, it can be best to work at least two jobs to gain more base earnings, contribute to multiple 401Ks if possible, and obtain more experience that can be presented to a potential future employer.  This is not how many people would prefer to live, and certainly not myself, but in order to advance under an increasingly difficult set of workplace norms (as inflation leaps forward, compensation might still stagnates), it might be a necessary sacrifice, if just a temporary one.  It is necessary only in the sense that without it one might not escape financial limitations or would escape them much more slowly.  To purposefully set up a society to pressure people to do this by default, a wholly avoidable thing, is to knowingly establish an exploitative system.

Despite the challenges of having even just two jobs and the immense forfeiture of free time and non-professional tasks therein, navigating multiple jobs can be a pathway to greater economic stability or to buying more food, entertainment, and so on without depleting existing savings.  Without ever believing the falsehood that it is the only possible way to become more financially secure, or that it is not ultimately up to employers to end the exploitation of employees that drives some people to seek multiple jobs, a person can have more than one job for part of their life.  It is doable, and it is also irrational for certain people to prefer for others to live this way so that they can continue underpaying or otherwise exploiting them.

No Worse Than Other Types Of Racism

There is a sense in which some evangelicals might regard the Jews as more worthy of attention, aid, and love than others, though this is usually paired with an emotionalistically higher emphasis on American citizens than foreigners as a whole.  While some Christians actively trivialize what the Torah and other parts of the Old Testament say about God's relationship with the ancient Jews in order to seem more inclusive, others commit the inverse error of all but verbally exalting the Jews as superhuman beings, taking the side of people just because they are Jews or affiliated with the modern nation of Israel, perhaps insisting that historical antisemitism means Jews deserve greater concern than the rest of humanity.  Though worthiness of greater respect does not follow, it is indeed the case that Yahweh chose the Jews for a special purpose of sorts.

Deuteronomy 7:6 calls the Jews a holy people and a treasured possession of God, but this is in contrast to those who practiced the pagan activities condemned right before this.  If it is wrong to engage in such rites, it would be immoral for everyone, and it is in this context that Yahweh says he has chosen the Israelites out of the world to be his people and his treasured possession.  All humans equally bear God's image even if there can be great disparity in how much voluntarily pursued moral value a person has beyond this, and neither being a Jew nor a Gentile at any time in history dictates one's status as a human being, one's philosophical stances, or one's individual moral character.  There is nothing racist about God using the ancient Jews as a vessel to express justice, love, and mercy to the other civilizations around them.

God could have selected any group of people, no matter how initially aimless or morally and philosophically lost they were, as his chosen people.  Nothing about being born in a certain region or time to a certain family makes one a superior human.  Moreover, Yahweh's relationship with Israel was always intended to be a way to impact foreigners (Deuteronomy 4:5-8).  The ideas of Genesis 1:26-27 already establish very early that racism or nationalism of any kind is unjust on the Biblical worldview, and Isaiah 56:3 makes the following statement: "'Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say, "The Lord will surely exclude me from his people."'"  The Old Testament's lack of racist prescriptions or commands from Yahweh (for or against Jews) did not need a New Covenant.  On the level of metaphysics, morality, and soteriology, Jews and non-Jews alike are valuable for reasons wholly other than their race or ancestry.

The same rationalistic truths (for the humanity of all people is true irregardless of moral and religious truths) and the same moral doctrines of the Bible that make antisemitism erroneous, then, also make the special treatment of Jews as if they are more valuable than others equally invalid.  That "There is neither Jew nor Gentile" (Galatians 3:28) in the sense of moral obligation and soteriology is not a truth that contradicts anything in the Old Testament or that is not explicitly affirmed in the words of the Torah and elsewhere long before the New Testament.  Jesus and Paul only spoke and lived in accordance with something that logically followed from the tenet of Genesis 1, the shared metaphysical likeness to God that all people bear.

Whether it is rooted in eschatological fervor or something else, the evangelical ideology (not that every evangelical believes this) that Jews should be revered for being racially Jewish is thoroughly unbiblical, as is antisemitism.  It is irrational and Biblically unjust to side with Jews just because they are Jews or with the political deeds of Israel just because Jewish individuals are behind them, and, yes, some evangelicals might point to antisemitism as a supposed justification for their racism in the other direction.  Antisemitism is no worse than other types of racism.  Support for Israel for no other reason than that it is for Israel (though on the level of personal motivation, the evangelical who holds to this probably thinks they are securing God's favor for prioritizing Jews above many other people) is also no better than the unflinching support of America, China, or any other country no matter what its leadership believes or does.  Racism and nationalism in favor of Jews are just as erroneous by default as antisemitism.

Deuteronomy 22:13-21 (Part One)

"Frodo," here is more of that attention you seem to want!  I finally had the time to write the first of a two-part, comprehensive series on what Deuteronomy 22:13-21 does and does not mean for you, since you have clearly written as if you deny the premises stated below or what follows from them by necessity, inside or outside of Biblical veracity.  I will try to write the second part soon, but remember that many other posts that have been released this year have been scheduled out months or more than a year in advance in some cases.  I do not at all usually write something and schedule it for a day or so out in advance.  As such, I will write part two when I have the time to devote to it outside of work and the like.  Is the Bible sexist against either gender when it comes to sexual expectations for men and women?  Not at all, as texts like Deuteronomy 22:13-21, which deals with a specific scenario in which a woman lies about her virginity before marriage, do not say or necessitate what some people believe, such as that only women can or should be virgins Biblically speaking, that virginity is strictly equated with an intact hymen, and so on.  Since many philosophical facts independent of the Bible or about what the Bible teaches about general morality are prerequisites to realizing this, I will address them first.

The Nature of Conscience

The following is true regardless of whether the Bible is.  Conscience is only a subjective sense of morality.  Conscience could exist if there is nothing good or evil, though if this is/was the case then it simply could not correspond to anything but a person's mind and its feelings or preferences.  If morality does exist--not cultural consensus about what is supposedly good or evil, not personal approval or condemnation of something, and not belief in morality, but actual objective moral obligations--conscience is still subjective.  An individual person's "sense" of morality also might be entirely miscalibrated or lost over time so that it does not align with what is righteous, but the more important fact is that a subjective sense of morality cannot tell you if morality really exists or what its exact obligations are.  All it reveals is that you feel a certain way, that the thought or sight or mention of a particular thing makes one horrified or uncomfortable or furious.  This is all many people go off of when cornered about why they believe in a certain religious moral framework or endorse a particular society's laws.  They can pretend like there is more to their motivations than gratifying personal conscience, but this might not be the case.  If the obligations of Deuteronomy 22:13-21 really do correspond to a moralistic deity's nature, then conscience means nothing.  If Christianity is not true, since there would not be any other moral-theistic system with actual evidence pointing to it, no one would actually hold to moral positions except on the basis of preference.  Maybe a given moral idea is true as long as it does not contradict logical axioms or some other necessary truth, and maybe it is false.  No one would have any basis for actually believing such a thing either way.

Mosaic Law Describes The Biblical God's Unchanging Commands

As for the endurance of Mosaic Law's obligations according to the real tenets of Christianity, the Law is presented as inherently good (Deuteronomy 4:5-8) and as being complete enough that one can find or logically derive all of Yahweh's moral nature from it (Deuteronomy 4:2).  The only things that could change about the universality obligations, which are rooted in the nature of an unchanging deity (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17), is that some of them could not be binding outside of a particular context.  My wife and I cannot be obligated to offer sacrifices to the priests if there is no sacrificial system and priesthood in place, for instance.  This does not even have to do with whether animal sacrifices as prescribed by the Bible are really morally good.  If I cannot do something, it is by logical necessity not evil for me to not do it.  All of the precise sins with the status of crimes and the exact punishments for those sins as outlined in the Bible, from minor assault (Exodus 21:18-19) to cursing one's parents (Leviticus 20:9), are detailed in the Torah and would not be only for a given societal structure to uphold, but for all cultures at all times.

These laws and the obligations they reference (which would not be mere words or customs, but legitimate obligations that transcend the human mind) are not overturned or declared tyrannical in the New Testament.  The moral epistemology of conscience aside, Jesus affirms Mosaic Law and literally says he is not overturning it (Matthew 5:17-19).  He also approves of the execution of people who curse their parents (Exodus 20:17), for instance, while chastising the Pharisees for not doing what the Law actually demands while contriving and submitting to mere social norms (Matthew 15:1-14).  Jesus was not opposed to the very laws the Father he wholly submitted himself to revealed.  As for Paul, he is presented, as any thorough Christian thinker would be, as a theonomist who says he is committed to everything the Law entails (Acts 24:14) and that the Law is not sinful and, in fact, is necessary to know one's moral obligations (Romans 7:7).  This on its own refutes the idea that he believed in conscience over Mosaic Law and that the Law could be improved upon.  Paul's comments on conscience in Romans 2:13-16, after all, are that Mosaic Law is written on people's hearts (this would not contradict conscience being subjective and unverifiable).

Not About Sex Before Legal Marriage

Something that needs to be mentioned about Deuteronomy 22:13-21 is that it obviously is not about sex before legal marriage being evil (it is not necessarily sinful Biblically), and especially not just for women.  From the passage itself, this is clear from how in this limited case law, it is the woman lying about her virginity that is the issue.  Outside of this passage, Exodus 22:16-17 already addresses the scenario of two people who are neither engaged nor married to each other having sex.  The man and woman are under most circumstances to get married, unless there is parental objection (or if the relationship would be abusive for either party, for that is already grounds for divorce in Exodus 21:9-11 and Deuteronomy 24:1-4).  Casual sex is sinful.  Sex before legal marriage is not universally immoral according to the Bible.  Moreover, God did not create human governments; people did.  Legal marriage is inherently a social construct because it by nature cannot exist apart from a culture, and yet, God told the first humans to procreate and called their state very good (Genesis 1:26-31).  Premarital sex in the conventional sense is not automatically sinful, so a woman or man not being a virgin when she/he is married would not inherently be a moral failing.

The Gender Equality Of God's Image

Also of great relevance to the issue of gender and moral obligation is the verse in the referenced portion of Genesis (1:27) that says men and woman are equal.  Men and women, whether or not the Bible is true, could not have moral obligations that are exclusive to them unless it has something to literally do with their anatomy, the only difference (along with physiology) between men and women.  That which is good and could be done by both would be good or even obligatory for both and vice versa.  More than just this, there is not and cannot be such a thing as different personalities that are "masculine" or "feminine" that one's genitalia dictate.  It does not logically follow from having a penis or vagina that one is stoic or emotional, hypersexual or asexual/demisexual, or prone to lead or prone to follow.  It also is not the case that just because one person of a given gender thinks or acts in a certain way that another person of their gender will, for people are individuals.  These truths are not grounded in or revealed by petty science or social customs, but pure logical necessity.

To list just some things, men are not Biblically obligated to put themselves in harm's way specifically for women, disregard their emotionality, or consign themselves to silence or denial if they are sexually abused by women--which happens twice, not that many people acknowledge this, in the very first book of the Bible between Lot's daughters in Genesis 19 and Potiphar's wife with Joseph in Genesis 39.  Women are not to be confined to the home of they do not wish to abstain from professional work elsewhere--my god, Proverbs 31 by itself refutes the idea that the Bible prescribes this for women, as the woman is praised for her business productivity and her husband is the one who in this window of time is not working!  They are not to seek to be or be externally pressured to be a mother if it does not suit their personality, just as they, like men, are not prohibited from leadership in the Torah or showing part or the whole of their bodies publicly [1].  Nothing is sinful on Christianity, certainly not on the basis of gender, that God has not condemned (Deuteronomy 4:2).

Female Masturbation

Now, back to Deuteronomy 22:13-21.  One of the most idiotic things I have ever heard about this passage is that it supposedly condemns female masturbation.  I have already shown that neither women nor men are morally required by default to be virgins when they get married according to the Bible.  Thus, this cannot be what the passage is about.  However, I have also had the person to whom this series is addressed say that women in particular were not allowed to masturbate in Israel because they were allegedly demanded to be virgins prior to marriage, which this person assumes from Deuteronomy 22:13-21 is equated with having an intact hymen (demanded by God or by a Hebrew culture they think is repudiated hy the Bible at large, they did not strictly specify)!  The hyman part will be focused upon in the next part of this series.  Regarding masturbation, only a fool would think that the Bible is condemning something it never directly or directly mentions.

It does not prohibit masturbation, which of course means it does not condemn it for either gender, and to cite Deuteronomy 4:2 yet again, nothing is to be condemned that God has not condemned.  Never once does the Torah or anywhere else in the Bible condemn masturbation by either gender.  It is a permissible act that can be a deeply introspective, delightful expression of sexuality.  Still, even then, a woman could masturbate without "breaking" her hymen, so this objection is based on non sequitur fallacies that are not only logically erroneous, but that also distort what the Bible does and does not say and the scientific possibility of different forms of masturbation for women.  The clitoris could be manually stimulated without ever entering the vagina, for instance.  Neither the exterior nor penetrative kind of female masturbation is Biblically sinful, whether inside or outside marriage or with or without visual/mental stimulation from something like sensual images of the male body.  None of this is condemned directly or by logical extension in Mosaic Law.  Anyone who is a Christian and objects is not only irrationalistic, but a legalist like the kind Jesus opposed among the Pharisees.  Anyone who is not a Christian and objects that this is not what the Bible really teaches is a goddamn fool as well.

Part One's Finale

The wording of laws that happen to mention a specific gender, the relevance of Deuteronomy 22:13-21 to prostitution, the real criteria used to probabilistically evaluate if a woman was a virgin, the frequency in which this law is prescribed to be carried out, and the equivalent male obligation to not lie about virginity will be tackled in the second part.  All of this is either philosophical background to the issue of ethics and gender as a whole and Christian morality in particular, as well as well as setup for the details in the next part that will dive into the Deuteronomy text in question.  No, Yahweh of the Bible is not some sexist bigot against women or men, but whatever is or is not immoral, though we cannot prove that any moral system is true as opposed to probably true (inconsistent moral systems are false by necessity due to contradicting themselves and logical axioms), our feelings and our society's collective habits are necessarily, demonstrably meaningless and irrelevant.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/bikinis-are-not-sinful.html

Assumptions That Misrepresent GMOs

Alongside conspiracy theories about the deep state [1], the Illuminati, the United Nations, Jews, and alien invaders, there is the demonization of generically modified organisms, or GMOs.  While any living thing that is genetically altered is a GMO, modified food has been the focus of the belief that an elite group is trying to force the world into reliance on artificially enhanced food, or that the GMOs are inherently unhealthy and outright dangerous.  Malicious proliferation of a damaging food supply or forced dependence on a specific cabal for food is the charge.

For some of those who assume that changes to, say, corn's genetic code must be catastrophic or immoral, things that neither logically follow nor have evidence suggesting them, the concept of chemicals in their food frightens them.  Mere chemicals do not have to be placed by people to already be present in the makeup of the food, and not all artificially placed chemicals would have to inevitably lead to disaster.  GMOs could be used to guard against environmental factors that threaten crops or to augment their health effects when consumed.

Close to 90% of corn in America is supposed to be modified to boost crop yields or better withstand the herbicides that kill competing weeds. Without erasing the genetic components already there, the insertion of a gene like Bt adds new qualities like the enhanced ability to endure insects such as caterpillars. Creatures could develop resistance to genetic modifications, yes, and still GMOs can give a significant advantage to crops.  

Golden rice, for another example, has been engineered to have beta carotene, which lends it the golden coloring while also having the power to help with vitamin A in countries like Bangladesh, where rice is plentiful.  GMOs are conceptually neutral and could be pursued for purposes like eliminating this malnutrition or they could be used recklessly.  Like alcohol, cars, firearms, and social media, how they are used is what can be destructive rather than the thing itself.

GMOs are a faster, more direct way to achieve similar goals to selective breeding, where creatures or plants pass on traits to offspring across multiple generations.  The overlapping outcomes are reached using somewhat differing methods.  With many crops already impacted, it would not be as if GMO usage is a looming but still-future issue.  If someone could alter the genetic code of corn or potatoes to improve the nutritional value or survivability of the crop, they could tamper with it in ways that hinder the nutrition or safety, but this is not because GMOs can only be wielded for harmful or conspiratorial ends.

"Chemicals" would not be the default problem if chemicals are all around us as it is.  Alterations would not be dangerous for humans unless they are particular kinds of modifications, and legitimate problems with the food supply could be resolved or lessened by specific genetic manipulation.  Conspiracy theories, as long as they are consistent with logical axioms and all other facts, could be or could have been true, but they can only be assumed by the typical consumer who only has hearsay and sensory limitations or total assumptions (as in, unprompted by even misunderstandings of sensory experiences) to hold on to.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-deep-state.html

That Which Defiles

In context, when Jesus says that nothing going into a person's mouth makes them unclean, he is not speaking of eating food prohibited in the dietary laws of Leviticus 11.  He does not mention or even hint at the eating of pork, shark, or crawfish either as a suddenly permissible thing or as something he is touching upon at all.  No, he specifies the exact action he is focusing on early in Matthew 15, when some of the Pharisees complain that his disciples do not wash their hands before eating (15:1-3).

The Pharisees that he says invent asinine traditions supposedly in service to God (in violation of the command of Deuteronomy 4:2 to not add to obligations, as if doing what is good is not enough to truly be righteous) set aside the actual obligations rooted in Yahweh's nature, Jesus points out, such as the obligation to execute those who curse their mothers or fathers (Exodus 21:17, Matthew 15:4).  Instead, they submit to social constructs and personal preferences, all of which are meaningless and irrelevant to the truth.  Washing hands prior to meals is not prescribed in the Torah.

What goes into someone's mouth, even potential dirt, does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth does, according to Jesus: the context is simply that of him affirming Mosaic Law as just even with its executions, so he is not denying or in any way contradicting the core tenets of the Torah.  Though they are far less central and important than the criminal justice laws or those clarifying how not to act towards God, the dietary laws are among God's commands.  Jesus does not oppose them or say that God's nature has changed regarding this issue (Malachi 3:6).

There is nothing about the dietary laws tied to situational circumstances like the Temple, without which there can be no sin in not offering sacrifices at the Temple, for the building is not standing.  One cannot be obligated to do something one cannot do, and one can go a lifetime eating that which is permitted in Mosaic Law--and there are plenty of foods, from meats to vegetables to fruits to even bugs, that are allowed.  For those who have been eating the prohibited foods on a regular basis, it might be very inconvenient to narrow or shift their diet, but it is not impossible.

Arbitrary customs like praying before meals or always washing hands before eating would be the real morally unnecessary deeds.  One could do certain needless things like these if one wished to, given that they do not violate real obligations by default.  Since they are not obligations, and even if they were, making favorable assumptions about them would be irrational (and any assumptions), and looking to irrelevant factors like conscience or social norms instead of morality is irrational and immoral.  The Pharisees added to Mosaic Law while actively failing to practice it.  This was one of their errors in the story of Matthew 15, and the dietary laws are not even slightly challenged by Jesus here.

Understanding The Nature Of Language

Everyone who reads or speaks is already familiar with some sort of language.  Though it is wholly unnecessary and absolutely dangerous for non-rationalists, some people even think using language instead of just conceiving of abstract concepts or visualizing mental imagery--the danger comes from thinking words are necessary for thought, when one must already be able to think to create or learn words to start with, or in thinking that there are no truths that precedes words, for reason and all else that is objectively true must already be true for words to be assigned to them.  Ignoring these or other facts, such as how there cannot be such a thing as inherent meaning to a word, some people go so far as to hold that familiarity with the technical lexicon of a subject or the words for, ironically, categories of other words (like indirect objects) is needed to understand language, and in turn that language is somehow needed to know reason and introspection or concepts like that of God or morality.

You do not need to know what onomatopoeia means or be familiar with the definition of the phrase coordinate adjective to understand language.  You can know the function of a subject and verb without recalling the terms and can know the seeming intended meaning of a word, even having never formally studied linguistics at any level.  Language is useful between people only as a means of communication more precise than the even greater vagueness of gestures and grunts, and everyone from young children to the elderly can at least somewhat grasp what people seem to mean without knowing the words to call many things, like the future perfect tense or etymology.  There are people who subjectively are fascinated with history or culture and they might not like this.  They also might actively prioritize the metaphysically secondary, epistemologically useless (at actually revealing other minds) nature of language, social interactions, or historical records over things like logical necessities.  After all, they would never think words have inherent meaning or are vital to understanding miscellaneous concepts if they were rational, even very abstract concepts like logical axioms, the uncaused cause, moral obligation, scientific epistemology, and so on.

What is self-evident (the basic truth of axioms and the existence of one's own mind), what follows from this, or what one immediately perceives are knowable, just not on the basis of random words that one has to invent or learn in order to describe what is already true.  There is not even any set of symbols that automatically fits a particular idea except in the context of a linguistic system that can only be arbitrary at the core.  Words are neither necessary truths nor found in the natural world. They are nothing but constructs of minds or cultures used for a utilitarian purpose (with an end goal) for communication or out of personal infatuation.  No examples are necessary for this to be true by necessity, and none are required to know this with absolute certainty, but there are many examples stemming from the already-fixed truth of how words are purely arbitrary constructs.  The word terminal, as one instance, could in the English language refer to a part of a battery, an airport, or the lethality of a condition (a terminal illness).  

Even on the level of what more unexamined experience points to, none of these things is the meaning of the word terminal.  It could by contemporary social patterns be used in any of these contexts, so it has no single intended concept behind it.  Still, a word with a single conventional definition has no intrinsic meaning.  There is not a single phonetic unit or written character that could escape this, and even then, if the speaker/author means something unusual or novel by a word, then that is objectively what the meaning is in this case.  People can be terrible communicators or can gratuitously use words outside the normal context of what other people seem to generally mean, but their words mean only whatever they are intended to.  People can still point out the misuse of words according to what an established but arbitrary language's norms are, but one cannot "know" what a word intrinsically means because there cannot be such a thing.  Epistemologically, there is fallible evidence in a given context that someone else's words merely mean a specific thing in probability.  With one's own words, one can just introspect to directly known without ambiguity what one means by it!

Those who regard language far above its real nature, again, might not like this.  They might love noticing patterns in historical usage of words more than actually looking to reason and concepts, which are independent of language.  They could be more interested in the relatively superficial nature of how communication can bring people together than in what is actually or seemingly being communicated.  They might be emotionalistically enamored with the potential trappings of academia's approach to language to the point of thinking people cannot know the concepts behind their own words without knowing the literally made-up linguistic conventions.  You do not need to have heard of Egyptian hieroglyphics or remember what the word phonetics means to understand language if only you are rationalistic and direct your attention to language.  As for those who would reject any of this, these people are pathetic fools, too inept or egoistic to look to the truth.

Motivations For Paganism

The term paganism can refer to nature/animist religions, ranging from variations of pantheism to a more spiritualistic version of panpsychism, and it can also refer to general non-Christian religions, which would in a broader sense include Islam and also philosophies that were adhered to before the days of Jesus.  Like any worldview, paganism can be believed or practiced for a variety of reasons, but in this case, none of them are valid.  Either the concepts are outright false, as they contradict logical axioms or some other truth (like in the case of pluralistic or pantheistic paganism), or they cannot be proven, or even evidentially supported, making pagans guilty of idiotic assumptions at best and consciously charging into emotionalism at worst.

They might long to feel connected to something larger than themselves by aligning with traditional metaphysics and religions of their homeland, looking to assumptions and social norms/approval instead of the necessary laws of logic that transcend all else to fulfill this desire.  They might love nature, a subjective and thus irrelevant state of mind, confusing a material world for an animistic one--this could be true, but it is neither logically necessary nor evidentially likely, and either way, there is still an uncaused cause separate from nature and any lesser, created spirits like those assigned to different environments in some paganism.  Irrationality is inherent in any of these motivations and beliefs, even as love of nature is neither irrational nor unbiblical in itself.  It is the emotionalism or assumptions that are asinine.

Another potential motivation for paganism is emotionalistic disdain for Christianity, almost inevitably on the basis of misunderstandings--that it is metaphysically (logically) impossible, that it is epistemologically without evidence, that it teaches cruelty is righteous, that it teaches any kind of gender complementarianism, that it encourages environmental exploitation, and so on.  For some pagans, this might not even be about rejecting a supposedly false or oppressive religion, but merely about being different from what is more mainstream, though true Christianity is so different from its mainstream distortions that they scarcely resemble each other (its real doctrines of epistemology, morality, hell, love, sexuality, and far more are almost unheard of among theological conservatives and liberals alike).

Perhaps related to the misunderstanding that Christianity is sexist against women, which would by necessity also entail sexism against men even if this goes unacknowledged, pagans might even be responding to misogyny with misandry given how female-centric some kinds of paganism are.  If so, they would be hypocrites even with regard for their own supposed moral beliefs.  Whether it is misandry rooted in the neglect of how both men and women have a role in procreation, stereotypes that slander men or deny their full humanity, or special reverence for women that is withheld from men, pagans could, whether or not it is even consistent with their other tenets, be extremely sexist against either men or women.

Paganism of course has no evidence in its favor aside from these aforementioned delusions of pagans even where some of its aspects are logically possible.  Yes, certain versions of it are logically possible: since they do not contradict axioms or the existence of an uncaused cause, they could have been true even if they are not. However, Christianity is not only fully consistent with all necessary truths of reason, including in ways that are almost universally undiscovered, but it also has immense amounts of historical evidence in its favor.  No form of paganism does, from vague nature religions to animistic philosophies.  Pluralistic spiritualism is false in any case because contradictory beliefs cannot be valid all at once, rendering the most inclusive types of paganism logically impossible by default.  The rest often neglect how the uncaused cause is the deity that could deserve worship, whatever its moral nature.

A Prohibition Of Shaving?

Leviticus 19:27, even for the Christians who mistakenly think that the majority of Mosaic Law is not universally obligatory on the Christian worldview (Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Malachi 3:6, Matthew 5:17-20, Luke 16:17), might strike many readers as odd.  It addresses an issue that is trivial either way by comparison to much that the Torah deals with: it says to not cut the hair at the side of one's head or, for men, the edge of one's beard.  Sometimes confused for a prohibition of shaving, the verse says nothing about the whole of the hair on someone's face or general head, focusing exclusively on the hair in the two aforementioned places.  There are clear reasons why this is not a universal condemnation of shaving or trimming hair, even male facial hair, and there are also very direct contextual cues that all but certainly limit this to the avoidance of pagan practices that have nothing to do with why many moderners cut their hair in any bodily area.

Even if this verse did mean what some might assume, allowing a beard to grow out inches and inches before cutting half of its length away, for instance, would not be the same as just trimming the edges.  From this alone, the command could be kept without resulting in permanently untrimmed, unkempt facial hair.  It also does not condemn shaving all facial hair away as opposed to only cutting the very edges while leaving the rest untouched.  This is perfectly analogous to how cutting down a tree does not involve trimming its protruding branches.  It would obviously still be possible for someone to have kept this command and removed their beard altogether or in part.  In truth, it should not have to take someone more than a few moments of not making assumptions and of dwelling on what logically does and does not follow from this to realize everything so far.

There are also strong hints that the context of surrounding verses might apply to verse 27.  Immediately before, verse 26 says not to seek omens or engage in divination, which is trying to learn of future events by supernatural means (though this would not apply to Yahweh and his prophets as legitimate predictors).  Verse 28 says immediately after to not cut your body for the dead.  Disfiguring the body out of mourning over or attempts to rouse the dead is disallowed.  The phrase "for the dead" indicates that this is about spiritualistic practices that are contrary to Christian metaphysics and ethics.  In actuality, according to the Bible, the dead know nothing (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Job 3:11-19) in their unconsciousness or nonexistence unless stirred by means like sorcery (1 Samuel 28).  The command about cutting the beard seems to specifically be about avoiding pagan activities of the day.

Leviticus 14:8-9, in addition to this, very plainly says that someone was to remove all hair in cases of defiling skin conditions.  Shaving off all of one's hair as verse 8 describes would by necessity include the beard on a male already, but verse 9 mentions the beard.  It was to be shaved away along with the hair of a person's scalp, eyebrow area, and the rest of their body.  Thus, there is not only no command in Leviticus 19 to not trim any facial hair at all and no demand to not trim the edges outside the context of condemning pagan rites, but five chapters earlier, there was already permission and the ceremonial requirement to remove all hair from one's body, which would span the head, the neck, the torso, the groin, arms, and legs.  A priest could not examine someone's body to see if every trace of a skin disease was gone otherwise (14:3).  Beards would have to be removed to fulfill this.

Yahweh's And Allah's Eschatological Justice (Part Two)

The wicked and the righteous are, according to the Quran in Surah 2:81-82, both going to live forever in the Hereafter, either in the Garden/Paradise or in the Fire, aka the Islamic hell.  Numerous other passages from the Quran affirm the eternal nature of the pain the unforgiven human sinners are said to experience [1].  The Bible, no matter how popular the idea to the contrary is, teaches that any suffering in hell is temporary and that death is the final consequence of true justice for sinful humans--among other verses, see see Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, John 3:16, Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23, Revelation 20:15 as listed in part one [1].  As if these verses are not as or almost as clear as language can be on the matter, what of Matthew 25:46, which says the wicked will go to eternal punishment and the righteous to eternal life?  Not only does it not follow from a punishment being eternal that it must entail suffering, but the very contrast in this verse could only apply if the wicked do not live forever (all of this is addressed more thoroughly below).

The concepts behind the "There they will remain" for both groups in Surah 2:81-82 and the "eternal punishment" of Matthew 25:46 are not equivalent.  If someone is in agony and will remain there forever, with no escape (see Surah 2:167, 217, 275-276), then they will suffer eternally.  There they will remain.  Eternal punishment, however, does not have to involve endless suffering depending on what exactly the punishment is.  All it has to do is be final and irrevocable.  It could even involve no torment at all if death itself, the cessation of life and exclusion from all the potential joys therein, is the full punishment or the culmination of it.  The effects, the status of nonexistence, would just have to last forever.  Now, the Bible does not say that the wicked will immediately be exterminated in hell, only that their death, their literal purging from conscious existence, is the outcome.  Yahweh's justice is death with the potential for some torment beforehand (Luke 12:47-48).

Matthew 25's contrast of eternal life with something else also means that the other experience or fate, however long it lasts, cannot involve eternal conscious existence, or else both parties would really be receiving eternal life, just of a different kind.  On a linguistic level, this would be as asinine as saying that something unprovable is actually provable (which is the ultimate foundation of many people's worldviews when it comes down to it!), and on a logical and conceptual level, it is inherently impossible.  Someone who does not have eternal life cannot be alive in order to be tormented.  Unlike the Bible, the Quran simply never contrasts eternal life with the punishment of hell.  Both the righteous and wicked are explicitly said to live forever in their respective abodes with the only linguistic ambiguity whatsoever being that baseline level of unknowability which no language can avoid.  Only the meanings of our own words are known with absolute certainty because there is no inherent meaning to a vocal sound or written symbol [2] and non-telepathic beings do not know other minds.

Both the Biblical and Quranic hell are described as featuring fire.  The Biblical hell is even called the lake of fire, which is the second death (Revelation 20:15).  Beyond things like this and how they are both supposedly manifestations of divine justice, they are rather different.  Revelation 14:9-11 and 20:10 are at most talking about specific groups of beings and not everyone else, and if they are literal, then they would have nothing to do with the fate of the wicked masses, and if they are figurative, numerous other Biblical passages already establish that the Christian hell is not one of eternal conscious torment.  The beast and devil mentioned in Revelation as receiving eternal agony are also described in other places as still being killed/destroyed, as with a seeming singular antichrist figure in 2 Thessalonians 2:8 and seemingly with Satan in Ezekiel 28:11-19.  Yahweh's and Allah's justice are not the same when it comes to criminal punishment in this life or hell in the next.  Yahweh's is logically possible and evidentially probable, but Allah's is self-contradictory.  The Quran's presentation of Allah as if he is the undistorted version of Yahweh is far more egregiously seen with the nature of hell in each religion than it is with Allah's conditional, non-universal love (Surah 4:107).

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/09/yahwehs-and-allahs-eschatological.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/12/examples-of-linguistic-ambiguity.html

The Consumption Of Meat

Many typical stances on the moral nature of eating meat, as well as the reasons those stances are adhered to, are quite irrational one way or another.  While the dietary restrictions in Mosaic Law never forbid meat itself, there are kinds of meat that are initially prohibited, yet many Christians, even if the dietary laws were universally obligatory like other parts of Mosaic Law, would almost certainly never abstain from meat if it was required of them.  It would be perceived as too inconvenient.  Non-Christians (and plenty of Christians too), though, look to subjective conscience and emotional comfort, social agreement, or cultural norms for what are ultimately their moral assumptions.  Even as people who like to eat meat might believe it is morally permissible to do so because they are used to it, whether or not they are Christian, others might object to the consumption of meat based on how the animals were treated before the slaughter or simply because an animal must die.

It is possible to raise and kill animals without torturous methods, and meat is one of the best foods for people with health or aesthetic conditions that are worsened by eating carbs, such as certain aggressive skin inflammations like seborrheic dermatitis.  All cruelty in preparing animals for death can be fully avoided, though of course their death would still occur in order for their meat to be secured.  Artificial/synthetic meat would do away with this by allowing us to sidestep the death of a creature in order to obtain and enjoy a substitute for animal flesh.  While other animal products might still need to actually come from animals unless synthetic versions of them were also concocted, if artificial meat--not plant-based substitutes, but artificial meat--was to become a normalized option for human meals, the Biblical obligation is clear.

Should synthetic meat be accessibly distributed, then it would certainly be better on the Christian worldview to consume artificial meat with the same flavor or nutrition than it would be to, at that point, unnecessarily kill a creature that is a part of God's creation (whether directly or indirectly, God is responsible for the existence of life according to Genesis), a creature that God has called "very good" (Genesis 1:31).  Neither killing animals nor consuming their meat is inherently a moral problem by Biblical standards.  It is the abuse of animals, the reckless slaughter of creatures in a way that devastates the natural world and its ability to produce food for us (such as by eating or wasting too much meat that animals would grow scarce), and the needless killing of animals themselves, even if it does not otherwise devastate the environment, that is sinful.

Animal life would have some degree of objective moral value for the same reason the physical planet and cosmos and the human body and mind would: they are creations of God or at least have their value grounded in his nature, without which nothing could be good even though some things would still exist (the laws of logic and empty space) and still be true.  If meat is synthetically replicated, as well as easily accessible in an economic and distribution sense, it would very obviously follow logically from Biblical ideas stated as early as Genesis that such a substitute would be morally superior.  For someone to willingly, consistently consume artificial meat when possible instead of animal flesh is not to treat animals as the equals of humans, but it is another way to enjoy the taste or other benefits of meat while honoring God and his creations beneath humanity.

Animals are sub-human, not that this means they deserve malice or neglect.  Even as their own death was part of God's good creation--human sin seems to have only introduced human death (Romans 5:12, 6:23), and even herbivores would have to kill something in order to survive before the fall of the first humans--to gratuitously kill an animal is to trivialize a thing that still by all appearances shares, in a lesser kind of way, the breath of conscious life that God imbued in humans, a living thing that God regards as very good.  The Biblical stance towards animals is not that one must brutalize, ignore, or be apathetic towards them, even as it is not that they are to be revered as having the same metaphysical status as humans, the supreme animal which alone is said to have the full image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).  The common deviations from acknowledging these doctrines are all abominations in their own way.

China's Capitalism

Names can be misleading.   They are only mental and linguistic constructs used to communicate a concept from non-telepathic mind to non-telepathic mind.  Words and the phrases formed by them can be invented, used, restructured, or used in new contexts as best suits the desires of a person, and not everyone is rational.  The vast majority of humankind is far from living for the necessary truths and absolute certainties of reason or for the unyielding obligations of morality (if the latter exists as evidence for Christianity points to, then how we should live is what people should do regardless of convenience or preference), and thus they can inanely use words to promote fallacies and deception.

The CCP, or Chinese Communist Party, exemplifies this.  Neither communism nor capitalism has to be implemented in a destructive manner, though the stupidity of most people will almost always lead to mass devastation of one kind or another.  China is associated in name with communism even as it practices a very aggressive form of capitalism in its production and exports.  The country is responsible for a deluge of products that are inexpensive and of poor quality in other nations; it is also the largest user of coal, the most environmentally damaging of the fossil fuels, as a collective.  Groundwater toxicity, air pollution, and discarded plastic are the consequences of how China has approached production motivated by consumerism.

A country that pollutes its own land and sky to such a high degree or that floods the planet with flimsy, cheap imitations of more durable, recognized products is practicing a reckless form of capitalism.  Not every possible type of capitalism would lead a region to this, and only fools believe otherwise, but it is not something that a government or corporation would bother with except for the love of profit, nationalist and emotionalistic patriotism, and apathy towards environmental and humanitarian concerns.  To clarify, capitalism and nationalism are absolutely not connected by necessity despite how a ruling class can appeal to both for egoistic power.  That the acronym CCP abbreviates the Chinese Communist Party does not mean that the nation of China is not ruthlessly capitalistic.

When American conservatives complain about how socialistic or communistic China is, they are misunderstanding or ignoring the reasons why a country would ever produce so much at the cost of human and environmental safety.  Greed and power, which American capitalism is also ultimately about, are not what would drive people to have a genuinely classless society of communal ownership and aid, which is what some members of the early church abided by in Acts 2:44-47--though this is in no way obligatory, it is not at all predatory in itself or Biblically evil.  China is renowned for its reported authoritarianism, self-serving (for those in power) consumeristic output, and destruction of its own environment and that of the world as a whole by extension.  China's irrationalistic form of capitalism is on full display even if every American conservative looks away.

Taking From Your Neighbor's Field

In some parts of America, if one was to walk through someone else's field where corn or grapes have appeared and take them, eating them as one walks, one might get killed by gunfire or at least threatened with being shot.  Mosaic Law actually allows this and by extension condemns treating this the same as theft.  To take a handful of grapes from your neighbor's vineyard or to take standing kernels from their field and eat them at that very moment is specifically allowed and encouraged.  Deuteronomy 23:24-25 touches on these two exact scenarios, clarifying that the real moral limitations of the consumer is to not use tools to take or store more than can be eaten or implicitly carried along by hand.

Similarly, Leviticus 19:9 says to avoid two things: harvesting at the very edges of one's fields, the most accessible parts to others, and combing through the harvest area a second time to gather fallen grapes or other crops.  These are to be left for the poor and for foreigners.  Obviously, if someone lived in isolation from others, there would be no obligation to do this since there are not poor or foreigners, as the text specifies, expected to roam around, but this is very much contrast to the utter unwillingness to share resources or truly aid the poor that many evangelicals are marked by.  To not do this when one lives in a community with others is sinful, just as others walking through to take all of one's crops involuntarily would go beyond what is permissible according to Deuteronomy 23:24-25.

If a community actually abided by Deuteronomy 23:24-25 and Leviticus 19:9, the poor would have a much easier time surviving, and surviving with comfort at that.  Foreigners, newcomers to a land and potentially without personal connections, would not have to resort to begging or sins like theft to obtain enough food to satisfy them at a given time.  They would be in the wrong to take more than they can immediately consume, but they would indeed not go hungry as long as there were fields producing edible substances from the natural world.  Mosaic Law is, once again, very explicitly egalitarian, in this case with regard to Israelites and Gentiles, natives and foreigners, and the rich and the poor.

Abundance of agricultural production is to be openly accessible to the poor, to foreigners, and to friendly visitors, but not at the expense of someone's own food or financial security.  No one is overlooked or treated as anything less than a full bearer of God's image under these laws, as is the case with the rest of Yahweh's commands in the Torah.  Yes, Mosaic Law is very pro-foreigner, but not supportive of irrational philosophies or the sinful actions of what were then the foreign nations around Israel.  It also explicitly safeguards the poor, who could so easily be tossed aside or overlooked when abundance in fields is kept hidden or withheld from the destitute or financially struggling among the locals.

Rationalism Is Not Evidentialism

There is no amount of evidence, which is probabilistic and perception-based by nature, or else it would be logical proof, that can demonstrate that anything is true other than the fact that there is evidence that makes it seem as if a given thing is actually the case.  It is logically true in itself that something is true, for if nothing was true, this itself would have to be true, and so it is impossible for this and other logical axioms to have been any other way.  Nothing about adultery being evil, alien life not existing, God loving humanity, the world existing 10 minutes or seconds ago, or electromagnetism functioning the same a moment from now is logically necessary on a metaphysical level in itself.

More than this, none of these things follow from any inherent logical truth (an axiom or something that follows necessarily from another thing), and thus none of these things are intrinsically or obviously true.  There is and cannot be a way for a non-omniscient being to verify all of them, for epistemological limitations abound that prevent anything more than perceptions in many regards.  Intuitions or perceptions, not logical necessity, inspire typical people to make all sorts of assumptions based upon their subjective experiences that might or might not be true (and sometimes they are contradict reason and cannot be true whatsoever!).  A non-rationalist might hear a distant gunshot and assume that a gun was actually fired instead of the sound being an auditory hallucination, for example, when either of these things is logically possible but unprovable.

Many people have elements of selective, assumption-founded casual evidentialism in their epistemological worldview.  As long as something seems a certain way or appeals to them, they are subjectively persuaded without something being proven, such as with someone who does not like theft believing it is immoral because it makes them feel guilty if they do it or outraged if others do it.  They could also want it to be true and believe in something on these irrelevant grounds.  They want their spouse to love them, or it outwardly appears as if their spouse loves them, so they believe that this is true even though there are many ways this could be false, from personal misperception to marital deception.  Outward perceptions of facial expressions, words, or physical actions cannot actually prove to an external, non-telepathic or non-omniscient observer what someone else is actually thinking or feeling.

Rationalism is not evidentialism.  Just because there is evidence for something does not make it true, only true that there is evidence or seeming probabilistic support.  No one totally rational believes that because the moon has come out on previous nights that they recall, the moon must come out by logical necessity the next night.  No one totally rational believes that even if all primary historical sources on a specific matter agree on something that it really happened: consensus and hearsay do not make such a thing true, nor does belief.  If they event happened, it happened whether recorded or not (or recorded accurately or not).  The historical evidence for it is ultimately irrelevant in this sense.

Now, almost no one I have met actually professes to think that a written document saying something always inherently makes it true.  Fitheistic Christians do not exactly think the Quran merely saying something means it is true or knowable even as they supposedly believe the opposite about the Bible.  Whether it is a religious text they do not adhere to, a political opponent's claims about history, or some other thing, they will not actually be consistent with their beliefs based on fallible evidences.  A liberal would probably not say that a conservative news print is honest about everything, for instance.  They might believe the inverse about their own.  However, no news source is verifiable because general history and what the senses perceive are unverifiable!  One can even know that there is an uncaused caused that set a causal chain in motion or directly created the physical cosmos and time, since self-creation of the universe or time, an eternal timeline or universe of events (an infinite regression), and coming into existence uncaused are logically impossible, yet the historicity of World War I or the fall of Babylon do not have such proof behind them.

At most, potentially dishonest sources or unverifiable claims can be looked to.  Since historical and even current events cannot be proven by testimony--testimony can be nothing more than hearsay evidence that might be sincere but mistaken or fabricated almost completely--everyone who believes otherwise is an irrationalistic fool to the extent that they believe this, even if they are partially rational in other cases, such as by recognizing the intrinsic veracity of logical axioms.  A fully rational person would distinguish between evidence and proof.  Did Jesus exist?  Probably, as evidenced by documents like those of Josephus and Tacitus!  But like with Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Marie Antoinette getting beheaded, or the discovery of the electron in 1897, no amount of hearsay or written or sensory evidence proves anything but that there is this evidence.  Again, non-rationalists might already believe this (even if only for its convenience) about some source they do not like or find personally persuasive.  Someone who believes a conspiracy theory about the moon landing is false will probably assume that any source claiming the contrary is false.  Still, a written source is a source.

Either writing something means it is true or it does not, and it obviously does not in any case.  All sources or none of them are verifiably true by logical necessity, and it is certainly not all of them because it does not follow from writing or saying something that it really happened or is true, no matter the cultural event or scientific phenomena!  There is no such thing as something being true because some documented source says so (other than that one perceives a documented source that says so!), just as there is nothing logically necessary about an event happening in the external world as opposed to one's mental perceptions even if one sees it directly.  If one sees that there is a correlation between heat and the melting of ice, does this mean that it must be true and is thus absolutely certain that this is a casual relationship?  While it seems likely that this is a direct causal relationship, it is not verifiable.  One can only see that the correlation is observed and that one's subjective memories and immediate sensory perceptions make it appear as if this is causality, though, despite all occurrences having a cause, correlation never can prove causation, not even for things many people assume.

Take the phenomena of particle physics experiments.  Did someone who reads about and arbitrarily believes whatever an article  says about this actually conduct the experiments?  Would they be able to know even if they had that their sensory experiences match the real external world and are not distorted by hallucinations, interference from some unseen force, and so on?  The answer is no in both cases.  Nor can someone know from conscience that morality exists or from their longings for objective existential meaning, if they have such desires (what one person experiences is not necessarily what someone else does), that anything is truly valuable or morally meaningful as opposed to true or false, knowable or unknowable.

No, rationalism is not evidentialism.  Perception is not proof of anything except that there is perception.  Justified true belief is not assumption or persuasion-based or rooted in anything but sheer logical necessity, with many things not being logically necessary in themselves, but logically necessary if some other unverifiable, non-necessary thing is already.  Evidentialism is irrational unless it is an evidentialism where one only believes that evidence is present rather than what the limited, subjective, potentially illusory evidence suggests is true, a non sequitur.  Fools confuse evidence for proof.  Fools also make assumptions that filter what they believe about evidence from the start.  A rationalist knows at least the most foundational, transcendent truth of reason (axioms) and their own conscious existence, not believing that anything that does not follow in some way from these is true.

Movie Review--The Black Phone

"With the door shut, no one can hear anything down here.  I soundproofed it myself.  So shout if you like.  You won't bother anyone."

--The Grabber, The Black Phone

The Black Phone, like Doctor Sleep before it, is an incredible horror accomplishment.  If anyone is struck by how similar it is in some ways to films based on Stephen King's writings, that is because the short story The Black Phone adapts is from Stephen King's son Joe Hill.  Doctor Sleep has much in common with it: both feature child protagonists, explicitly supernatural elements, excellent production values, and optimistic conclusions that follow very dark events.  Since Doctor Sleep is an absolute masterpiece, that The Black Phone mirrors its best qualities means it too is an artistic triumph.  Director Scott Derickson helms yet another great film that stands favorably next to Sinister and Doctor Strange.  Ethan Hawke's villain serves as one of the key pillars of the movie, and Hawke gets to revel in the ambiguity around his character.  A simple yet highly focused and deep film, this latest project to be directed by Derrickson affirms again how talented he is with handling horror.

Production Values

As one might expect from Derrickson, there are some jumpscares, but as is the case with the best horror movies that use them, they are not constantly strung together so that it becomes easy to tell when one is probably about to arrive, and they are not used to replace the atmosphere created by the acting, the general cinematography, and the themes of the story.  The Black Phone is superb in its atmosphere and in how the core characters are explored throughout the film.  Regarding both, all sorts of plot points from throughout the movie become crucial to how a climactic scene, to the point where the full narrative significance might not even hit attentive viewers until after they have finished watching.  It also helps that the cast is excellent the whole time.  Mason Thames and Madelein McGraw join the increasingly large pool of incredible child actors in Stephen King or Stephen King-related films.  Because of such movies, the normal quality of child acting in horror has dramatically increased as of late.  Then there is Ethan Hawke, who, having played the villain in Moon Knight earlier this year, gets the chance to become a far more personally insidious character, conveying simultaneous ambiguity and seeming brokenness (as I get into below, the character seems to have suffered abuse as a child).  That so much in one sense and so little in another sense is revealed about him makes the mystery all the more clever.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Young Finney Blake is abducted by a figure called "the Grabber" who has recently kidnapped multiple children, awakening in a large basement with a disconnected black rotary phone on the wall.  His kidnapper says that the phone does not work, yet Finney gets periodic calls from spirits of other victims.  They give him information on various escape possibilities despite none of the attempts succeeding.  Meanwhile, Finney's sister Gwen has been experiencing seeming psychic dreams so relevant to the Grabber's activities that the police use her as an informant, as she has seen things in her dreams like the black balloons left at the abduction sites despite this information never being given to the public.  Finney tries option after option to escape his captor, who becomes increasingly threatening.

Intellectual Content

There are a handful of more subtle philosophical issues that The Black Phone tackles, such as whether a girl's psychic dreams are the result of God granting her special perception (which makes this a great fit for Scott Derickson as a horror director who is also a Christian) or why adults might kidnap children.  At first, it seems like the Grabber might kidnap young boys for sexual reasons, yet despite a few comments that are consistent with this being or not being the motivation, he never does anything sexual that we see.  His ideological or personal motivations are left in the dark, but there are hints that the Grabber was perhaps himself abused as a child, given his fixation on children and on punishment.  The psychological reason for his desperation to cover his face with a mask to at least some extent is also not explained, though it is a very significant part of the story.  Regardless of what the Grabber's motives were, The Black Phone is able to use the premise of a child abduction to lead to an ending that is about empowering children, not unlike It or Doctor Sleep.

Conclusion

As with Sinister before it, Scott Derrickson shows his sheer competence with handling the horror genre in another modern horror classic that parallels the Stephen King adaptations of recent years.  The main performances and the examination of how resourceful children can be are crucial because of the very personal scale of the film, and the primary and supporting cast members alike make the most of their time onscreen.  The Black Phone is an instance where simplicity is not a negative trait of art, but a strength, a pillar that masterfully elevates the story and its themes.  In an age of interconnected franchises, which are of course not of poor quality by default no matter how much some hate them, it also is a reminder of how standalone films can indeed stand strong on their own and how horror is a very fitting genre to set up in this way.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  A few scenes involve brutal fistfights.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "fuck" and "shit" are used.

"Behold! A Man!"

Depending on what one means by a specific arrangement of words, the accuracy of a statement is there or not--it is not about how it is received by an external audience, but about whether the concept intended to be articulated is actually true.  One can only define words with other words, as anything else would be the things themselves which words are supposed to convey.  One must create or learn words since they are mere mental constructs.  Definitions are, as constructs that are not the things they describe, of course limited.  Again, it is impossible to provide definitions without using words to define words, and then those additional words would have to be defined, and so on.  Linguistic communication is inherently imperfect because it does not actually connect minds.

It is also still possible for imperfect (on one level or another) or partially ambiguous (and all language involves some ambiguity except for how one's own words and their meaning can be known to oneself) definitions to be valid in a sense.  Such examples are unnecessary, but a story of the rivalry between Plato and Diogenes pertains to how definitions can be incomplete but still ultimately accurate.  Plato reportedly proposed that the linguistic definition of a man is a featherless biped.  After hearing Plato's definition of a man, the cynic Diogenes plucks a chicken, presents it before Plato's Academy, and says some variation of "Behold!  A man!"  This is often recounted as a humorous event, but it is nonetheless not true that Plato was wrong on this matter.

Humans are featherless bipeds, having no feathers and walking on two legs under normal biological circumstances--which does not mean people cannot crawl or that all humans even have legs to begin with--so the definition is correct, though it would also apply to other creatures as well.  Yes, a plucked chicken has no feathers and walks on two legs.  So would a plucked emu or penguin.  This does not make any of them human, and it does not mean that there cannot be other featherless bipeds that are logically possible or that walk the planet.  Plato's definition of a man is not as precise as it could be.  It is not that the statement itself is false.  Yes, many people are poor communicators or are far less precise than Plato in this story, but this does not necessarily mean the idea in question is false.

Two of the errors a person could fall into regarding definitions are the following: there is the error of being intentionally or carelessly vague/inaccurate without correcting oneself and that of thinking that any incomplete definition is automatically invalid.  If someone defined humans as animals, they would not be wrong, since animals are biological creatures and humans are biological creatures, but this is broader than Plato's summary of a person as a featherless biped.  One could more specifically define a human beyond the generalities of a "biological creature" and the more narrow but still somewhat ambiguous summary of a "featherless biped."  All words are arbitrary and vague, though.  This is not solely a characteristic of any single definition.

Yahweh's And Allah's Eschatological Justice (Part One)

The nature of hell is a far more grave moral matter than whether God simply loves or does not love all people, for withholding affection from them, if that is what the Quran means by love (Allah is still presented as just despite not loving everyone [1]), does not mean Allah over-punishes according to the standards of Quranic Islam.  What those standards are for eschatological justice are not the same as the Biblical ones and, more importantly, are logically impossible.  Called the Fire, the hell of Islam is mentioned very early in the Quran and is frequently spoken of throughout the following Surahs.  From verses like Surah 2:24, where it is said that people and stones are fuel for the Fire, or Surah 4:56, where it is said that a person's skin will be remade when hellfire burns it away to be burned all over again, one could not tell the duration of this punishment.

These statements on their own only mention that Islam involves an afterlife of some kind sometimes called the Hereafter, with flames reserved for the wicked.  There is also the inevitability of great torment in this Fire.  Nothing is addressed here about whether the Quran teaches annihilationism or the irrationalistic injustice of eternal torture for a finite amount of finite human sins.  Even in the Quran, despite these limits being far more severe than those of the Bible, there are boundaries for terrestrial justice, such as only cutting off the hand of a thief and not torturing them for as many days as they can survive (Surah 5:38; contrast with Exodus 21:1, 3-4).  These would be grounded in Allah's nature, including "eye for eye" matching for permanent physical injuries (Surah 5:45, though in Islam, like in Christianity, eye for eye does not encompass all prescribed sins and punishments, such as for theft).

Other verses contradict the Quran's own version of proportionality.  Surah 2:81 says that the wicked will enter the Fire, there to remain (2:81-82).  Those tormented in the Hereafter will not be helped (2:86), and they will not leave the Fire (2:167).  The inmates of the Fire will abide there forever (2:217, 2:275-276).  In Surah 3:24, it is said that those who say the Fire will only touch them for a limited number of days are misled by delusion.  This could not be the case if the suffering in hell, for whether a realm hypothetically outlasts its residents is a different matter, was to have a just, fixed ending point.  For yet another relevant verse, Surah 4:121 says that there is no escape from the Fire, or the Islamic hell.  While not every relevant Quranic verse to the issue of a punitive afterlife tackles whether the torment is endless, plenty others do, and they make it clear that the torment has no end.

It is possible for there to be no such thing as righteousness and therefore justice if God does not have a moral nature.  The deity of Islam, though, could not be just because if morality does exist, and thus the potential for sin and justice with it, then it is logically impossible for endless torment of any kind to be proportionate to any amount of individual sins with a fixed scope, as is the nature of every particular sin.  Christianity does not have this inherent falsity as one of its doctrines because it specifies over and over that the ultimate penalty for sin is the literal cessation of being, the total, permanent end to life (Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23, John 3:16, Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:15, and so on).  All passages that seemingly speak of eternal torture either refer to a particular subset of God's enemies, actually teach blatant annihilationism and are just misunderstood by traditionalists, or are clarified by passages that insist the opposite for the same beings in question (such as Ezekiel 28:11-19 seems to do for Satan as compared with Revelation 20:10).

Torture is worse than death if it continues forever or reaches certain thresholds, but such torture is unjust on the Biblical worldview both in this life and the next because the same deity's nature dictates justice in all things, and it does not contradict itself in different contexts.  What idiot would prefer to be loved, or "loved," by an entity that tortures them eternally?  Even on a subjective level, after 50 trillion years of agony, it would take an enormous fool to not be longing for release either by reconciliation to God or by annihilation of the conscious soul.  Christians who think God loves everyone but sends people to hell for perpetual torment do not understand the Biblical notion of hell.  In Islam, there is no such thing as permanent annihilation or redemption from the Fire, so an annihilationist Muslim is the heretic according to the Quran's impossible idea of cosmic justice.  In Christianity, the heretic is the one who thinks Yahweh's justice involves the eternal torture of unrepentant humans.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/08/yahwehs-and-allahs-love.html

Executive Compensation

In 2021, some executives are supposed to have made up to 670 times more than the typical American worker, which is an extreme gulf that can never be bridged by "hard work" or determination on the part of lower employees--not at the standard compensation rates they receive right now.  Statistics like this are indeed unprovable hearsay one way or another on an epistemological level, but there are many people who would insist that the concept of this ratio is just or who would not care about the enormous gap.  The most well-known executive position is that of chief executive officer, or CEO, or someone who helps oversee a collective organization, though there are other C-suite executives such as the chief financial officer (CFO).  While it is likely not surprising to almost anyone that C-suite executives would be paid very well, it might shock them to hear just how well they are paid, and how little the workers they rely on are often paid in comparison.  An executive, however, would have to work far harder than humans are even be capable of in order to deserve such massive salaries along with the additional benefits.  Even greater responsibility for more of a company's functions would not make some executive compensation levels just.

If executives like CEOs were only paid 50 times as much as the lowest ranked workers in their companies in base compensation alone, not counting bonuses, stocks, and severance packages, it would still be the case that they are very likely not literally working 50 times as hard as all of the workers far beneath them.  No executive I have ever heard of literally works, physically or mentally, say 40 times as hard as even many low-level restaurant, warehouse, or retail workers do, much less 308 or 670 times as hard.  There might be more extensive consequences for the company if the executive makes a certain poor decision (though even some decisions that might stimulate short-term profits are still pragmatically or morally idiotic), whereas a low-level worker is at worst likely to impact a few customer interactions or complicate local processes if they make a poor decision.  Plenty of low-level workers are still working harder in more demanding, monotonous, or unsafe conditions than corporate executives, sacrificing their sleep, physical health, emotional wellbeing, and free time for their jobs in ways that executives do not necessarily have to relate to, all with a greater risk of losing their jobs over even simple misunderstandings than executives are for making more egregious choices.

Of course a higher position within a company should be paid more than the default compensation for entry-level or less responsibility-heavy positions, unless an executive is willing to voluntarily decrease their salary to a more company-wide level.  However, even if an executive does not like what this would entail, none of them deserve to make hundreds of times what lower employees make when those workers are risking more to earn barely enough to both survive and take steps towards savings or additional comforts, if they get paid even enough to just survive on one job.  In other words, it is not that executives should not be paid well, but they do not deserve the extravagant, unmerited amounts of compensation and additional benefits they tend to receive, just as lower workers do not deserve to be paid only enough to barely keep them alive.  Beyond the amount necessary for basic survival and stability, pay could only be deserved on the basis of personal merit and how difficult a task is, and no executive works hundreds of times as hard as the physical laborers they rely on do.

If humans have value, then every person, including executives and their least compensated employees and everyone in between, deserves livable wages for full time positions.  There is no contradiction between paying people a minimum salary/wage that actually helps them comfortably live, or perhaps even thrive, and paying some people more than others because of skill, seniority, or personal accomplishment in the workplace.  It is just that none of these things mean executives deserve quite so much compensation, financial or otherwise, as what many of them reportedly receive for what they do.  They certainly should receive significantly greater pay than a part-time worker or plenty of introductory positions, just not anywhere near as much as they currently make according to the supposed average.  A major obstacle to rectifying this is the greed of people accustomed to or eager for power, which stems from the irrationalism that contributes to their selfishness, greed, and arrogance.

Almost no one, regardless of their economic status, is willing to give up erroneous and fallacious beliefs, hypocritical actions, and self-serving traditions if they are comfortable with them or benefitted.  Non-rationalists are thoroughly irrational, hence why so many of them will not abandon contradictions and assumptions or embrace necessary truths when someone else brings them up.  Non-rationalists with extreme financial and social power are likely to be more unwilling to change as reason demands because they either 1) might not care about logical truths and justice (after all, they probably just base their worldview around whatever makes them feel justified in being materialistic and greedy) or 2) have more economic gain to lose.  This is why external pressure from rationalists is likely what will bring about change.  Some people against current executive compensation might even be just as selfish and materialistic as the executives they envy, but rationalists can avoid the pitfalls of everyone else.