Supporting A Business

As more businesses have their reported dealings or worldviews exposed which the owners would rather keep from the public, the same internet that allows this information to spread allows individual consumers to communicate their intentions to boycott specific companies or industries.  It is not the case that whether a company has truly committed terrible deeds can be known from such hearsay, but every claim of this kind is evidence for one of two things: a company has mistreated its workers or consumers or someone has lied about the matter.  Though it cannot be proven, what if the first of these two possibilities is actually correct--or simply seems to be correct in light of testimonial evidence?

It is logically possible for the leadership, workers, and customers of a business to avoid mistreating each other on every level, but how should a person handle a business with a leader who is content to exploit everyone he or she can as long as they can obtain profits for a time?  So much of corporate oppression can be hidden from media attention, at least for a time, and it is consumer money that feeds every company one way or another.  Companies cannot survive without consumer purchases, and consumers who hear about charges against specific companies might not be eager to buy from them until the misdeeds cease.  The important issue, though, is not whether consumers are comfortable exchanging their money for company products/services, but whether this would actually be evil.

First of all, buying something permissible from a company without awareness of evidence that the organization is engaging in some evil behavior or plan cannot be immoral, for unless a person is aware of the injustice and supports this immorality or does not care, the consumer is not himself or herself doing anything morally vile.  The same would be true of employees working for a company that they have not seen the real nature of, even if they are somehow partaking in the immoral corporate practices unintentionally, without knowing the full scope of what their work enables the company to carry out.  A lack of knowledge (not that people can even know that deeds they see with their own sense of sight are not illusions of perception) of what a company is doing, unless someone has only not noticed it due to philosophical stupidity or negligence, exempts someone from being guilty of the business's faults.  They are not guilty in this case of unintentional sin.

If the company's misdeeds are publicly acknowledged, is it then always immoral for consumers to buy from them or for employees to work there?  That would depend on what exactly the work or product/service entails.  If the work itself is inherently wrong, then of course all who voluntarily work there or seek out the company's services are unjust.  An example would be if murder is wrong and a company allows clients to pay for the chance to kill people, or if torture is wrong and a company allows clients to do whatever they want to someone as long as they have money to offer for the opportunity.  However, if something else is problematic, such as a corporate leader exploiting his or her employees as they perform tasks that are not actually immoral, then no, a consumer is not automatically expressing tolerance towards employee oppression just because they purchase bread or coffee from a specific brand.  A person who needs a specific medicine to stay alive is not sinning, not by Biblical standards, if they must pay a horrendous company for that medicine, for instance.

Just as watching a film is not the same as supporting whatever worldview it endorses, buying from a company is not necessarily the same as supporting that company in any sense beyond begrudgingly or unknowingly giving a company money as the leadership clings to irrationality and injustice.  There is not by necessity any deep allegiance to the worldview of the executives or any support for greed (or any other sin) being expressed.  It would be the company leadership and any worker who directly contribute to any immoral deeds knowingly or eagerly who are in the wrong, not always the consumers who need or want what the company has to offer, given that the product or service is not by default something immoral.

Game Review--Mario + Rabbids Sparks Of Hope (Switch)

"The Rabbids and Lumas were saved, but something terrible happened.  An enormous blast of energy.  The Rabbids and Lumas were flung far away . . . where they were merged together, creating a new, powerful species now known as Sparks."

--Jeanie, Sparks of Hope

In Sparks of Hope, the galaxy is threatened by Cursa, a tentacled cosmic entity that spreads a substance called Darkmess across planets to alter their atmospheres.  Greater freedom to move around in the overworld and free movement within a circular area, not a grid like in Kingdom Battle, is only fitting for a game that expands to different "planets" as Mario faces a new foe.  As a game, Sparks of Hope offers stellar improvements over its predecessor.  Rosalina also returns!  She has otherwise been relegated mostly to spin-offs like Mario Kart and Mario Party following her debut in Super Mario Galaxy, so Sparks of Hope is significant in this aspect.  At first, she will not be prominent despite the Rabbid version of her appearing on the game's cover.  Only closer to the end of the game does she make her actual appearance as a vital part of the plot.

Production Values

In the chronological sequence they are visited, the five main planets are a beach world with an obstructed sun, a snowy planet with unnaturally fierce weather, a forest land with trees drained of color and vitality, a world of flowers and honey suffering drought, and a desert realm with a raging storm.  The graphical presentation of each setting is colorful, unique, and of a generally high visual quality.  Mario and his companions have to resolve the central meteorological or biological issue facing each planet to progress to Cursa's realm, the final location of the game and a much shorter one than the rest.  Accomplishing primary objectives triggers massage aesthetic changes.  In the third of the aforementioned worlds, once the drained vegetation has its color restored as part of the plot, the landscape brightens immensely.  This change combined with the ability to move around more freely outside of battles as Darkmess tentacles are defeated makes it as if the planet is almost entirely new.  There is full voice acting for AIs called Beep-O and Jeanie, with miscellaneous other characters receiving partially voice acted lines--the onscreen text will continue past where their voices stop.  With things like some texture proximity issues aside, the production values are largely excellent!

Gameplay

The gameplay is divided between third-person navigation through each planet's overworld and combat within individual battles.  In the overworld, the hovering robot Beep-O assists the player's chosen character, and "he" is eventually equipped with a sonic wave emitter that can destroy or move certain objects and then a separate means of revealing hidden walkways and objects.  You can find red coin, green coin, and blue coin challenges in various places--for instance, blue pipes transport you to special chambers where obtaining all the blue coins within a time limit awards you a planet coin, a chest of signature Mario gold coins, and a database entry for the Galactic Atlas.  Planet coins are received for completing other optional missions, like defeating three groups of Goombas on the first world of the game.  In this overworld perspective, touching enemies triggers fights, although you can flee before leaping into them.

The movement changes drastically should you fight: there is entirely free movement within the character's finite radius each turn, but attacking locks the character in place with an exception of one character after a certain skill is purchased.  If they have action points remaining (there are two actions allowed per turn, along with a dash attack if there is an enemy within range and if the main attack has not rooted them in place), they can still use an item or a Spark.  The Sparks are the game's new class of allies that provide bonuses to specific attacks or defensive capacities.  While Sparks are leveled up by spending star bits, all playable party characters have synchronized XP meters, so there is no need to rotate the equipped party members just for the sake of leveling up.  They all progress to the next level at the same time with the clearing of fights.  They also can all be healed outside of fights by spending a flat fee of coins or at the screen immediately before officially starting a combat arena for the same cost.

As for the combat itself, each character has their own strengths and attack option.  Rabbid Mario strikes close enemies with gauntlets and damages outliers with the shockwaves.  Peach uses an umbrella to deal damage in a conal pattern, potentially hitting many enemies up close and from a distance in a single blast, and the elevation of her firing mechanism means she can directly hit enemies behind partial cover.  Mario himself wields twin energy guns that he can shoot at separate enemies or one unit.  Newcomer Edge has a sword she can hurl like a boomerang at a particular opponent, dealing damage to any foe that happens to be struck along the way there and back.  Luigi is best from a great distance, since his bow and arrows deal more damage if he is further from the target.  All the rest has some distinctive stack and special ability.  An example would be how Rabbid Rosalina can lock enemies in place for a given duration unless the player attacks them first.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

As Mario games so often begin, Sparks of Hope opens in the Mushroom Kingdom.  However, Peach is not kidnapped this time; Rabbid Peach is briefly captured by a shadowy ray-like being that flies.  The protagonists rescue her before traveling to a series of planets in their starship to gather enough of a material called Darkmess to reach the realm of Cursa, an enigmatic cosmic entity that has polluted each planet with Darkmess and altered the local weather conditions.  Along the way, they acquire Rabbid Rosalina, who says she must give Rosalina urgent news.

Intellectual Content

Beyond the strategic aspects of the combat, which can be fairly difficult at times, there are sporadic elements of satire or light brushes against genuinely deep philosophical issues.  Jeanie, the new AI companion alongside Beep-O, talks of "her" own existence being verified when her software becomes active for the first time, which is glossed over due to the game's genre and target audience despite phenomenological self-evidence being of the utmost epistemological significance after logical axioms.  As far as I know, however, this is the first Mario game I have played that references scientific concepts (still a subcategory of philosophical concepts) like joules and the universe existing for billions of years.  Jeanie does call a Darkmess Tentacle "the wellspring of this supernatural storm", so she at least does not commit to the errors of metaphysical naturalism as she speaks of such scientific matters!

Conclusion

Sparks of Hope is a superb return for the Mario + Rabbids crossover franchise.  The overworld is broader, the combat is smoother, and the story once again incorporates the more cosmic presences of Mario games thanks to Rosalina and the Lumas at last.  Some of the side quests are genuinely clever or quite prolonged, like "Bury the Hatchet" with its satire of the American legal process.  Thanks to a completion time of around 20-30 hours--I passed 30 hours without reaching 100% of all optional quests--it is not a short game either.  Kingdom Battle has its strengths, and Sparks of Hope surpasses the former game as a whole.  The world of Mario is persistently diverse and creative!

Content:

 1.  Violence:  There is minimal violence from physically dashing into enemies and shooting them (or vice versa).  Defeated enemy units dissipate into black ash-like substance and vanish entirely.

Selfish Reasons For Caring For Workers

Doing even that which is just and obligatory cannot make someone a just, righteous person if they are only doing it for personal gain, for social manipulation, or for emotionalistic satisfaction.  It is not enough to do something that is morally good by happenstance, with philosophical apathy, or for the sake of appearing like a moral giant to others when there is selfishness within.  Unless one's motives are to understand truth and live as one should in light of it, the only way one could perform a righteous act correctly is having the proper motivations.  Every individual has the power to keep their motives as secret as they can, but there is no such thing as being a good person only to impress or sway other people.  If moral obligations exist, submitting to them and fulfilling them is good in itself, and it is delusional to think other people's perceptions of oneself could possibly matter at all.

As impersonal as some of them can be, businesses are comprised of individuals.  Companies cannot exist without individuals.  Individuals inside a company, or at least a single one, are necessary for there to even be a business, as are people outside of the company who can purchase from it.  Whatever moral obligations there are would by necessity be binding for everyone in a business, from the lowest "unskilled" worker to the highest executives.  Just as some individual people, for reasons that have nothing to do with occupation or corporate profit, make a habit of anything from fighting illicit discrimination to helping the poor and beyond to gain public recognition, the leaders of certain companies might strive to do things which are ultimately morally good, but with a desire for nothing more than to be perceived as good.  After all, a public that has favorable perceptions of a company is less likely to oppose it or stir up controversy.

Livable compensation, paid or unpaid time off, healthcare benefits, a welcoming atmosphere, and more are not beyond any thriving corporation's reach if only they were managed in such a way as to prioritize worker wellbeing; there is no excuse for why the leaders of major companies do not even consistently offer their workers survivable wages/salaries and the full acknowledgment that professional work is but a relatively trivial part of life compared to so much else.  Even when there are steps in a more humanitarian direction, including anything from Amazon's company-wide minimum wage of $15 an hour (just over double the minimum wage in some states) to general promises to be more environmentally friendly, a company that is only trying to use fair pay, work-life balance, diversity, environmentalism, or any other Biblically good thing for mere public relations purposes is not truly an ethical workplace.

What about companies that might pay people well only so they might spend more on the products or services produced by their own workplaces?  Some businesses would very likely remove almost all appealing or obligatory aspects of how they treat their workers (or consumers) if only there would be no outcry from those inside or outside the companies, and when a company only treats its workers like holistic humans when they are pressured to by a hostile public or by legislation, it is almost certainly the case that its owner(s) would have continued whatever exploitation they were practicing if they could do it unopposed.  Caring for workers on a financial or emotional level is woefully incomplete if the goal is only to appease people to generate more revenue or remove obstacles to corporate success.  Like other non-rationalists, executives and managers who are concerned only with personal gain might unintentionally or egoistically do that which is just without a devotion to reason or morality.  How they can profit is prioritized over truths like the secondary nature of work to other things or the fact that worker exploitation is not justified by utilitarian or emotionalistic benefit.

Miscellaneous Torah Denounciations Of Authoritarianism

Is the Torah's moral philosophy authoritarian?  Does it require that people submit to human authority figures simply because they are in authority as a political figure, an employer, and so on?  Absolutely not, or not in the sense that many might believe.  The closest thing to a passage that could be directly misinterpreted to promote true authoritarianism, solely by people making assumptions since the words do not state or imply such a thing, is Deuteronomy 17:12.  Here, showing contempt for a judge of God's laws, such as by mocking them, is mentioned as a capital sin.  You can see the words below:

Deuteronomy 17:12--"Anyone who shows contempt for the judge or for the priest who stands ministering there to the Lord your God is to be put to death.  You must purge the evil from Israel."

However, the idea that the Bible demands authoritarian submission to other people not only contradicts other very anti-authoritarian passages in the prescriptions of the Torah, but it also misaligns with Deuteronomy 17:12 itself.  The judges are only to be respected beyond their base human rights because they are enforcing the penalties corresponding to God's just nature, not because they have power within an arbitrary human construct.  The evil is in disregarding this for the sake of personal whims.  In reality, Deuteronomy 17:12 teaches that it is obligatory to submit to authorities who hold and exercise power legitimately.

The only authorities to always be submitted to are logic, God, and morality, none of which are human.  Logical axioms are true in themselves and thus ground all other necessary truths of reason.  The Bible never directly acknowledges them in the way I do in my speech and writing, but it does not have to, since they are true independent of God (as would have to be the case with necessary truths) and many individual doctrines of the Bible are overtly consistent with logical axioms, the criteria for it being possible for something to be true.  Morality, unlike logic, only exists if the uncaused cause has a moral nature, as Yahweh is said to, and morality is by nature what should be done.  God, if his nature is moral goodness, deserves universal human submission due to his status as a rather different metaphysical being altogether, but human authorities do not.

People must on an individual basis be in alignment with/submission to logic and morality in order to even possibly deserve submission from others.  If they are not rationalistic, they are irrational fools, and if they are evil, they deserve opposition.  If morality does not exist, no one deserves anything because there are no rights and obligations.  It could simply never be mandatory to submit to evil people because they are in authority!  Now that I have touched on what is logically true about authority whether or not the Bible is itself true and clarified the real teaching of Deuteronomy 17:12, let us examine example after example of anti-authoritarian passages in the laws revealed by Yahweh in the Old Testament, one of the places where some readers might expect to find the Bible most explicitly embracing authoritarianism.

For starters, slaves/servants must be treated well within certain boundaries or else they are entitled to immediate emancipation (and they are allowed to leave at whim in practically all circumstances without opposition according to Deuteronomy 23:15-16).  They are not told to lovingly submit to further abuse to win their masters over to a worldview or personality shift or any other such asinine idea.  All of this is antithetical to the idea that masters and mistresses are Biblically permitted to do whatever they wish to their male or female slaves because they are slaves, as if being in a position of power over somebody else logically entails that whatever one does must be righteous or at least not irrational or evil:

Exodus 21:26-27--"'An owner who hits a male or female slave in the eye and destroys it must let the slave go free to compensate for the eye.  And an owner who knocks out the tooth of a male or female slave must let the slave go free to compensate for the tooth.'"

Employers are not to be regarded as always in the right or deserving of special protection from being identified as agents of injustice, when applicable, or singled out for condemnation before God and others.  Employer authoritarianism, like parental authoritarianism, is rather rampantly accepted in many evangelical circles I have interacted with, yet it is directly rejected by passages like the following:

Deuteronomy 24:14-15--"Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner residing in one of your towns.  Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it.  Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin."

Whether they are employers or not, the wealthy, who have greater material resources and thus the time and money to entrench themselves in political power, are never to be favored over the poor, or vice versa, which would be illogical in itself and contrary to Biblical doctrines like that of the base equality of all people (Genesis 1:27).  There should be no discrimination in favor of them or automatic positive disposition towards them due to their belongs and any social power they acquired through them:

Leviticus 19:15--"'"Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly."'"

This is no less true of the king (or queen), for monarchs and by extension other rulers are never declared exceptions, and Deuteronomy emphatically insists rulers are not exceptions--just after Deuteronomy 17:12, where it is said that anyone who disrespects the judges enforcing Yahweh's laws is to be executed.  Again, this is utterly opposed to human authoritarianism.  The king or queen should be put to death or otherwise punished exactly like any of their subjects:

Deuteronomy 17:18-20--"When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the Levitical priests.  It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites and turn from the law to the right or to the left.  Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel."

This would already follow from Deuteronomy's overt tenet of showing no partiality because partiality is inconsistent with true justice, and it is also inconsistent with alignment with reason.  Only assumptions or biases would ever compel someone to show partiality in the sort of way condemned here, which means anyone who does so has betrayed reason as well as violated the Torah's moral prescriptions:

Deuteronomy 16:19-20--"Do not pervert justice or show partiality.  Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the innocent.  Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you."

In these and other ways, the laws of the Torah, which the text specifically ascribes to God and not to the preferences of Moses or any other Israelite, very obviously condemn many uses of power to treat others in particular ways.  There is no call for universal submission of slaves to masters/mistresses, the poor to the rich, subjects to rulers, and more.  On the contrary, Mosaic Law goes out of its way to repeatedly emphasize that there must be no escape for the wicked based upon their social standing, gender, nationality, wealth, or political power.  It is not sinful to have authority, as long as it is not seized on the basis of irrelevant factors like gender and race, but absolutely no one should submit to anyone who is irrational or unrighteous.  At best, this is optional.  Authoritarianism is utter heresy against the necessary truths of rationalism and heresy against genuine Biblical doctrine.

The Prophet Samuel's Honest Manipulation

Like how God telling Isaiah to go naked for three years (Isaiah 20:1-6) and King Saul to kill the Amalekite men, women, and children (1 Samuel 15:1-3) would mean that according to these passages alone, each of these behaviors is not evil, God telling Samuel in 1 Samuel 16 how to manipulate others without lying to them would mean that this is not a Biblically immoral course of action.  Because this narrative directly says that God authorized Samuel to do this, the often applicable clarification that a narrative solely mentioning human actions does not in itself teach anything about their moral nature is irrelevant.  1 Samuel 16 ascribes the instructions to tell the truth partially for the sake of honest manipulation to its perfect God.  Indeed, it is because Saul neglected to kill all the Amalekites he could between Havilah and Shur (1 Samuel 15:1-9) that Samuel has to anoint a new figure as king, hence why he is cautious about visiting Bethlehem to begin with, for he fears Saul:

1 Samuel 16:1-5--"The Lord said to Samuel, 'How long will you mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him as king over Israel?  Fill your horn with oil and be on your way; I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem.  I have chosen one of his sons to be king.'

But Samuel said, 'How can I go?  If Saul hears about it, he will kill me.'  

The Lord said, 'Take a heifer with you and say, "I have come to sacrifice to the Lord."  Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what to do.  You are to anoint for me the one I indicate.'

Samuel did what the Lord said.  When he arrived at Bethlehem, the elders of the town trembled when they met him.  They asked, 'Do you come in peace?'

Samuel replied, 'Yes, in peace; I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.  Consecrate yourselves and come to the sacrifice with me.'  Then he consecrated Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice."

Samuel does not lie in this passage, and God does not tell him to lie.  There are verses detailing how people lie in very particular circumstances and are actually rewarded by God for this, as with the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah, who lie to Pharaoh when they are commanded to kill all male Hebrew babies after they are born to save lives (Exodus 1:15-21).  While casual and general lying is something immoral to avoid outside of scenarios where one is averting a lesser evil (Leviticus 19:11), the true universal, more heinous sin of lying against others has to do with false testimony (Exodus 20:16, 23:1, 7, Deuteronomy 19:15-21, and so on).  However, Samuel did not need to resort to lying to preserve his life in 1 Samuel 16.

Samuel does, however, state the truth about his arrival in a way meant to manipulate a certain reaction so that his safety is promoted.  He does not say all that is true about his intentions, and he does not have to in order to avoid lying gratuitously.  Selective affirmation of the truth is not lying no matter what some people feel or prefer about the matter.  This is not condemned directly or by extension on any level in Yahweh's detailed moral laws.  People of lesser ideological accuracy and moral character do not deserve to not be manipulated as suits the needs of the superior, given that the latter individuals are not themselves believing anything illogical or behaving immorally in the process.  Since Saul sinned by intentionally failing to kill all the Amalekites between Havilah and Shur, God rejects him as king in favor of a morally superior candidate (1 Samuel 15:13-28).

As a vital aside, lying is not always the same as successful deception, as I have clarified before, since deception involves someone believing the lie.  Thus, although the guilt for a sin always lies with the sinner alone, someone who is lied to is not deceived unless they allow themself to be by assuming that something unverifiable that another person tells them is true.  If it is not a matter of strict logical necessity that another person does not have to articulate in order for oneself to discover it, then it cannot be known from the testimony of others, though their statements are a form of evidence.  Thus, to believe them, one would have to deviate from strict adherence to logic by making an assumption--examples include if another person tells you they love you or that they visited a given location last week without you present and you believe them.  Either way, manipulation is not Biblically evil in itself, as I have relished in pointing out here over the years.

Needless lying is always morally wrong according to Leviticus, but not telling the entire truth is logically distinct from lying even when done for self-benefit, like it or not, independent of whether morality exists or what that morality would entail.  Biblically, there are many cases where there is no obligation whatsoever to tell the entire truth about one's intentions or actions as opposed to the entire truth about whatever one does speak on (as long as the aforementioned sort of exceptions is not relevant).  Moreover, while it is absolutely contrary to the irrationalistic concept of showing equal love and respect to all people (no matter their philosophies or deeds) by default as is embraced by some evangelicals, manipulating morally inferior people casually or regularly could not possibly be evil.

Cosmic Horror: The Cosmos And Beyond

Someone stranded in the vacuum of space or confronted with a raging ocean storm might very well find the natural world frightening.  Natural phenomena like earthquakes and tsunamis can also be destructive and horrifying, but they are hardly representative of any sort of thorough cosmic horror.  Not even extinction events or the fates of the universe proposed by secular scientists begin to approach the peak of cosmic horror in literature, cinema, and gaming.  Indeed, particular events like the Permian mass extinction would have been quite harmful and terrifying to onlooking creatures with the capacity for more than passive sensory perception, with oceans losing the majority of their oxygen content, severe global warming getting triggered by elevated carbon dioxide levels, and a great deal of biota being removed from Earth for good.  It is nonetheless a material process that ends terrestrial life and thus earthly suffering.

As for how the universe might come to an end or fall into a very different state, the heat "death" of the universe (it could involve the continuation of matter but the extinguishing of starlight) might scare people even though it is supposed to be many billions of years in the future, but it is still a material event, and one that would require the death of life beforehand for maximum entropy to be reached.  If the Big Crunch is true, the expansion of the universe comes to an end and is reversed.  The Big Rip would entail that the gravitational force holding atoms together is overpowered by the expansion of the universe, and atomic particles drift so far apart that they lose their current structure.  The notion of things like these happening might stir up anxiety in someone's mind in spite of the great amount of time between now and then, and yet this, having to do with the cosmos, is not quite what cosmic horror as a whole or at its best is about.

None of this would compare to eldritch beings, if they exist/existed, especially the more malevolent or supernaturally powerful ones, which will always be by far the superior feature of cosmic horror over the mere backdrop of an inanimate, "uncaring," or chaotic material universe.  That conscious or seemingly conscious superhuman beings know of humans with cruel intent or regard us as we commonly regard ants or bacteria pertains to a far more existential kind of horror than the vastness, emptiness, or hostility of various aspects of the natural world.  While the phrase cosmic horror contains a word that is sometimes used in reference to the literal physical universe, as a genre, it is about far more than a personally unfortunate natural disaster or merely what physics could do to the universe in the distant future.

Cosmic horror in its greatest and purest forms is scarcely about the universe, if it is about them in any direct sense at all.  It is about the metaphysical or epistemological nature of reality being worthy of dread in far more foundational ways.  Mother of Stephen King's Revival, although elements of the way she and her seeming afterlife realm of the Null are portrayed in the novel are at most illusory [1], is an entity more Lovecraftian than some of Lovecraft's own more mainstream icons, and the sort of cosmic horror explored in the novel--an allegedly eternal afterlife of amoral suffering inflicted by beings more powerful than humans--towers over anything in the natural world.  Similarly, a deity that hates but recognizes the intrinsic truth of logical necessities and torments people in an afterlife forever for seeking them would, though not conventionally Lovecraftian, be a source of cosmic horror extinctions and smallness before the universe could never rival.

To really dive into the most significant forms of cosmic horror, a work would not even be about the universe at all.  What is or could be beyond the cosmos could always be objectively more severe.  Many things about, for instance, an afterlife are logically possible.  Even if they turn out to not be true, they could have been because they do not contradict logical axioms.  Moreso than the awakening of Cthulhu or even the awakening of Azathoth, which supposedly would end the entire cosmos altogether in Lovecraft's stories, an afterlife has more potential for sheer terror than anything else.  The enormous size of the universe in outer space, the overhyped mysteriousness of the quantum scale, the viciousness of miscellaneous non-human animals, the uncontrollable onslaught of meteorological phenomena, and so on might be fear-inducing, but they are nothing compared to other logical possibilities that are supernatural in nature.  The universe in its entirety is incapable of rivaling spiritual entities or states of experience that are by necessity either existent or at least logically possible.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-kind-of-non-theological-hell-mother.html

Marital Intimacy

Marriage has the potential to see two people bonded to each other in rationality, sincerity, and joy across different categories as much as they allow themselves to be.  Since people can lovingly give themselves in total openness about themselves to one another, the intimacy can be extreme in its depths and in the comfort this brings to both people.  Though the epistemological limitations of human nature cannot be shed so that a person sees right into the mind of their marriage partner, marriage can come as close to this as is logically possible.  The intimacy that is possible goes far beyond mere sexual bonding.  There is far more to individuals than there sexuality, so there is inevitably more to married couples than their sexual relationship with each other.

This is why sexual intimacy--and interpersonal acts of sexual contact always involve a degree of physical intimacy even if there is relational detachment--does not have the power to cure a marriage of woes that are beyond the scope of the sexual aspects of the relationship [1].  If a couple is intentionally intimate only on a sexual level, however regularly, especially if there is no independent or transcendent relational connection, affection, or commitment, the marriage is practically as good as dead already.  Sexual intimacy in a relationship is certainly a vital thing for people who are not asexual; indeed, the sexual component (which is not necessarily just about having sex) is all that separates the likes of dating or marriage relationship from a platonic friendship.  There are far more important qualities for a couple to share together.

Without alignment on an intellectual level, that of sharing a worldview that also must both true and verifiable for the relationship to not be based on the false and destructive errors of assumptions, philosophical apathy, or subjectivism [2], a relationship is always both invalid and handicapped.  A couple united in their allegiance to falsehood or lack of concern for foundational truths has betrayed reality, which means that the only basis for their relationship is error and emotionalism.  Aside from their worldviews being false or assumed by necessity, this means that the relationship is actually superficial and hindered in the scope of its flourishing as well.  There is no deeper sort of intimacy than that of friends or romantic couples who are both devoted to the rationalistic truths which transcend all other things, including sociality and psychological connection.

Of course, philosophical/intellectual alignment in the truth (anything else is wrong and therefore utterly baseless) and mutual celebration of this is not all that it takes to establish the widest, deepest composite of intimacies.  Without genuine relational attachment and love, the union is empty in a different sense, a hollow social arrangement that one or both parties are only passively drifting along life in.  It should not be difficult for someone to see how this cheats both halves of a marriage out of a relationship that reaches greater peaks, bringing with it more penetrating levels of personal connection that elevate the marriage as a whole.  For a relationship to reach its full potential, there must be first recognition of and commitment to the objective philosophical truths of reason, then personal connection (the next most vital general category), and then sexual intimacy within this context.

The absence of any of these qualities necessitates an obstacle, whether it is acknowledged or not, to the holistic, true intimacy that a maximally thriving marriage--one thriving in its submission to rationality, mutuality, affection, and openness--allows for.  Take away any of these characteristics of the relationship, and the marriage is either based on something philosophically invalid (untrue or epistemologically unprovable and thus unjustifiable as a belief) or at the least has not reached life-giving unity to the largest extents possible.  Even if only for the idiotic sake of blind emotionalistic fulfillment, it would still always ironically be in a person's best interests to seek out and cultivate such marriage relationships if they do desire to marry, for, though they could never achieve this status while holding to emotionalism, only this kind of marriage is of the greatest potency.  What sort of self-obstructing person would intentionally scheme to go into marriage strictly to waste their own time?

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-limited-power-of-sex-to-heal.html

[2].  See here:

A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/06/rationalism-key-to-stable-marriage.html

B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/01/relationships-built-on-rationalism.html

The Social World And The Natural World

Unless the laws of nature change, which is possible unlike with the laws of logic, they are constant and do not depend on the actions of humans or any other animal.  Matter will--again, unless the unlikely logical possibility of scientific laws changing comes about--decay under the same conditions in the same ways at the same rate.  Objects will continue to be gravitationally attracted to other objects with greater mass (like a planet), and so on.  The laws of logic transcend matter and mind and govern all other things, true and unchanging by their own inherent nature, and the laws of physics cannot have this status; they are not metaphysically true by necessity nor epistemologically self-evident.  Still, they persist without dependence on human activity.  It is physical matter subject to these scientific laws that people use to form the buildings and tangible property of their cultures.

In contrast, culture itself is always established or contrived by social beings.  Human societies are not exceptions.  As long as an arrangement or characteristic is not logically impossible because it does not contradict logical axioms, any social structure can be set up.  This does not mean, of course, that there can be no moral problems with a given society--for instance, it is logically possible for a community/nation to discriminate against people of a given skin color, but this does not make it either rational or morally valid on the part of the people believing or practicing this.  To go back to the relationship between nature and culture, the difference is that the former is a physical world governed by seemingly constant patterns of "behavior" and the latter is entirely constructed by social beings, and indeed only can exist when multiple beings interact with each other.

People might not be able to do anything about how the negative charge buildup in storm clouds is attracted to protons in the ground, but people can change their economies, leaders, and hierarchies.  There is nothing about monarchy, democracy, communism, capitalism, patriarchy, and all other such systems, whether they are rational or irrational, righteous or evil (or amoral/permissible), that is inevitable in the sense that there is no way it could not be altered or substituted for another such system.  Some non-rationalists might suppose that their society must already be structured correctly in the sense of rationally or righteously because it is what they are accustomed to, and some, whether they like it or not, might believe that various characteristics of their society cannot possibly be changed by someone with enough power or resolve.

Now, logically necessary truths about both nature and society in all their possible forms do not depend on either the cosmos or any being, much less cooperation or consensus between individuals.  Not even God can render that which cannot be false, the necessary truths of reason, untrue, nor can he make what is logically impossible true.  Even so, the way that human societies are structured is the product of how the beings within it set it up.  There is no such thing as societies facing unavoidable shifts from A to B or always remaining in one configuration for better or worse, because independent of whether a society is immoral and thus should be changed to any applicable extent, there is no logical necessity in a society being one way or another.  Although people cannot create anything contrary to logic like a country both with and without a monarch at once, a culture is whatever people otherwise fashion it to be.

Social customs are contrived by people and can be changed by people; laws of nature continue to govern events in the physical plane whether one wishes or not.  The natural world with all of its "behaviors" could cease only a moment from now, since there is no logical impossibility in this.  There is also no impossibility in those with power altering a society or someone else overpowering them to impose a new state of affairs.  The social world is a layer of reality that only exists in light of the relationship between two or more beings, something that is not physical or subject to the laws of nature.  Again, the social world can be changed by will and voluntary action.  The natural world and its laws, which themselves absolutely could change for reasons other than a shifting cultural direction, is the backdrop against which people can craft all sorts of valid or invalid social systems they could amend if they chose to.

The Torah On Prostitution

Rahab, a prostitute from the book of Joshua, is called an example of commitment to God in Hebrews 11:31 because she hid Israelite spies.  From this passage, one would not be able to tell if prostitution, the process of having sex in exchange for money, is sinful.  Rahab is said to have been a prostitute, and she is commended as righteous.  To find what the Bible foundationally says about the morality of prostitution, one would have to go to Mosaic Law, the only place in the entire Bible where a great many things are addressed.  Yes, prostitution is mentioned elsewhere, but sometimes either in narratives or in figurative language, not in the direct moral commands of Yahweh as described in the Torah.  This is where one would have to go to find the core details of what is said about the issue beyond things such as that a given person practiced this profession.

Making someone a prostitute, first of all, is evil (Leviticus 19:29).  As with rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27) in cases where mutual consent would make a sexual act adultery or some other capital sexual sin, forced prostitution, like forced labor on the Sabbath, would be a sin only for the perpetrator, not for the victim whatsoever.  No one forced into sexual activity is ever guilty whenever they are made to do anything at all, not even for a career of sex work (though not all sex work in the broadest sense is actually sinful, something I have somewhat touched upon before and will do again).  Leviticus 19:29's wording of not making one's daughter a prostitute would by necessity not be dependent on the age of one's child, in the sense of whether they are literally a child by age or only in the sense of one's offspring, nor would it be something that is truly about not treating one's children as opposed to everyone, and that means this treatment is no less abominable for sons or men.

The same right to not be made into a prostitute would be possessed by boys and men, for they too share God's image (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2) and can be prostitutes as well, though asinine gender stereotypes present men as sex-obsessed (rather than some men due to personality or upbringing/broader cultural conditioning they succumbed to) enough to pay for sex with women and as physically unattractive enough that women would supposedly never naturally seek out men for sexual activities due to finding their bodies sexually alluring, whether payment is involved or not.  All of this is nonsense.  The Bible itself even acknowledges male prostitutes along with female ones later in Deuteronomy 23:17-18, to be addressed soon.  The sexism inherent in assuming that a prostitute must be a woman because the profession is supposedly tied to a woman's non-existent stereotypical "nature" and that regards men as simultaneously hypersexual and unattractive is logically false independent of any moral realities.

This verse alone does not condemn prostitution as a whole, only forced prostitution, which would be a sin of the one who forced another into the position and not a sin of any violated man or women.  As for Deuteronomy 23:17-18, it focuses at first specifically on shrine prostitutes, or prostitutes who perform their role in association with religious rites or worship, but the second verse already brings clarity to how Yahweh despises the earnings of a prostitute altogether (it does mention the earnings of both genders, not that it would need to for one to be sinful by logical equivalence to the other).  By verse 18, it is not speaking of simply shrine prostitution being immoral.  The passage says that bringing the earnings of any prostitute in to God's house to pay a vow.  If the earnings of a prostitute are despised by God, as the verse states, then the activity of prostitution itself that generates the income would have to be immoral, not merely the bringing of the payments to some formal place of worship of Yahweh.

Separate from this, other verses in Leviticus teach that voluntary prostitution defiles the participant, something that could not be the case if a given deed is not morally wrong, at least in the context of the worldview espoused by the Bible.  In both Leviticus 21:7 and 9, someone who becomes a prostitute of their own volition is said to have defiled themself.  A priest's daughter who becomes a prostitute is even to be executed by burning (21:9).  Due to logical necessity (a thing that is evil and can be done by people of either gender must be evil for both) and the wording of Deuteronomy 23:17-18, not that the latter is necessary to realize this, the Biblical morality of voluntary prostitution is not different for men than for women, so a priest's son would deserve the same fate.  Yes, prostitution in all of its manifestations is Biblically sinful, though it is specifically prostitution by a priest's children that is said to merit capital punishment.  Unless someone commits adultery, incest, homosexual intercourse, or some other separate sexual sin as part of their prostitution, a prostitute does not necessarily deserve to be killed despite their sin making them deserve eventual biological death, the first death, and the literal second death in hell (Matthew 10:28, Revelation 20:15) as would all wrongdoers (Romans 6:23).

What Is Biblically Obligatory And Supererogatory

James 4:17 says that anyone who knows the good they ought to do and does not do it has sinned.  Since what is morally required, if such a thing exists, is morally required (this is true by logical necessity because a thing can only be what it is), failing to fulfill a genuine obligation would have to be immoral.  This does not and cannot mean that anything at all that is morally good, such as certain miscellaneous acts of kindness, is mandatory so that anyone who does not practice it has erred.  There are many examples of the sharp distinction between what is obligatory and supererogatory (good but not obligatory) in Christian ethics, either in the direct wording of the Bible or by logical extension.  In their irrationality, though, many modern Christians or pseudo-Christians I have interacted with actually dismiss what the Bible commands as irrelevant or optional and champion what is ultimately morally unnecessary as if it was actually the standard.  This is part of what Jesus condemned the Pharisees for (Matthew 15:1-20).

As for examples of what is optional but still good, giving servants/employees more than one regular, full day free of labor each week (Exodus 20:8-11, 23:12, Deuteronomy 5:12-15, and so on) is permitted, since it is not condemned directly or by the logically necessary ramifications of what is prescribed/condemned.  Still, only one day of rest is required per week for all people, which would mean that someone forcing or pressuring others to work every day is unjust.  Going beyond this is morally good as long as there is not the aim of somehow exploiting workers in doing so--such as by only giving them additional free time with the goal of holding onto more profits by not diverting more money to compensating workers, to the point of keeping them in poverty--but the Bible is explicitly clear about how no person has a human right to more than a single day for every week without any sort of professional labor.

For another example, the Bible does prescribe that husbands and wives not sexually neglect each other.  Exodus 21:10-11 addresses how a man who does this to his wife gives her the right to divorce him, and though this is the particular scenario mentioned in the text, Paul, like any rationalistic person would, recognized the logical equivalence of husbands and wives and the ramifications of Biblical tenets like those of Genesis 1:26-27, describing husbands and wives alike as having an obligation to not sexually deprive each other except by mutual consent and temporarily (unless they are both asexual or some other such thing).  However, this does not necessitate that spouses have sex or engage in other sexual activities with any specific frequency such as every day or two.  These passages only condemn sexual neglect.  A married man or woman could fulfill this obligation without having sex each day, which would be supererogatory--good or permissible, but not required.

It would also go above and beyond Biblical obligations for a farmer to leave half of their field, as opposed to the edges, unharvested so that the poor, the foreigner, and the widow can eat from it (Leviticus 19:9-10, 23:22, Deuteronomy 24:19-22).  There is nothing immoral about going further than the obligation mandates, for such expressions of generosity are simply an expanded version of the very same things that God demands, but it is nonetheless only the edges of a field that should, that must, be left for others.  It is sin, in all cultures and in all eras of history (Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Malachi 3:6, Matthew 5:17-19, and so on), for those with agricultural land who live alongside the societally disadvantaged to not passively or actively share what grows at the edges of their field, at a minimum by not harvesting it for themselves.  No one has done anything evil, in contrast, by not reserving half or all but the very center of their land's yield for the poor.

These are not the only examples within Biblical ethics of the exact line between what is obligatory and supererogatory.  The book of James does not contradict any of this.  If someone does not do what they should do (what they "ought to do"), which is the very way that the wording touches on the issue, they would by logical necessity be in moral error.  It is just that they have no obligation to go beyond this: it is untrue that they should strive to surpass this because doing so is by nature unnecessary and because then there would be no line one is morally free to stop at.  Anything that is good would be obligatory, which would lead to contradictory (and thus logically impossible) obligations since a person only has finite time and energy and could not do all good things at once, and certainly not without forfeiting their own ability to literally survive in the process, which would ironically stop them from doing good.

The Stupidity Of Age-Based Content Ratings

No boy or girl of a specific age is unable to handle content in art just because it is violent or sexual, as if sexual content in itself is either on par with or worse than illicit violence, as many American parents seem to think, and as if the Bible in any way condemns consuming such art as a child or an adult [1].  Their worldview and personality will dictate that.  Will a portrayal of a torturous execution traumatize then?  That purely depends on their nature as an individual, not on the actual content.  Will he or she react by finding unjust violence amusing in life as they observe or interact with others?  If so, it is not the fault of the entertainment, which cannot make a being believe or do anything [2].  Aging alone would not resolve this problem anyway.

All of these things are true.  In spite of this, content rating systems for video games, films, and television shows are based around age.  A T rating for a game is supposed to signify that someone should at least be a teenager, 13 or older, before playing a game.  An M rating supposedly means it is best to be 17 or older.  The PG-13 category for movies allegedly means a child should be 13 or above, while an R rating is the cinematic equivalent of M in the gaming industry.  Age, though, has nothing in itself to do with someone's philosophical maturity, psychological stability, or willingness/"ability" to "handle" artistic content like gore.  It never follows logically that a 13 or 17 year old has any worldview or mental trait, so age can only be irrelevant.

Of course, all of these age markers are also arbitrary, in addition to demonstrably having no necessary relation to a child's (or adult's) readiness to consume a specific work of art.  Why is 13 focused on instead of 12 so that there is a PG-12 rating?  Are all 12 year olds by logical necessity different than 13 year olds in this regard?  No, and it has nothing to do with age, but one child is not another, and so on this level as well, the non sequitur nature of the contrary ideology is erroneous.  Also, the rating systems of other countries exemplify how arbitrary these categories are--the Australian M rating has two levels, one for 15 and older that is merely advisory and one for 15 and older that requires a guardian to accompany the child.  The Australian R rating is for 18 and above, and the rating system applies to both video games and movies.

Age-based content ratings are intrinsically asinine for the aforementioned reasons already.  It is not that one set of cultural norms in this arena is or could be valid and the others are not.  People who think age-based content ratings are very important, such as for parents, nonetheless likely think the age recommendations of their culture are the right ones without even considering that all lines here are random by nature and made in denial of the objective truths of individualism.  It is the content that would matter anyway, not the age of the player or viewer, not that age entails any particular level of worldview or personal development or that one person's psychological state must be that of another.

Stupid people are stupid because it is easy or comforting.  I absolutely would not expect most parents to suddenly become rationalists when confronted about their idiocy and then immediately recognize the falsity of this sort of ageism.  Hiding children away from things that have no power to mold their philosophical stances unless they allow them to is not rational parenting.  Reductionistically treating a child as if he or she is just a certain number of years is not rational parenting.  In the same way, opposing the consumption of entertainment by one's child because one is subjectively offended by it or on any other fallacious grounds is irrational.  Age-based rating systems reflect errors and assumptions that contradict these logical facts.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/02/legalistic-parenting.html

[2].  See here:

A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/10/can-video-games-cause-violence.html

B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2019/08/digital-violence.html

All Mistreatment Is Abuse

Whatever the moral framework, abuse of a person is mistreating them.  The popular language of "sexual abuse" and "physical abuse" might lead some people to assume that abuse is just a given subcategory of wrongful treatment worse than the rest.  Abuse itself, though, is simply mistreatment.  Sexual abuse would be mistreating someone sexually, physical abuse would be mistreating someone physically, and so on with psychological/emotional or financial abuse.  Ultimately, any form of unjust behavior is abuse of someone or something.  Some are more vicious and blatant, like public and unjust torture, and others can be more easily concealed or overlooked, like private words of illicit contempt.

Not all abuse is equally severe or immoral, but it is all abuse.  Some categories are worse than others and certain potential abuses within each category are worse than others.  As I said, what actually is or is not abuse depends on the tenets of a specific worldview.  If nothing is immoral because all things are amoral, neither good nor evil, then nothing is abusive in a moralistic sense in reality, only according to various particular false philosophies.  However, some actions would still be cruel or exploitative.  The Christian worldview, a heavily moralistic one, acknowledges many things as abusive, including some that modern human rights advocates (who almost always just believe in rights on the basis of subjective conscience or arbitrary and irrelevant social conditioning) likely do not think are evil.

Biblically, it is abuse to intentionally strike or injure someone (Exodus 21:15, 18-19, 22, 26-27) outside of self-defense or justice (Exodus 21:23-25, 22:2-3, Leviticus 20:27, Deuteronomy 25:1-3, etc.), unless the blow is consensual (note the context of quarrelling in Exodus 21:18-19, rather than something like wrestling).  It is abuse to not pay one's workers before sunset the day their shift ends (Leviticus 19:13, Deuteronomy 24:14-15).  It is abuse to either kidnap someone (Exodus 21:16, Deuteronomy 24:7) or to steal mere possessions from them (Exodus 20:15, 22:1, 4, 7-9, Numbers 5:5-7).  It is abuse to make workers labor for seven days in the same week (Exodus 20:8-11, Deuteronomy 5:12-15).  Likewise, it is abuse, in a populated agricultural area, to not leave the edges of fields unharvested so that the poor can freely take from them (Leviticus 19:9-10).  Among other things, it is also abuse to not love by at least fulfilling one's obligations to them (Leviticus 19:18, Romans 13:8-10).  It is not abuse to stone somebody to death if their actions truly deserve it (Deuteronomy 13:6-10, 17:2-7, and so on), but to inflict greater and artificially prolonged suffering on someone who deserves death by stoning could only be abusive.

There is no single category of abuse (or, amorally, cruel/exploitative treatment), and this is by no means an exhaustive summary of the human rights (in select cases, the rights of all humans that are workers, parents, and so on) taught by the Bible.  For instance, there is also the right for spouses to not be sexually neglected (Exodus 21:10-11, 1 Corinthians 7:2-5), the right to not be made to serve as a soldier against one's will (Deuteronomy 20:5-9), the right to only be legally punished on the testimony of at least two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15), the right to not wear clothing (Genesis 2:25, Exodus 22:26-27, Deuteronomy 4:2), and the right for servants to be released after seven years with a generous severance arrangement (Deuteronomy 15:12-14).  Any sort of deviance from what is prescribed is abuse on Christian philosophy, no matter how much alleged Christians since the time of Christ have denied the ongoing nature of these obligations.

Now, some rights would necessarily exist if Christianity is true even if they are not explicitly mentioned in Yahweh's moral revelation.  That is, while no one can know what Biblical human rights there are from conscience or hearsay or preference or cultural norms (from nothing apart from reading the Bible while making no assumptions), the text does not have to list literally all of them for its worldview to entail them.  Exodus 21:26-27 says a male or female slave who is abused so that their eye is destroyed or their tooth is knocked out must go free.  The text gives examples of two particular physical abuses that are clearly subsets of a greater category that is condemned as a whole.  It does not mention other body parts, but it does not need to.  The same right to emancipation would also apply in other such cases of abuse.  Conceptual consistency and logical necessity reveal what rights follow from others or what scope a particular moral right has.  Whatever the right, though, to mistreat the person by not acting in accordance with their right is to deviate from one's obligations towards them, and this is abuse in every single instance.

Logic's Independence Of Matter

A tree, a diamond, a speck of sand, and so on are all dependent on the existence of matter, for they are physical things.  Matter could exist without there being any stones or grass or water, but there could not be stones, grass, or water without material substance.  This is as true of miniscule physical particles at the subatomic level as it is of the greatest nebulas and stars of the universe (or multiverse, if one exists).  Regardless of what that matter consists of at any scale from macroscopic landscapes or mountains to the smallest of applicable quantum units, if there is such a thing as elementary particles at all, it always has in common with other matter that they are physical substances that occupy metaphysical space, which is itself nonphysical since there would still be empty space where matter could go if there was no cosmos at all.

The entirety of the universe with all of its constituent parts is contingent; it did not have to exist and it could cease to be at any time because there is no necessity in its continued existence.  Yes, it has to exist right now in light of very particular truths [1], but it did not have to ever come into being at all.  Both a cosmos of practically any scale and the total absence of a physical world are logically possible because they do not contradict logical axioms either way.  With or without its presence, the laws of logic still exist.  It is still true by self-necessity that some truths or ideas follow from others, because otherwise, it would follow from the laws of logic being false that any individual logical truth is false.  It would still be intrinsically true that some things are inherently true, as the alternative would be that nothing is true, something that would itself be true.  It would still be true that contradictions are impossible because if they were not, then they would exclude logical necessity from being true, so the truth of non-contradiction would still be true even if it was false.

Reason exists independently of the material world because it cannot not be true, which in turn necessitates that it cannot not exist.  Thus, it is immaterial in nature because the natural world in all of its diverse forms is not something that exists because it could not be any other way.  This is required by the fact that the laws of logic, including both axioms and what follows from them, transcends all else.  If logic was immaterial, or even mental rather than mentally grasped, then it would not be true in itself.  Material objects and environments do not exist because they have to.  They exist because of preceding events that go all the way back to the Big Bang, which was directly or indirectly brought about by the uncaused cause.  The uncaused cause, or God, could have not existed, and there would simply be no cosmos.

Logic is true in itself, and God and nature rely on it rather than the other way around.  Neither of the other things or anything that depends on them could even be possible without being consistent with logical axioms.  Nature is what many people stop at because they can see and feel it.  In truth, it is something immaterial which is the very heart of reality, moreso than even God.  Reason could only be immaterial if it does not depend on anything else.  Being inherently true, it does exist in the real or hypothetical absence of all other things, physical or nonphysical.  This is not self-evident like the simple truth of axioms, but it does follow from them and other things that follow from them.  The immateriality of logic is of extreme significance because it is connected with that which could not be false.  The universe is governed by reason in that nothing in it could violate axioms, yet it is not reason.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html

Pleasure As An Escape

Some pleasures are exclusively mental, like that of existential empowerment derived from discovering logical necessities, and some are both bodily and mental, like the taste of food, for though the body's tongue physically contacts food, without the mind, there would be no experience of this contact or of the flavor.  In other words, some pleasures involve only the mind and its grasp of reason and itself, and some involve the mind and its senses, which in turn perceive the body and the seeming external world.  None of these truths are what hedonists are ultimately after, for they want pleasure for the sake of pleasure--or pleasure for the sake of escape, no matter how irrationally they approach this wondrous subject.

Alcohol, other drugs, sex or other forms of sexual expression, comfortable clothing, or immersion in entertainment like cinema and gaming to the point of neglecting more philosophically significant matters are some of the ways a hedonist might choose to live out their reductionistic bent towards pleasure.  None of these things, though they can be deeply pleasurable, must or can only be used in such a manner.  Motivated by more than just the allure of pleasant experiences, though, the most desperate hedonists are more foundationally after relief from pain.  Whatever their individual trials and tribulations, they do not want escapism for the sake of mere escapism.  They desire peace, healing, or distraction.

The truth is that a hedonistic approach to pleasure on an ideological or behavioral level, regardless of the method or type pursued, not only prolongs the problem(s), for one would be allowing them to remain or worsen by seeking emotionalistic/hedonistic escapism instead of addressing them, but it also increases the likelihood of more trials.  For example, someone who resorts to alcoholism in an attempt to cope with depression still has their depression to deal with, and accidentally getting into a vehicular accident while drunk would make their life situation worse.  Aside from even moral concerns and the irrationality of living for pleasure instead of for the necessary truths of logic (although one could find great pleasure in them), there is always the potential for great pragmatic harm.

Perhaps this comes to mind for some hedonists as they look to something like drugs to deliver them from problems that are independent of drug abuse or addiction, although a functional hedonist is always more likely to be a non-rationalist who does not know truth at all, as opposed to someone who knows logical truths but selectively or behaviorally disregards them.  If the thought of this truth, though they could not truly understand reality as a non-rationalist, does surface in someone's mind, pain might still be enough to persuade them to seek out pleasure in a toxic manner anyway.  After all, the goal of this kind of hedonist, who is less shallow than someone who leaps into hedonism with other intentions, is just to drown suffering out of their immediate consciousness (as much as they can) by triggering distracting but temporary states of mind.

The problems nonetheless are there when the hangover ends, the hangover itself entailing more difficulties.  They will not have disappeared just because someone indulges in promiscuous sex, yet troublesome emotional attachments and pregnancy might result.  Examples are in actuality unnecessary to know this objective truth: hedonism does not eliminate the problems it might be used to mask.  On the contrary, it can allow them to fester and can in one way or another lead to additional woes that a hedonist might mistake for more of a reason to seek pleasure in irrationalistic forms.  Pleasure by itself can provide a helpful escape of sorts from misery and to recognize, celebrate, and act on this is not invalid.  Hedonism regards pleasure as the focal point of life or as the ultimate or total remedy for practically any trial, and it is by necessity neither.

Yes, Humans Are Animals

While not all animals share the same biological or seeming phenomenological components--for an example of the former, sharks have electroreception, unlike humans, and for an example of the latter, sea sponges do not reportedly have any neurons [1], unlike humans--all biological creatures are animals.  This includes people.  We have stomachs and excretory systems like dogs and bears, we have eyes and hands as do chimpanzees (which are supposed to share almost 99% of the same genes with us) and gorillas (with which we share slightly less generic overlap), and we consume food and water to survive as do lions and ants.  None of these examples of similarities are necessary to realize that humans are animals because any bodily creature would have to be one.

Some people are fiercely offended by the fact that being different from other animals does not mean we are not animals ourselves.  Not that dissatisfaction or dislike would make it true or false, the concept they might hold to instead denies the massive overlap between humans and the creatures of the land, air, or sea.  We are heterotrophic (we eat other organisms for food rather than producing our own through photosynthesis like plants or chemosynthesis like some deep ocean life), we reproduce sexually as most animals do, and we have organs like lungs and a heart that can also be found in many other creatures.  We eat, drink, and can die as they do.  We pass on and inherit genes.  We can succumb to sickness.

The exact physical differences between humans and other animals depend on which animal is in question, for some are far more like us in form than others.  Humans have nonetheless outwardly dominated the planet by civilization and technology, though the natural world can still easily render us incredibly vulnerable, and though it is really the capacity for intelligence, despite many people never becoming rationalists and thus never truly being rational, that has enabled the doability of these things.  Of course I still cannot know just how phenomenologically similar other animals are to me as opposed to how similar they seem, for not even the minds of other humans can be known by a non-telepathic/omniscient being to exist or to be experiencing specific things at a given time!

It is at its core mostly on the basis of religious or other spiritualistic metaphysical philosophies that some people think humans are not animals instead of being unique animals, although there is nothing logically contradictory about being an animal and, say, having an afterlife of some kind or being created or guided by God for a higher purpose; none of this contradicts logical axioms, so it is possible and thus could have been true even if certain aspects are not.  It also possible that other animals either do or do not have afterlives but not humans, for humans to have or not have afterlives but not other creatures, or for all, some, or no individuals from each species to have one.  There is nothing about being human that has to entail this sort of nature to the exclusion of other animals sharing the same.

We are mental beings with physical bodies.  Our bodies, as far as scientific evidence from microscope observation suggests, are themselves made of cells that in turn contain genetic material, as is the case with animals.  Humans do not have to be as distinct as possible from other animals to be different from them, but, again, being different does not necessitate that humans are not animals.  As established already, people could only be animals.  It in part, besides misconceptions about the logical consistency between spirituality, certain specific religions, and this fact, a passive neglect of looking past words to ideas could make this idea unpopular.  Words cannot force anyone to believe in fallacies and errors.  Even so, common references to other creatures as animals without using the same word for people could lead to assumptions by some that humans must not be animals.  It all would depend on what is intended by the words as to whether someone errs by referring to people and animals using different collective terms.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-sea-sponge.html

The Potential Of Every Genre

The potential of every genre for ideological and artistic quality might be denied from time to time when a particular genre or subgenre takes over the entertainment world, angering those who are not participating, or when someone's subjective preferences gravitate away from certain types of storytelling.  Horror, action, comedy, and superhero stories (though the last of these can be entries in other genres that happen to feature such characters) can be neglected or slandered on these grounds, and it often takes concrete examples of quality projects to silence certain detractors although they could have already known their errors from reason alone--it does not follow from belonging to a certain genre that a work is awful.

Sometimes a more sustained trend helps a storytelling category be taken more seriously as it merits.  In recent years, a great deal of horror content with a more explicit philosophical bent has been created, from Saw films to The VVitch to Get Out to Alien: Covenant to Us.  Some of these films have been assigned the phrase "elevated horror," referring to a category that is about artistic excellence and thematic depth as much as or more than it is about base horror.  Of course, horror, like every other genre, can be executed in philosophically weighty or trivial ways, and there are far older horror tales that aim at existential and epistemological issues, like the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.  It would not surprise a rational person that horror is not devoid of potential for addressing reality.

They would not even have to rely on these examples to prompt them to realize this.  For now, a renaissance of horror, in cinema particularly, has produced more examples of philosophical horror that reach for more than just cheap jumpscares or a profitable opening weekend.  Other genres are also sometimes misunderstood as being incapable of artistic excellence and the metaphysical or epistemological elements that are overt in the best of entertainment.  In spite of such fallacious criticism, being an action, superhero, or visual effects-heavy work does not exclude a strong story, deep characterization, and exploration of grand philosophical issues.  Any genre can be executed well or poorly and on all levels.

Terribly constructed, thematically shallow, and greed-motivated entertainment does not make it logically impossible for any particular overarching genre to be utilized in a way that honors or at least tries to align with something more foundational and significant than hollowness and monetary success.  It is possible for there to be superb and abysmal action films (or games, and so on).  It is possible for there to be deep stories about superheroes and pathetically inept tales across mediums about the same type of characters.  Like with drama, horror, and more, the execution determines if a given work is of high or low quality (or mediocre), and even terrible or lackluster execution does not mean a storytelling concept is itself the problem.

Do Not Even Eat With Such People

1 Corinthians 5 sees Paul confront the church at Corinth for a kind of sexual immorality he says not even the surrounding pagans of the day tolerated: a man having sex with his father's wife.  Sexual immorality is not whatever someone's personal feelings or cultural zeitgeist approves of.  The specific type of incest in question is a man having sex with his father's wife (Leviticus 18:6, 8, 20:11), which could be distinct from the independently sinful act of a man having sex with his mother (18:7; or by extension, a woman having sex with her father) because having multiple spouses is not condemned (Exodus 21:10-11, Leviticus 18:18, Deuteronomy 21:15-17, and so on).  It is not the case that all sexual expression outside of marriage or sexual expression within marriage that is directed towards the thought of other people is sinful (Deuteronomy 4:2, 12:32).  When Paul speaks of sexual immorality here, he only means what the Torah directly or by logical extension condemns.  Nonetheless, Paul culminates the chapter of 1 Corinthians by saying to not even eat with such a person as the incestuous man and to expel all like him from the church.

God did not command such things as never eating with sinners in the Torah, so this, like anything else that neither is prescribed by Yahweh in Mosaic Law or elsewhere or that follows logically from what is prescribed, is a permissible option in some situations although it might to some come across in isolation like a universal command.  Tolerance is not righteous, and it cannot possibly be even if Christianity is false and some other moral system is true [1], and Paul is certainly emphasizing the error of thinking that one can trivialize the sins of other people, and particularly people who claim to be an ideological brother or sister.  To clarify, he is not violating Mosaic Law by proposing an excommunication of sorts here instead of execution.  The very sin he is highlighting is one only specified in the Torah, and he does not push back against God's demand to kill such a person as the man who has his father's wife (Leviticus 20:11).

Any person is indeed free to show mercy as long as it is not on the basis of fallacious assumptions that mercy is required or owed to anyone, though the default is to impose justice at the expense of all conscience or social objections; people are obligated to follow God's justice and justice alone (Deuteronomy 16:20), purging evil from among them (Deuteronomy 24:7, which Paul paraphrases in 1 Corinthians 5:13) and showing no pity (Deuteronomy 17:7, 12, 25:11-12), with no special respect given to the rich or poor (Exodus 23:3, 6, Leviticus 19:15), the native-born and the foreigner (Exodus 23:9, Leviticus 19:33-34, 24:22, and many more), or men and women (Exodus 21:17, 26-27, 28-32, and many more).  Paul does not object to any of this, and indeed, he would have been in violation of the Law to have the offender killed apart from two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6, 19:15) or by someone other than judges/an assembly serving Yahweh (Deuteronomy 17:6-11, 25:1), for he was not a judge.  Thus, aside from all of the other related non sequiturs and reasons why nothing about 1 Corinthians 5 contradicts strict theonomy, Paul is not acting contrary to Mosaic Law in demanding expulsion rather than execution in this particular case.

Now, is what Paul calls for here contrary not to the Law, but to the actions of Jesus, who nonetheless fully endorsed Yahweh's Torah laws (Matthew 5:17-19, 15:1-20, 18:15-16, and so on)?  After all, Christ eats with sinners and is condemned by the Pharisees for it (Matthew 9:10-13, Luke 5:27-32).  The distinction is that Jesus eats with people who are in need of a spiritual physician, as he puts it in these passages; he says it is the sick and not the healthy who need a doctor.  The sinners he dines with are people newly devoted to true righteousness or who are not pretending to be genuine and/or thorough followers of Yahweh.  The Pharisees who object to him are those who are in reality not abiding by Mosaic Law as it is (Matthew 23:1-3, Mark 7:1-13).  By contrast with Jesus, Paul addresses the severity of overlooking a brother's or sister's sins, or those of a supposed brother or sister, and insists on not even eating with such people, instead saying that the unrepentantly immoral (sexually or otherwise) man or woman be expelled from the church (1 Corinthians 5:11-13).  He actually distinguishes between those allegiant to God (or allegedly so) and those who are not, pointing out that to truly avoid all the wicked, one could not inhabit this world at all (1 Corinthians 5:9-10).

Yes, even the morally "sick" within the church need a physician, but the context of Christ's meals with wayward or recently repentant people is not the same as that which Paul is speaking of.  The apostle states elsewhere (Ephesians 5), in full accordance with the logically necessary ramifications of how if something is good or evil, actual toleration of the latter is itself evil, that we are not to be partners with those who are not only unrepentantly sexually immoral, but also greedy or in any way impure--an even broader direct scope of sins than those mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5.  Something which follows from the ideas put forth in both chapters, though, is that spouses, and not just pastors, would be included among those who are not to be partners with unrepentant sinners or not even eat with them if they claim to be in allegiance to God and all that this entails.

It could not be the case that this is true of everything except being marriage partners with such persons, a potentially even more intimate relationship.  Without the word being used or the specific context of marriage being brought up, Paul addresses how there is basis for divorce over sins other than sexual immorality.  Like Exodus 21:10-11, 21:26-27, Deuteronomy 21:10-14, and 24:1-4 from Mosaic Law in all of their ramifications, Paul's stance ultimately requires that divorce is permissible for any sin whatsoever.  If this is what is allowed or situationally necessary in marriages, which could not in context possibly be exempt from what Paul speaks of, then of course relationships between non-spouses in the church, in business, and so forth would be permitted to be broken and even tossed aside in certain cases for any unrepentant sin, especially of grievous kinds!  Sin is not to be tolerated one way or another.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-senselessness-of-tolerance.html

The Importance Of Deuteronomy 22:6-7

Deuteronomy 22:6-7--"If you come across a bird's nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young.  You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life."

Returning lost domestic animals is in part about restoring another human's property, yes, and it also benefits the animals, which might be endangered or confused (Deuteronomy 22:1-3).  Furthermore, helping an animal to its feet is certainly about the animal's benefit and not just it's owner's (Deuteronomy 22:4).  Plowing with animals of different sizes and corresponding strength is also condemned, something, while it is listed among other prohibitions of mixing particular things within a category, also for the wellbeing of the animals involved (Deuteronomy 22:10).  Although bestiality is sinful in part for other reasons (it is not heterosexual human intercourse), it is the rape of an animal, which Deuteronomy reiterates is evil (27:21; see also Exodus 22:19, Leviticus 18:23, and 20:15-16).  Along with each of these commands pertinent to the treatment of animals in the book of Deuteronomy is the instruction to not take away a mother bird with her eggs or hatched children in 22:6-7.

Animal Life

It is not only humans that the Bible says possess the breath of life (Genesis 2:7); as if it is not clear from Genesis 2 that the breath of life is consciousness or gives rise to it, and thus that any conscious being in a physical body would on the Biblical worldview have the breath of life, Genesis 7:20-23 mentions animals perishing in the flood of Noah's day and that everything on land with the breath of life died except for Noah and his family.  They are not people, yet they are presented as conscious beings God made.  Among the early Torah prescriptions is that of Exodus 23:4-5, where even an animal belonging to one's enemy must be returned or helped if it struggles under its load.  Expanding on Exodus 23:10-11, Leviticus 25:1-7 lists wild animals along with male and female servants, hired workers, and foreign travelers as those who are to be fed from what the land yields during its Sabbath years.

Verses in the prophetic writings such as Habakkuk 2:17 and Jonah 4:10-11 reinforce that the destruction of animals is a serious matter as it is with that of people--but many other passages clarify that the needless killing of animals, or any other mistreatment against them, is not as weighty as when the same sins are committed against humans.  In Genesis 1:26-28, God creates human men and women to rule over lesser animals as the only beings specifically said to be made in the divine image (see also Genesis 5:1-2).  Despite how animals are also living creatures that God created, and as such are a "very good" part of reality left of themselves (Genesis 1:31), they are metaphysically inferior to humans, and God goes as far as to say that he will Genesis 9:5 demand an accounting of our lifeblood from every animal as is the case between persons.

Lesser Than Humans

While animals are also divinely created things that have the breath of life and moral value on the Christian worldview, it is a distinctively lesser value than any human possesses.  The laws Yahweh prescribes for human societies emphasize this over and over.  Leviticus 24 says that killing an animal merits restitution, but killing a person unjustly deserves execution.  Stealing an animal deserves repayment at specific ratios (Exodus 21:1, 4); kidnapping a person deserves death (Exodus 21:16).  The domestic animal that kills a man, woman, or child, including a male or female slave because they too are human, must be itself killed without exception (Exodus 21:28-32).  Though the exact wording of the laws on this scenario deal with an ox, the moral concept would be relevant to any situation where an animal kills a human, particularly a domestic farming animal or a pet.

It is not inherently evil to take the mother bird's children for consumption, as long as they are of a kosher species (Leviticus 11, Deuteronomy 14), but to go out and take a human mother's or father's child for any such purpose would be the capital sin of kidnapping (Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7).  If even adult birds a person stumbles upon in the wild have the right to not be taken with their children, then people are all the more valuable as beings bearing God's image.  Of course, humans having a higher moral and broader metaphysical status than animals does not mean that it is possible to know what the precise obligations towards other people do and do not entail from conscience or culture.  The obligations that exist according to Christianity can only be known from the Bible itself, with reason being necessary to know the Bible to begin with [1], as well as to know what a particular moral concept logically necessitates even if the text does not mention every ramification.

The Promise of Long Life

Deuteronomy 11:18-21 does say that those who fixate on the words of Yahweh's laws may live long, yet it does not simultaneously say that things may go well with those who do this.  Deuteronomy 12:20-28 does say that obeying its command to not eat blood when consuming a kosher animal can make it go well for you and your children after you, albeit without specifying a prolonged life.  This alone does not mean that both would not be the case. In contrast, Deuteronomy 22:7 ends with the statement that things will go well with the person who obeys the command in question, to the point that they might enjoy a significantly longer lifespan.  This entails that Deuteronomy 22:6-7 parallels the commandment to honor one's father and mother.  First stated in Exodus 20:12 and restated in Deuteronomy 5:16 in Moses's paraphrasing of the Ten Commandments, there is the explicit mention that it may go well with someone who honors their parents and that they may have a long life.  

Twice in Deuteronomy, therefore, is this potential for two-fold reward brought up regarding those who submit to particular moral obligations, one of which is a reaffirmation of something already taught in Exodus 20.  As for the promise of long life, Paul points out in Ephesians 6:1-2 that the command to honor one's parents is the first commandment with any promise whatsoever, and the same general promise is made to those who do what is righteous by not taking the mother bird and her children.  Ultimately, though, all sin makes the sinner deserve death (literal death, not eternal torment), and true righteousness deserves eternal life, which is not achieved in this present life (Daniel 12:2, Romans 6:23).  This is in accordance with what God promises in the covenant curses of Leviticus and Deuteronomy for sin and righteousness (such as in Deuteronomy 30:11-20): he sets the choices of life and death before the Israelites starkly.  How people treat animals like birds is not irrelevant to this even though the treatment of humans is more crucial.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-refutation-of-sola-scriptura.html