The Power Of Cosmic Horror

It is no secret on this blog or in-person interactions with others that I have had more than just annoyance with non-rationalists throughout the years.  As people who disregard the only inherent truths and live for assumptions or emotion over logical necessities, they have received my fierce and outright, brazen hatred that I was practically never opposed to showing.  Hatred is not irrational or evil just because it is hatred, after all.  As long as you do not make assumptions or mistreat anyone in thought or deed, there is nothing problematic.  I prided myself on the way that I unflinchingly, eagerly expressed that loathing and not even on Christian ethics could I have been in the wrong (Psalm 5:5-6, for example, is one of many verses affirming that some hatred is morally good).

Reading Stephen King's cosmic horror story Revival unexpectedly shifted my attitude towards people in general, not that my worldview itself was in error.  I became persistently merciful, and not out of hope of manipulating non-rationalists for pragmatism or amusement.  The end of the story shows a glimpse into an alleged afterlife called the Null that everyone, from babies to the elderly, goes to after death: a dimension where souls in supposedly undying new bodies are trapped in eternal servitude to anthropomorphic ant-like slavers who are in turn enslaved by immensely powerful beings that are almost godlike except that they might not be uncaused causes.  One of these beings, Mother, can imprison or display the new, still-animated bodies of people within her own massive, spidery, projected body.  Overwhelming lights illuminate the marching horde of humans that, according to Mother, will never receive death, light (of a non-threatening kind, since there are the aforementioned extreme lights in the Null), or rest.

If this kind of afterlife exists, which is entirely logically possible despite the evidence for Christianity with its eternal bliss or annihilation of the soul (John 3:16, Romans 6:23), people endure lifetimes of suffering only for death to awaken them to something far worse than any pain of this world.  With sexual abuse, the pain cannot last longer than the abuser is alive.  With murder, the pain of earthly existence, not the hypothetical pain of an afterlife, cannot outlast the deed that kills the victim.  Not even the most severe tortures of this world, that far outclass murder in cruelty, would be anything more than a drop in an infinite ocean compared to ceaseless slavery and torment at the whims of immortal Lovecraftian beings.  The Null is not about morality since it involves supposed endless pain and is the postmortem destination, as assumed by the protagonist, of everyone.

Though there is no evidence for an afterlife like this, there is a great deal of evidence for Christianity and by extension its very different, often unacknowledged hell of justice and death rather than endless torture of any kind.  Yahweh's justice, not that eternal torment could be morally proportionate to the finite sins of a human life as it is, is the elimination of those who betray or refuse reconciliation to reality (Ezekiel 18:4, 2 Peter 2:6).  They will neither suffer forever nor exist as a blemish on his creation.  The last enemy to be destroyed, if Christianity is true, is death itself (1 Corinthians 15:26) and then pain itself will be no more (Revelation 21:4).  There is no eternal suffering in Yahweh's hell.  What the wicked come to is the second death (Matthew 10:28, Revelation 20:15).

Reading Revival, it is not as if I had never realized that not only is an afterlife logically possible because it does not contradict axioms, but also an afterlife that is very different from the Christian one is possible.  A universalist heaven could be a popular idea on an emotional level, but a universalist, non-theological hell that has no purpose other than just to subjugate the human dead for the sake of the Great Ones is even worse in one sense that the irrational, unbiblical heresy of the evangelical hell.  At least this unbiblical hell of eternal conscious torment is supposed to be about justice although that very fact is what makes it a logical contradiction, whereas the Null is presented as an unavoidable, permanent residence for all human souls (though other Stephen King books conflict with this and thus the Null as it is described is an illusion or the protagonist made assumptions).

Even now, many months after I read the novel, the irony being that I bought it right around when I became a rationalist nine years ago and happened to initially never read past the first 70 or so pages, the elements of the Null and the general idea of an inevitable and endlessly hellacious afterlife still receives my attention all the time.  Intense flashes of color alongside live stage music remind me of the lights of the Null, where the colors seem alive and alien and like they are perceiving the terrified human inhabitants.  I joke about how at any moment I might go to meet Mother and see her leg reach down for me with its decorations of screaming human faces.  It is not that I had not thought about many of the relevant ideas without making any assumptions, but that I was never particularly terrified of just the fact that something like the Null is entirely logically possible, as utterly unlikely as it seems.

The plentiful evidence for Christianity would have to be an illusion, which would probably mean much more about the sensory plane is an illusion than just a few documents about the life and death of Christ.  The uncaused cause would have to be amorally sadistic or apathetic, leaving dead humans to be treated cruelly without end by some other supernatural beings.  Whatever hell might exist in this case would not be about proportionate justice with a finite ending or about eradicating evil by purging reality of unrepentant sinners.  Like the Null, it would be about arbitrary suffering or the irrationalistic or pointless whims of an eldritch entity.  This is far from the Christian hell, and since there is evidence for Christianity, it is improbable.

As I read the slow burn cosmic horror novel that presented this afterlife, I developed a terror of death that I had never before experienced, and it is not because the likely afterlife--the Biblical hell--is anywhere near as severe as the Null.  Despite this, I simply no longer had the subjective desire to be permissably aggressive with non-rationalists or wish annihilation upon them.  It cannot be irrational to wish nonexistence upon those who reject or ignore the only part of reality that cannot have been any other way in itself, logical axioms, and when it comes to Biblical morality, all unrepentant sin deserves death.  Because of the power of non-religious cosmic horror, all the same, I lost my bent towards wishing for a much less awful and,ore importantly, deserved fate for people.  A different kind of cosmic horror seized me: concern that other people might avoidably fade from existence altogether.  This saddened me like never before, and I came to deeply prioritize mercy for others.  Directly Lovecraftian horror shifted my attitude towards the Bible's own lesser cosmic horror.

The Face Of Fear: The Ubermensch

The novel The Face of Fear by Dean Koontz features a pair of antagonists, Frank and Bill, who aspire to be among the first of the "supermen" that Nietzsche predicted.  Serial killers initially targeting women because they think that the superman, sometimes elsewhere called the Ubermensch, is of a superior race that only men can rise to, the two are devoted to explicitly Nietzschean concepts.  The loss of Christianity's cultural prominence, or "Christianity's" since there has never been a time on the historical record when Biblical Christianity rather than some major distortion was popularly recognized for its actual nature, provoked Nietzsche to anticipate people who would shirk away from what he considered unhealthy, confining Christian values and live for their own arbitrary moral intuitions or preferences.  The pair thinks they are to help usher in a better world in their own image.

Frank tells Billy that Nietzsche "has" to be right about people, or human males in particular according to them, being in an intermediate evolutionary stage because otherwise everything is so pointless.  This, of course, is a non sequitur.  Unless something is true in itself like logical axioms or in light of some other necessary truth, it does not matter what the personal, pragmatic, or broader metaphysical ramifications are as far as whether or not it is true is concerned; just as it does not follow from how the uncaused cause has to have a moral nature for good and evil to exist that therefore it does have a moral nature, because otherwise life has no objective value, it does not follow even if otherwise "everything is so pointless" that the Nietzschean philosophy of the Ubermensch is true, or that it is verifiable even if it was true.

Still, The Face of Fear has its villains assume that the Ubermensch, though they call it the "superman" instead of using that word, must be male, which does not follow from the basic concept of the Ubermensch in itself, and that this person represents a new "race" of humans.  When one of the pair wonders early in his descent into greater stupidity how he can reconcile his current left-wing political philosophy with that of the Ubermensch, he is told, "Pure, hard-core liberals believe in a superior race.  They think they're it".  Liberals do often think they are superior to others even while at the same time hypocritically and erroneously thinking all notions of superiority are false, but this is usually on ideological and not racial grounds.  Supposing that liberalism and the misogynistic superman are compatible, in order to accelerate their ascension to formal power, the duo plans to create chaos by pitting men and women and various racial groups against each other by means of murdering or mutilating people from each category and blaming it on some supremacist organization from the other demographic.

No actual feminist--an egalitarian who neither dismisses nor privileges men or women with matters like domestic abuse, mental health, workplace leadership, or any stereotype, all of which are fallacious--would ever do the things that Frank and Bill sought to blame on a fictitious feminist group, though they hoped, without understanding the misconception themselves, to benefit from broader societal misunderstandings of basic, logically necessary philosophical truths about gender equality.  Of course, the Ubermensch is not a race either, so the antagonists' fallacies are numerous; it is a status that would be achieved through ideological and introspective means on an individualistic basis, one that could be voluntarily accepted or rejected.  There is nothing about it that would only pertain to men, as much as Nietzsche is supposed to be misogynistic and as sexist against women as Frank and Bill are, and it is not a true physical or phenomenological evolution.

Now, detective Ira Preduski says in the epilogue that Nietzsche was a brilliant but misunderstood philosopher, a total error!  At most, a very select number of details in his worldview are accurate and deep, such as what he said about sensory-projected idealism [1] and the practice on the part of historical "Christians" of killing anyone who they perceived to be heretical [2] (as if many popular ideas about Christian theology are not utterly unbiblical [3]), but as a non-rationalist, Nietzsche was by necessity a total fool who could not have known when he happened to be right due to being a non-rationalist.  He denied the absolute certainties of the inherent truths of logic and knowing one's own conscious existence [4], and thus he could not have known anything that hinges on those truths either metaphysically or epistemologically, which is all things.

His idiocy would not be totally erased even if Nietzsche's philosophical ideas were/are not sexist towards one gender or the other.  Is Nietzsche misunderstood?  Yes, including by people I have met who claim Nietzsche was somehow not a moral nihilist [5].  Some of them might think that the Ubermensch was actually something meant to keep humanity away from nihilism rather than to express a false moral subjectivism or a relativistic, egoistic bent, as if living for one's own personal values is not nihilistic or relativistic at its core.  Since it is far more irrational to deny the intrinsic truth of logical axioms and the absolute certainty of the existence of one's own mind than it is to be sexist, for the falsity of sexism is dictated by reason rather than the other way around, and because one could not perceive other people of any gender without already existing as a consciousness, Nietzsche was an utter fool in the worst of ways already.  His selective stumbling upon truth as addressed here [1] is really still him arriving at a conclusion that happens to be right since he rejected reason and its absolute certainty, whereas Frank and Bill sidestep the core issues of metaphysics and epistemology altogether, being even shallower than the fool they thought of as a visionary.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/11/nietzsche-on-external-world.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/09/nietzsche-on-executing-heretics.html

[3].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-evangelical-distortions-of-god.html

[4].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/01/nietzsche-on-thinking.html

[5].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/08/denial-of-nietzsches-nihilism.html

The Errors Of Corporate Empiricism

People who have likely never philosophically discovered the difference between their personal preferences, social traditions, ideological assumptions, and then the truth and certainty of logic are always more likely than not, in a world like this, to be the ones in positions of corporate power.  It takes effort to be intentionally rational, for even someone who would otherwise be rational to just assume that the correct starting point is correct or that the right things follow from the right concepts would be irrational.  Almost no one is intelligent or resolved enough to ever do this, much less on a consistent basis!  When irrationalists hold power, they harm everyone, including themselves, and one expression of this is through contradictory, self-defeating or hindering goals.

This is as true in a corporate context as it is in a governmental, familial, or other kind of circumstance.  Power is not what blinds people to reason.  They do this to themselves, if they are not rationalists.  However, in failing to recognize and accept logical truths, they do not fully sidestep philosophy, for everything in reality, including valid and invalid beliefs, is philosophical.  The most apathetic, lazy, philosophically incompetent corporate figures will still rely on reason even as they deny or ignore it.  By necessity, such a person will still have a worldview, no matter how assumed or contradictory it is.

It is just that instead of looking to reason, these business leaders will inevitably make assumptions.  This is how every arbitrary tradition and oppressive practice of the workplace comes forth.  Too stupid to understand the laws of logic that they are already standing on, such figures embrace errors on the basis of the logically impossible ideologies of egoism, relativism, or sensory empiricism, even if they have never once reflected on what would follow from their own supposed beliefs.  As for sensory empiricism, this is the thing being directly or indirectly assumed to be true by irrationalists who prioritize a random amount of experience in a role over rationality and trainability.

Despite American society being set up so that people must waste unnecessary amounts of time, often only to enrich undeserving employers and not even themselves, there are companies with idiotic hiring requirements that only accept prospects who have worked in similar settings for an utterly arbitrary number of years.  This, of course, prohibits otherwise capable and perhaps even rationalistic people from securing jobs they might excel at.  If this is enforced by enough employers, how can a company get workers when the workers need the job in order to obtain the experience that would then get them hired for the job?  It is luck, a very precise educational trajectory, or connections that would actually secure this kind of job, though some might resort to the intellectual and moral failures of deceiving employers to sidestep.

This is also the irrationalistic embrace of sensory empiricism in a business context, the erroneous belief that experience with the senses has a greater primacy than reason and rationality (the grasp of reason).  Logical axioms and what follows from them could not have been any other way and are not grasped by senses like sight, touch, or smell; even so, since reason is a set of necessary truths external to the human and divine mind, the intellect is a sort of sense.  Experiences would still neither be metaphysically possible nor knowable as mental phenomena apart from reason.  Though it is more important that corporate sensory empiricism is contrary to the only truths that cannot be false (logical truths), the consequences for those seeking employment could literally be deadly as the entrance barriers to various industries tighten without reason, making it more difficult for people to survive in a materialistic culture that both seeks to deprive them of their resources and then belittle them for not having more.  No matter the consequences, the mere fact that this approach to business is based on assumptions that demonstrably false ideas are correct makes it invalid from the start.

Kosher Foods: Legalistic Traditions

There are legalistic traditions--irrationalistic and unbiblical additions to Yahweh's moral obligations--about which foods are supposedly kosher, but the actual dietary laws themselves permit plenty of food.  The irrationalism of social constructs and philosophical hypocrisy is what Jesus condemned about the Pharisees, not the tenets of Yahweh's Mosaic Law itself, including the dietary restrictions and allowances.  An example relevant to the food laws of the Torah is that the Pharisees thought washing hands before eating is a moral obligation although this is never prescribed in Mosaic Law (Matthew 15:1-20).  Like evangelical and many historical Christians with the whole Bible and like plenty of Muslims with Islam, Jews have often mistaken tradition for real Judaism and submitted blindly to meaningless conventions.

Even the words assigned to some food or food-related substances misleadingly imply they are demanded by Mosaic Law.  Kosher salt does not have iodine, yet iodine can be eaten according to Mosaic Law since it is not among the condemned foods, and a historical tradition of using the larger, coarser "kosher" salt to drain blood from edible meat is of no relevance.  This would be a construct of tradition and not a mandate of Yahweh, yet it is sometimes regarded more as a customary way to prepare meat than a moral prerequisite to eating permitted kinds of meat.  Salt itself is permissible with or without iodine and regardless of its size.  Irrationalists who confuse cultural norms or conscience for the tenets of a religious system just by fallacious social association would not even be abiding by their own professed, alleged worldview, yet in other cases, this is exactly what is done.

I have encountered multiple people who claim that an animal must be killed in a non-abusive manner to make its meat kosher, but this is not the case.  As far as brutality or gentleness goes, the treatment of an animal before its meat is eaten is entirely irrelevant to the categories of permitted and forbidden food in the Torah dietary obligations, though they are of course relevant to broader Biblical morality.  To kill an animal needlessly is to disregard a living creature that bears some of the goodness of Yahweh, just to a lesser extent than humans (Genesis 1:31).  To harm it unnecessarily, with the intent to degrade it, or in certain ways (such as bestiality or physical harshness without any care for its wellbeing) is sinful, just for different reasons.

Another irrelevant or legalistic tradition is to only consider food kosher if it was prepared by Jews or had its preparation overseen by them.  This is another obvious preference or social construct that became confused for a Biblical requirement by non-rationalists, as is typical.  Beef and vegetables and bread, to list some examples, are always kosher as long as there are not prohibited foods mixed in with them (not even non-kosher food separately readied nearby--without contact--nullifies the Biblical permissibility of the other food).  Jews, of a religious or genealogical kind, do not have to be involved for meat or some other substance to be allowed by Yahweh's Mosaic Law.  If this was the case, all people outside of a very particular lineage would have been sinning just by eating anything at all to survive in the days of ancient Israel, which would make not being a Jew or having access to trade with Jews sinful, an impossible thing when all people bear God's image and have the same obligations (Genesis 1:26-27)!

Now, one thing that the Bible does not mention specifically that is a necessary part of kosher eating is not eating food that has supposedly come into direct contact with illicit food, especially if one saw the mixture and the food items were pressed together.  It does logically follow that if eating something is immoral, even intentionally eating microscopic pieces of it along with or inside other foods would be immoral.  This is a normal practice that actually is rooted in the ideas of the commands themselves.  This follows by logical necessity so that in saying not to eat something, the Bible already addresses this in a partly direct and partly indirect sense.  Either way, if the Torah dietary laws are true, then this would have to also be true.

Food is such a major practical and also often social part of human life that any moral obligations regarding it have, on one level, penetrating ramifications.  The dietary laws are among the least important of Yahweh's commands, yes, but they are still morally charged and still important for that reason alone.  Because the dietary obligations are not overturned by anything stated in the New Testament, it is crucial to distinguish between what is and is not permitted without assumptions.  The host of traditions surrounding kosher food have to be identified and avoided (short of knowing personal preference where it does not conflict with the commands themselves) just as much as unpermitted foods.  To err in one direction as opposed to the other is still to err.

The Nature Of Talk Therapy (Part One)

Of course not everyone needs to go to general talk or cognitive behavioral therapy.  One person benefitting from this does not mean another person automatically would or that they even have any current trial that calls for it.  Also, not all problems even can be treated by such therapy, as some need direct medication or alternate treatments more intensive than anything focused on conversation that prompts introspection.  There is not necessarily anything irrational or wasteful about someone attending talk therapy sessions without being in true need of them, as long as one recognizes that this is only a preference that brings subjective comfort rather than a logical, moral, or personal necessity.  For people with penetrating or ongoing emotional or broader psychological struggles, this therapy can still be a very liberating, stabilizing thing.

Now, I know my own mind with absolute certainty, as any conscious being can if they look to reason and introspection without making any assumptions, since they are directly experiencing their own thoughts.  Anything that one is thinking or feeling does not need social prompting to be identified and understood precisely as it is.  As for other people, I cannot know if there are any other minds at all, and no one else that is human like I am would be free of this limitation.  This would be an assumption and an error that both therapists and their patients would need to avoid to be rational and to bring about genuine growth or change.  There is no such thing as a non-telepathic being knowing what someone else is thinking or feeling or even knowing if they exist as an independent consciousness.

Therapy nevertheless provides an opportunity for someone to focus on aspects of themselves that, by necessity, they either already knew or could have known from reason and introspection beforehand (and hearing something from a therapist does not make it true or prove it is true, since only reason and introspection can do this); for some people, being mildly "confronted" or simply having the chance to talk about past or present emotions is all they need to start taking their mental health, as well as its impact on the rest of their lives or others, far more seriously.  This is for the same reason why talking with friends can be so cathartic and helpful.  Verbalizing even struggles or burdens one knows can bring psychological release.

Therapy cannot resolve certain causes of stress or depression or anxiety, to list just some mental problems.  It absolutely does not change societal issues like poor job opportunities or another person's unwillingness to be rational, communicative, or righteous.  A therapist who is irrationalistic will also be destructive to their patient(s), and yes, it will always be more likely than not that they are irrational because most people are irrationalistic.  It is easier to be irrational than rationalistic, as the latter takes actual initial effort, and potentially mighty effort at that, that is unrelentingly pursued, and then the logical truths are never to be abandoned--besides, being rational is not about believing medical hearsay, celebrating empathy or conscience, or pretending to know the existence or contents of other minds, even if they are your patients.

Rationality is being in intentional, knowing, accepting alignment with the necessary truths of reason (starting with logical axioms) that dictate all other things, inherently true in themselves, and it entails making no assumptions as one discovers them and actually lives in light of them.  This is rationality, not believing in whatever stereotypes, emotionalism, hearsay, contradictory worldviews, or any other assumed or impossible things that might be very popular in some therapist circles.  A therapist could be helpful by accident without being rational, yes.  However, they would still not be a good therapist.  They would be a fool who happened to be useful without even philosophically knowing their left hand from their right hand.

Samson And Delilah's Abusive Relationship

The account of Samson's life starts before Judges 16.  Delilah comes into the narrative in this chapter, and because of her intimate relationship with Samson, the rulers of the Philistines promise her payment if she can find out the source of his unusual strength so that he can be subdued (16:5).  Ultimately, their connection becomes one of the examples in the Bible of an abusive romantic relationship.  Nothing says or directly implies that there was a sexual relationship between these two figures.  This does not have to be the case for there to be a romantic relationship and the potential for exploitation.  Enough is said to clarify that Samson loves her, but she betrays him again and again, asking for the secret cause of his strength, doing the very thing he says would render him like an ordinary man in hopes that the Philistines would overpower him, and then acting upset that he did not tell her the truth.

Samson falls in love with Delilah early on, Judges says (16:4), but nowhere does it say she loved him.  When one person loves another, they might be willing to endure, at least for a time, disregard, neglect, and active mistreatment.  In the case of Samson and Delilah, he is the victim, and her abuse is of the active kind.  Delilah does not physically or sexually abuse Samson as far as the story states, though her relative lack of strength compared to his supernaturally enhanced might would not be the reason for this, nor would her gender.  A weaker person can still physically or sexually mistreat someone stronger than them, and aside from the obvious logical possibility of women raping or otherwise abusing men in ways involving bodily mistreatment, the book of Genesis has examples of sexual abuse of men by women.  

Potiphar's wife repeatedly sexually harasses Joseph after his refusal to have sex with her, culminating in her grabbing him against his wishes (Genesis 39), and, earlier, Lot's daughters rape him after getting him drunk (Genesis 19).  While she never goes this far regarding what the passage actually says, Delilah is guilty of emotionally abusing someone, and more specifically someone who loves her.  Delilah expects for the Philistines to capture and possibly kill or torture Samson, and she nonetheless hands him over to the Philistines for money.  In fact, she outright asks him up front how he can be tied up and subdued (Judges 16:6), and when her first attempts fail, she tells him he has made her look like a fool (16:10, 13, 15).  After long enough, Samson is sick of her prying and manipulation and tells her the truth about how his hair has never been cut since he is a Nazirite (16:16-17).  The Philistines act on this information and gouge out Samson's eyes once he is their captive (16:18-21).

The text says Delilah wears Samson out until he yields, despite having witnessed how each time he gave her a false reason was followed by an attack from the Philistines where she did the exact thing he told her would remove his strength.  Delilah's abuse is not what directly gouges out Samson's eyes, something only to be done to a man or woman who maliciously wounds another person, outside the very limited scope of applying Lex Talionis, in a permanent way (as opposed to lesser injuries or sexual assaults, which are punished differently [1]) by removing their eyes (Exodus 21:22-25).  She still intended to profit financially from Samson's capture regardless of whatever more severely unjust behavior would be inflicted on him.  There is also the way that she tries to exploit his secrets for financial gain particularly by taking advantage of a one-sided romantic relationship.

The story of Samson and Delilah is really one of an abusive woman and a man whose abnormal strength would not be able to deliver him from illicit emotional manipulation.  This does not reflect any false idea about how men can only be abused by women in nonphysical ways.  As if anyone needed examples in textual narratives to realize that men and women can abuse each other in all the same ways, other parts of the Bible already very plainly address this.  Rather, the story from Judges 16 illustrates how emotional abuse can lead to greater mistreatment and that it still is very much abuse in itself.  Delilah could not have overpowered Samson while he was granted special power by God, but she is the kind of person who almost certainly would have physically abused him herself if only she could get away with it while receiving payment from the Philistines.

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

A Means Of Expressing Anti-Consumerism

The buying of non-necessities is not in any way inevitably driven by greed, insecurity, or economic materialism and its manifestation of consumerism.  To have or not have wealth, as well as the many morally permissible things it can allow one to have, is not a matter of philosophical aptitude in rationality or moral character.  There is nothing about wanting or possessing non-necessities that necessitates the presence of greed.  Alongside this truth, it is the case that there could be much to gain in one way or another from the practice of abstaining from unnecessary purchases, particularly in a hyper-consumeristic culture.

One could for a period of time make minimal or no purchases at all beyond what it takes to obtain the likes of medicine, clothing, food, water, and shelter.  It could last two weeks, a month, or longer, and there could be allowances for up to a certain amount of spending on non-necessities--which can brighten people's lives far more than necessities alone--for part of the whole of the minimalist purchasing period.  There is not any rigid amount of time this has to last.  Similarly, there is no such thing as a Biblical obligation to engage in this at all (Deuteronomy 4:2).  It could simply be a means to experience a different kind of introspection as one concentrates on non-monetary or non-consumer aspects of life (which people can and need to already be doing aside from restraining their spending).

For someone who needs to save money for grand health, relocation, or other objectives, this has the benefit of holding onto more of their income and savings, all while expanding the latter if their is incoming money.  For someone who struggles with materialistic tendencies or desires, this could be a way to temporarily focus on that which is greater than money and the products it can buy: reason, truth (which is grounded in reason), God, morality, and other people.  For someone who simply appreciates the chance to exhibit self-control though there is not a trace of consumerism or greed in them, a time of minimalist purchasing still offers something deeply rewarding as they dwell on their empowering mastery over their financial decisions.

Whatever the motivation, this kind of restraint is an option for those who seek to not only not participate in consumeristic trends, but to more actively set themselves apart from them.  Again, there is nothing irrational or immoral (by Biblical standards, the only moral framework that is probably true) in opting to spend money on things which are not necessary for life as long as materialism, greed, or any kind of assumption or neglect of the truth is involved; it is, moreover, also true that only buying that which prolongs one's life could make that life very dull, as survival just to blindly survive, both subjectively on the level of personal fulfillment and objectively on the level of aligning with reality, is asinine.

Whether they partake in minimalist purchasing or not, people are not helpless to follow every personal impulse or conform to societal norms.  Times of minimalist spending can put these truths and their ramifications for finances at the forefront of someone's mind even if they have to fight distractions to focus on it.  Life is not about possessions, but it is instead about things that transcend both the possessions that make survival more enjoyable and the survival that enables one to enjoy the possessions.

Even when it comes necessities and things much closer to them than not (clothing is in this category, depending on the climate and other needs), "Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes," as Jesus asks (Matthew 6:25)?  One absolutely does not have to succumb to consumerism to desire and pay for many luxuries or general non-necessities.  One can also withholding spending in intervals to focus on the truths that define reality in opposition to consumerism and its less sinister counterpart, a gratuitously worry-based fixation on material concerns.  Forgoing unnecessary purchases for a time can either help a person celebrate these familiar truths or discover them for once.

Game Review--God Of War (PS4)

"I know you're a god.  Not of this realm, but there's no mistaking it."

--The Witch of the Woods, God of War

"There are no good gods, boy.  I thought I taught you that."

--Kratos, God of War

Abandoning the linear progression through rooms with their own fixed camera angles, the combo-based combat style of the classic games, and the very setting of Greek mythology, the 2018 God of War reboot makes very bold choices that successfully bring the franchise to an open world RPG style and to Norse mythology.  It was already hinted that Kratos survived the apocalyptic consequences of his rampage at the end of God of War III, and his attempts to live in isolation with what is left of a new family are thwarted when an Asgardian representative bent on violent confrontation comes to his door.  Using this as part of its springboard, the introduction title of the Norse subseries very effectively expands the depth of characterization that was always present in the franchise.  The way that the parent-child relationship of Kratos and his son Atreus is integrated into everything from cutscenes to the very gameplay itself, building up across the entire story, is a unique accomplishment in itself.  Of particular note is how Kratos, irrationally believing all gods must be alike in part because of his own deep egoism in Greece, struggles with first hiding his power from his son and then convincing him to not act cruelly once he is told.

Production Values

From the woods around Kratos' new home to enemies like the Draugr to icons from Norse mythology, such as the World Serpent Jormungandr, the God of War reboot is a masterful visual accomplishment.  Much of the game is spent in Midgard out of all the Nine Realms, but this land, with its massive lake, mines, forest, and snowy regions, is presented with very high quality graphics.  Whether because of mandatory story objectives or for the sake of optional side quests, other realms become available, including the icy afterlife realm of Helheim and the volcanic landscape of Muspelheim (where fire is supposed to have originated).  The aesthetic for all of them is wonderfully executed with graphical clarity and generally smooth animations.  Upon resuming from sleep mode, the game might run very poorly for a handful of moments, but this does not reflect its usual performance.  With the voice acting, though, there is no flaw.

In fact, far more humor is here from new characters than the otherwise very dark series has ever seen.  This does not smother the very somber tone that the core narrative possesses.  Beyond mere words, the expressions and gestures of the characters also convey a great deal about them.  The face of Kratos, especially the sadness in his eyes, and the conflict reflected each time he holds out his hand to touch Atreus but pulls away before his son can see, for instance, express his burdened affections wonderfully.  Adding to the high production values, Bear McCreary's excellent music continues the series tradition of reflecting the narrative intensity while changing the sound to fit Scandinavia rather than Greece.

Gameplay

Beyond the new controllable camera, the main and side quest system, and travel by boat, the novel aspects of the gameplay include Leviathan axe, which replaces the Blades of Chaos until the latter are unlocked for the player to use at will.  The axe can be swung or hurled and then recalled, as with Thor's Mjolnir, and it can be left on certain enemies to lock them in place with its frost effects.  The throwing mechanic is required to solve some optional puzzles like striking three runes beyond melee reach in order to open chests.  You might even have to do creative things like embed the Leviathan behind a runic bell, walk away to the second rune, and then recall the axe to ring the former, leaving you enough time to hit all three.  The Blades of Chaos (as aforementioned) and Spartan Rage do still return with a new presentation.

The open world map system, unfortunately, is not as smoothly implemented as many other changes.  It rarely is helpful for anything other than showing where Kratos is with regard to a very broad area, having little assistance to offer in actually getting from one precise part of a realm to another except for showing a single dotted line to indicate a general pathway.  Even so, there are more dimensions for Kratos to travel to using the World Tree at the heart of the Nine Realms, with mystic gates linking individual places in the same realm.  Each has a Valkyrie (or more than one) imprisoned by Odin that can be fought and killed to free them from their corporeal forms.  Moreso than a dragon and the at-first unkillable god Baldur, many of the Valkyries are the toughest enemies in the entire game.

Aiding with Valkyrie fights and other parts of the game, the RPG elements of God of War mean you not just upgrade equipment like the Leviathan axe, but also can choose from different clothing options that have their own varying bonuses for vitality, defense, runic attack power, and so on.  Items can be leveled up using specific materials found in the environment or from secondary quests.  In turn, they also increase the chances of succeeding in other side quests, such as the combat trials of Muspelheim or exploration for key objects through the toxic fog of Niflheim.  Areas can also be revisited to gain more experience points to fully upgrade all weapons and all light and heavy runic (magic) attacks.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

The second wife of Kratos, Faye, has just died, and Kratos and their son Atreus set out to fulfill her wish to spread her ashes from the highest point in the Nine Realms once an aggressive Aesir (one of the Asgardian pseudo-deities), who turns out to be Baldur, visits their home on Odin's command.  The journey draws the attention of Thor's sons, and the pair also becomes entangled with a witch who has an identity beyond what she lets on.  Kratos hesitates to share his own past and identity with Atreus, who admires his strength and yet initially does not seem to suspect him of being a god like the ones hunting them.

Intellectual Content

There are many layers to the irrationality of Kratos, only some of which specifically pertain to his son.  "Do not assume," Kratos says when Atreus seemingly makes assumptions about the nature of a war in the elf realm Alfheim, but he openly assumes that all human spirits are self-serving liars, which is especially ironic given that he is a ruthlessly egoistic person except when it comes to protecting his son.  In fact, he goes so far as to discourage helping anyone, biologically alive or not, if there is no personal material benefit.  "Trust your eyes and instincts," Kratos tells Atreus.  Intuition nevertheless proves only that intuition exists, and even then, a genuine non-rationalist does not know logical axioms or their own existence, so they are just passively believing things because they are subjectively appealing or arbitrarily persuasive.  "We do what we please, boy" he says when hunting the deer, only to oppose this stance when Atreus, hearing he is a god, starts acting on impulsive, selfish, fluctuating whims.

At first, Atreus celebrates his alleged pseudo-divine nature, asking playfully if he can transform into an animal.  He still quickly comes to scorn the mortal being his mother was, despite embarking on an arduous trek for the sake of her wish, and speaking harshly to a dwarven ally simply to flaunt his new sense of power.  Atreus says that it feels good to be strong, to which Kratos says, "I know."  Kratos has killed most of the "gods" from ancient Greece--not true gods or goddesses because none of them are uncaused causes as created beings with physical bodies--and led to the deaths of many humans when the natural forces controlled by the gods like Helios or Hera became highly dangerous.  He desperately hope his son will not be like him and mishandle his power so extraordinarily.  For all his shock or concerns before and after at children attacking their parents, though, Atreus fires an arrow into Kratos when his father was only trying to save him (attacking one's parents is a capital offense according to Exodus 21:15, not that Kratos has not done the same thing), somewhat mirroring Kratos' own aggression towards his father.  Atreus starts saying that truth is more important than kindness to defend himself, and this could only be correct, since kindness being more important than truth would be true and thus truth would still be more central.  However, he only says this out of his own egoism, disregarding the truth that it does not follow from him having the power to enact one's whims that they are morally good or permissible.  The boy also says that gods can do whatever they want, but he objects to the Aesir doing as they please--an utter hypocrite like many people when it comes down to it.

Kratos is a hypocrite in more than the already-mentioned ways as well, calling all gods hopelessly evil despite trying to do "better" in raising his son (whatever he means by this in his arbitrary moral philosophy).  There is no small irony in him assuming they are all like him and in trying to care for a child with a part "divine" standing that he despises.  Hoping to restrain the emotionalistic acts of his son, Kratos urges him to kill in defense and not as an indulgence (more for pragmatic reasons, it would seem, than moral ones), yet he almost kills in this way at the end before he saves Freya from being choked by her son.  However, he encounters someone whose rage and pain leads her to desire even worse things than Kratos ever committed in any of the games.  Having been so emotionally attached to her child that she would rather die at his hands than be protected from him (a spell prevented her from harming anyone), she says she will rain down "every violation" on Kratos, which is obviously irrationalistic and wildly unjust if morality exists.  "Every" cruelty or violation would involve things like all forms of sexual assault, eternal torture, and so on, so she is an absolute insect of a philosophical thicker to ever believe such things are just (at least with eternal torture, whether it is in Helheim or some other afterlife, this is logically impossible due to the inherent disproportionality) or to believe otherwise, whether or not she had rational grounds for doing so, and then promise to act otherwise.  The God of War franchise is full of fools who do not deserve to live, and Freya and Kratos herself are among them, yet each character is used to exemplify the potential intensity of parental devotion to a child.

Conclusion

Released to the world eight years after the game it is a direct sequel to, God of War is a modern masterpiece of storytelling and reinvention.  The approach to the parent-child relationship, as well as the the exploration of power, hypocrisy, and paganism, are incredibly well-executed.  Regarding the former, the final boss fight alone has Kratos and Atreus assisting each other at the player's input in a splendid display of coordination that only develops well into the plot.  The more bizarre ramifications of how the franchise treats its separate geographic regions within Midgard--so far, Greece and Scandinavia respectively--are addressed very scantily, given how the death of the Olympians decimated Greece and yet not even the sun dimming has any consequence for the land of the reboot.  Either such things are mere constructs or illusory projections of the gods, and thus they can be contained to each broad location, or Greece and Scandinavia really are in different dimensions.  Metaphysical issues like this aside, the game is deep in its philosophical themes, gorgeous in its visual clarity, and evolved yet reminiscent in its combat.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  As much as Kratos is more reluctant to engage in combat, everything from fists to his axe blade and more are used to viciously attack enemies, which draws blood.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "bastard," "bitch," "damnit," and "fucking" are used by the dwarven characters.

Oblivion Or An Afterlife

My body is vulnerable to many kinds of deteriorations, and I can see animals die or find the remains of their physical bodies.  Unless this decay or the observations of other creatures dying only make it misleadingly appear as if I will die (I could not know before it happened and might not even know after it happens), this life of mine will come to an end even if the universe it is lived in continues afterward, and my consciousness will either perish altogether or live on in some way.  The ultimate epistemological uncertainty of whether one's death will occur, though it seems extremely likely that it will, is something that could be ignored for a lifetime by non-rationalists.  They assume that they will die because they are told that they will or because they have assumed that what has happened to other creatures must also happen to them.

There are other things relating to consciousness, death, and the possibility of an afterlife (since this does not contradict logical axioms, even if there is not an afterlife, there could have been one) that could be neglected.  For instance, it is not true that there is nothing to fear about the logical possibilities of a permanent cessation of consciousness or its broad alternative of an afterlife, as Cicero claims in On Old Age.  While endless nonexistence means one cannot experience pain of any kind, it also means that one cannot experience any kind of joy, pleasure, or fulfillment, and it is entirely legitimate to lament or fear this even as it would bring relief.  One would not even be able to experience rest or peace in oblivion because one would not exist to perceive any mental state at all.

As for an afterlife, if someone does not realize that it could be or could have been the case that there is an afterlife of immense agony and terror, they are incredibly stupid.  The mere continuation or resurrection of one's immaterial consciousness after death would not by necessity be pleasant or relaxing.  There are many logically possible afterlives other than Christianity's reduction to nonexistence in the lake of fire and eternal bliss in New Jerusalem (both of which are loosely summarized by John 3:16), some having to do with morality and some not having anything to do with real or imagined justice.  It is possible that God's moral nature is not actually like that of the Biblical Yahweh even though there is much evidence that the uncaused cause is Yahweh, meaning any sort of justice in the afterlife could be more severe than the Biblical kind (though default eternal conscious torment is still inherently disproportionate to any sin), but other logically possible afterlives involve extreme suffering without there even being a moralistic intention behind it at all.

One does not even need specific examples of logically possible afterlives that are very painful in order to realize that there could be a great deal to fear about death or an afterlife.  Even knowing with absolute certainty that one would just immediately cease to exist as a mind could bring terror of its own if someone longs for eternal life in a blissful state.  The blissful part is a vital clarification, since eternal life is not intrinsically a positive thing, for there are many variations of it that could make someone wish they had never come into existence in the first place!  If more people realized this, they would take the possibility of various afterlives and the ramifications of both consciousness after death and soul oblivion far more seriously.

The very misunderstood Biblical contrast of a resurrection to be annihilated on the level of mind and body and an everlasting afterlife of resurrection to enjoy every nonsinful thing in paradise still ultimately amounts to a contrast between oblivion, just with a shorter afterlife before it, and life.  In this case, oblivion is justice, not a mercy or an amoral phenomenon.  Eternal life is not eternal existence in torment, but in perpetual peace, pleasure of nonsinful kinds, and harmony with the deity who wants all people to seek this type of immortality.  The Biblical afterlife and the nature of what is and is not logically necessitated by an afterlife, regardless of Christianity, are seldom recognized for what they are or regarded as sincerely as their nature calls for.

The Illicit Productivity Objection To Raises

From casual conversations to annual evaluations, workers might be asked to list ways in which they still have alleged room for improvement.  On a rational and moral level, there is a distinct and attainable perfection entailed by any logical truth or moral obligation, and many people fail to realize that this kind of perfection is beyond no one's reach.  On a professional level, there are so many meaningless or amoral factors that contribute to productivity and accomplishments in a career.  Certain employers would also always expect more no matter how much one does for them.

A person cannot continually increase their output without increasing technological aid or human support because they have limited time, limited energy, limited resources, and many other things to focus on that have nothing to do with work.  Start at incredible output from the beginning, and this might be mistaken for a constant that will never fluctuate or a baseline that should not be rewarded with periodic raises.  Start at lower output from the beginning and improve it over time, and every request or opportunity for a raise might still be met with the supposed need to "wait" to evaluate performance later.

The irrational expectation for maximum effort at all time in all jobs hinders raises on merit or other accomplishments.  Incompetent employers could unfortunately withhold raises until there is massive or maximum improvement, and there isn't always room for more, meaning raises can be kept away from employees on the either the grounds that they are 1) less than maximally perfect/"ideal" workers or that 2) they have no more room to improve.  With the right kind of employer or manager, whichever side a worker falls on, they will go unrewarded or will face even higher expectations.

It does not help that some business figures expect infinitely growing productivity and infinitely growing profits.  It does not matter how triumphant or abnormal their prior successes were.  They will always want to expand the current or next year's profitability by a percentage, making the same amount of money from before all over again while adding to it despite many workers having less money to spend thanks to greed and inflation.  The easier way to guarantee higher profits as much as possible is to simply fire employees or refuse raises, productivity being a regular but often irrelevant objection to granting raises.

It is not as if there are not other reasons to give raises anyway.  Increasing seniority and familiarity with company procedures and goals show how someone has, gladly or reluctantly, invested part of their life in their workplace, an investment that is almost never compensated to an extent that is easily livable or that allows for holistic human flourishing.  Productivity could secure attention, raises, and promotions if employers are rational, observant, and fair, but it also might trap someone in low pay or in a cycle of irrational expectations for more.  There is not always an easy way to build a career or greater financial stability by just being productive.  Not even meeting or exceeding higher and higher goals will ensure either of these things.

The Best Economic Value In An Art Form

Entertainment/art can come in many forms thanks to electronic technology, even as older formats like physical books persist.  Of all the various mediums for art, when utilized properly, gaming is by far the one that transcends the others.  Whatever other formats have, it has too.  Text, images, video, music, non-musical audio, storytelling, characterization, extended replayability, emotional stimulation, and explicit philosophical exploration are all part of gaming or could be incorporated easily to a greater extent with the right resources and intentionality.  Nothing that other mediums feature, including the capacity to stimulate imagination that is so commonly associated with literature specifically, is beyond gaming, but video games can have far more depth due to extreme duration and direct interactivity.

They belong to the superior medium in this sense.  Still, despite being useful for both philosophical enjoyment--everything is philosophical, so I mean on the level of focused reflection, not that entertainment is necessary to prompt a great deal of discovery and thought--and casual relaxation at the same time, entertainment costs money far more often than not, and gaming can be among the most expensive of these pastimes.  New releases might be sold at anywhere from $50-$70 or more, depending on whether one buys special or limited editions of games.  The devices that run the games themselves incur and additional cost, and compared to individual books, films, or television seasons, a game can have a higher monetary price per unit.

A $60 game that only lasts 10 hours, though many take longer than this just to complete the main story, offers fewer hours per dollar than a $10 movie that runs for two hours.  The difference here is $6 per hour rather than $5.  The former might be far more immersive by nature of being a game (this is a major part of what makes the best of gaming's potential superior to all other art forms), yet the latter is on a strictly economic level providing more entertainment for its cost.  Nevertheless, with any of the games that cost less than $60 and/or have more than 10 hours worth of content, the $5/hour ratio is matched or improved upon.  A 20+ hour game with high replayability and a price of $25 will always bring a better economic value in this sense than a $10+ cinema ticket or Blu Ray with no special features.

This is why paying for a $60 game around its launch, or years later if it is a first-party Switch game for whatever fucking reason (Nintendo generally locks the prices of its own games out of sheer greed), can still be of far greater economic benefit than expenditure on most individual releases in other formats such as books or movies.  For each dollar spent, given that the game takes more than 6-10 hours to complete (which is already longer than many films and books require) there is higher likelihood of a far, far greater amount of usage for each monetary unit.  With certain platforms, companies, and franchises, the prices debut at or eventually diminish to well under the $60 that some games are introduced with, financially weighing this further in favor of gaming.

While gaming can have a large initial financial hurdle to pass, with handheld or standard consoles costing hundreds of dollars up front, as a financial investment, gaming can be vastly more economically sustainable under the right circumstances.  Literature and television do not have side quests, "endgame" content, or alternate modes.  Films seldom last more than 90 minutes to 3 hours.  Books and non-gaming electronic mediums like cinema do not have collectibles, exploration, or the ability to directly interact with dialogue, combat, and movement.  Only gaming does.  Even with its financial value, the medium has far more to offer than others when correctly realized.  There is also no other art form with more potential for usage per monetary unit spent.

Divine Jealousy

As the uncaused cause, God is superior to all other beings, even hypothetical beings created with all of the same power and intentions other than the fact that they did not always exist past-eternally.  The metaphysical initiator of the causal chain that produced all contingent things (not himself, the laws of logic, or empty space), and the only being whose nature could ground morality if it exists, God does not have to be the Yahweh of the Bible to be the ultimate being.  The laws of logic are more foundational as necessary truths than even he, but the uncaused cause is above humans as humans are over insects.

This is true whether or not it is the deity of Christianity.  Either way, these truths are relevant to the nature of the Christian God, who calls himself by the name Jealous in Exodus 34:14.  This is said in the context of condemning the worship of other gods or toleration of affiliated practices.  Yahweh outright identifies himself as a jealous deity here.  What does this mean and not mean?  Jealousy, as common as it appears to be, particularly among non-rationalists, is for all of its popularity not always perceived as a positive trait.  In fact, it destroys relationships by acting as a barrier to everything from personal peace to interpersonal stability.

Yahweh's attribute in question is not the petty jealousy of someone who thinks their significant other should never be attracted to anyone but them or who panics at the thought of someone else being attracted to their partner.  Rather, it is the disposition of a being whose nature is so much higher than that of humans and other metaphysical entities that to give equivalent (or sometimes any) allegiance, submission, or love to the other beings is itself a great irrationality and sin.  To reuse a similar human example, a jealous spouse might be enraged or offended by something that is not even immoral, like their partner being sexually admired by others, but with God, there is no other being who could deserve anything apart from him because there is no right or wrong aside from his nature.

Divine jealousy in the Biblical sense is far from petty, selfish, and asinine.  If the uncaused cause has no moral nature, no one deserves anything, not even God, and there is nothing morally right or wrong about any attitude like jealousy in any of its forms.  No person would deserve to be spared from divine jealousy in this case.  If the uncaused cause does have a moral nature--and an uncaused cause exists regardless [1]--then its characteristics and will are good no matter what any other creature prefers.  God's jealousy is literally the only kind that could possibly be valid as a basis for expecting behaviors from others.

Yahweh is the only being that has an inherent right to be jealous if he is the real uncaused cause.  Far from making him stupid or volatile, this would necessitate that one's supreme allegiance (other than to the logical truths that make Yahweh's existence and nature possible in the first place) should never be given not only to false deities or lesser spiritual beings, but also to other people or oneself.  As far as beings are concerned, there are none higher or more foundational than the uncaused cause.  God could not be immature or irrational for demanding proper recognition on these grounds.

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

Rationality In Mental Illness

No one is rational or morally right or in any way legitimized in allowing their depression, their anxiety, their bipolar disorder, or any other such condition to dictate their worldview or to deter them in carrying out their obligations.  It is one thing to have severe dementia to the point of not remembering anything past a moment or two, and this person is not irrational for never getting past the fundamental self-evidence of logical axioms and their own conscious existence.  It is another thing to have other mental illnesses/disorders that they use as an excuse to flee from reason, even if only on a selective, partial basis.

It might be more difficult for them to remain rational than it would be without their mental health struggles, certainly, but they do not have to make assumptions, they do not have to ignore familiar logical truths, and they do not have to selfishly mistreat others because of their mental state.  If they fail in any of these ways, it is their failure alone and not the fault of anything or anyone else.  Like everyone else, they have no excuse for not discovering at least the self-evidence of logical axioms and their own mind's existence.  This of course does not mean that those who fail do not have, in some ways, less outright irrationality than someone who does not have these obstacles to focus on and still fails.

I myself have periodic, intense existential depression, not that me relating or not relating to this is what makes any of these aforementioned truths real and knowable.  No one needs to experience such things to think of and realize logical necessities about a given thing like mental health.  Logical axioms are inherently true, and all else hinges on them by default.  It is impossible to be valid in ignoring them throughout one's life no matter one's mental health.  Yes, since they are true by intrinsic necessity and are epistemologically self-evident, even a person in psychosis or a dream could discover or acknowledge them.  Other things that follow from them or that would inevitably be governed by them are likewise not secondary to whether one feels fulfilled or stable.  No, it is the other way around.

In my case, existential depression is brought about by epistemological limitations, other mental health issues, and the way that life circumstances are complicated by this combination of variables, so it is ironically created in some ways because of philosophical seriousness rather than getting used as the supposed, contradictory justification for ignoring such things.  That would be contradictory because thinking that the unfortunate nature of one's life could legitimize resisting knowledge of the nature of reality obviously would entail relying on things that are being dismissed, as if reality is not higher than preferences anyway.  Personal struggles do not alter any foundational truths or anything else other than the fact that they make it so that one is struggling.

Emotionalism is still emotionalism no matter who engages in it or whatever universally irrelevant, invalid motivations they might have for it.  The mentally ill (short of someone with a truly hindering condition like the dementia I mentioned above) are no less capable of perfect rationality than they would have been apart from their psychological challenges or suffering.  In all contexts except for those involving extremely young children and those with the more intense conditions I have touched upon, there is no legitimate excuse for irrationalism and its manifestations of assumptions, hypocrisy, selfishness, and neglect of axioms and other truths.

Game Review--Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) [Xbox]

"It's been said that the 501st got the best of the war.  We also got the worst.  On Felucia, the Seps dug their metal heels into the muck of that alien hellhole and dared the Republic to come in after them . . . Cut off and for all we knew abandoned by our superiors, our only hope was Aayla Secura, our Jedi commander . . . When her death came, I hope it was quick.  She earned that much."

--501st trooper, Star Wars: Battlefront II

The first Star Wars: Battlefront had a great premise with very lacking execution in key ways.  Star Wars: Battlefront II, the original 2005 Battlefront II, that is, rectifies some of those shortcomings by having a far better single player campaign with more elaborate storytelling, new space battles, playable Jedi and Sith, and more planets.  This comes with a steeper campaign difficulty at times: instead of levels being beatable by simply killing enemies until their reinforcements dwindle to zero, you are given a small amount of reinforcements and the enemy team has unlimited troops.  Completing objectives grants an often small reinforcement boost, but in certain levels, they can still die off very quickly.  This is overall a sequel that went in a markedly better direction than its predecessor even aside from this deviation.

Production Values

Only coming out a year after the original game, this sequel very much looks like an old Xbox game from what was at this point almost two whole decades ago.  The very different graphical limitations of a distant console generation mean that, though the character models and environments would look horrendous next to numerous modern or even last generation video games, the quality is not poor for the initial time of release.  Star Wars: Battlefront II can even handle a lot of units onscreen at once, as seen in levels like the Jedi Temple campaign mission where many clone troopers, Jedi, and Temple guards could be fighting at the same time.  There are also new locations like Mustafar, the inside of the ship boarded by the Empire at the beginning of A New Hope, and regions of outer space, so the environments are more diverse and numerous this time.  The pixelation or lack of detail is still very distinct compared to today's games all the same.  Even the loading screens can show lots of pixelation!

Gameplay

With the camera resting in a third-person position and the gameplay involving objectives like the capture of command posts with limited troops available, Battlefront II is in some ways very similar to its predecessor.  This time, the campaign forces you to complete specific goals instead of just killing a certain amount of enemy soldiers, which gives way to a sudden, gratuitous increase in difficulty in its final levels.  The imprecision or over-sensitivity of the aiming controls can be a much bigger issue when piloting a spacecraft, so the option of skipping campaign space battles makes the game more accessible even as the on-foot levels on Yavin IV and Hoth can be brutal for other reasons.  To offset some difficulties and provide novelty, there are times throughout the campaign where special characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, or Boba Fett can be played in a franchise first.

Outside of the campaign, different game modes with similar battlefield mechanics are offered.  You can take over one planet after another in Galactic Conquest, where the player and computer take turns moving or building fleets to engage enemy starships or attack their planets.  Credits earned over the course of these turns can buy single-user bonuses like extra ammunition capacity for a specific battle or they can unlock more troop classes; otherwise, for example, if you play as the Confederacy of Independent Systems, only the super battle droids, the standard unit, will be available.  Someone wanting a faster, less strategic alternate game mode can just launch an individual round of warfare and capture all command posts or eliminate all opponents.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

The campaign follows a clone trooper from Geonosis, where the Clone Wars begin, to his service to the Empire in the Galactic Civil War.  As part of the 501st, the group that becomes the personal troops of Darth Vader, he exterminates rebellious citizens and even surviving Jedi after Order 66.  In one case, the 501st attack Naboo when the new queen after Padme does not submit to the Empire.  This unnamed clone trooper latches onto Imperial propaganda and retaliates when the Rebels destroy the Death Star.

Intellectual Content

Almost everything here was explored in much greater intellectual and emotional depth in Dave Filoni's Clone Wars show--after the far too lighthearted first season--but Battlefront II does deal with things like the attachment of the clones to specific Jedi commanders, their sincere loyalty to a corrupt government, and their lives after the war they were created for.  This was before the inhibitor chip was introduced in the Clone Wars show, so it is very likely that in this version of the timeline, the clone troopers loyal to the Empire simply submitted to the philosophical ideas behind the Empire's propaganda and just assumed that the hearsay and the ideology surrounding it are correct.  This removes some of the tragedy of the new canon version of Order 66 while still keeping a different sort of tragedy.  Ultimately, the campaign does not dive into the precise details of these events and the ideas driving them, but it does still somewhat bring them up.

Conclusion

In spite of the graphics being very clearly outdated, the old Star Wars: Battlefront II shows how a promising but underdeveloped game could be improved upon.  The AI still has its problems, and the increased difficulty of certain campaign segments is prohibitively intense sometimes, yet there are marked steps in a superior direction.  Battlefront II is still not quite the absolute gaming legend so many imagine it to be in this era of nostalgia.  It is an example of a game that builds on good concepts while still leaving room for a numbered sequel that never came to improve things further.  The series did continue before it was rebooted--it was just handheld games like Renegade Squadron (PSP) and Elite Squadron (DS and PSP) that eventually allowed innovations like character customization or transitions from ground to space or vice versa within the same battle.  Star Wars: Battlefront II was later rebooted with a new campaign for a different console generation, but that will be saved for another time.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Laser weapons and alternates like grenades or flamethrowers are major parts of the game, yet without ever drawing blood.