An Especially Asinine Form Of Antisemitism

Every form of racism or discrimination based on lineage is irrational because it does not logically follow from race or familial descent that someone has or lacks any intellectual, moral, or personality traits.  With every form of such discrimination, there are errors and assumptions that almost always reduce down to stereotypes.  Jews can face stereotypes and other assumed errors like anyone else, ranging from the idea that they secretly manipulate the wealth of the world for selfish ends to the idea that Jews are morally culpable for the death of Jesus, a Jew.  Antisemitism, or discrimination against Jewish people (the word implies reference to all Semitic people, yet is reserved for the Jews), can take numerous forms, yet one of the most asinine is that springing from the notion that the Jews killed Jesus or that they are responsible for his death either way.

Some Jewish individuals were involved in the plot to have Jesus killed, but the Romans killed him, and it is the renowned Roman form of crucifixion which violates Yahweh's justice that killed him.  For the handful of Jews who did participate in the general process of slandering Jesus and demanding that he be killed, they betrayed almost every obligation of justice Yahweh demands of people.  They were so driven by malice that they wanted an innocent person to die (Matthew 26:59-63; see Leviticus 19:11 and Deuteronomy 19:15-19), and much more importantly, they did not care if the means of death was one of the absolute most dehumanizing, cruel processes ever to be inflicted on humans across recorded history, if not the most dehumanizing and cruel (something condemned in much less severe punishments, as in Deuteronomy 25:1-3).

Yahweh's laws, which many Jews of Christ's days only selectively followed, forbid such punishments as crucifixion for their inherent injustice on the Biblical worldview, even down to the irrationality of reserving crucifixion for foreigners or non-citizens (Leviticus 24:22), though the most egregious injustice is the universal injustice of the physical and psychological brutality of this execution method.  The Jews who wanted this to be done to anyone deserve damnation along with the Romans who carried it out on Jesus and others, but even then, this would only pertain to certain Jews of the time, and it has nothing to do with the worldview or deeds of Jews millennia later.  Like everyone else, modern Jews and those of other historical periods between the time of Christ and the present day could only deserve anger or punishment based on their own standing, not the standing of someone else of the same general ancestry.

There is no moral responsibility on the part of other Jews even in the days of Jesus for those who did not participate in schemes to have him crucified--or anyone else; though the logically necessary falsity of this antisemitism is knowable in full apart from specific examples, it is as erroneous as thinking all Germans, including those alive today, are guilty of the offenses of 1930-1940s Nazis or that white people born after American slavery are responsible for something that had nothing to do with them.  The sins of the Romans are not the sins of the Jews, and the sins of a handful of Jews from the first century AD are not the errors of other Jews of the era or of contemporary times.  Even for the Romans, members of what was likely the worst recorded society by far (the Nazis were tame by comparison in some ways), it was not another Roman's beliefs or deeds that determined their intellectual and moral standing.  It was their own.

Game Review--Ratchet & Clank Collection (PS Vita)

"Robotic citizens of the Solana Galaxy, the hour of your liberation is at hand!  Long have we robots suffered under the bigotry, the stupidity, the squishiness and foul stench of organic life forms.  Soon, all robots will bask in the liberty and equality of my benevolent, iron-fisted rule."

--Dr. Nefarious, Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal

More than 20 years ago, the first Ratchet & Clank game came to the PlayStation 2, the next two years each seeing one sequel for the same system reach the public.  The series has since had a reboot starting with a remake of the original game in addition to entries made for the PSP and PS3.  The core PS2 trilogy was eventually brought to the PS3 and PS Vita with an HD collection that marks the only time the franchise ever appeared on the Vita.  This collection has a vast amount of content, and it fits well alongside the other HD collections of PS2 games on the Vita like that of the first two God of War games.  The limitations of the Ratchet & Clank PS2 trilogy will just be more apparent by comparison to contemporary games since they are fairly old by this point.

Production Values

The jagged, sometimes blurry graphics of this trilogy are distinctly outdated, but that does not lessen the quality of the game in light of its era and platform.  This is an HD version of a PS2 series transplanted onto the PS Vita, a handheld console from 2012.  To expect PS4 or PS5 level graphics would be to ignore the differences in the age and power of the systems.  What Ratchet & Clank Collection does accomplish is preserving the presentation of three PlayStation 2 classics and moving them to a portable system where they are more accessible to people who cannot play them on their original system.  The sound, including the voice acting and the noises of each iconic firearm of the trilogy, has indeed aged better than the graphics, as longtime gamers might expect, and now each of the three games has its own set of trophies on the Vita to distinguish then from the PS2 versions beyond just the portability and control changes (such as to account for the rear touchpad of the Vita).

Gameplay

The gameplay of the trilogy has its renowned weapons and mild platforming all intact here, but it needs to be clarified that the controls are the greatest enemy of this collection.  The rear touchpad of the Vita must be held down to strafe, but the strafing either does not always activate or will disengage randomly in one of the worst Vita-specific controls I have ever encountered.  Since there is no lock-on button and the strafing controls are absolute shit, in the first two games, one will have to dodge by making unnatural movements to the left and right while trying to take a few shots at the same time, whereas in the third game, there is an option for a strafe-locked third-person camera and a first-person camera that lets you walk around--in Ratchet & Clank and Ratchet & Clank 2, you must stand in place to use the first-person camera, although you can fire weapons while doing so.

This somewhat major issue of controls aside, the core gameplay of Ratchet & Clank and its two PS2 sequels have very similar but solid gameplay with evolutions of certain aspects introduced in each consecutive game--and there are even ways to bring all purchased/unlocked guns from the first game into the second and from the first two games into the third, although this is a one-time mechanic, so having purchased as many as possible beforehand is ideal.  The weapons range across the trilogy from a glove that releases grenades to a shotgun-like energy weapon to a plasma whip to a suction device that turns small enemies into projectiles.  In Ratchet & Clank 2, weapons can be upgraded one tier by killing enough enemies with them, and Ratchet's maximum health increases for killing enough enemies with any weapon, up until a fixed total amount, of course. In Ratchet & Clank 3, weapons can be upgraded by use past a single tier, and Ratchet can earn up to a capacity of 200 health points by leveling up enough.

There is also mild platforming, optional arena-based battles, secret bolt collectibles, and the occasional race required by the story to progress.  These races can be the hardest parts of the game until you adjust to them after at least a few rounds of practice.  Adjusting to them is partly a matter of developing skill as needed and partly overcoming the trait of the fellow racers where they go faster than you by default, an idiotic choice on the part of the game designers, as even hitting every boost pad and ring barely keeps you ahead of their natural speed in the first game.  As daunting as they might seem, even the parts of the trilogy like this can be finished, albeit after lots of practice for some people.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

The first game opens as Clank is produced by a factory that fails to make him meet the standard specifications--he is very small and much less imposing, and he escapes the factory to crash land on Ratchet's planet of residence.  Chairman Drek of the corporation Clank fled wants to build a new planet for his species using parts of other planets, without regard for how this will impact other beings.  Clank hopes to find an alleged hero called Captain Quark to save the solar system.  After eventually defeating Chairman Drek, Ratchet is tasked with recovering a stolen bioweapon because of his celebrity status in the second game, and after the adventures of the previous two games in the trilogy, Ratchet and Clank return to Ratchet's homeworld in the third installment to repel an invasion of machines led by Dr. Nefarious, a seemingly sentient robot that wants to exterminate organic life to usher in social equality for machines

Intellectual Content

Ratchet & Clank and its two numbered sequels are far from philosophically deep games while having story elements related to corporatism or the nature of artificial intelligence.  There is still a great amount of skill and sometimes forethought necessary to intentionally complete certain parts, and there is also the optional collectibles that can require far more environmental analysis than much of the main objectives.  Since entertainment can succeed in other ways even if it forfeits the higher greatness of abstract themes or profound characterization, this does not make any of these three Ratchet & Clank games bad, just lesser than plenty of other games in key ways.

Conclusion

These main Ratchet & Clank games before the reboot series started in 2016 certainly lack the thematic complexity or philosophical weight of something like Sony's other series God of War, but they are still competent in other aspects like their variety of weapons and in their demonstration of how a series can steadily improve on the mechanics of prior games with each release.  That some of the same control flaws persist well into this collection of games could make for a very frustrating experience for people who do not want to randomly jump back and forth while attempting to shoot enemies.  All the same, players seeking nostalgia, curious about the kinds of games that Sony once published for the PS2, or looking for plenty of content in a single Vita release, Ratchet & Clank Collection gets enough right to deserve at least some attention.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  There is little to no blood despite the frequent fights with enemies.

The Sea Sponge

The only reported multicellular creature with not only no brain (like a jellyfish or starfish), but also with no neurons at all distributed throughout the tubular body, sea sponges rely on inflow of water to receive nutrients as it stands rooted in place.  Still, it is said to react to stimuli like light (visual) or touch (tactile), such as by contracting at the point of impact.  Found in the epipelagic zone all the way down to the distant trenches of the hadalpelagic zone, this organism is even more unlike humans when it comes to neuroscience than other ocean animals like the aforementioned sea star.  It is thus far a unique peculiarity among catalogued organisms.

A whale has a brain, like a dolphin and a shark have a brain.  A jellyfish has no brain but still has neurons diffused throughout its body.  A starfish as a nerve ring around its mouth with a protruding radial nerve for each arm.  Sea sponges possess none of these things.  Moreover, they lack all organs, such as those for digestion or respiration, not just those participating in neurological activity.  Even coral is supposed to have more of a nervous system than none at all despite its own absence of a brain!  According to professionally popular contemporary scientific stances, it is not as if a nervous system seems to be necessary whatsoever to have mental experience, at a minimum not in all animals.

You can of course never see a consciousness by looking at a body, including the brain or extended nervous system of an applicable organism, with only the outward behaviors making it genuinely appear as if something is conscious.  Science is thus irrelevant to the core metaphysics of consciousness in this sense, for any mind is an immaterial, invisible thing no matter its integration with a body.  One's own consciousness is directly experienced.  That of other biological things can only have the epistemological appearance of existence.  All sorts of creatures still act is if they really do have some degree of perception of the kind I as a being relate to.

In the sea sponge, once again, there is something with a physical body that still acts as if it is conscious, yet there is not a trace of a nervous system.  Is it conscious?  It is impossible for a non-telepathic, non-omniscient observer to know.  It certainly would seem that the sea sponge has some sort of mind, though.  The same epistemological limitation that prevents one from knowing if plants or AI or other people are conscious is there.  As far as sensory observation suggests, the sea sponge probably does have a mind, whatever its actual experiences would actually be like.

Like so many other animals, examples being roaches with a ganglion in both the head and another in the abdomen and octopi with their focused clusters of neurons (like miniature brains) for each arm, sea sponges do not share the human style of nervous system.  If they truly do have minds, then having a consciousness without a specific kind of correlative nervous system is not only logically possible (it does not contradict any necessary truths like axioms and thus at least could have been true), but it is also already the case among some members of the animal kingdom.  There is already absolutely no logical necessity in a mind having or not having a corresponding material brain or other neurons.  With the phenomena we can observe, there seems to also be no contingent, happenstance scientific necessity with this in the particular laws of physics that apply on Earth.

Subjective Persuasion

Anyone who is persuaded by less than absolute logical certainty, only provided by logically necessary truths grasped without assumptions, and anyone who is not persuaded by logical proof are among the chief problems of the world, right next to people who would not care about necessary truths even if they knew of them.  Every single individual who does not intentionally, consistently forsake assumptions in favor of reason itself is a slave to stupidity to one extent or another.  Without exception, such a person believes that their perceptions and desires mean reality must be what they wish it to be or at least how it seems to be.  They are otherwise apathetic towards truth for the most part, knowing that they are delusional yet clinging to their asinine worldviews anyway.

They believe in whatever happens to appeal to them or appear convincing in the moment.  If they ever begin to suspect that there is or could be a difference between their perceptions and the reality beyond them, they are quick to disregard, ignore, or trivialize this doubt.  Of course, it is impossible to ever truly understand the inherent truth of logical axioms or their whole metaphysical and epistemological nature by focusing on mere sensory perceptions, emotions, hearsay, and preferences.  Since logical axioms are the only things that in themselves cannot be false or cannot have been any other way, these irrationalists are preventing themselves from knowing the heart of all things.  This kind of person will never know the true nature of reality--that it is entirely governed by the laws of logic and that nothing can be known apart from them, even when there are things besides logic in existence (their own mind, the external world, and so on).

Sheer force of emotion, societal pressures, preference, and terror at the thought of being stupid and wrong motivates them to hold to whatever contradictions (impossibilities) and assumptions (unproven or unprovable concepts) they find intoxicating or persuasive.  Which things they subjectively perceive to be persuasive, for persuasion on its own is nothing but subjective, will almost certainly change from one point in their life to another, yet they will always believe that their irrationalistic beliefs are valid or at least not abandon them upon realizing they were only assumptions.  There is nothing about their worldview that aligns with reality except by accident, and even then they cannot truly know where the overlap is present because they are enslaved by assumptions and unexamined ideas.

Subjective persuasion is meaningless and inherently arbitrary, having only to do with whatever randomly satisfies someone personally rather than what is both true by necessity and logically demonstrable.  Being convinced and being rationalistic are not at all the same thing!  A rationalist, however, is persuaded metaphysically by logical truths because they cannot have been any other way.  A rationalist is persuaded epistemologically by logical truths because a necessary truth, a truth that in itself cannot be illusory or that cannot be anything other than true, is absolutely certain.  That which cannot be false or misperceived other than intentionally is not uncertain, no matter how abstract it is or how strange it might seem.  Persuasion by logical truths is to tether one's beliefs to objective reality, while subjective persuasion is universally invalid.

Forgiving Like Yahweh

On an ultimate eschatological, soteriological level, God does not forgive everyone.  Though this mercy is accessible to all and God wishes it for all (2 Peter 3:8-9, 1 Timothy 2:3-6), preferring the repentance of the wicked to their demise (Ezekiel 18:23, 33:11), it is not only not the case that everyone necessarily turns to God, as universalist salvation would entail, but it is also the case that the Bible says most people will not (Matthew 7:13-14).  They will perish by being killed in hell (2 Peter 2:6, Matthew 10:28) because of their own unwillingness to choose truth.  Divine forgiveness is not forced upon people or withheld for only the "elect," contrary to what Calvinism entails.  It is whoever wishes to repent who obtains salvation (Revelation 22:17).

Many seem to forget or selectively ignore this when they demand or strongly push other people to forgive.  As a mercy, forgiveness is supererogatory left to itself, as since mercy can never be deserved (it is not treating sinners as they punitively deserve), it cannot be owed to anyone.  There are still multiple calls to forgive throughout the Bible, with a very crucial condition.  For instance, see Ephesians 4:32, where Paul says to forgive people as in Christ God forgave us.  The kind of forgiveness Paul is encouraging is not universal, the default, or immediate.  He says to forgive each other as God forgives us--and God does not forgive preemptively or do this to everyone because of obstacles on their own end.

Someone who has erred must repent and wish to be restored to him to receive that soteriological restoration.  They will die in hell without this and never be resurrected again to have the opportunity to seek repentance.  As already addressed, forgiveness is not extended from God to human individuals apart from willingness, or else everyone would be saved because it is God's hope that this would come about for every person.  God's nature is what grounds the existence of morality, so if this is how God forgives, then it is the forgiveness that we would be to imitate.  This is also emphasized in Colossians 3:13 and in passages like the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matthew 18:21-35), where the king does not release someone from debt owed to him except when asked.

There is no such thing as a Biblical obligation to forgive people one or all unless they request it.  Otherwise, they are not repentant, and mercy is undeserved anyway, or else justice could not be righteous and mandatory, for mercy is suspending justice in a situation on the level of permitting someone to forgo merited punishment.  Justice is by nature how someone deserves to be treated, so there is no such thing as forgiveness or any other sort of mercy being the real obligation over this.  The latter is not required by God and yet he opts to forgive the repentant anyway.  With broader mercy as well as forgiveness in particular, we are to express it in the way that God does (Luke 6:36).  This necessitates that repentance precede showing forgiveness to others unless one wants to gratuitously go further than this.

A Life Of Labor

The only way to fully avoid work in this life is to be dead.  To eat, drink, or prepare food, one must expend some degree of effort, no matter how small.  To exercise or engage in hobbies, one must put forth some amount of mental or physical effort, with these being types of work although they are quite different from the more specific kind of professional work the word is often reserved for.  Work and utter inactivity are more genuine opposites than workplace labor and the pursuit of activities in free time are.  Some people who long to be free of the workplace or especially from workplace exploitation might not have yet realized the different kinds of work are not all professional, and there is no way to truly escape some of them without allowing oneself to perish.

Collecting food, hunting, cooking, setting up and maintaining shelter, migrating, or defending oneself are all forms of work, but they are kinds of labor that do not require participation in a society structured to make people's lives, at least on a scheduling level, often revolve around professional work.  Someone who is against work itself on a moral level is an irrationalist; he or she is lazy, selfish, and generally stupid enough to think that their personal preferences dictate logical truths and moral obligations.  Even if professional work was evil, it is not as if work itself would be removed from human life altogether by abolishing the social construct of employment.

Whoever thinks that a life without bondage to the workplace--and in American culture and others like it, the workplace is indeed often oppressive--would be a life without any troubles or effort is a fool.  In fact, some people would have to work harder or longer just to survive without a civilization than they would under the horrors of the American workplace.  This does not mean it is not irrationalistic for a society to be set up so that the majority of its members' (or most of its members') lives must be spent primarily on laboring for a likely exploitative organization.  A person can certainly be mentally fixated on deeper things like reason, God, or friendship even as they exert immense psychological or physical effort in professional work, but their outward life is in many ways consumed by the social construct of the workplace.

Work itself is not the issue inside or outside the context of societies.  As long as humans need food, water, and physical safety, there are activities that they will need to do in order to secure these things as individuals or as groups.  Even if all societies and thus all workplaces vanished from the planet, the need to work in order to achieve these goals would not disappear as well.  Human life is such that work is inevitable unless someone is content to suffer and die without resistance, or to pay someone else to complete their tasks, to rely on their benevolence, or to force them to be their caretakers.  Labor might be objectively intrusive into one's life or subjectively unwanted, but it is a pragmatic cost that must be paid in order to survive.  There are also luxuries that working professionally for compensation allows for which are unobtainable by just living off of nature.

Workplace oppression is contrary to truth and justice rather than work itself.  That laboring outside of the professional workplace for survival, comfort, pleasure, or for the sake of a pastime is undesired by some does not make workplaces either benevolent or cruel by default.  Professional or not, the kind of work and the extent to which it occupies people's time are the major factors that would determine whether it is morally legitimate. There is no valid philosophical objection, not one that can be proven in light of human epistemological limitations, to work itself in all of its possible manifestations; only assumptions, contradictions, or emotionalism would have certain people believe otherwise.  Similarly, that work is on some level almost completely unavoidable does not make it the central part of reality as a whole or human existence in particular.

The Celebration Of Holidays

There are a great many reasons why someone might celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, as well as multiple reasons why people might oppose these holidays--and many of them are erroneous.  Objections are less commonly voiced, but they could include the idea that, say, celebrating Christmas is immoral because of its extreme consumeristic associations, but this would be to oppose a thing based on how it is approached by a society of tradition and emotion-driven irrationalists instead of for its own core nature.  Inversely, the more culturally visible ideology here is that holidays matter because they are longstanding customs or because they make some people emotionally excited.

Though tradition is an idiotic reason to do anything (unless the tradition is not irrational or immoral and one recognizes this, participating without believing in fallacies on the subject), even the motivations behind this kind of celebration are often incomplete or asinine.  Some people might use Thanksgiving to celebrate things that, if they are deserving of gratitude, would be worthy of it on each day of the year, yet they make little to no effort to embrace gratitude year-round.  Some people might celebrate Thanksgiving out of a genuinely emotionalistic love of family member, no matter how irrationalistic or morally pathetic they are.  Some people might participate in Thanksgiving gatherings and meals for no reason other than because it is a tradition, and I do not mean that someone recognizes it as an arbitrary holiday, refuses to make any assumptions about it, and happens to subjectively enjoy the holiday without any sort of philosophical idiocy involved.

There is nothing in the Bible that directly addresses anything about the date of the birth of Jesus within any calendar system, and it is very unlikely that December 25th out of all 365 days in the Gregorian calendar is the right day of the year.  Celebrating Christmas is idiotic when it is motivated by the unverifiable belief (not that anything more than possibility can be known about historical events like a birth), just as it is idiotic when it is motivated by secular consumerism or emotionalistic love of tradition.  If a person does not make assumptions but wants to celebrate something like family or the advent of Jesus in a rationalistic manner, then of course there is no issue with the mere celebration of Christmas.

There is certainly nothing inherently special or morally significant about gathering with family, especially to only have superficial, artificially positive conversations with them, whatever the cultural norm for a given holiday usually entails.  Anyone who does this emotionalistically is a fool, but that does not mean there is no way to celebrate holidays and even navigate asinine or random traditions (all traditions, as opposed to logical truths, are random) without betraying reason.  A rationalist can even celebrate holidays because of emotional investment without slipping into emotionalism, for the beliefs and intentions behind the simple participation in holiday festivities make all the difference here.

The Immense Number Of Cultural Assumptions About The Bible

Almost the entirety of what is commonly believed about Biblical teachings inside or outside of the church has nothing to do with its real doctrines.  From core metaphysics to sexuality to Yahweh's justice to the Biblical afterlife before the resurrection and far more, literally almost nothing of what is associated with Christianity is actually taught by the Bible.  Yes, the Bible states that there is a deity, and yes, it teaches that Jesus came to save sinners by his death and resurrection; these are among the only things popularly believed that the Bible teaches which it actually does.  In fact, concerning the creation story, there are many assumptions and errors that are so common many people might not even recognize them.  With this issue alone, and I will not go into all of the sub-issues here, there is an immense number of cultural assumptions.

The Bible never says God created Adam and Eve as the only humans in Eden, but it does say that he created Adam and Eve there.  Whether they were the sole first humans is completely unaddressed in the Genesis creation story.  Similarly, it never says that there was or was not thousands or billions of years that elapsed between the events of Genesis 1:1, 1:2, and 1:3.  These things of no core significance in a sense, as logical axioms, absolute certainty (where it can be found), the existence of God as the uncaused cause, and the nature of morality are by necessity unaffected.  Still, the actual words of Genesis never touch upon them at all.

For a Christological example of such assumptions, the virgin birth of Isaiah 7:14 is not immediately referencing Jesus in context.  The child in question is the son of Isaiah's wife, who was a virgin before having sex with him and producing a son.  Though this is a virgin giving birth to a child, it is not the same thing as the virgin birth of Matthew 1, even if there are certain parallels that make the latter quote the former.  Jesus is a parallel in some ways to the child of Isaiah 7:14-16, but he is not at all the same person.  This is another example of a very popular but blatantly wrong assumption about the text; even if it was taught by the Bible in Isaiah 7 itself, it would still be irrational for anyone to assume it is mentioned this way.

Another miscellaneous example is the details about Satan's history.  In Ezekiel 28, the guardian cherub who turned away from God to arrogance and unjust violence is never said to be Satan, also called the devil in the New Testament.  Perhaps this fallen cherub that walked in Eden is Satan, and perhaps not.  Nowhere does the Bible affirm one way or the other.  Certainly, it is likely that Ezekiel 28's demon is the same as the devil of the New Testament because there is no mention of another specific, prominent demon alongside Satan.  The New Testament still never details Satan's backstory and the Old Testament never confirms the fallen cherub of Ezekiel 28 as Satan.

There are far greater errors--both in that they are more philosophically foundational and and that they impact how we live far more than something like Adam and Eve being the first people--believed about the Bible in spite of what it plainly does or does not say.  Theistic irrationalism, the inherently false concept that God could be outside of or able to alter the necessary truths of logic, is the worst Biblical/theological error of all, as it not only misrepresents the Bible, but it also pretends like logical axioms and other necessary truths could ever be anything other than intrinsically true.  Eternal torment in hell, gender complementarianism, and anti-theonomy are much more irrational and deep errors than thinking the Bible excludes the creation of other people around Adam and Eve, but all of them are false or merely assumed.

The Scientific Method

Simply having passive sensory experiences is not the same as specifically implementing the scientific method, which entails at least some level of intentionality and openness to repeat observation that are not present behind mere sensory perceptions.  Any material environments in existence, any objects within those environments, and the ways in which various physical things interact nonetheless have a scientific nature, though scientific and sensory are not identical concepts; not everything pertaining to the senses is scientific, and, of course, the senses are far more phenomenological than related to physical existence, though there is no scientific perception apart from them.  Across everyday life, however, even someone who does not care for scientific investigation or phenomena will still perceive these matters frequently, from the most familiar to the most exotic correlations they encounter.

Scientific correlations are ultimately a matter of sheer happenstance, practical factors, in one sense.  Despite being subject to repeated observation through the senses, they are not necessary truths like logical axioms and other logical truths; they are also not the uncaused cause without which causally contingent things like the cosmos could never have come into existence.  They remain important for human life on one level due to how they relate to human convenience, safety, and general physiological flourishing.  Despite how to varying extents, people have to rely on some of these correlations--such as how drinking water can satisfy thirst, how pressing a switch can activate lightbulbs, and how refrigeration can preserve food for longer periods of time than free exposure to bacteria--many people are not especially observant in this regard or do not necessarily care to contemplate beyond the bare minimum needed to survive.

Everyone with functioning senses is still in experiential proximity to scientific phenomena, as one does not have to be a scientist by profession to perceive or be intrigued by or understand (as far as limited, subjective perceptions of correlations goes) things and events in the physical world.  In truth, not only is the material world utterly trivial compared to the necessary truths of logic that transcend and govern it, as well as to the uncaused cause, but it is also not knowable as far as science goes beyond subjective perceptions, correlations being among these.  Correlations are found constantly in sensory life: exposure to sunlight are correlated with sunburns, scratching skin with the alleviation of itching, and turning a key in a car's ignition with activating the engine are just some of them.  They do not prove anything more than that one is perceiving correlations, and even the most consistent correlation that falls short of a logically provable causal relationship could be an illusion where the true cause of a thing is unseen or seemingly unrelated.

Now, someone who foolishly obsesses over science to the exclusion of rationalism will probably not realize all of this, or they will at a minimum not care that science at most hints at certain logically possible activities within the universe, never actually confirming them beyond the level of potentially illusory evidences, while reason is really at the heart of this truth more foundationally than science.  There is nothing rational about fixating on or even excelling at navigating the sensory correlations of science without first understanding the superior nature of reason, epistemologically and metaphysically, including how science is mostly practical in its application while reason is inherently abstract and practical in all things.  

The scientific method is usually either trivialized to the point of ignoring its still-significant relevance to human life, perhaps even hated by some of the many modern people who benefit from the technological and medicinal advances it leads to, or glorified as if the material world could possibly be what constitutes the necessary truths and absolute certainties of logic, or as if it has some grand moral value apart from God's nature.  Relied on every day, and still not to the same omnipresent, all-encompassing extent that everything constantly relies on the laws of logic, the scientific method has its place in the nature of reality, and that place is routinely exaggerated or rejected by irrationalists of different kinds.

Pursuing Carbon Neutrality

There are two ways a corporation or general society could reach "net zero" with current emissions like carbon: either the emissions are reduced or they are counteracted.  According to present paradigm, nature's carbon sponges include plants, trees in particular because of their longevity and size, and phytoplankton.  Both land-based vegetation and phytoplankton, for the latter are microscopic plants that are adrift in the ocean, engage in photosynthesis, through which the carbon is removed from carbon dioxide to be stored in the organism.  To better neutralize the warming consequences of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel usage, both of these kinds of absorbers would need to be utilized.  One likely hears more about how trees can help with climate change of human origin.

As far as scientific evidence points to, yes, they are useful for this end.  The role of phytoplankton is still larger.  With more oceanic water than land, phytoplankton in the sunlight zone (the top 200 meters of the sea) use the same process as trees over a broader area.  Perhaps this emphasis on trees is because there is more a random person can likely do to preserve or plant trees than to directly protect phytoplankton.  Minimizing or collecting marine pollution is one way to safeguard phytoplankton, rather than release plastics that interfere with photosynthesis and simply remain in the water for extended periods (and get infested by the creatures therein).  Diminishing carbon dioxide or absorbing it also helps phytoplankton since increased heat can set in motion a chain that kills them.  Even so, trees are visible for many in everyday life, unlike phytoplankton.

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are another way to improve the carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere, since they do not release carbon--though we cannot safely, securely rely on renewable energy exclusively [1].  Burning fewer fossil fuels spews less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn gives plants on land and in the tropic zone of the sea fewer emissions to counteract, and renewable sources do not contribute further to the issue; they are sources of clean energy.  In conjunction, promoting healthy trees and phytoplankton, curtailing general pollution, and using more renewable energy sources when possible is the best way to undo damaging buildup of excess greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Net zero for carbon emissions does not mean that there is no carbon being emitted, but that there are balancing measures that can be taken simultaneously, even as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere can be lessened.  Beyond natural carbon sinks like phytoplankton, there is also the possibility of genetically modifying plants to store more of this substance, such as by living longer or growing larger (for trees).  There are indeed accessible ways to achieve carbon neutrality in spite of apathy from some and active exploitation of the natural world by others.  The correlations between plants of various kinds and carbon absorption provide a great avenue to (in part) fight any global warming perpetuated by modern civilization.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/10/renewable-energy.html

Elon Musk's Irrational Stance On Remote Work

If a phone or laptop is the only equipment someone needs for their job, apart from a charger or router for the device, that is, then it is always less safe, less convenient, and perhaps less productive to make people squander their time in daily commutes.  Driving to work always brings the possibility of loss of life or health, as even without traffic collisions, there are many potential mechanical failures or health conditions that could strike and lead to a crash of some kind.  That does not even touch on the lesser environmental emissions and the additional free time for employees before and after a working period that remote work allows for--not that business leaders tend to care about either of those things under American-style capitalism!

Some jobs cannot be done except in person, at least safely or effectively.  If artificial intelligence and automation were to become more refined and introduced into more functions in the workplace, human presence could be diminished, which would increase human safety and convenience; with the current social framework in place in countries like America, however, this would likely not be used to give humans remote jobs or remote participation in formerly in-person roles, but to exclude them from the workforce altogether.  Some employers are more direct about not permitting workers to labor remotely even when the job is not hindered by it and in spite of the many objective benefits for employees.

Elon Musk has reportedly said that the "laptop classes" are living in delusion, that it is immoral for them to get to work from home (or elsewhere outside of a company office) while other people who make their cars or their food have to labor in person [1].  Ignoring the clear distinctions between different industries and roles, and how some of them are better or perfectly suited for remote work using a laptop and the internet, he condemns remote workers for not wanting to trade time with friends or family for traffic-filled commutes, for wanting to do what is most convenient for them as they work for their companies, and for not wanting to partake in a convention that is no longer technologically necessary.

Except for the specific cases where work is necessary in a particular physical location for the likes of worker safety or actual productivity (not to enforce arbitrary productivity demands), there is absolutely no reason why any workers should not at least be offered the option of remote labor if they would prefer it.  Communication between employees can still occur by phone, by email, or by workplace-specific messaging applications.  Deadlines can still be met.  Information can still be logged, shared, or analyzed.  For all applicable jobs, remote work is plainly the ideal option for those who do not want to surrender more time than is absolutely necessary to work, who want to pursue health or enjoy their relationships.

To exert power, to engage in more direct micromanaging, and/or to force compliance with meaningless traditions are the sole reasons why those with the most illusionary authority in the workplace hierarchy might want to abolish or scale back remote work.  How else would middle managers whose only real role is to micromanage or gratuitously observe the workers who are actually accomplishing the important tasks hide in their flimsy obscurity?  How else would a certain kind of egoistic leader feel like they are in charge to interfere when it is not required?  How else would the often pointless tradition of seeing one's coworkers in person be continued?  It is not always for productivity or alleged moral reasons why remote work is opposed.  Imposing subjective whims as if they were obligations, as Elon Musk wants to, is the real irrationality or injustice here.

[1].  https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-remote-work-morally-wrong-get-off-high-horse-2023-5?amp

Negotiating For Compensation

Asking for a raise can be treated as an opportunity to give employees more and more goals with the implied promise of more compensation (or perhaps a direct promise), only for raises to be resisted, delayed, or provided at trivial amounts.  Negotiating for or requesting a raise does not have to be like this.  In a world without anyone motivated by fallacies, malice, or selfishness, it would never be the case that workers would need to ask for livable wages/salaries, and raises based upon expanding responsibilities, higher positions, deepening seniority, or personal productivity or talent would not be blocked or dependent upon an employee's conversational skills with an employer who might be trying to overwork and underpay wherever they can.  Unless this is to become this world, negotiation is a burden that can fall far more on employees than those they work for, and being prepared to communicate the disproportionality between current and merited pay is a necessity of sorts.

Everything down to the length of time someone has spent with a role or company can be relevant.  Seniority can give a person time to amass knowledge of company operations, formal and informal policies, and useful relationships with other workers (even if they do not extend to anything outside of a workplace context and into genuine friendship).  Since some company or department norms might not be officially documented or might easily be forgotten during transitions of power, prolonged seniority paired with a memory of precise details like these can certainly be appealed to for negotiation purposes.  More significantly for the company, though, a longtime employee might have a lot of productivity contributions or know how to navigate flexibly around problems.  Specific examples of competency or desire for growth (not it is possible for there to be endless professional growth) can help in negotiations over pay increases.

If a company would be crippled or just set back dramatically if one was to quit or withdraw effort, then one has not just the same level of baseline power that all employees have because an employer needs workers to uphold the status quo; one would also have power as an individual worker on the basis of milestone accomplishments, talent, familiarity with the company, or connections to people within the hierarchy.  All of this can be mentioned and emphasized in a discussion about compensation.  Unless one has a manager or employer who actively avoids neglecting, trivializing, or oppressing employees, one might have to bring these things up oneself instead of hoping that achievements and potential will be noticed by default.

Drawing attention to the genuine justification for a raise or promotion (which should come with a raise already unless a person voluntarily declines it) based on merit is not guaranteed to be met with approval or celebration by an irrationalistic boss.  The company figure on the other side of the negotiation might have already noticed what the employee cites, hoping they would not bring them up or ready to dismiss them for irrelevant or vague reasons.  Rationality and firmness are needed together in this case.  Of course, an employer who wants to reward workers for their integral contribution to his or her successes would not be waiting for workers to mention these things in hopes of receiving an arbitrary raise.  No, they would be eager or prepared to give one beforehand.

In the numerous cases where the employer or manager is not this kind of leader, one might need to fight for even deserved raises, either to adjust for the rising cost of living or to account for increasing seniority or skill.  The same handful of idiotic excuses will probably be stated by an irrationalistic leader, though.  The budget might supposedly be too restrictive to permit livable or individualistically deserved compensation, but it will simultaneously be "compatible" with high executive pay or expensive gifts for clients.  Minor or irrelevant blunders by the employee--though they would deserve at least livable compensation regardless--might be treated as if they invalidate strong work.  Be prepared to push back against this stupidity without resorting to the idiocy of assumptions, slander, hypocrisy, or selfishness that many employers might be slaves to.

A Republic Is A Kind Of Democracy

Is America a republic, a democracy, or a democratic republic?  Some people use these words almost interchangeably and other people use them as if they refer to different political systems.  America is actually all three of these things.  A democratic republic is a type of republic, and a republic is a kind of democracy.  It is not particularly difficult to realize this.  No, calling a country's governing structure a republic does not make it so.  As always, to know the truth, someone must look past words to concepts, without making assumptions, while also recognizing logical necessities.

In a republic, citizens (some of them at minimum) vote on representatives, who in turn make decisions that impact the citizenry.  This is the republic of the United States of America: there is voting on who becomes a political official, such as a senator or the president, and after that, the citizen class has no direct bearing on political events orchestrated by those in office until the next election time.  It might be said by some people that this is not a democracy, but it is only not a pure/absolute democracy, the worst form of this abomination, where the majority directly and fully dictates everything about how a country is run.

Consensus, feelings, and preference are irrelevant to dictating or revealing truth (other than that one is experiencing certain feelings or preferences).  Thus, pure democracy is even more opposed to truth because of its inherently relativistic or emotionalistic approach to matters that are by necessity never determined by relativistic attitudes or emotion.  Some people recognize at the least that democracy is dangerous since it is as volatile as the majority and can be expressed through whatever stupidity or cruelty 51% or more of a community wish, when its pragmatically explosiveness is meaningless next to how it is antithetical to truth and the fixed, intrinsic nature of reason in which all truth is grounded.

A republic is at most still not this absolute and this thorough of a democracy.  There is always a democratic element to any republic that features elections of any kind, however limited, however sporadic, and however .  Democracies, in contrast, do not need to involve a group of elected representatives in order to be democracies.  A republic without elections would just be a form of oligarchy, where the representatives are the ruling class, as if oligarchy cannot be democratic.  A true republic as distinguished from a general oligarchy always involves elected representation.

As such, republic by default is just a subset of democracy in each of its manifestations.  A republic cannot be rational or good as a political framework because it is democracy, and democracy is inherently irrationalistic, for the idea that the majority or consensus in any way determines or reveals the truth is one that is false by necessity.  Reason grounds truth.  Logical axioms and other necessary truths, whatever moral obligations exist, and even lesser things like whatever scientific laws/phenomena really exist behind the veil of perception are not made true or made knowable by whims or agreement.  Anyone at all who supports democracy is by nature in opposition to the very nature of truth itself.

What Logically Follows From A Biblical Command

You cannot know from conscience that the Bible's moral tenets are true.  Indeed, for myself, I never had any moral feelings flare up at the notion of having a weekly Sabbath (Exodus 35:2-3) or not eating animal fat (Leviticus 3:17).  My conscience never made me feel as if charging any level of interest at all on a loan to a fellow countryperson (Deuteronomy 23:19-20) or the poor (Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:35-37) is sinful.  Not that anyone's moral feelings matter--independent of whether Christianity is true, they are only subjective and random, malleable emotions, not something that could possibly provide proof of anything but the feelings themselves.  People who cling to conscience only do so because they are stupid or frightened of some alternative, not because it is rational or even morally right to do so.  The person who truly cares about morality would disregard conscience anyway, caring about actually doing that which is obligatory and avoiding that which is evil regardless of how they feel about anything.

Moral epistemology is far more nuanced and yet simple as far as broad philosophy and Biblical teachings go.  Here, I will focus on the latter.  Within Biblical statements, everything that one needs to ascertain what would be immoral, permissible, or mandatory on the worldview described therein is addressed (Deuteronomy 4:2).  The Bible's central and only primary, complete moral teachings are put forth in Mosaic Law, with some narratives affirming or elaborating upon this--if God tells someone to do something, then on the Christian worldview, the thing is not evil, but looking to narratives rather than or apart from Mosaic Law is not going to unveil most Biblical moral doctrines.  Some of the commands have logically necessary ramifications that mean they are really touching on more than just one particular case at once.  Though no one needs this example to realize the preceding or many of the following things, Paul realizes this when referencing Deuteronomy 25:4 in both 1 Corinthians 9:7-10 and 1 Timothy 5:17-18 in contexts that are not at all about animals, but about people having a right to the rewards of their labor.

The verse from Deuteronomy says not to muzzle an ox while it is treading the grain.  This is because animals are also beings with the breath of life (Genesis 7:20-23) that have moral value on the Christian worldview (Genesis 1:20-25, 31).  It happens to be the case that Yahweh's nature is such that to prevent an animal from eating the grain it is spreading is mistreatment.  Still, the New Testament quotations of this verse are about people who plow literally or figuratively deserving to reap the harvest, and 1 Corinthians 9:10 as much as says this outright.  If disallowing animals from having some of the grain they are distributing is sinful, how much more is unfairness to humans who are made in the image of God in denying them the proportionate rewards of their labor?  In Mosaic Law itself, which Paul cites as someone who in no way teaches that its obligations have been superceded or annulled or revealed to be tyrannical as many pseudo-Christians assert (Acts 24:14, Romans 7:7), there are many instances where it would be obvious to any rationalistic person what follows and does not follow by necessity, even if the text does not mention something.

To follow is an example of a broad issue that is addressed on the level of both trying to persuade others to commit an evil act and then going further by doing the action.  Regardless, only the former would be needed to condemn the latter.  In Deuteronomy 13:6-10, suggesting to someone that other deities besides Yahweh be worshipped is prescribed the punishment of execution by stoning.  Four chapters later, Deuteronomy 17:2-7 says to do the same to someone who has worshipped other deities or celestial bodies.  Deuteronomy 13, without Deuteronomy 17, already would condemn actual worship of anything but Yahweh.  If merely enticing someone to worship other deities or the natural world is deserving of death, then of course it would follow that actually going further than this and engaging in worship of other deities would deserve at least the same punishment.  For a sin where this sort of logical necessity is presented without the Bible writing it all out, if attacking someone with a stone or with one's first outside of self-defense is evil (Exodus 21:18-19), attacking someone with a shovel or a brick would, if it has the same level of resulting injury, also deserve financial restitution for the victim to make up for any time they could not work.  The obligation articulated in this verse is not largely or exclusively about stones and fists.  It is about how, according to Yahweh's nature, this level of assault (without permanent injury or accidental death, which are addressed separately) is always sinful and the just punishment is always for the aggressor to pay the victim in the aforementioned manner.

There are many more such things in Mosaic Law.  Is Deuteronomy 25:11-12 really only teaching that a woman who grabs a man in this way is sinning, as opposed to if she had gone beyond grabbing or if a man had done this to a woman?  No!  If a woman sins by just seizing a man's genitals--not in a consensual sexual encounter that is morally permissible (such as within marriage)--in the context of defending her husband, then of course she would have sinned even moreso by using her fingers to inflict pain on the man's penis or testicles in that situation, and of course grabbing a man's genitals in a nonconsensual or degrading manner in other scenarios would be at least just as immoral.  This law, therefore, is of great relevance to the sexual assault of men by women, which the Bible never denies or trivializes.  A woman who grabs a man's genitals to harass or humiliate him if he refuses to have sex with her or because she thinks she is entitled to sexually touching him against his wishes, having nothing to do with self-defense, would still deserve to have her hand cut off.  Moreover, a man who grabs a woman's genitals (breasts on either gender are not genitalia and thus are not "sex" organs even though exposure or admiration of the genitals can be entirely nonsexual) to control her in a fight, even to protect his wife whom she is attacking, sins because the act is the same (and Genesis 1:26-27, not to mention many laws in the Torah, plainly teaches gender equality).

The Bible does not need to mention the then-far-future technology of automobiles for it to logically follow from exact Biblical statement of Leviticus 19:16 (if true) that driving recklessly is immoral, for this would already endanger any people around oneself while driving as this general verse condemns.  Exodus does not need to say when it condemns kidnapping (Exodus 21:16) that a race-based slave trade is evil because if all kidnapping deserves death, then of course race-based abduction for the transatlantic slave trade of several centuries ago is even worse than basic kidnapping.  By saying to not bring the payment of a male or female prostitute into God's house to fulfill a vow because God hates them both (Deuteronomy 23:17-18), it is saying that prostitution is evil in all cases, or else God would not hate their compensation.  Many premises are articulated in particular phrases from which it would follow by necessity, in itself or in light of other passages, that things not mentioned at all or not specifically included in the statement would have to be evil as well.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

Logical Necessities And Fallible Evidences: The Innermost Depths Of Christian Apologetics

Logical possibility is not what makes something true.  No, this only means it is possible!  It is possible that I will be abducted by aliens within the next few minutes, that I am hallucinating the vast majority of my sensory experiences, or that electricity and radioactivity will suddenly behave differently than they do now.  That does not make these things true.  They are still of course logically possible because they do not contradict logical axioms or what follows from them, all of which cannot be anything other than true in themselves.  All else hinges on them or is lesser than them.  Many Christian apologists are not rationalists, though they all might pretend to be more than subjectivists hoping to arbitrarily persuade others with fallible evidences.  In all of there emphasis on how many secondary sources reportedly agree that Jesus existed as a first century Jew, they might ignore the primary sources that are of true relevance, also avoiding the fact that logic is inherently true and historical evidences of any kind are not.  Out of an obsession with subjective persuasion based on their own assumptions, they tend to wholly neglect the deepest of philosophical truths and issues that are of far more significance than whether random parts of Biblical narratives are historically documented (this too is significant, but far less so in many ways).

Does the Bible, for instance, ever say that logical axioms are false or that they are created things (which would require that they were not true before their creation, an impossibility)?  No!  Neither Genesis 1 nor John 1 says God created everything, which would include himself and the intrinsic (or necessary) truths of logic.  The latter only says that Christ and God jointly created all things that have been made (John 1:3)  For the former, the Bible already says God preceded the universe, time, and human and animal creations, as well as angelic beings, though the last of these is ultimately only mentioned in passages like Ezekiel 28.  Thus, the Bible would already contradict itself and thus be false if Yahweh is supposed to have created everything.  Moreover, he could not have created himself, performing such an act or any act at all when he did not exist.  That this is a logical impossibility is far more crucial than that it is a doctrine foreign to the Bible.

It is inherently impossible for logical axioms and the other necessary truths that follow from them to be anything other than true and thus in existence even if no deity had ever created or if God was to cease to exist.  If the Bible was not consistent with such philosophical truths, then more foundational parts of its metaphysics would be impossible no matter how much historical evidence there is for things like the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  It is an unfortunate fact that more Christian apologists do not simultaneously recognize the inherently true, metaphysically supreme, and epistemologically self-evident nature of logical axioms and that the more important issues of Christian apologetics are about Christianity's compatibility with rationalism, not its psychological relevance to modern life or its overlap with historical and scientific evidences, which are always potentially illusions and utterly secondary to reason anyway.

For another example of this besides the intrinsic, eternal existence of logical truths independent of the uncaused cause, there is the fact that non-rationalists cannot deserve to exist.  The nonexistence of moral value and obligation would mean that no one has a right to anything, including to exist or not be killed.  If anything at all is good or obligatory, however, reason dictates its nature, and thus reason must also be good and alignment with it must be obligatory.  A non-rationalist disregards or intentionally remains ignorant to knowable truths and would by necessity be less valuable than people who seek awareness of reason and the important truths it grounds.  To misunderstand or neglect reality is irrationality, and nothing that is true or good could not rely on reason: since reason cannot be false without still being true, everything else that is even possible must be consistent with it.  The Bible acknowledges and is consistent with this by presenting the deserved fate of the unrepentant wicked as reduction to nonexistence (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28, John 3:16, Romans 3:23).

These and other logical facts are things the Bible affirms or does not deny even if it might seem to non-rationalists inside or outside the church that this is not the case.  Gender egalitarianism is another such thing.  If the Bible really did teach that men and women have psychological differences and not merely physical ones, it would be objectively incorrect on this issue, because it does not follow from having a certain set of body parts or physiological functions that one has a given personality or talent, as these are distinct matters.  Similarly, if it said that there are moral obligations for only men or only women, it would also be wrong.  There could be no such thing as morality, but if something is morally good, it is good no matter who does it, and if it is evil, it is evil no matter the gender of who carries it out.  The Bible clearly teaches gender egalitarianism (Genesis 1:26-27 and Exodus 21:26-29 address this, and verses people think teach the opposite are misinterpreted through assumptions).  Again, it is the Bible's agreement with logical necessities that makes it possible, not how there are numerous genuine evidences for many of its tenets on the level of historical documentation or scientific perceptions.  An apologist who does not quickly come to realize that logical necessity is more vital to Christianity's probable truth than fallible evidences is a horribly inept thinker indeed.

Evolutionary Survival

Non-theistic evolution would have many chance elements, but natural selection, as it is called, would not bring about new species immediately, nor would it necessarily result in what is optimal instead of minimally sufficient.  If unguided evolution happened, yes, there is still an uncaused cause by logical necessity, and the two are not contradictory, just as an uncaused cause creating the universe and abiogenesis creating life from materials in the universe are not contradictory.  Theism does not exclude many things that are popularly mistaken as antithetical and vice versa.  Biblically, abiogenesis would not have occurred if Christianity is true, but that is a different issue than what is being focused on here.

Why would there be imperfect adaptations to the environment of an animal if natural selection is about increasing the chances of survival and reproduction?  A plant that succumbs to a given disease does not have a gene that grants immunity.  A species of fish with poor vision does not have a gene that brings better visual "hardware" for the eye and nervous system, and its correlating phenomenological sense of vision would suffer (it just might not need excellent sight or any sight at all).  Some things might die because of their limitations before they can reproduce at all.  Tradeoffs between one characteristic and another aside, there is nothing about evolution that itself requires perfection in behavioral/survival outcome or the traits used to obtain it.

As long as an organism is just effective or fortunate enough, by as much as a sliver, it has the chance to reproduce, and if it gets to do so, then its genes and corresponding physical traits (phenotypes) can be passed on.  It does not need to be "ideally" fit to survive through physical ability or mental fortitude one way or another if other members of its species are less equipped to survive, such as by having some crippling disability or happenstance greater susceptibility to sickness, or if some chance disaster eliminates many others while leaving the creature in question alive.  Again, nothing more than the bare minimum is required to survive here.

The concept of macro-evolution is about gradual changes from generation to generation.  It is not the idea of one species directly giving birth to a totally different species or even a small number of generations producing a different species.  Non-theistic (or angelic or extraterrestrial-influenced, etc.) evolution is not presided over by outside forces and is not even about giving one animal anything more than what is absolutely necessary to get by, and it would by nature lead to chance mutations.  The applicability of various traits to survival, in contrast, would not be total chance because they would or add to or detract from the probabilistic likelihood of life extension or the passing on of genes.

If macro evolution did occur, then it would not need to be the case that we would observe every kind of surviving species and individual within each category has perfect, universal adaptations.  In this case, there would not even be something to set one individual animal physically apart from another to give it a survival advantage.  What barely permits a living thing to stay alive and perhaps procreate is enough.  Whether survival objectively matters is an issue hinging on whether morality exists and what its obligations are, which is really a matter of whether the uncaused cause has a moral nature and, if so, what it is like.  Survival opportunities and chances, however, are affected by physical traits, and only creatures that reproduce could pass on their traits.  This is natural selection, which is on this level true even if it was independent of macro-evolution, and it does not involve the immediate development of high quality traits unless guided by some sort of mind, for all it would need would be something just useful enough.

The Devil's Fate

Demons are not humans.  They are not said to be especially made in God's image, though they would be necessity share some characteristics with God, like consciousness and intellects and intentionality within their minds.  They are the beings Jesus says hell was created for (Matthew 25:41), suggesting that they were created prior to humans.  This is relevant to the fact that Revelation says that the devil, the beast, and the false prophet will be tormented day and night forever and ever (20:10), though it not only does not say the same about the humans thrown into the lake of fire (20:11-15), but humans suffering eternally would contradict everything the Old Testament and New Testament say about the punitive afterlife that awaits the wicked--with the initially seeming exception of people who have taken the mark of the beast (Revelation 14:9-11); the smoke of their torment literally rising forever would still not require that they exist forever.

Is Revelation 20:10 literal, though?  While the Bible simply makes the promise that the second death, with its permanent extinction of consciousness, will be the just outcome for the human unsaved, even for the Satan, it would be true in his case that finite sins would be punished with infinite torment if Revelation 20:10 is literal.  The only explicit reference to eternal conscious torment in the Bible is the book that is sometimes the most figurative, and the only possible, hyperbolic reference to eternal conscious torment for humans exclusively involves those who take the mark of the beast; neither case, however, would contradict the Biblical claim that the collective unsaved of humanity are destined for eternal death after very limited torment, if any at all.

While it is not actually established if the fallen angel of Ezekiel 28 is what the New Testament calls "the devil," this demonic entity is possibly the same being.  At the very least, this chapter refers to a specific, singular angel of particular beauty that descends into arrogance and sinful violence, initially falling into pride because of its great beauty (28:17).  Ezekiel 28 states what the fate of this being is: to be consumed with fire and burnt to death (28:18), to "be no more" (28:19).  If this is Satan, then long before Revelation was written, God had already revealed what is supposed to await this demon who once walked in Eden as a guardian cherub (28:13-14).  The passage shifts either way from references to a human monarch, the king of Tyre, to a clearly demonic but unnamed being said to at some point be killed by fire.

It is indeed true that some things in Revelation are plainly symbolic.  Some verses clarify this as they describe the literal reality that a figurative image or word points to, so there is always a necessary element of sheer literalism.  It is entirely possible that Revelation 20:10 is not literal after all when it says that the devil and at least two others will be tormented without end, but it is also possible that the fallen cherub of Ezekiel 28 that will come to an end by fire is not Satan, the devil, at all, just a different demon.  At the same time, the differences between demons and humans mean that hell was not made for the latter, and the very obvious, constant justice in store for wicked/unsaved humans is an end to their conscious existence altogether through cosmic death (Ezekiel 18:4 and Matthew 10:28 alone establish this).

Again, the issue of the massive disparity between endless torture for sin and a finite number and severity of sins committed would arise with the devil's fate.  Justice is justice regardless of the being it is inflicted upon.  Although the aforementioned distinctions between fallen angels and fallen humans are still there in Biblical philosophy, it is not as if injustice becomes just depending on who it is directed towards.  This needs to be recognized even when it concerns Satan, perhaps identical with the corrupted cherub of Ezekiel 28 that is certainly said to not be tortured forever.  Even if the devil was a liar from the beginning of his fall and a murder (John 8:44), unsaved murderers do not have eternal life (1 John 3:15), the eternal existence that no being but God has by default (1 Timothy 6:16) and that God and Christ must extend to humans, without which one would cease to exist for one's sin.  Satan himself would very well also be destined for death, for destruction, not for eternal torment.