"It Can Be Safely Assumed"

Despite how some people speak, there is no safe assumption.  One might hear, as I have, others say that "It is safe to assume" a given thing or that "It can be safely assumed" that something is true.  I have even encountered the literal statement that something can be "logically" assumed.  An assumption is by nature a belief on a basis other than proof, which can only be found in logical necessity; even the introspective proof of one's immediate mental states, though it involves experience within one's consciousness, is only proof because logic necessitates that experiencing something means at least the mental perceptions are real.

Oh, an idea being assumed might be objectively true and even demonstrable from logical necessity, but if anyone assumes it, they are to one extent or another disregarding logic altogether, thus making them irrational.  It does not matter that it is true or also entirely knowable, and it does not matter if the thing seemed so probable that the person felt comfortable with making an assumption.  Subjective persuasion or approval is not objective logical proof, which means one thing by necessity is true in itself (like logical axioms) or in light of some other truth.  Other than recognition of logical necessity, which is true independent of all else, there can be no knowledge.

People can still believe or perceive things without having true knowledge because not genuinely knowing logical axioms and other necessary truths does not prevent someone from thinking and experiencing.  When they brush up against the fact that they have only assumptions to stand on, or when they feel so persuaded that something is true even though it is not verifiable (or at least they have not logically verified it), they might believe anyway that they really are justified in making an assumption.  That some people openly admit they are assuming something while calling their assumption rational only means their delusion is far greater than someone who knows logical axioms but still believes in other things that ultimately contradict them.

Anyone who exists still exists, for instance, even if they have never rationalistically examined anything to find the necessary truths about it.  Any non-rationalist just cannot know even this self-evident fact or the logical axioms on which even this depends!  To have knowledge, they would need absolute certainty, and to have absolute certainty, they would have to recognize what cannot be false for what it is.  There is nothing that cannot be or have been false, because its falsity is literally impossible, other than logical axioms--including the logically necessary existence of an uncaused cause, as it could have been the case that there was neither any beings nor physical substance in existence.

It could not be or have been the case, for instance, that nothing logically follows by necessity from anything else, because then it would follow logically from the nature of reality that nothing follows by logical necessity, and that anything that would have followed logically would be necessity have to be false!  That one cannot doubt or reject one's own conscious existence without already existing as a consciousness is likewise epistemologically self-evident, but there is no inherent necessity in one's mind or any other mind existing, only in a mind existing as long as it exists (an application of the logical law of identity) and existing if it perceives anything at all.

No one can be intelligent (rationalistic) regarding a given matter without avoiding assumptions and turning to logic, starting with logical axioms, yet due to ego, fear of abstract truths, social conditioning, philosophical apathy, or any other invalid reason, so many do not.  In a world short of perfection, it will always be more likely that a person one is meeting for the first time will be a non-rationalist precisely because shedding or avoiding assumptions takes effort when a person is used to the alternative.  Whether the assumptions are passive or active, everyone who is not a rationalist is a slave to assumptions, and there are no safe assumptions.  Every assumption makes someone irrational to the extent they assume.

The Relevance Of Exodus 21:28-32 To Modern Life

For some time, I have relatively infrequently written articles that are meant to be published less than up to a year or more in advance.  Coming across article after article about human deaths preventable if greater care had been taken or due to non-wild animals, often by happenstance, compelled me to write this one in light of fairly recent occurrences.  As far removed as a spontaneously dangerous encounter with a bull's horns might be from the lives of many people in my country today, Exodus 21:28-32 is still highly relevant to modern life, and not just because the exact scenario described in the case law should be universally handled in the manner prescribed (as directly taught by verses like Malachi 3:6 and Matthew 5:17-19 independent of other reasons and verses).  

Read the verses if needed.  The moral principles entailed by Exodus 21:28-32 are not limited to specific parts of an animal that can be dangerous (horns as opposed to claws or feet, for example), specific animals (a bull as opposed to a heifer or dog), or even non-human animals altogether.  Really, this passage is about how human negligence leading to the death of a man, woman, or child is a sin so great it deserves the same punishment as murder (Exodus 21:12-14) and other severe sins like rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27).  

For one thing, a dangerous factory machine that goes unrepaired despite worker complaints would be subject to the same obligations, including the obligation to execute anyone negligent enough to take no precautions to save human lives when they have warning (such as the situation addressed by Deuteronomy 22:8).  It is not just bulls or animals Exodus 21:28-32 addresses by logical extension!  And if being protected from injury or death stemming from neglect is the right of every "man or woman", "son or daughter", and "male or female slave", the same would logically be true of intentional injuries, the greater category of sin, according to this passage alone in isolation from the rest of Exodus 21.  One can find a multitude of examples of reported negligence leading to human death or of circumstances that, though negligence was not necessarily always involved, are still within the scope of Exodus 21:28-32.

More recently, a woman named Blanca Ojanguren Garcia is said to have been gored to death by an elephant in a Thai care center while traveling early this very year [1].  Since the elephant killed Blanca, using the same kind of bodily instrument (horns) mentioned in Exodus 21:28 at that, the creature should be killed according to Biblical philosophy because a non-human animal has killed a human.  That the animal had never killed anyone prior to this at least as far as the article mentions has no relevance.  It cannot be known in advance that a domestic/agricultural animal will kill a person.  Though the owner/caretaker is not necessarily guilty in this case depending on the specifics of what happened, the animal still must die.  A woman was reportedly killed by an animal that was not residing out in the wild, and that is all it Biblically takes for the animal responsible to need to die if the claim is true.  Yes, certain cares must be taken with handling non-human animals for the sake of their own moral rights (see passages like Exodus 23:4-5 and Deuteronomy 25:4), but human life always merits priority.

Another example of an incident relevant to Exodus 21:28-32 is the death of three men in India, who drove off of an unfinished bridge in 2024 while seemingly following a Google Maps route [2].  Yes, Google Maps getting updated to prevent tragedies like this is not something that always be ensured quickly.  At a minimum, still, local government doing nothing to block the drivable surface of the unfinished bridge whether or not navigation apps would guide anyone on such a road is absolutely the same kind of negligence condemned so explicitly in Exodus 21.  Contrary to corporate practices that try to leave consumers with most or all of the risk and no substantial recourse if they survive a dangerous situation in any way related to an organization's products or services, the Torah commands that people who passively disregard human life be put to death.  Someone failed to install signs or other obstacles on the Indian bridge in question to prevent injury, loss of property, or loss of life.  Exodus is not subtle whatsoever about the deserved punishment, although monetary ransom is permitted as a substitute in verse 30, whereas this is injustice for murder (Numbers 35:30-31).

Yet another relevant event took place in 2024 and culminated in the death of a young woman named Alison Pickering in America [3].  Allergic to peanuts, she ate a familiar dish from a restaurant she had been to before.  However, the introduction of peanut sauce to the ingredients unannounced to customers triggered her allergy, and ultimately consuming the sauce killed her.  Not even the wait staff was allegedly informed of this change.  Anyone at the restaurant who knew as much as they could that the ingredients would change and said nothing about it would be guilty of the class of negligent sin addressed in the first chapter of Mosaic Law after the Ten Commandments.  The absence of an unconfined animal that injured Alison here would not make a moral difference.  By logical necessity, this situation would have to be connected to the same rights and obligations as that of a farm animal that attacked someone and was never penned up, only to later kill a person.

Other stories similar to these can be found [4].  Perhaps Judeo-Christianity is true and perhaps it is not, like many worldviews consistent with true rationalism.  Either its veracity or falsity is logically possible irrespective of fallible evidences.  But aside from its truth, the ideas behind Exodus 21:28-32 are not irrelevant to a host of circumstances common in modern times.  Thus, on Biblical theology, it does not matter it you do not own bulls or are not exposed to animals that could show dangerous behavior whether or not they attacked or killed anyone in the past.  Each human should be protected from incidental harm or death as much as possible.  Each human is also responsible for ensuring as much as they can that others are not placed in danger due to passivity.  Other case laws in Exodus have analogous ramifications beyond the exact things the words speak of.  

The principles of Exodus 21:10-11, for instance, are not just about a polygamous marriage specifically; logically and textually, all husbands and wives can divorce for neglect of material or relational needs/rights (Genesis 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 7:2-5).  The concepts of Exodus 21:26-27 are not just about literal slaves; all people can or must Biblically go free from relationships for abuse no matter their promises of commitment beforehand (Exodus 21:5-6, Deuteronomy 15:16-17), including from any marriage relationship.  Exodus 21:18-19 is not just about a stone or a fist, Exodus 21:23-25 is not just about negligent injury to a pregnant woman (21:22), etc.  Exodus 21:28-32 is certainly no different!

[1].  https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/asia/spanish-woman-killed-elephant-thailand-intl-hnk/index.html

[2].  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly23yknjy9o

[3].  https://www-cbsnews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/texas/news/texas-restaurants-new-recipe-cost-her-life-parents-on-a-mission-to-make-changes/?amp_gsa=1&amp_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQGsAEggAID#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17327304113266&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Ftexas%2Fnews%2Ftexas-restaurants-new-recipe-cost-her-life-parents-on-a-mission-to-make-changes%2F

[4].  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/us/google-maps-lawsuit-collapsed-bridge.html

Can Business Not Be Personal?

"It's nothing personal, just business" might be a common or stereotypical phrase of someone shrugging off a course of action undertaken in the name of money and access , especially if they had to trample on someone to achieve that financial goal.  Popularity of course does not entail logical correctness.  The idea behind the phrase is philosophically nothing but bullshit on multiple levels.  On one hand, if an action truly is immoral, whether there was personal malice driving it or whether the outcome is pragmatically beneficial does not override this.  On the other hand, business cannot not be personal.

What is a person's motivation for engaging in business as a merchant, employer, or employee?  Is it to achieve psychological or lifestyle security by amassing wealth?  Is it to impress others, as stupid as this is?  Is it to feel better about themself either by living up to cultural pressures about success or being accomplished as an individual?  The exact motivation or blend of motivations is not necessarily the same from one person to another, but desiring any of these or other things is an inherently personal matter of subjective intention.  Desire for security, fame, and accomplishment is inherently personal, as is hoping to make a positive impact through business efforts; all desire is subjective, even if the desire is otherwise for something that itself transcends mere subjectivity.

Subjective matters like ego, psychological insecurity, or the longing to impress others are personal!  It is logically impossible for someone to have a fully impersonal approach to business.  I do not mean that their philosophy of business is automatically tainted by logical fallacies because no one has to make assumptions or hold to errors rather than align with the objective truths of reason.  I am referring not to their beliefs about business, but to what drives them to involve themself in business at all.  Perhaps they simply want to make money to avoid starvation or dying of thirst or exposure to the elements (homelessness), which although it is about physical needs broadly relevant to human life rather than sheer individualistic fulfillment is still necessarily personal.

Some motivations might be more personally and introspectively charged, absolutely.  It is possible that one person feels driven to succeed in business to provide for their family they deeply love.  Another could be devoted to contradicting stereotypes about their workplace potential on the basis of gender, race, or class.  Others could be pathetic slaves to greed out of commitment to the delusions of egoism or materialism.  While hoping to make money for the sake of endless profit increases is obviously asinine (due to the impossibility of infinite growth and the stupidity living for a social construct like money over pure logical truths), it is no exception to business always being personal.  Exceptions to this are logically impossible.

There is and can be no such thing as business not being personal.  Logically, it is impossible for anything contrary to be true.  Nevertheless, most people are not rationalists and thus have no true knowledge of necessary truths, and many times the phrase "It's nothing personal, just business" is used only to deflect moral criticism anyway.  As if any actual moral obligations could be just sidestepped because they are inconvenient for your business practices!  If someone ever uses this phrase, they have made themselves vulnerable to being humiliated by total refutation, and confronting them about their stupidity could ironically hurt them very personally.  Thinking themselves cold and detached or at least intending to project this persona while avoiding accountability, they leave themself wide open to very personal reckoning.

Bodily Functions

Prudery can extend to more about the body than mere genitalia and sexual acts--the two not being identical whatsoever.  Though consumption of food is correlated with the energy that keeps physical creatures alive, it leads to excrement, the same as how the intake of liquids leads to urination.  Deuteronomy 23:12-14, with the preceding two verses setting up part of the context, actually had to do with the visibility of certain biological waste in a camp.  It might seem at first to some readers that this is God here treating defecation as evil or at the very least as something that is immoral to see despite its biological occurrence.  However, the human body with its anatomy, including the genitalia and buttocks, and physiology, including the activity referenced in Deuteronomy 23:12-14, is very good (Genesis 1:31).  Yahweh is not a prudish being since it is he who would have created living creatures and their workings and approved of them.

Also, some clarifications can be discovered about or relating to this set of verses.  Verse 9 already specified the military context of a camp, not that defecation is limited to a martial encampment or a battlefield.  The wording of verse 10 also references male soldiers despite how female soldiers are never prohibited by the Torah, and as fellow bearers of the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2), they are of course permitted to fight righteously just like the men who are no more expendable than they are, with Deborah the judge being a Biblical example of a woman appointed by God to preside over male soldiers (Judges 2:16-19, 4:4-7).  Humans defecate and not men alone.  In fact, there is something else that in part follows from this to be mentioned later on.  Any female soldiers would of course have the same obligations described here.

The passage says to bury the excrement resulting from when people relieve themselves on the battlefield, not because it says God is disgusted by the human body that he made or its functions or waste, but because it is a way to respect the divine force that is said to have actively moved about the encampment.  Now, there is nothing here or elsewhere said to be immoral about defecating in front of others or seeing others do this thing, and the same would go for urination by logical extension, which is not even addressed here since the text speaks of excrement (23:13).  It is leaving human feces unburied during a military campaign that is prohibited, far from having the same moral weight as something like engaging in an unjust war as the aggressor or torturing captives (combatants or civilians alike).  It is also not something to be buried because other people might see it outside the camp.  No, it is a way to respect God in this scenario.

From this brief set of verses, a great deal is affirmed one way or another, even if these things could be discovered from other verses (Genesis 1:31 and Deuteronomy 4:2 would already tackle how such activities are not evil, nor do they need to be hidden from other people).  While personal comfort or discomfort with bodily functions like urination is a subjective thing that for some people might simply have no matter what their cultural background is, hiding people away when relieving themself in either manner by default is just a social custom that some people are so adjusted to or appreciate so much that they might not think about how it is just that: an unnecessary habit.  Segregating people when performing this activity by gender is likewise a social construct, not something done out of some logical necessity for the act itself or to honor any Biblical command.  No such thing is prescribed in the Bible in itself or by logical necessity through a separate command.

There is no need for any unwilling person to proceed with these biological functions while being watched, as that does not logically follow.  What is the case is that inside or outside of the Christian worldview, there is no rational (true and logically verifiable, that is) basis for conversationally  shunning any mention of urination or defection, for striving to only perform then in secret--or maybe in the presence of a significant other--except out of sheer personal preference, and for treating these aspects of biology as non-applicable or offensive to women, as well as for believing that men and women should take great care to not speak of or do such things in front of each other (again, perhaps except for spouses on the prudish stance).  Thinking one could add to one's moral obligations, as if God's nature does not reflect all that is good and his revelation does not at least indirectly convey all of them, is itself sinful, as addressed by Deuteronomy 4:2.

Bathsheba's And David's Baby

In the aftermath of David's adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah, the prophet Nathan confronts him at God's prompting according to the text of 2 Samuel 12.  Nathan says in verse 14 that David will not die following David's acknowledgement of his sin--sin which deserves premature death by execution (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22).  There was mercy on this level.  However, the prophet also states in the same verse that the son born to Bathsheba and David from the adulterous sex will die.  What happens to this child according to Biblical doctrines instead of non sequitur assumptions and moronic traditions?  Some (hyper-Calvinists) might insist he went to hell if he would have rejected God when older.  Other people say the child went to heaven if it was too young to sin.  The only way that the chapter touches on this at all is indirectly: David says that he will go to his son and his son will not return to him (2 Samuel 12:25).

David only says he will in some sense go to the child.  He does not speak of any alleged immediate afterlife he would share with his son and certain not of heaven as popularly conceived of, as will be addressed.  From the wording of 2 Samuel 12 alone, it would not follow that he is referring to a conscious afterlife that the baby is already experiencing which David will eventually join.  The text is perfectly compatible with the idea that David only expects to join his son in death at some point.  The child will not return to life, but David's life can end so that both are dead.  This passage does not provide any real details, much less hints, about what the intermediate state before the final judgment is, or if there is one.  It also says nothing about whether babies that die automatically go to heaven or hell at some point as some assume.

One must look to other passages.  In actuality, Peter says in Acts 2:29-34 that David did not ascend to heaven when he himself died, having just quoted Psalm 16 where David says God will not abandon him to Sheol, the state of the dead.  Jesus also teaches in John 3:13 that he is the only person who has ever been to heaven.  David, Bathsheba, Rachel, Elisha, Joseph, and more all went to Sheol upon death according to the Bible.  What, then, is Sheol like?  Contrary to a popular misconception of it as an afterlife realm of consciousness divided into a side for the righteous and a side for the wicked, it is not a place where spirits of the dead are rewarded or punished before the final judgment.  It is a place/state that all people are reduced to at death in which the righteous and wicked alike are unconscious (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Job 3:11-19, Psalm 6:5, and so on).

Animals like sheep go there as humans do because Sheol is the earth or water that holds a body rather than an underworld of consciousness (Psalm 49:14).  For the mind, which is not inhabiting the body after death (James 2:26), there is only unconscious sleep until an eventual eschatological resurrection of humanity (Daniel 12:2).  When David says in Psalm 16 that God will not abandon him to Sheol (a state of oblivion for conscious perception, as Psalm 88:10-12 would suggest even in isolation from explicitly direct passages like Ecclesiastes 9:5-10), or the grave, he is also alluding to a future resurrection.  Otherwise, he and everyone else would remain in unperceiving sleep where no one can think or feel or praise God, for it is only the living that can worship him (Isaiah 38:18-19).

It is plainly taught, just not in 2 Samuel 12, that the son of Bathsheba and David goes to an unconscious sleep before which he will either rise to eternal life in bliss with Yahweh, either because he had not sinned or because he chooses God after the resurrection, or rise to be killed permanently if he refuses to align with truth (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6).  There will be no eternal torture in hell for their child or for the many genuinely wicked figures in Biblical narratives either way.  Theirs is the second death (Revelation 20:15) if they neither repentant in this life nor in the next after their resurrection--yes, this is logically possible, and the Bible does not say it will not be permitted.  It is in fact highly probable since God wants everyone to repent (2 Peter 3:8-9, 1 Timothy 2:3-6, Acts 17:30), as well as since not everyone has exposure to Christianity or the evidence for it, and yet John still says there are people from every nation, tribe, and language that receive salvation (Revelation 5:9-10, 7:9-10).

The innocence of the baby as a human that has little to no capacity to sin out of intentionality or philosophical carelessness alone means the child would not deserve hell.  No one is even in hell right now according to the Bible.  Only after Satan is placed in the lake of fire are wicked humans restored to life from Sheol and damned to be killed in hell (Revelation 20:10-15).  The child is also not in heaven.  No one is in heaven until after the resurrection of the righteous and heaven comes to the new earth through New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22).  Right now, says the Bible, the righteous sleep, and the wicked likewise sleep, unaware of even the self-evidence of logical axioms and the existence of their own consciousness.  The two outcomes to follow are either eternal bliss or eventual destruction with an eternal exclusion from life itself.  The child of Bathsheba and David is neither suffering nor in heaven if Christianity is true.

Olber's Paradox

Olber's paradox pertains to the logical ramifications of how the sky would appear at night--depending on whether there is a disparity between perception and the natural world beyond it, as I will address--if the universe had no beginning, had no spatial boundaries and thus is not expanding, and is populated by an infinite sea of stars.  Infinite in age (in other words, past-eternal), infinite in scope, and infinite in its number of stars (for it stretches on in all directions and is inhabited by celestial bodies, or else the physical universe would not be infinite in scope/size, leaving some metaphysical space empty), which would have had an infinite amount of time to come into being, this sort of universe was recognized as being contrary to what one sees when one gazes into the dark, star-spotted skies at night.

If there is an infinite array of stars in a universe extending endlessly in all directions, there would not be distinct darkness marking the night sky that is illuminated only at scattered points by stars. The night sky would be far brighter and more densely lit than what appears to us on Earth.  This would require that there is a sufficient number of stars to crowd the night sky in an unbroken, uniform light, which itself would mean that all starlight aimed towards the planet is visible regardless of distance.  Not even the fact that light takes time to travel distances would account for what is seen above us because there would have been an infinite amount of time that has elapsed, which is already an utter logical impossibility in itself independent of empirical evidence.  On the level of epistemological limitations and sensory perceptions, Olber's paradox, however, could still not logically prove that the universe is not metaphysically infinite in the aforementioned ways (that is impossible for non-empirical reasons).

There could be more stars that I cannot see although they exist, for instance, whether for some more practical, scientific reasons like these particular celestial bodies being obscured by some unknown laws of nature, or because of a more metaphysically explicit disconnect between my mental and sensory experiences and the external world of matter, such as if a grand eldritch being is manipulating my sensory experiences.  Also, there might not be stars at all, as unlikely as it seems; visually perceiving something, whether a building up close or a star in the cosmic distance, epistemologically proves nothing beyond that one's visual perceptions exist.  The correspondence of those perceptions to a material universe outside of the mind and its senses is entirely up in the air.  Thus, Olber's paradox only shows that if we are seeing the universe as it is, the universe would have to at least be finite in its boundaries (size), finite in its age, or dynamic instead of static with regard to expansion, because there is not starlight at every point in the night sky.

It is nevertheless true that the cosmos can be proven to have had and only to be capable of having a beginning, and this is due to logic instead of probabilistic scientific methodology.  The logical impossibility of an infinite number of past moments or causal events within those moments is absolutely certain since it is a logical necessity.  Whether it is units of time or a chain of causal events, an infinite amount leading up to this moment or whatever events are happening right now would mean that the present could never be reached.  An infinite amount of time or occurrences could never fully elapse in order for this moment and the events transpiring during it to arrive.  Thus, whether time and the universe have been around for a moment or billions or trillions of years, they cannot have always existed.

As a logical necessity, all of this is true by default and any scientific truths must be consistent with it to even be possible.  All the same, Olber's paradox does entail that scientific observations from the standpoint of Earth, if they reflect reality beyond our perceptions and not just our subjective experiences, disqualify a universe of eternal age, boundless spatial distance, and thus one that is not expanding (because it is already inhabiting infinite space).  It is only as a response to a very particular philosophical error refuted by pure reason or scientific assumptions that do not match the sensory evidence that one would ever need to bother with looking to the night sky and thinking about how stars, visible light, and the age or size of the universe would relate to the cosmos not being eternal, infinite, or static.

Of Course Prophetesses Are Biblically Valid

It might strike theological conservatives as frustrating or outright offensive, but Biblical law permits prophetesses, and narratives of the Bible give multiple examples of them.  There are two ways that a text can condemn something: it can either directly call it immoral or say it should not be done, or it can prescribe something which would logically necessitate that an alternative is immoral.  The Bible does neither with female prophets, or prophetesses, not even in the Mosaic Law some people seem to assume is thoroughly hostile towards women, among other things, in positions of spiritual, familial, or workplace leadership.  Of fucking course prophetess are Biblically valid.  The Bible does not teach that moral obligations beyond those having to do with actual anatomy like male circumcision, not behaviors that people with any genitalia can do, are just for men or women.

Deuteronomy 13:1-5 and 18:14-22, for instance, condemn prophecy in the name of other gods and false prophecy in the name of Yahweh (both are capital offenses), but not prophetesses.  In fact, Deuteronomy 13:6-10 exemplifies how male language like "he" can refer to both genders since men and women are introduced and then referenced in these verses with male wording in some translations, like the KJV, NKJV, NASB.  Compare this to the KJV translation of Deuteronomy 13:5; male wording is irrelevant to whether prophets must be men.  Many other passages like Exodus 21:20-21, 21:26-27, Leviticus 13:29-39, and Numbers 5:5-7 do the same thing as Deuteronomy 13:6-10, often with perpetrators or victims of some sin among both genders.  Miscellaneous passage would thus be using male language when all people are in view if nothing about the context requires that it is referring to literal men.  As if the obviously egalitarian proclamation of Genesis 1:26-27 (and 5:1-2) and the absence of a prohibition of female prophets are not already enough to demonstrate already that prophetesses would of course be Biblically permitted and valid, Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32 say not to add to God's commands.

Men and women bear God's image; men and women can sin in the same ways, and men and women can grasp reason and serve God and righteousness, either by carrying out the obligations all people have or by becoming special representatives of Yahweh.  There are specific examples of prophetesses in the Bible, despite examples of such a thing being unnecessary to establish that the Bible does not condemn them.  In Exodus 15:20, Miriam, the sister of Moses, is called a prophetess--or prophet depending on the translation; again, male wording does not necessarily refer to just men and in many cases could not.  This is in the allegedly misogynistic Torah!  Now, I already addressed how Mosaic Law, by far the most central and thorough of all the Biblical moral revelation, says absolutely nothing against female prophets.  It is just that the Torah affirms them in this way as well.

Deborah of Judges 4 is called a prophetess, and she leads the whole of Israel, acting as a judge in the days before the Jewish monarchy.  Barak, a man, insists that he will only go on the military operation she prescribes on God's behalf if she goes with him (Judges 4:4-8).  Nothing about this contradicts the explicit, literal teachings and words of the Torah.  There is also Huldah of 2 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 34.  King Josiah has just found the book of the law, a clear reference to some portion of Mosaic Law, and laments how the people have not upheld it.  He tasks several people with inquiring of God about the book, since Josiah says that God's anger with the people is great, and they go to Huldah the prophetess.  Now, people can be hypocrites, but there is no hypocrisy in Josiah's reliance on the prophetess Huldah and his simultaneous devotion to Mosaic Law.  Her actions are not immoral because she speaks truthfully and her gender is not an affront to the deity who made both men and women equal in their humanity and thus metaphysical value, intellectual capacity, and moral rights and obligations!

Without listing the other prophetesses of the Bible, I want to touch on how Luke 2:36-38 mentions Anna, the prophetess who sees Jesus as a child and celebrates him.  This prophetess interacted with the young Jesus and spoke with listeners about his role in the "redemption of Jerusalem".  After the resurrection and ascension of Christ, Peter quotes Joel 2:28-29 in Acts 2:14-18, which predicts a particular era in which sons and daughters would prophesy, and in which God would pour out his spirit on his servants, male and female.  It is not as if he forbade such a thing beforehand, though.  God does not change (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17), and thus the obligations rooted in his nature do not change.  Men and women are not in error for prophesying when both can perform the same task!  This was never opposed in the Torah's detailed moral commands where some might expect prophetesses to be dismissed.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.

The Sabbath Is For Man

Having one day a week where one cannot work in the standard sense of the word might be easy for someone immersed in or obsessed with superfluous, meaningless labor and productivity to regard as intrusive.  Perhaps the basic concept of a weekly Sabbath, one day of rest for every six days of work, strikes such a person as restrictive or dangerous, but the more foundational issue is not about professional work at all.  It is about whether the Sabbath would interfere with mental health or physical safety.  Just what is permissible on the Sabbath?  Can one take a step?  Can one enjoy food?  What Jesus claims about the Sabbath is contrary to the notion of a day of deprivation meant to gratuitously test our patience and willingness to forgo matters like fulfillment, healing, or pleasure.  He outright declares, in accordance with the Old Testament as will be demonstrated, that the Sabbath is for people and their flourishing, not the other way around:

Mark 2:27--"Then he said to them, 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.'"

Moreover, the scope of the Sabbath's rest encompasses all people and their animals.  No earthly creature is to be excluded, and the benefit of those resting is acknowledged as vital, as stated in verses like the following:

Exodus 23:12--"'Six days do your work, but on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and so that the slave born in your household and the foreigner living among you may be refreshed.'"

Deuteronomy 5:12-15--"'Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you.  Six days shall you labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God.  On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do.  Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.  Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.'"

Obviously (to someone looking to reason while avoiding assumptions), it cannot be to our benefit to disregard the likes of our physical health one day a week, which could already sabotage our mental health despite mental rejuvenation being one of the literally stated goals behind a weekly Sabbath.  Yahweh's Mosaic Law does not in any way prescribe that we undermine our own actual wellbeing for the sake of rest that is supposedly for our wellbeing!  When Jesus says that the Sabbath is for mankind (which on its own contradicts the idea that keeping the Sabbath is an obligation only for the Israelites), not mankind for the Sabbath, he articulates nothing that is not logically and textually evident from the Torah's primary prescriptions for one day of rest for every seven days of work.

From Exodus 23:12 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15 alone, it can be seen that the Bible emphasizes the mental and physical health of those resting on the Sabbath.  Part of the basis for the obligation is that as creatures God brought into existence and sustains, and especially so for humans due to having the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2), animals--including people--have value and deserve to not to be unnecessarily overwhelmed by unhealthy expenditure of effort.  The point of the Sabbath is not to physically rest just enough to not prematurely destroy one's bodily functioning before more labor is done the next day, but to regularly refresh the minds and bodies of those who rest.

Jesus heals bodily deformities and conditions on the Sabbath (as in Matthew 12); as if mere walking on the Sabbath is anywhere condemned by God in the Torah, Jeremiah 17 and Acts 1 plainly permit it in various ways--for instance, Jeremiah 17 only condemns carrying loads for business through the gates of a city on the Sabbath, not walking through them.  Walking for health (mental and physical) or for leisure is not contrary to Biblical obligations.  Unrelated to health in particular but still allowing certain acts of physical labor on the Sabbath, Leviticus 6, 24, and Numbers 28 require that the priests engage in specific activities necessitating physical exertion.  On all levels, physical movement itself is not prohibited!

The properly executed Sabbath is liberating rather than confining, in fact.  Eating, drinking, bathing, walking, and so on are not sinful on this day.  A regular day of rest defies those who reductionistically regard people (more specifically, often people other than themselves) as a means of professionally generating profit, promotes human flourishing, and provides a day overtly dedicated to introspective and recreational pursuits.  The Sabbath is indeed for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath.  Whoever thinks of the Sabbath as a geographically or historically limited obligation according to the Bible is delusional, as is whoever thinks it is an oppressive thing in concept, intention, or practice.

The Pension And The 401(k)

Retirement is supposed to be the grand reward waiting at the end of a long career full of hard work, though hard work in no way logically guarantees that one will be able to retire.  In addition to standard compensation derived from employment, retirement benefits from employers like a 401(k) plan with matching are meant to serve as an additional incentive to come work at a company or remain there for prolonged periods.  The pension has largely been replaced by the 401(k), although the former term might still be familiar even to those who have never received or worked towards receiving one.  What exactly is the distinction, and why would many companies offer the 401(k) over a pension?  Here I will examine the basic nature of one retirement setup and the other as related to why employers might forgo pensions for their own benefit on top of probably exploiting workers in their regular wages or salaries as addressed elsewhere.

With the 401(k), the employee is given the freedom, and the burden, of choosing the investment risk level and the percentage of their pay that goes into the plan.  Depending on market factors, the amount inside the account can oscillate, though it allegedly trends upward across longer periods of time.  The employer can match up to a given percentage at one percent for each percentage the employee contributes.  It is just that this might come with time-based limitations on how long one must work at the company before the employer match is permanently transferred to the worker.  In other words, if a company has a vesting period of three years, you have to either wait that full duration in order to truly keep any of the employer match or you will have to wait that amount of time to fully keep it.  Depending on the company, there could be partial vesting each year prior to that threshold.

One genuine benefit of 401(k)s, still, is that they can be migrated (or "rolled over") to the 401(k) of a new employer so that it follows a worker from job to job.  On the contrary, a pension remains with the company of origin: and if the company fails, one's retirement would be affected.  Why would 401(k)s have reached such prominence when pensions were popular during a portion of the 1900s?  With a pension, the employer has to give a set amount in retirement each month until the death of the retiree.  It does not matter if the investments go poorly during the employee's working years so that the employer loses money from this arrangement; they have to eventually pay the pre-specified amount on a monthly basis after the worker's retirement.  The company bears the risk of managing the investments, and the retiree might live a long life, so having the employee contribute a portion of their own direct earnings with or without an employer match can save the company an immense amount of money.  Once the 401(k) match is made, the employer has nothing to do with the money in the account other than potentially reclaiming some of it if a worker leaves before the vestment period ends.

Ultimately, forgoing pensions in favor of optional, employee-managed 401(k) plans saves or can save companies money, which in turn is used as another way to minimize the reward to employees for their labor and loyalty while placing more risk on their shoulders--though it is policies like this that undermine the incentives to remain loyal to companies at large to begin with.  An organization could also strategically "lay off" people who are reaching the vesting term to protect the company from having to permanently transfer ownership of the vested portion of retirement contributions.  As long as they do not do it for particular discriminatory reasons, there is nothing illegal on American law about merely letting people go abruptly and without a valid reason under at-will employment.  There is no need to go this far to save more money than a pension would require, however.  401(ks) can still easily benefit a company's retained finances more than pensions.

Functional "worship" of the bottom line is more and more overtly what many companies will prioritize over people inside or outside the organization.  The pandemic era saw companies celebrating record profits while refusing to pay workers more from the value they helped generate (or even to pay them truly livable compensation), and layoffs have become routine because times are so ostensibly difficult for executives looking to continually boost profitability--although the exclusive way to keep doing this is to exploit consumers or employees, as otherwise only a finite amount of money can be obtained from a finite consumer base on a planet with a finite human population.  The delusion of pursuing endlessly higher profit is highly stupid even when the timeframe is year after year rather than each fucking quarter.  Placing more instability into the lives of workers as they prepare for their retirement by emphasizing 401(k)s over pensions is just one of many ways an exploitative company could try to shortchange the employees it relies on.

The Book Of Jonah

Jonah, son of Amittai (Jonah 1:1), was an active prophet during the reign of Jeroboam, son of Jehoash, the king of Israel (2 Kings 14:23-25) in the Biblical account.  He is tasked with going to Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, to preach against it because of its great evil (Jonah 1:2).  While the first chapter of Jonah does not specify the sin in question, 3:8 provides slightly more detail.  The ruler of Nineveh proclaims that his people are to give up their violence along with their broader immoral ways (along with many other parts of the Bible, the book of Jonah clearly presents morality as universal and having nothing to do with being a Jew or Gentile).  Violence is not always evil, but Yahweh's Torah law makes it clear what the distinctions are, and Assyria is recorded as using very unbiblical forms of torture that go far beyond 40 lashes (Deuteronomy 25:1-3) or cutting off someone's hand (25:11-12) for limited, particular sins.  The Assyrians are renowned for flaying people and displaying human skins, among other extreme brutalities.  The book of Jonah leaves which illicit acts of violence the city repents of unspoken, but the king does repent and instructs others to do the same (Jonah 3:10).

The prophet has already said while inside the great fish that "'Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs'" (2:8), and still he is disappointed and hostile when a pagan city does turn from its sins.  He does not want that same grace to be extended to the citizens of Nineveh.  No, it cannot be illegitimate to go so far as to hate unrepentant sinners as God does (Leviticus 20:23, Deuteronomy 25:15-16, Psalm 5:5-6, 11:5, Proverbs 11:20).  The text does not say if Jonah hated the residents of Nineveh or not, but it does eventually reveal that he was reluctant to go to the city not out of fear.  He admits he expected God to relent in his threatened punishment out of love: "'This is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish.  I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity'" (Jonah 4:2).

His error is not hating the Ninevites and this would not necessarily be immoral as long as he did not mistreat them himself.  It is hoping that they would not repent and wanting God to destroy them anyway.  The prophet of Yahweh is greatly displeased and angry (4:1) precisely because God had compassion on them "and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened" (3:10).  The idea that only the deity described in the New Testament loves and accepts repentance from practically anyone is asinine and assumed; the Old Testament describes God as loving Israel and foreigners (Deuteronomy 10:18-19), inviting all who are willing, regardless of ancestry, to become his follower (Isaiah 56:3).  It is also in the Old Testament that his love is said to outlast and eclipse his anger (Psalm 30:5), which parallels how the wicked will be exterminated in hell and undergo finite torment at most (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6), yet the righteous and redeemed will live forever (John 3:16).

After God asks Jonah if he has any right to be angry over his mercy (Jonah 4:4)--mercy is an arbitrary thing by default that never has to be shown to anyone, so there is no basis either for demanding it or opposing it in itself--the prophet decides to wait to see what would happen to Nineveh (4:5).  God directly causes a vine to grow to provide shade, something Jonah was very delighted by (4:6).  He then has a worm chew the vine to the point of withering (4:7).  With his head now exposed to the sun, Jonah wishes he was dead and insists he is angry enough to die (4:8-9).  God again asks in this time if he has a right to be angry.  Appealing to the greater worth of any and all humans than plants (Genesis 1:26-27), Yahweh points out that Jonah has cared for a mere vine that he did not even cause to grow and that only lived for a day, while Nineveh is full of more than 120,000 people lost in their wickedness, and many animals as well (4:10-11).  "'Should I not be concerned about that great city?'" God asks.

Here, the book of Jonah ends.  There is no additional verse and thus the weight of Yahweh's words and the ideas behind them is left as the final thing for readers to dwell on.  The moral value of animal life is held up as reason enough to be hesitant to destroy the city, though the human presences, however marred by sin they are (and some horrendously great sins at that in light of what is elsewhere ascribed to the Assyrians), are what God is most concerned with.  The command for Jonah to prophesy in Nineveh (given what Jonah said he knew about God beforehand) and God's compassion towards the repentant inhabitants are examples in the Old Testament of how Yahweh does not damn Gentiles for being Gentiles and wants every fallen person to be saved (2 Peter 3:8-9).

To hate sin and sinners can be rational and righteous.  God despises both according the aforementioned verses and more.  Still, he loves not just some people, but all.  If love is what drives him to show mercy, as even the book of Jonah acknowledges, and he wants everyone to repent, then he loves everyone, Jew and Gentile.  The Biblical deity does not change (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17).  His affection and mercy are not novel in the New Testament.  Rather, the New Testament elaborates upon the divine love that is already established long before.  It is not just Israel that Yahweh shows mercy to.  Jonah dislikes this, and God draws attention to his hypocrisy.  As difficult as it can be to accept mercy directed towards the true worst of sinners, far more difficult than accepting mercy directed at oneself in some cases, to oppose it when God is willing to withhold deserved destruction could never be right.

Making Yourself Irreplaceable--But Not For The Reason Managers Want

Where one can, striving to have high pay, minimal hours, and the freedom to confront or non-slanderously, non-maliciously mock irrational "superiors" or subordinates without pushback is the way to climb out of the abysmal shadow of the modern American workplace.  Being paid liveable amounts or better is only one part of a truly positive job.  A lack of micromanaging or pettiness is also a prerequisite to this kind of workplace.  Also, the ability to openly or even viciously shut down stupidity in others regardless of its source is an integral thing for every willing rationalist.  When one might be in dire need of a strong income, as if opportunities to find this are plentiful, one might need to be very strategic about verbalizing the only valid worldview (a rationalistic one) and reacting to the almost inevitable bullshit they will encounter.

There is a way to at least partially escape this.  Make yourself so useful as an employee, by skill or by seniority, if you have the energy or whim to do so, that you cannot be easily replaced or would devastate the company with your voluntary or involuntary departure.  It is even better if there would be long-term difficulties with a separation.  That way, without actually doing anything irrational or immoral, you can be a thorn in their side by humiliating stupid people--such as people who practically worship career and "professionalism," workplace utilitarians, petty managers, hypocrites, and people who in any way unrepentantly deny a logical truth--without risking as much retaliation.  Yes, this is what it is when someone decries any sort of stupidity at work and is targeted for it: retaliation, albeit sometimes of a lesser severity than when a company is trying to conceal the likes of employee deaths or executive insider trading.

You will then have relative immunity for any legitimate harshness, mockery, or expressions of loathing that you wish to engage in.  Other people might hate you, but it is only because (if true to this extent) you hate their irrationality and are vocal about it.  Since you are so familiar with company processes, so tied to projects that take place over long periods of time, or are so talented at your job--or if there is a worker shortage, among other things--it would be more damaging to the company pragmatically to fire you or have you resign than for the probably many non-rationalists to suffer your refutations, insults, and manipulation.

There are also more subtle ways to be a rational, morally just obstacle for corporate egos.  If an irrationalistic manager/supervisor (and anything from casually endorsing philosophical errors/assumptions to enforcing trivial pettiness makes them irrational) likes recognition from their "underlings," refuse them the recognition their hearts crave.  You do not even have to belittle them to just ignore them when you can and observe with delight if they appear heartbroken.  If an irrationalist seeks praise, instead of praising them for the (on their own) meaningless achievements of the workplace, scoff at their philosophical stupidity and how they prioritize work over understanding the deep logical necessities that govern reality.

As powerless as plenty of employers or managers/supervisors might want workers to feel, employees have inherent power to a degree as fundamental parts of any business beyond a sole proprietorship with a hierarchy.  Rationalists also have an inherent intellectual power that is more foundational than all the other logically possible types, which puts them in a great position, if they so desire, to exploit both of these truths for their benefit.  Yes, manipulating non-rationalists without violating their literal human rights could absolutely not be the same as a manager or employer trying to manipulate "underlings" for selfish or otherwise asinine reasons.  The difference is like killing someone in self-defense as opposed to murdering someone casually or out of greed.

Making yourself irreplaceable in the workplace can be done for reasons wholly other than wanting to advance a career or please a boss who might not know their right hand from their left.  It can be a way to protect one's ability to lash out at non-rationalists without unjust consequences befalling one for doing this.  Far from being about enriching someone higher on the hierarchy, conforming to arbitrary professional norms, or impressing people to win their ultimately worthless approval, it is about celebrating the intrinsic truth of logical necessities and thus the lesser status of anyone who refuses to discover, acknowledge, or live for them.  No one has to be this vicious in this particular kind of way to be rational, but there cannot be anything irrational about it.

Detesting The Dishonest

Multiple places in the Bible say that God hates people, with some of them targeting a particular kind of sinner.  Leviticus 20:23, after the chapter has condemned or prescribed punishments for actions like cursing one's parents, bestiality, and incest, states that God hates people who practice such things, as he did the pagans the Israelites lived around.  In other cases, it says God detests miscellaneous sins.  Proverbs 11:1 says that God hates dishonest scales, which are addressed in Deuteronomy 25:13-15 when it condemns the use of predatory or inaccurate weights and measures.  The following verse of Deuteronomy 25:16 says he hates the dishonest person.

God is said to hate those who practice deception, not just deceitfulness itself, something repeated later on in Psalm 5:6.  If it only said that he hates lying, it would not necessarily follow that the text is saying he hates all liars by default, though hating the people would necessitate hating their errors as well, for the latter are the entire basis of this divine loathing.  One necessitates the other and one does not.  In Deuteronomy 25:16, though, it specifically says that God despises the liars and not just their sins as distinguished from the people who practice them.  It is not just that they are said to be excluded from eternal life (Revelation 22:15, Romans 6:23), but that God harbors actual hatred for them.

If a worldview (the ideology itself as opposed to mental acceptance of the ideology), belief, deed, or intention is worthy of hatred, so would anyone who holds to such things unrepentantly also be worthy of hatred.  According to the Biblical worldview as the book puts it forth, not according to various traditions, some people do deserve to be despised.  The same Biblical deity who loves the world desperately to the point of offering mercy to every sinner who repents (John 3:16, Romans 5:8, 2 Peter 3:9) also abhors some people, and there is no contradiction in this, nor does the literal hatred Yahweh has for the unrepentant wicked ever relent as long as they exist (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17).  He is a deity of both love and hatred.

Also, to deserve hatred does not mean that one is obligated to hate everyone applicable, only that it is not immoral to have this disposition towards them and that they do deserve it.  Otherwise, to not hate certain people would itself be sinful, and there would be no room for mercy that is pursued out of, potentially, a lack of hatred.  See Luke 6:36, though there are many ideological or personal motivations behind why someone might opt to be merciful in a given case.  While using accurate weights and measures for business purposes is hardly the most truth-honoring thing a person can do, the way that the Bible says God hates the dishonest in spite of his mercy affirms how seriously it takes disregard for truth.

"Do not lie," Leviticus 19:11 says.  Lying in the case of criminal slander even deserves the same penalty as the allegedly committed sins (Deuteronomy 19:16-21).  Of course, without truth, there cannot be moral obligation, and without obligation there can be no sin, so metaphysical truth, which is ultimately grounded in the fixed truths of logical necessity and possibility that not even a deity could alter, would have to matter above all else for this to be the case, or else nothing could matter.  Detesting the dishonest is at its core born out of enormous devotion to truth by God or by humans.

A Stereotype About Menstruating Women

The experience of pain, whether physical or strictly mental or both of the body and mind, does not mean a person necessarily struggles with grasping even the most abstract truths of logic in such moments.  If they as an individual were to have trouble focusing on reason or wanting to be rational in those times after all, it does not follow that they will give in to emotionalism or any other kind of irrationalism.  Either way, the presence of excruciating physical or mental pain does not mean that the agony will continue indefinitely for the rest of one's life.

All of this is as true of the pain connected with women's menstrual cycles as it would have to be of any other suffering in this life.  Out of misguided but irrational sincerity or outright sexist hostility, some people, and they would not have to be men, might hold to fallacies about the nature of a woman's period.  In some circles, women are already assumed to be deeply emotional, perhaps to the point of being emotionalistic--the only thing that makes someone emotionalistic is believing or acting based on emotion as opposed to reason, so there is no arbitrary level of frustration, such as from physical pain, that makes someone succumb to this error.

Especially in groups where women are already assumed on the basis of various non sequitur fallacies like the fallacy of composition (what is true of one woman's personality is not automatically true of another's, and it never has to do with her being a woman regardless), menstruation can be misunderstood as something damning women to hysteria each time they are on their period.  Again, just suffering from any degree of pain does not force a person to be irrational, but the companion to the sexist, dehumanizing notion that men are emotionless is the sexist, dehumanizing notion that women are insane during their monthly bleeding (when this cycle is applicable to them, that is, for it is not in all cases).

One might hear everything from casual or overtly malicious jokes about a specific woman's alleged inability to control her composure while on her period to sarcastic but cautious declarations that women should not hold political/military/corporate power because of what they might be tempted to do while menstruating.  Not all women have to menstruate, not when menopause or sufficient stress intervene, and for those that do, it does not logically follow by necessity that having a period will reduce them to stupidity.  No one, man or woman, needs to be in such pain to be irrational, pain does not change someone's worldview or treatment of others unless they allow it to, and one woman is not the same being as another anyway.

During those often three to seven days in which a woman expels her uterine lining through her vagina along with blood, this normal but difficult biological process could be misunderstood by fools who approach the matter with assumptions.  If a woman mishandles anger or excitement while on her period, she is not being irrational because she is a woman or because of her menstruation.  She as an individual chose to handle her emotions or circumstances in that way.  This stereotype and other affiliated sexist concepts are invalid already, but they also hinder openness about something most women will experience month after month for a great deal of their life.  It is false and destructive.

The Gender Egalitarian Biblical Ethics Of Property Ownership

Just as the concepts behind the wording of Exodus 21:26-27 do not mean that anyone has to have servants, but that if they do, abusing them forfeits the right to their service for the remainder of their six years if a fellow countryperson (Deuteronomy 15:12-17), Deuteronomy 21:15-17 does not mean that anyone has to give their property (inheritance) to their sons exclusively, primarily, or first.  Nowhere do these verses either prescribe this or say that daughters cannot initially or eventually be willed property, although it either speaks of sons or of children in general using male language.  Is it sinful to will or give property to sons?  Not at all, and this would have to be the case on gender egalitarianism anyway.  Is it sinful and otherwise irrational to only will property to sons when there are daughters present, especially if they as individuals--not because they are women--are more rational and righteous than their brothers?  Absolutely!

Nothing in the allegedly misogynistic Mosaic Law contradicts these truths.  First of all, the Bible never says, not in the Torah or elsewhere, that women cannot own belongings (and as I love to point out in many ways, it goes further and says to not add to God's commands in Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32).  It also explicitly teaches that they can, as will be directly addressed later below.  There is a set of passages that might seem at first to some people as if they teach that sons must inherit property before women, though these ideas could only be assumed to be put forth in the text--and this also would not be a prohibition of them obtaining property through other means on their own.  In Numbers 27:1-8, when Zelophehod's daughters come to Moses because their father has died and left no sons, God tells Moses that they should certainly inherit their father's belongings and that if a person has no sons, the inheritance must go to daughters if there are any.

The text plainly does not say that property must always be given to male children first and directly presents the right of women to have possessions and inheritances.  It says if there are no sons, inheritance must be given to daughters.  This only entails that property cannot be withheld from female descendants merely because they are women when there are no boys; what it says is that property cannot be redistributed outside of the immediate family if there are daughters who can take it.  In other words, it is sinful to skip over them just because they are women.  Again, like Deuteronomy 21:15-17, Numbers 27:8 does not say that men must receive family property first.  Any historical or narrative practices of the Israelites contrary to this simply do not reflect the actual concepts articulated in Mosaic Law, which here and in numerous other places affirms the gender equality and egalitarianism of Genesis 1:26-27.  Joshua 17:3-5 also references this incident with the daughters of Zelophehod.

Many other direct or indirect affirmations of how women can have property like men are found in the Torah.  Aside from the ramifications of Genesis 1:26-27 alone with no statements to the contrary, women could become servants and were to be freed for the same reasons as male servants, which entitled them to be released with animals and other resources (Exodus 21:26-27, Deuteronomy 15:12-17).  People would have done this to pay off an ordinary debt or to earn restitution money if they did not have enough to pay their victims of thefts or certain assaults (Exodus 22:3).  Also, Numbers 5:5-7 very clearly mentions men and women, not even relying on the English male words for many gender neutral commands [1], as having the same right to receive restitution or obligation to pay restitution as needed, which could only be done if women and men both had money or property to give, or means of generating an income.  Leviticus 12 says that women who give birth must offer animals they can afford afterward, which, again, requires that they have belongings like animals or means of paying for them.

On their own, any of these things affirm that women of course are Biblically permitted to own property, married or not, just like men. In fact, Numbers 36:6 says that Zelophehod's daughters Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milkah, and Tirzah were free to marry anyone they wished as long as it was within their tribe (for reasons having to do with the Year of Jubilee).  Women are allowed to have possessions and work for personal money or to pay off debts, and they are no less obligated than men, for obvious reasons of logical equivalence of both the sin and the person responsible for it, to make restitution from their money and property if they sin in an applicable way (see Exodus 21:18-19 or 22:1 for examples).  The Bible never denies any of this, teaches things from which all of this would follow by logical necessity already even if nothing more was said, and goes out of its way to emphasize in multiple ways that women can own property that is theirs, not even just co-owned along with a husband.

[1].  See here:

https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-neglected-misandry-of-some-biblical.html

Asking God To Die

The Bible openly features key figures who wish to die, asking God for this as with Moses or wishing they had died at birth as with Job.  Regarding the former, Numbers 11:4-17 sees the Israelites, free of their slavery in Egypt, express ungratefulness for their manna and clamor for meat, which compels Moses to ask rhetorically if he gave birth to the Israelites, requesting that God kill him if he has found favor in Yahweh's eyes because he is overwhelmed.  Nothing about this desire seems sarcastic or insincere.  The text presents Moses as if he truly hoped for God to kill him, and nothing in this narrative condemns him for it.  God's response is to have Moses alleviate some of his burdens by sharing his responsibilities with 70 elders of Israel.  Yahweh does not kill him, but neither does he chastise him for wanting it to happen.  Then he promises to give the complaining Israelites nothing but meat for a whole month so that they will be sick of it (Numbers 11:18-20).

Job also wants to die in the midst of his great suffering.  Refusing to curse God and die as his wife encouraged (Job 2:9-10), he still wants his life to end, and not for the reason many pseudo-Christians might relate to if their trials reach a certain intensity.  No, he does not expect a heavenly afterlife to immediately be his!  He curses the day of his birth (3:1-10) and longs for the absence of experience in Sheol, where the righteous and wicked, the rich and poor, sleep in the peaceful absence of experience (Job 3:11-19).  The author of Ecclesiastes later concurs that the dead know, feel, and do nothing at all (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10).  If this unperceiving "sleep" of the soul is what awaits us after we die until the resurrection (Daniel 12:2), why would anyone who suffers not want to leap straight into relief from terrestrial pain?

Of course, that key Biblical figures did or did not do something in narratives is not what demonstrates that a thing is good, evil, or permissible on the Christian worldview if the narrative itself does not directly address this in some way; that is accomplished by Mosaic Law and other explicitly, strictly morally prescriptive parts of the Bible.  There nonetheless is a way to accelerate one's arrival to the experiential nothingness (this is different from nothing at all existing, which is logically impossible [1]) of Sheol.  Do any of God's statements condemn suicide directly or indirectly?  "Do not murder" from Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17 does, for it addresses all people and does not limit its scope to the murder of other people alone.  While Exodus 21:12-14, 20-21, Numbers 35:30-31, and so on address one person intentionally and wrongfully killing another, which is indeed worse than suicide since it is done to someone other than oneself, the wording of murder's prohibition in the Decalogue does have a broader applicability in one sense.

Self-murder is still murder, albeit of a different kind.  At the same time, wanting to die is no sin.  This desire could be purely involuntary, first of all, which means no person could be in the wrong on the level of ideological stupidity or moral guilt for just finding their own death appealing or genuinely wishing they were dead, even going as far as begging God for release from life as Moses does in Numbers 11.  Someone cannot possibly be in logical and moral error for experiencing a mere feeling that does not change their rationality, worldview, or willingness to do what is obligatory.  Moses and Job hope to die in the respective passages examined.  In those passages and others, God never condemns wanting to die.

Whether it is to escape what can be relentless, incredible misery in this life or to decrease one's conscious waiting time until the true Biblical afterlives [2]--for the dead only sleep until their resurrection and thus the actual amount of time until then does not diminish with their death, though the dead cannot experience anything before then--hoping to die and praying to die is not problematic on its own.  Allowing this to deter one from fulfilling obligations, like that of enacting real justice in all of its Biblical forms (Deuteronomy 16:20) or abstaining from murder of oneself and others, would be sinful.  Pretending like it is justification to stop believing things on the basis of logical necessity, such as if it seems like rationality takes "too much effort" or is personally inconvenient, is irrational.  Wanting to die?  This itself can be rational in some ways (to live is to have the capacity for pain [3], so to wish for death on grounds of avoiding pain is absolutely rational), and it cannot be immoral left to itself.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/07/god-and-empty-space.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-real-punishment-we-biblically.html

[3].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-burden-of-consciousness.html

Caffeine And Other Drugs

As a stimulant substance that can amplify certain mental states, caffeine is a drug, and one that can enhance energy for a time, although it can also prolong or deepen exhaustion when used in exclusion of rest.  It might not be called a drug openly by some people.  After all, it is a rather culturally entrenched drug in many places.  One would be able to use and talk about it freely in places where one might be shunned for using even something as relatively soft a drug as marijuana.  With various other substances like alcohol, there is widespread social acceptance, but usually with restrictions of when or where or possibly how much one is drinking or using it.

Caffeine is distinct from many other drugs, yes, but it is a drug that is looked to for daily or fairly regular stimulation in plenty of cases.  Despite having the potential to over-accelerate one's heart, it does not get people high or drunk as opposed to jittery or alert even when sleep is what a person really needs.  What is arbitrary and hypocritical about this is that people who condemn all use of other drugs, save for some that are medically prescribed, might object on the basis of addiction being likely or even merely possible, whereas caffeine addiction is fairly normalized.

As for biological and mental health, is regular caffeine use automatically dangerous?  Intaking up to around 400 milligrams of caffeine a day is generally expected to be safe for adults, with smaller amounts like 100-200 milligrams being safer, even if ingested all at one time--it is just that some people might be very sensitive to caffeine and have extreme difficulty sleeping afterward.  Drinks (and sometimes foods) of varying cultural popularity have miscellaneous amounts of caffeine, and the extreme popularity of the likes of coffee shows that caffeine is a socially accepted drug.

Danger to health is not what makes something an addiction.  Still, people can suffer caffeine withdrawals or become dependent on it to simply navigate basic waking life.  Upon discontinuing use for even a time, someone could experience headaches and lethargy.  This, however, is likely to be ignored or dismissed though it is addiction.  Addiction is not as easy to pinpoint as some think [1]--is someone addicted to air because not breathing it has adverse effects?  Is needing food to live or liking a particular dish an addiction to food?  Not at all!  By being hypocritical, though, certain people who are dependent on caffeine disregard the nature of reality as they come to caffeine for comfort or pleasure to the point of undergoing withdrawals without it.

Caffeine is not like cocaine; it is not that the latter being highly destructive by default means the former must be as well.  Nonetheless, addiction is often celebrated, perpetuated, or trivialized when caffeine is involved, for people misunderstand it, assume it is not a drug or encourage dependence when they would not do the same for equivalent substances, or think it a personal necessity for their lives when it is not.  The way my culture at large regards drugs is very selective.  Some psychological dependencies are encouraged and others are not.  The very nature of caffeine as a drug might be highly under-recognized.  All the while, many of the legitimate and incomplete factors of addiction alike are present in how some consume caffeine, as blind as they are to double standards they might hold to.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/12/what-is-addiction.html

Financial Stability In Marriage

Death or divorce can end a marriage with a moment's notice, and disability could cripple the earning spouse's income or ability to find work at all.  A husband or wife could turn to abusive behaviors even if there was no precedent evidence.  What will happen to the spouse who relied on his or her partner for all things regarding finances?  They would likely be socially disregarded or fall into homelessness in the case of the first two possibilities if they cannot obtain their own income.  In the case of disability befalling their still-living partner, they would nonetheless be forced to become far more involved in earning money to now support the person who once took that on his or her shoulders.

There are many ways a spouse's very life or presence in their partner's life could be snuffed out.  If not their life, their bodily or mental functioning could be diminished at any time with no warning whatsoever.  A couple that does not prioritize preparations for such an unfortunate future is automatically far more vulnerable to many kinds of suffering.  It is not an expression of dissatisfaction or suspicion of the other if one of them tries to maintain an income even if the other generates enough money to sustain the entire couple.  No, it can even be an expression of love to labor with the intention of taking care of them in the future or not falling into poverty if they were to die.

There is also the possibility that one spouse would become abusive or cold over time, whatever their motivation for doing so.  This is absolutely not something only wives need to be equipped to outlast: husbands are people and can of course be victims of sexual, physical, verbal, or emotional abuse of various sorts.  Each partner would need to be able to live in such an event without being dependent on an abusive person for the money or other resources they need to survive.  Regardless if a divorce follows, men and women would have to secure or already have some semblance of their own financial independence, and it is far easier to already have saved up money for emergencies.

As a couple, there is always the possibility of earning and saving more money together than an individual person could on their own.  There are just multiple circumstances that could make it a necessity for both members to have financial stability.  Developing this ahead of time is clearly ideal, and for those who think of these things and intentionally do nothing to live out these facts, they might one day find themselves in a terrible scenario where a relationship they perhaps had hoped would never sour has become the greatest moral and practical threat to their wellbeing.  Worsening economic conditions only make this more urgent.

Wishing Eternal Torture Upon Others

It is not necessarily true that morality exists.  Conscience is just personal moral emotion that has nothing to do with revealing whatever good or evil might exist and social norms, as asinine, hypocritical, and contrary between cultures as they can be, cannot prove there is any sort of objective morality (though it is of course logically possible for there to be).  True moral obligation, if it exists, is there independent of all human perception, preference, and activity.  Almost nobody realizes this or is rational or bold enough to admit these truths if they brush up against them.  However, if morality exists, then one being torturing another without end--not for a potentially long time or in a specific manner, but genuinely without end--could never be just.

This is what many people stupidly think the Bible teaches about hell [1], and some of them go around casually wishing it upon others.  A ceaseless stream of punitive torment, or certain kinds of torment, for a moral offense would always exceed the severity of the wrong it is supposedly punishing.  No amount of finite moral blunders on any human's part could ever deserve eternal torture, yet one can find non-religious people who say that if there is a hell, they hope someone they despise suffers there eternally, or that they wish there was this kind of hell for the sake of a particular person of they fallaciously believe they "know" it does not exist.

One can also find people who adhere to a specific religion, such as Christianity, actively wishing this fate on other people.  Some of them do not care about reason and justice and are only committed to the religion because they were raised that way.  Some of them do not care if the religion really entails eternal torture in an afterlife, but that does not stop them from believing that this outcome is morally deserved.  Some religions like Quranic Islam teach this and others like Biblical Christianity do not [2].  Since Christian might still long for this to be true as long as they are hypothetically not the ones who will suffer eternally, they can be humiliated by showing what the Bible actually does say about death, justice, and hell.

Still, one does not need to show that the Bible says permanent death without resurrection is the true deserved penalty for sin to realize and then in turn demonstrate to others that eternal torture could never be just for any human wrongdoing.  For the aforementioned reason, this is true independent of whether Yahweh is the uncaused cause or morality otherwise overlaps with what the Bible describes; it would be true by logical necessity if morality exists at all, though it is not true by strict logical necessity that anything really is good or evil.  Killing people illicitly could not deserve eternal torture.  If morality exists, since eternal torture would be the ultimate sin, anyone who wishes it upon others would deserve to die or even be killed for being so stupid and cruel.  Unfortunately for my preferences, the Bible does not say that killing them like the insects they are for their irrationalistic beliefs is justice for them in this life.  Their killing comes later.

There is a kind of asinine hypocrisy I have repeatedly encountered in America where someone is likely to be considered righteous by at least many Christians for wishing eternal torture upon someone else while thinking that the mere killing of a human in this life is the most egregious sin one could commit against them.  Evangelicals are often like this: they erroneously think murder is the worst one could do to a person but they vehemently endorse eternal conscious torment rather than Biblical annihilationism.  It is why they tend to verbally address abortion more than prison rape or domestic abuse or the tortures of the ancient and modern world.  This is backwards regardless of whether the Biblical deity is the real uncaused cause.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html

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

Technology: Morally And Pragmatically Neutral

For all the potential dangers and incredibly exaggerated negative reputation (in some circles) of technology, it is, unless the unprovable idea of technology being intrinsically evil is true, a wholly neutral thing.  This would be the Biblical position on the matter and the rational one independent of Biblical doctrines.  Providing many workplace, social, and other benefits, it would have to be used maliciously, deceptively, or in some other morally erroneous way--if these things are immoral in the first place--to be evil.  If anything, a lesser technological development is far more unsafe than the alternative, and technology can always neutralize plenty of the hurtful uses of other technology.  Yes, there is the capacity for digital privacy breaches, mass media deception, reckless or unjust killing by drones or firearms, and so on.

It is still absolutely neutral in itself as far as pragmatic outcomes goes and every potential harm is really either about how technology is used or it is accompanied by an equal or greater benefit.  Cellular phones can be used to arrange adulterous interactions or promote lies through messaging or broader online functionality, and they can be hacked by outsiders with the intent to abduct someone or maliciously spy on them, but they can also enable close friends to hear each other's voices across great distances and summon emergency personnel.  Firearms can be used to engage in robbery, murder, and more, but they can also be used for the purposes of self-defense or hunting animals for food.  Vehicles can be used to recklessly destroy lives and property, or they can be used for safe transportation and personal enjoyment without the illicit endangerment of life or property.

Technology does not worsen human behavior because only humans or literal mind control from external sources could do that.  What it can do is provide already irrational, wicked people new avenues to express their own errors and sins, or they entice themselves into using technology for immoral or asinine ends.  Surveillance and communication technology can also expose human behaviors that would already be present anyway, and although this enhanced level of documentation or visibility via photography, social media, and the general Internet can feed into certain people's desire for notoriety even when it is obtained by being stupid and evil, it cannot be responsible.

In truth, it is surveillance and communication technology that allows for people to be more safe in various ways.  A criminal (and I mean a criminal under the Torah's laws rather than under the meaningless constructs of human laws) could evade detection in spite of things like security cameras and cell phones that typically make their efforts far more difficult, but the measures they must take to avoid being caught are much more rigorous than those a less technologically developed society would require.  As for non-criminal dangers and inconvenient situations, it is easier than it would otherwise be, again thanks to things like wireless communication between devices such as cell phones, to call or text for help.

Whoever complains about technology is often really objecting to how it it used and then confusing the outcome, perhaps one that they only subjectively dislike instead of one that is objectively destructive or evil, for technology itself.  In other cases, it might be emotionalistic hatred of technology that is not presented in the guise of anything else (to the objector themself or to others).  Additionally, nostalgia for a less technologically developed time could be at the heart of such a stance.  This would again be about embracing fallacies and subjective preference, but it is a possible motivation.  There is no such thing as logical proof we can access or even mere evidence in favor of using technology being inherently evil.  It is regardless not harmful until used in such a manner.