Hades And Gehenna

Acts 2:27 uses the word Hades in reference to the Sheol of Psalm 16:10 and the general Old Testament, with Luke 16:19-31 perhaps seeming in isolation to present Hades as a dimension people go to right when they die.  It tells the story of a poor man named Lazarus who goes to a quasi-heaven while a selfish, rich man goes to Hades and is tormented in flames.  Even if was not a parable, though, it would still not suggest, and certainly not affirm, anything similar to eternal torture in a hellacious place.  In fact, Hades is not the hell Jesus speaks of one way or another.  For the latter, Jesus uses the word Gehenna, such as when he says in Matthew 10:28 that humans can only kill the body but that God can annihilate both body and soul in hell.  The ultimate irrelevance of Luke 16 to the direct doctrine of hell is very overt.

The story of the rich man and Lazarus is actually parodying a very unbiblical concept of the intermediate state, as the Bible plainly and repeatedly (though it needs to only say this one time) says that the dead have no ability to think or act before their resurrection (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Psalm 88:10-12, Daniel 12:2, 13, Job 3:11-19); they are not reunited with God or Christ until their resurrection if they are righteous or redeemed (John 14:2-3, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18) and are not resurrected for punishment in hell, which culminates in permanent death (2 Peter 2:6, Matthew 10:28), until after the return of Christ if they are wicked (Revelation 20:11-15).  Still, Luke 16 would say nothing about the duration of hell even if it was about Gehenna, the lake of fire, instead of Hades, or if Hades was taught as an intermediate afterlife.

The precise details about the true Biblical nature of Sheol aside, the text of Luke 16:19-31 never has God or any of the characters say that the experience in Hades will last forever.  No aspect of the story touches on this issue at all.  The Bible already says in Revelation 20 that Hades is thrown into the lake of fire, where unrepentant sinners are killed (Romans 6:23, John 3:16).  The Hades of the Bible is neither an everlasting state of being nor a realm of consciousness at all.  Within Luke 16 itself, these things are not specified.  The relevant verses are scattered about the Old and New Testament outside of this lone chapter of Luke.  Someone who fallaciously thinks that the chapter is talking about what the wicked immediately face upon death or who conflates Hades with hell/Gehenna/the lake of fire would still be in error for thinking this teaches anything about eternal conscious torment.

There is a gulf described in Luke 16 that stops Lazarus and the other righteous people from coming to help the wicked in their afterlife, who are tormented by flames and unable to have their tongues cooled: there is comfort for the righteous and pain for the wicked.  Jesus and the characters in the parable do not say anything about the length of time the rich man of the story would suffer.  It does not teach or even imply anything about the duration of pain.  If Sheol/Hades did involve punitive suffering, it would end regardless when the wicked are summoned to the great white throne to be judged, sentenced to hell, and killed there once and for all.  The Bible teaches the latter things elsewhere.  Hades, though, is really a condition/realm of the dead where there is unconsciousness, the total absence of experience.  Either way, Hades does not involve eternal torture.

Dissociation And Sleep

To be awake, a being must be conscious.  They are perceiving, experiencing their thoughts along with any sensory experiences applicable.  To dream, one must also be conscious.  Unconsciousness in the sense of not being aware of one's bodily surroundings is not the same as true unconsciousness.  A dream entails mental imagery and perhaps even mental audio, so it cannot be experienced apart from a consciousness that is actively perceiving.  What a dream cannot genuinely feature is physical sensations because the mind has retreated away from the senses for sleep to ever arrive; even when awake, it is not as if one can know if sights and sounds are mental correspondents with external things or exclusively within the mind because it is logically possible for these stimuli to be purely mental, rather than being external physical realities (a chair one sees a few feet away) or caused by material substance (a sound coming from a radio).

As I elaborate upon here, there is only one way to know if one is awake or dreaming, as difficult as it can be to identify it [1].  A person otherwise is assuming, is ignoring the issue, or has not discovered all of these very precise truths despite making no assumptions and looking to the inherent truth of logic.  What of a case, however, where a person is on their way to falling into slumber, yet they have not actually become asleep?  Not entirely unlike someone who focuses so intently on their work that background noise fades entirely out of immediate perception, their mind distances its focus from all sensory stimuli to the point that it is shut out of conscious awareness.  They are also not necessarily imagining anything, recalling anything, or thinking about any aspect of any matter.

It might seem rather ambiguous experientially (it is only subjective perception, not logical necessities, that can be epistemologically ambiguous) because a person is so dissociated at this point that they might not directly be thinking anything at all, not even passively seeing mental imagery.  At the same time, they would have to be awake since they have not yet fallen into actual sleep.  It might even suddenly seem to them like they were not asleep a few moments ago if an abrupt noise shakes them out of the dissociation, if they recall anything of the previous moments at all.  While in this state, however, there would be experience of such a passive nature or to such an extreme degree of dissociation that a person is oblivious to even the self-evidence of logical axioms and their own existence.

Now, no matter if someone perceives anything at all or rationalistically knows how to prove they are awake/still awake if they were actively thinking (again, see [1]), they can only either be awake or asleep.  There is no other possibility whatsoever.  It is not that there is sleep, the status of being awake, and a third, hybrid state that is in between the other two.  Just as someone can only be phenomenologically or biologically dead or alive at a specific moment, though they could be in the process of dying at a given time, a person is either asleep or awake.  This is a logical necessity and not a scientific truth.  That is, it is a matter of pure reason that there are no other metaphysical options, and thus someone can know this apart from the regular experience of going to sleep and reawakening.

The condition of extreme dissociation while awake and approaching the border of sleep simply exemplifies an unusual metaphysical status, one where dissociation is so strong that a person could be conscious on one level, in that their mind has not truly retreated within itself away from the senses and bodily experience (something only possible due to the truth of mind-body dualism), and yet they are not thinking or perceiving anything.  They are not dead, not phenomenologically or biologically asleep, and also not consciously thinking.  At least dreaming still involves consciousness that is not only in existence, but also that actively perceives!  Such a narrow range of scenarios of this kind are logically possible.

Their mind still exists and yet is not known in this duration--for they are not actually thinking in order to grasp the objective, intrinsically necessary truths of logic that illuminate other matters like introspection, which a rationalist has absolute certainty of.  Alongside dreamless sleep, this sort of state is the only one in which a person can exist as a conscious being but be unaware of anything at all: to dissociate like this means there is no grasping any passive sensory stimuli that cannot be proven to exist outside the mind (with one exception; yet again, see [1]), no exploration of their own mind itself, and not even any direct reflection on the logical truths that do not depend on the mind and that are needed to know its presence and nature to begin with.  Even non-rationalists, who do not know or acknowledge the metaphysically inherent truths of reason and their epistemological self-evidence, at least experience their own mind when awake or dreaming, despite only believing in assumptions regarding them.  A person this dissociated is conscious but ironically cannot be conscious of it!

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

The Sum Of Its Parts

That something, if applicable, is the sum of its parts or greater than its individual parts is not a mathematical, geometric, or scientific axiom, though it is true of mathematics, geometry, and science.  It is related to a logical axiom, and any particular example that follows from this is not self-evident.  That something is the sum of its parts is a truth about identity when there is this sort of applicable metaphysical constitution--that is, when one thing is made up of others, whether of a set containing multiple individual units of the same kind, a physical object composed of many particles, and so on.  However, it is the abstract truths of reason that are at the very core of reality and on which all else stands, and it is only what might be called the law of identity that is itself axiomatic regarding this issue.

An axiom is a self-evident truth: to fall into this category, it must be relied on even when denied, which makes it unavoidable.  It is not self-evident that grass is green, for perception of color requires a consciousness, which is itself self-evident to someone who makes no assumptions, and then, of course, the color green, like any color, would only be possible if it is consistent with logical axioms.  To doubt one's own conscious mind, one has to exist as a consciousness, and even though this is self-evident, it is only the laws of logic, which would still be true even if false (rendering their falsity an impossibility) that are self-necessary.  One of the axioms of logic is that a thing is what it is.  This is self-evident because if something is that which it is not, then it still is what it is, and thus the law of identity is true regardless.

It and other logical axioms are true independent of matter and would have to be true in order for any composite object to exist (or else it would be impossible beforehand); it is also true in a way that underpins mathematical groupings, such as how 5 is equal to 1 added to 1 added to 1 added to 1 added to 1.  Not even the logical truth as it pertains specifically to mathematics is self-necessary or self-evident, but this hinges on the fact that a thing is what it is independent of and thus metaphysically prior to all examples.  A given number being itself or a given number being reached by the addition of two other numbers depends on the law of identity and that certain things or or do not follow from others.  It is not the other way around so that numeric quantities ground the laws of logic!

The so-called axioms of equality in mathematics are not axioms at all.  They hinge entirely on the real logical axioms, which are more foundational and are what is truly self-evident, along with one's own conscious existence, though the latter still depends metaphysically on the former and is revealed epistemologically by the former.  However, that something is the sum of its parts, or that the whole is greater (literally, larger or more complete) than the individual parts, is still absolutely certain.  It is just not evident in itself.  Without these logically necessary truths, all the same, it would be impossible for anything to be true regarding numbers, which would of course encompass their identity and relations.  Logical axioms are not assumed or arbitrary starting points as other alleged axioms are.  They are things that cannot be false.

The Boundaries Of Time Theft

A concern of tyrannical and legitimate business owners alike, time theft is the act on the part of an employee of exaggerating hours worked, doing nothing during paid hours, or (sometimes) working unauthorized overtime hours, all of which deprive the employer of money not earned properly if paid out.  Even so, actions that do not really steal from employers are erroneously considered time theft by some.  For instance, is having a 5-10 minute conversation with a coworker about things unrelated to the job or company while on the clock stealing from an employer?  Is there always work that demands attention at all moments across all jobs?

Hypocritically, some of the same people who think the answer is yes might hold to the contradictory idea that it is nonetheless office conversations like these that are so important to personal and corporate growth that employees must give up remote work for the good of industry.  As in, laughing about non-professional matters with coworkers is supposedly terrible because it detracts from profit-generating labor (as opposed to potentially making them emotionally invested in their office culture), but it is also so "foundational" to sustaining the workplace that remote work is a monstrous scourge.  Neither of these things is true!

As long as the work gets done each week on time, it gets done, even if there are regular breaks for eating or talking.  There is no need to rush to finish a week's worth of work on a Monday (if the work schedule is standard; it might not be), even though some employers or managers might make assumptions regardless.  If you finish the work for the full week or most of it, depending on if this is doable given the job, early in the workweek, they might think you are simply being lazy and frivolous for the rest of the week.  If you do it throughout the week, there likely will be "free" time, which they might likewise object to even if there is nothing automatically valid about this response.  Certain managers truly have nothing to do for their own role other than contrive excuses to micromanage employees, and illogical charges of time theft might be an easy way to fill their own time.

They can overlook how some jobs by their very nature involving waiting time, like a receptionist position at a small business.  The role is needed, but there is not necessarily a constant flow of work to be done throughout the entire shift.  Part of the job is by nature objectively reactive.  No matter what a productivity-obsessed employer believes, there is literally not always something to do at every job while someone is clocked in.  Some jobs might require constant, direct labor.  Others do not.  All the same, the latter sort of jobs might still call for having someone in a paid standby position, though hours might pass without anything getting done or truly needing attention.  Having someone available to perform tasks as they arise and paying them during that waiting period is still vital, and the employee talking with coworkers or engaging in personal reading on the clock in such an interval would absolutely not be time theft.

Companies that ruthlessly react to even non-cases of time theft like this are very likely to steal from their employees by underpaying them for their hours or years of labor, not paying for all time spent working, or some other such bullshit.  Oh, and Biblically, withholding wages past the very next sunset after a worker's shift ends is theft (Leviticus 19:13, Deuteronomy 24:14-15).  Practically all conventional companies in America are guilty of this!  The most devastating and widespread time theft occurs when thriving corporations that could easily pay their workers genuinely livable compensation or better fail to pay wages this promptly.  Legitimate employee time theft from these same companies is trivial by comparison.

Mothers And Fathers

Parental authority and status, given that the parents are not erroneous or sinful either in the sense of mistreating their children or telling them to sin (these would obviously contradict other Biblical doctrines whether or not this is stated in these words) is affirmed over and over in Mosaic Law.  One is to honor, but not universally or emotionalistically obey, one's father and mother (Exodus 20:12, Deuteronomy 5:16, 27:16).  One is to not strike, outside of self-defense, or curse one's parents, mother and father alike (Exodus 21:15, 17, Leviticus 20:9).  In matters of bringing their children before the community to be examined or punished, both parents are involved if living (Deuteronomy 21:18-21, 22:13-17), and together they could act as two witnesses with testimony for or against charges of criminal sin (17:6, 19:15).

Proverbs 30:11 and 17 very plainly acknowledge the equal right of both parents to be respected as people and as parents, though this does not mean that abusive mothers and fathers are to be tolerated, praised, or loved more than any other fool.  None of this follows logically and Mosaic Law already addresses the just response to various forms of abuse, none of which involve partiality or lenience based upon the sinner's parental status.  Earlier in Proverbs, verse 8 of chapter 1 emphasizes listening to one's father and mother when they are in the right--one could not be obligated to submit to them if they are in the wrong.  There is nowhere taught any sexist obligation for a biological parent of one gender or the other to have a greater responsibility in raising their children on any level.  The same is true of the obligation to honor one's parents on the part of sons and daughters.

The verses mentioned so far do not even include the New Testament passages that affirm the equal authority of mothers and fathers (Matthew 15:3-6, Mark 7:9-13, Ephesians 6:1-3) and husbands and wives (Ephesians 5:21, 1 Corinthians 7:3-5).  Though it would not need to reiterate things that have already been established, the New Testament also reiterates in miscellaneous places that obligations are equally held towards fathers and mothers (Romans 1:30, 1 Timothy 1:9).  As parents or fellow spouses, neither mothers/wives nor fathers/husbands are actually said to have special privileges or obligations, moral closeness to God, and so on because they are the mother or the father.  Both are people and both are parents.  As such, it would be logically impossible for them to have gender-specific parenting duties, like cooking, working outside the home, or pushing their children towards philosophical accuracy.

None of these things can only be done because one has a penis or a vagina, and they would thus be morally good, bad, or neutral in themselves for all people.  Men and women are equal bearers of the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2) and this is not contradicted in any of the parenting obligations of Christianity or childrens' obligations to their parents as stated in the the Torah or elsewhere in the Bible.  As metaphysical equals, there is no special authority a husband or wife has over the other or over any children they might have.  It is not authority of fathers over mothers or mothers over fathers that is taught by the Bible.  It is also not righteous to respect fathers over mothers or vice versa.  Any patriarchal or matriarchal parenting or marriage ideologies are both unbiblical and also irrational separate from Christianity's doctrines and probable veracity.  

The Hebrew Midwives

The ninth command of the Ten Commandments does not address all deception in Exodus 20:16 and Deuteronomy 5:20.  The commandment in question is against false testimony rather than all forms of lying together.  Elsewhere, Leviticus 19:11 does label lying as evil outside of slander in particular (or else it would not be condemned), and yet there is a story very early in the Bible where two women are shown favor by God for lying.  Before Moses was born, adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, and tasked by I AM with returning to Egypt to free the Hebrews, the king of Egypt was desperate to control the Hebrews living in his land.  Oppressive labor does not stop them from multiplying (Exodus 1:8-14), so Pharaoh tells Shiphrah and Puah, who are midwives and Hebrews themselves, to kill any baby boys when they emerge from the wombs of their people (1:15-16).

The women, however, refuse to obey the ruler.  They arrive at a home, seemingly perform their service, and then allow any newborn boys to live.  To Pharaoh, who summons them when he learned how the male babies of the Hebrews were not being killed, they outright lie, claiming that Hebrew women give birth faster than Egyptian women (1:17-19).  If true, this would mean they would not have had the chance to directly fulfill Pharaoh's command since they were not present at the time of birth.  This is not what the text has already clarified as being their real actions beforehand.  They lie flagrantly to the king of Egypt, and Exodus 1 is not silent God's reaction to this.  It is not at all the typical reaction of God in many other circumstances, where lies are sins (Leviticus 19:11 again) that damn people to the lake of fire (Revelation 21:8, 22:15).

Not so with Shiphrah and Puah: in the wording of verses 20-21 in Exodus 1, "God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous.  And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own."  Like the Israelites at large, they were prosperous in the sense of multiplying in spite of the oppression around them.  Their glaring deception is rewarded by God, but not because deception is morally permissible under ordinary circumstances, such as when one is not trying to thwart a worse sin on the part of somebody else.  It is precisely because this lie is uttered in order to save innocent lives (there could be other such causes of equal or greater significance that would make lies the lesser evil) that it is not ultimately some grievous sin against truth.

For the sake of a greater truth than what they had really done with the Hebrew women in childbirth, Shiphrah and Puah are not guilty when they deceive Pharaoh.  On the contrary, God blesses them because of their deception, going as far as to give them families of their own, a fitting reward since they helped other Hebrews keep their male babies safe for a time.  At some point after hearing their lie, Pharaoh orders all of his people, now including the Egyptians, to kill every Hebrew boy that is born by throwing him into the Nile and to allow baby girls to live (1:22).  The story of how Moses escapes this fate is far more familiar to the masses than the role intentional deception played in sparing Hebrew babies for a time.

Later in the chronological sequence of Biblical narratives, Rahab lies to the servants of Jericho's king.  She insists that Israelite spies who in actuality stayed in her home, hidden away on the roof (Joshua 2:6), left her dwelling already (2:4-5).  Thus, she keeps the Israelite spies alive and arranges for her entire family to be spared when the massacre begins (2:12-20), and she and her family are indeed not killed (6:15-25) once the walls of Jericho fall.  Rahab is in fact listed as an example of righteousness in Hebrews 11:30-31 for sheltering the spies as she did.  The Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah are not the only Biblical figures who are guiltless, blessed, or commended for lying for the sake of a greater truth and to honor a greater obligation.  Only one of these examples would be enough to establish the Bible's clear stance on lying to prevent more severe sins, and still there are two.

Workplace Friendships

It is possible to have friends in one's coworkers, regardless of whether there is communication and meeting outside of working hours or workplace-adjacent contexts.  It is even logically possible that one will happen to find a rationalistic person at a given company, though this is very, very unlikely.  Such a person is worthy of special respect, devotion, quality time, and loyalty because their own allegiance would be to the truths of logic that are self-necessary, absolutely certain, supremely foundational, and immutable.  They would be concerned with far more than the petty social construct of professional workplaces and the pursuit of material wealth or status, and thus they, if they are really rationalists, are not fools to lament, manipulate, toy with, or dismiss.

A rationalistic relationship is based on things of inherent veracity and substance.  More than other workplace friendships rooted in circumstances (happening to work at the same company at the same time), these relationships can last solidly even after one or both people depart their jobs.  If it was just based on the circumstantial accessibility of being right next to someone during the workday, after all, then an exit from that workplace would mean the end of the primary reason for the friendship.  More than other coworker relationships, a rationalistic friendship is also based on something transcendent and true in itself, so the basis of the relationship does not disappear when someone leaves a job.

On the contrary, once the convenience of having to be around the other party of a lesser friendship is gone, the friendship will far more likely than not dissipate.  When among non-rationalists, though, there are the added concerns of cautiously revealing professional obstacles, personal information, or philosophical stances, as they might try to use this against you if they, in their drifting irrationalism and probable emotionalistic egoism, think they can somehow benefit, such as by advancing in their career.  While I can never know the contents of other minds (if they exist in the first place), and neither can any being with my human limitations, at least with rationalists, it is enormously less likely that they will ever resort to pettiness, misrepresentation, or asinine priorities.

People can never have the fullest possible relational intimacy, non-romantic or otherwise, without having thorough adherence to a shared worldview, and of course that worldview cannot be valid unless it is true, and in turn it cannot be validly held to unless it is logically demonstrable by self-evidence (as with the truth of axioms and to a different extent one's own conscious existence) or deductive necessity in light of axioms.  The vast majority of people one will meet in the workplace, managers, coworkers, and clients, will all but certainly not be rationalists.  The most they could hope for in their friendships is arbitrary satisfaction based upon emotionalism or pragmatic gain.  They cannot possibly stand on anything of actual demonstrated veracity or significance, or else they would be rationalists.

The Food Laws Of The Quran

The basic categories of forbidden foods listed most often in the Quran are carrion, blood, pig's meat, and any otherwise permissible creature the names of other gods are pronounced over, but there is an exception given for people who are desperate with hunger (see Surah 2:173, 6:145, and 16:115 for all of this).  Surah 5:3 again mentions carrion, blood, pig's meat, and any animals a god besides Allah has been invoked over as immoral to eat, adding that a strangled animal, one afflicted by a great blow or fall, killed by a beast of prey, or anything sacrificed to idols are to be avoided.  In cases of a violent blow or fall or goring by a predatory creature, the animal can still be eaten, if alive when found, as long as it is slaughtered correctly according to the same verse.  Eating seafood is allowed in general and on pilgrimages in particular (Surah 5:96).

Now, the Quran prohibits consumption of pig in isolation from any broader category.  While it is supposedly revelation that affirms the Torah (Surah 2:53, 3:3, 5:45-46, 48, 6:154, 17:2, 61:6), and Surah 6:146 does acknowledge that God prohibited any land creatures with undivided (unsplit) hooves to the Jews, Leviticus 11:4-8 and Deuteronomy 14:3-8 preclude consuming pig because a land animal must have both split hooves and chew its cud to be permissible as food, the pig only having split hooves.  In Quranic ethics, other such animals that only meet one of these requirements are allowed to be eaten, a glaring contradiction between the Islamic text and the Torah it says is from God.  Moreover, Leviticus 11:9-12 and Deuteronomy 14:9-10 allow only animals of the water that have both fins and scales; Surah 5:196, as well as the other aforementioned verses on sinful food, clearly permit the likes of lobster, crab, shark, and shrimp, all forbidden in the Torah.

Yet again, the Quran contradicts the Torah it says is from Allah on moral matters, allowing many foods that are condemned by God in Mosaic Law.  Not even the New Testament actually denies the ongoing nature (Malachi 3:6) of the dietary laws in the Torah: passages like Matthew 15:1-20 and Acts 11:1-18 are really about things other than food, like washing one's hands before meals, and the New Testament affirms the perfect righteousness and immutability of core obligations mentioned in the Old Testament over and over (Matthew 5:17-19, Romans 7:7, Hebrews 2:2, James 1:17, and so on).  If the Torah is true, as both the New Testament and Quran say, then the Quran is by necessity contrary to reality.  If the Torah is false, the Quran is still in error since it claims otherwise.  Very rarely is the Quran consistent with what is morally permissible or evil as described in Mosaic Law.

That both condemn eating pigs does not alter the very different reasons why.  The Quran even misrepresents the Pentateuch's restriction on eating fat: Surah 6:146 says that Allah forbade the Jews to eat the fat of cattle and sheep except what is on their backs and intestines and what adheres to their bones.  In actuality, while Leviticus says to not eat blood as the Quran does (Leviticus 17:10-14 and 19:26 are just some relevant verses), Leviticus 3:17 and 7:22-24 condemn eating all fat, though some verses in chapter 7 specifically mention sacrificial animals like cattle, sheep, and goats.  Fat, like blood, regardless of the creature it comes from, is not to be consumed.  The Quran does not even get what Mosaic Law says right!  In acknowledging the Torah as a prerequisite to later Islamic revelation to Muhammad, the Quran puts its doctrines in a state of utter contradiction.  Not all of them could possibly be true at once.

The Parable Of The Lost Coin

Between the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7) and the more popular story of the prodigal son (15:11-32), one can find the parable of the lost coin.  In just two verses, Jesus tells a story about a woman who has 10 coins but loses one of them, paralleling the shepherd of the previous parable who has 100 sheep but loses one.  He describes God and his angels as rejoicing at the repentance of a single sinner by having the woman celebrate finding her misplaced coin, inviting her friends and neighbors to share in her joy and relief.  The brevity of the passage touches on crucial matters, with the simplicity of the parable making it even easier to realize how it relates to other doctrines taught in the book of Luke and elsewhere.  Some of these issues are secondary to the most predominant focus, yet they are still acknowledged or brushed up against.  In full, here is the entire parable and the explanation Jesus himself offers immediately afterward.

Luke 15:8-10--"'Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one.  Doesn't she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?  And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, "Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin."  In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.'"

It is true that not all aspects of parables would have to be logically or Biblically valid outside of figurative meaning in the context of what even Jesus himself presents as a fictional or hypothetical story.  Even so, note that the parable centers on a woman owning her own money, a form of property.  If the metaphor is supposed to correspond to cultural practices of the time and region, then clearly women historically had property in Israelite society.  If the metaphor is supposed to align with literal Biblical moral teachings, then clearly it is not evil on Judeo-Christianity for a woman to have her own property (as the Torah affirms, which will be addressed below).  Also, the gender of the woman's friends are not specified, though it is both logically possible and Biblically permissible to have very psychologically and physically intimate friendships with the opposite gender without any sexual or romantic feelings, and even if these feelings are present, all involved can still be close, genuine friends.

These matters are tangential to the primary intention of the parable in a sense but nonetheless important.  In no way does Luke 15 contradict any sexism concerning money and broader property (or friendship) prescribed by God in the Torah because there is no such thing.  Deuteronomy 15:12-15 even requires that female servants receive property upon being set free as with male servants.  Numbers 27 commands that daughters not be excluded from an inheritance just because there are no sons.  Leviticus 12 and 15 as well as Numbers 5 and 6 prescribe that women offer their own animal sacrifices, with Numbers mandating that women bring the same animals as men for the same sins [1].  Moreover, Numbers 5:5-7 prescribes that women make restitution if they sin in a way deserving of this penalty (theft is the example in these verses).  Unless women had their own animals or income, it would not be possible for them to bring sacrifices or make restitution.  More than a few coins or the means to earn them is directly allowed for both men and women in Yahweh's perfect Torah laws (Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Psalm 19:7).  A woman owning coins in the parable corresponds to very literal rights and obligations women Biblically have not as women, but as humans.

Likewise, the delight God has over the repentance of each individual sinner is affirmed as literal, or else the entire parable of the lost coin is hollow in its context.  Jesus reinforces the literality of this point with as much clarity as the fallible contructs of human language can convey in verse 10.  Yahweh is not like his prophet Jonah, who bubbles with anger when the people of Nineveh repent and therefore are not killed (Jonah 3-4).  He takes no pleasure in even the deserved death of the wicked for their sin (Ezekiel 33:11), either their death in this world or the second death of annihilation in hell (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:11-15).  When the wicked man or woman repents and turns to God for forgiveness, "he will freely pardon" (Isaiah 55:7).  Sin does not go unpunished forever, but while someone is still in conscious existence, even while in hell before they are burned to death [2], there is always the hope that they will be saved by the God who wants none to perish (2 Timothy 2:3-4, 2 Peter 3:8-9) if only they repent while they still can.

The central purpose of the parable of the lost coin, as obviously pro-woman and supportive of female property ownership it is on its own and in connection with the true doctrines of the Torah, is not the value of women--who are not greater than men, but equal to them.  Though these issues are of extreme logical and Biblical importance, the main purpose of the parable is to communicate the great depth of the divine joy when an individual turns from his or her sin and thus from the path toward permanent death (Matthew 7:13-14) to eternal life (Ezekiel 33:12-20, Romans 2:6-8, 6:23).  Gender is irrelevant to the nature of sin both on the part of the victim (for instance, see the repeated emphasis within Exodus 21), if there is a victim for a given offense, and on the part of the one doing the evil (for instance, see Leviticus 20:15-18, 27) because the actions are the same.  If the Bible denied these truths, it would be in error, since this equality is correct by strict logical necessity.  But while gender equality is a vital part of the foundation of any logically possible moral system, and while repentance is contingent on there being sin to begin with and thus cannot be more philosophically important than the core nature of sin, Luke 15's parable of the lost coin focuses first and foremost on how God does not reject the contrite sinner.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/08/equal-access-to-animal-sacrifices.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/07/while-there-is-life.html

Talking About One's Marriage

If your spouse (or boyfriend or girlfriend) wants you to never discuss any legitimate problems within the relationship with other people, you have a controlling partner.  I do not mean someone who has a subjective preference for you to not talk about such things outside of the relationship but recognizes it as just that, a non-obligatory personal desire.  This is someone who demands or gently but deviously pressures you to keep anything that might make the relationship look strained (even if it is) from others.

Aside from the controlling and irrationalistic aspects of this, does keeping such things within the marriage (or dating partnership) truly help?  It might accomplish only the confining buildup of frustration, sadness, or anxiety until it bursts forth in, at a minimum, harsh conversation between the spouses.  This does nothing beneficial for a marriage even if some people fallaciously believe or personally prefer for the initial cause--being silent about problems with outside friends, family members, or therapists--to be pursued.

There is also the fact that, intentionally or unintentionally but negligently, someone might hope his or her partner does not mention relational issues to others because they do not want to stop behavior that might be objectively abusive.  Whether it is someone else raging against their partner having interests, friends, or pasttimes beyond them or seeking to combat or extinguish their partner's attraction to other people, or something else, they want to control their partner in ways they have no right to (and everyone needs to have interests beyond their partner because the necessary logical, philosophical truths of reality are not dependent on or strictly about people).

Wanting your spouse to wait for a certain time to pass before talking about marital struggles with external parties is not necessarily controlling, nor is wanting them to only be accurate in what they say or to leave out a few especially personal details without lying about anything else.  All of this can be done without one spouse being controlling, illicitly demanding, or otherwise abusive.  Even these can be urged out of emotionalistic, selfish motives rather than anything rational, though.

Furthermore, it is not only professional therapists/psychologists/psychiatrists who could be validly told about one's marital problems.  There is nothing irrational, malicious, unfaithful, or slanderous about telling one's friends of either gender about such things as long as one is honest.  This also does not exclude talking to one's romantic partner about the same problems, which would need to happen if they are to be directly resolved together as it is--although an irrational or abusive partner does not need prompting from the other party to realize what they are doing and cease.  In any of these directions, talking about relationship issues is vital when they arise.

No One Can Be Legitimately Trusted

I do not want anyone to trust me even if I tell them something relatively trivial such as that I remember that I ate a certain food a week ago or that I feel a certain way.  I cannot even know if my memories of such events are accurate, only that I have them, and it would require a literal telepath/omniscient being to know that what I say about my own mental states is true.  I know my own mind directly and with absolute certainty.  Whatever I am thinking, feeling, or otherwise perceiving, it is right there for me to experience.  This would not be the case for me with other people or for other people for me unless they are telepathic or omniscient as mentioned above.  If they lack these characteristics, they would be irrational to believe anything another person says that is not an articulation of a strictly logical truth, which would be true in itself and not be subject to epistemological uncertainty.

The difference between what I can know of myself and other minds, as well as the other way around, is distinct.  My perceptions of something like the sensory world, for instance, are uncertain as to whether they accurately represent the external world, though the perceptions absolutely exist as my mental experiences.  Someone else would have to actually be me or have their mind metaphysically bridged with mine in order to know if I am telling the truth about what my senses report to me, however, despite how I know for sure.  This absolute certainty does not extend to hearsay, and it is utterly, inescapably hearsay when another person tells me what they are thinking or feeling.  Whether they are my wife or my closest friends, it would be irrational for me to trust them or for them to trust me--and if they truly knew the interior of my mind, they would not even need to or be able to trust me, and vice versa.  We would know.

No, I do not and trust anyone else and no one else should trust me.  This is not because I am hoping to mistreat them or anything similar.  It is because there could not possibly be any basis for trust in any direction from any person.  If something has to be trusted in the sense of belief in the unprovable, rather than committed to on the basis of evidence (this can be done without fallacious beliefs like confusing perception/probability for logical proof), then it is irrational to believe it no matter what it is.  If something can be known, then it does not have to be trusted.  The existence of an uncaused cause is something that does not have to be assumed [1] or even partially trusted in.  In contrast, if someone was to actually believe that God loves them, as opposed to even believing that it seems likely based upon evidence for Christianity that God loves them, they have gone beyond what is verifiable.

Non-rationalists often seem to confuse trust for certainty and certainty for anything that seems true or that they want to be true.  They believe that trust in science or a religion or other people could possibly be justified by any amount of mere evidence, when many of them do not even begin to base beliefs on evidence, much less the metaphysically intrinsic, epistemologically infallible proof of logical necessity.  I of course do not want anyone to trust me.  This is for the same reason why I would never trust anyone or anything: it is unjustifiable because trust in the sense of belief is irrational.  Words mean whatever they are intended to, so someone could use the word trust to refer to commitment, but not everyone does.  It frequently has a positive connotation of belief when one has no absolute proof even though this could never be positive in a pragmatic or ideological way.

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

Harsh Words

Harsh words are not automatically sinful, though an emotionalistic culture might feel as if they are unjust in themselves.  This can be seen in the church when some people think the Bible actually condemns using the word fool in Matthew 5:22, when it is very clear inside and outside the context of that verse what the Bible is really prohibiting.  For one thing, as my first sentence acknowledges, this is never condemned in Mosaic Law, the Bible's central moral revelation (Romans 7:7) which both Jesus (Matthew 5:17-19) and Paul (Acts 24:14) obviously affirm despite superficially appearing--to fools, ironically--to reject them.

Matthew 5:22 itself is about baseless anger, sometimes translated as anger "without cause," which produces malice, not about random words supposedly having some sort of inherent immorality, which would be logically impossible as it is because words do not have any fixed or intrinsic meaning.  The meaning of any word is only what the user intends by it, and in this case, Raca is a term of contempt, which, although it is not always immoral to hold towards someone (Daniel 12:2, Isaiah 66:24), is about the intention and not mere language.  Jesus himself calls certain people fools later in the very same book of the Bible, in fact (Matthew 23:17)!

Elsewhere in the Bible, one sees that it is rational and righteous to call some people fools or foolish if they truly are a fool (Psalm 14:1, 53:1, Galatians 3:1), such as when Proverbs repeatedly refers to fools (including in Proverbs 26:3-12), so Jesus would not be condemning the arbitrary word itself, which could even be used sarcastically and teasingly and is like all other words a flexible social construct.  He is condemning malice and slander.  This is what James 3:9 also condemns: the use of speech to degrade people made in the image of God, not all speech that is subjectively unpleasant or objectively harsh yet truthful.

Now, James 3:7-8 is exaggerating about how no person can tame the tongue, since there is no such thing as unsurmountable sin, including those of words, as the Bible plainly teaches (Deuteronomy 30:11, Job 1:1, Matthew 5:48).  Moral perfection is always logically possible because something cannot be obligatory unless you are capable of actually doing it (for instance, I cannot be obligated to fly if I do not have the capacity or to resolve a global political issue if I do not have the power to do so).  Aside from the Bible, if something is good or evil, perfection in how one lives is by necessity possible even if it is extraordinarily difficult for someone.  Also, James 3 is separately exaggerating when it says the tongue is set on fire by hell.  It is not literally on fire, and hell is a place of fire where the wicked are burned to death after their resurrection rather than something that affects this life (Matthew 10:28, 18:8).

In the same way that James 3 is saying that hell enflames the tongue, though this organ is not on fire and is not caused to do anything by a non-sentient, future afterlife realm of punishment and cosmic execution, James 3 does not mean that no one can avoid verbal sins.  By condemning the cursing of humans made in God's image, it is also not saying that words like "fuck you" in a playful or otherwise non-malicious context, as if cursing in the Biblical sense is using profanity!  Again, only the intention really matters with such things.  As constructs to be used and tossed aside when a better term is thought of, words are not good or bad.  They are arbitrary sounds and symbols.

The Author Of Ecclesiastes

The author of Ecclesiastes identifies themself as the Teacher/Preacher immediately in the very first verse of the book.  In the words of Ecclesiastes 1:1 and 1:12, the author also calls himself the king of Jerusalem, and in 1:1, he refers to himself as a son of David.  There is only one son of David who becomes king in the Bible accounts: Solomon, the ruler associated with great wisdom who nonetheless fails to uphold several basic, major obligations of a monarch as prescribed by Deuteronomy 17 in Mosaic Law.

Solomon actually almost does not become the ruler at all (1 Kings 1:5-40).  Adonijah, described here as very handsome and born next after Absalom, tries to take the throne, and Bathsheba and Nathan the prophet visit David so that he would fulfill his promise to Bathsheba, that her son Solomon would sit on the throne after him.  Indeed, Solomon becomes king, but his mother first worries that the two of them will be treated as criminals if David's vow to her before God was not kept (Deuteronomy 23:21-23, 1 Kings 1:29-30).

Her son survives, reigns, and, as Ecclesiastes conveys, becomes fixated on understanding what, if anything, is either objectively meaningful or subjectively satisfying to him.  He contemplates how the universe seems to endure as people labor and die (Ecclesiastes 1:3-7), how knowledge can bring sadness (1:18; almost any rationalist can likely relate to this on multiple levels!), and how power, accomplishment, and pleasure alone do not make a person escape this cycle (2:4-11).  The looming, approaching event of death overtakes both the fool and the wise (2:14-16), which sobers the Teacher.

A great deal of the Teacher's statements nevertheless do not acknowledge many relevant, demonstrable truths.  For instance, they do not dive directly into the rationalistic epistemology of how his subjective perceptions and experiences do not make anything true, such as life or perhaps all things allegedly being meaningless (Ecclesiastes 1:2).  He does not address how logical axioms, the core of necessary truths, transcend even nature and God [1], nor does he readily admit that the finality of human death (though there is resurrection to come according to verses like Daniel 12:2 and Revelation 20:11-15) does not necessitate that everything in the life that precedes it is morally meaningless as opposed to temporary and thus finite.

Even so, the author of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon himself, has a unique position of prosperity in Israel's history from which to dwell on philosophical issues that are accessible to every willing person--for every man, woman, and child can look to the necessary truths of reason and engage in introspection [2].  Wealth and social status are not in any way required to discover and savor what is true by logical necessity, and since everything relies on logical axioms and their ramifications anyway, and they do not stop being true, there is no such thing as an inability to think about the nature of reality even amidst personal suffering or professional toil.

[1].  For some elaboration, see posts like these:

A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-ultimate-being.html

B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-metaphysics-of-logic-and-god.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-knowledge-available-to-all.html

Alleged Bible Contradictions: Matthew 22:37-40 And Romans 13:8-10

It is true that Jesus and Paul have conflicting theologies?  Jesus does say in Matthew 22:37-40 that loving God with all of one's being (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) and loving one's neighbor as oneself (Leviticus 19:18) summarize Mosaic Law as the two greatest or most foundational commands.  Whereas Jesus mentions two commands, Paul says in Romans 13:8-10 that loving one's neighbor, which he specifies is only one command, fulfills the Law.  Like many other seeming contradictions in Biblical philosophy, this one is not very difficult to identify as nothing more than an ostensible contradiction.  Read the passages below and see if you can notice the reason why Paul speaks this way and why it does not conflict with the teachings of Jesus:

Matthew 22:34-40--"Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together.  One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 'Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?'

Jesus replied: '"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."'  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: "Love your neighbor as yourself."  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.'"

Romans 13:8-10--"Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.  The commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery,' 'You shall not murder,' 'You shall not steal,' 'You shall not covet,' and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'  Love does no harm to a neighbor.  Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law."

As established by verse 8, Paul is focusing specifically on how one should treat other people.  This is the debt we owe all other people: to love them, which can only genuinely, holistically be done by treating them in accordance with God's just nature, as expressed in Mosaic Law.  Love is owed, making it deserved, and thus it is a matter of justice to love others.  The morality of love is not some issue of emotionalistic subjectivism, but it rather encompasses the many individual objective obligations like allowing workers to rest one day out of every seven (Deuteronomy 5:12-15), not murdering anyone (Exodus 20:13), not taking advantage of the disabled (Leviticus 19:14), and so on.  If one does all of these things and the rest along with living out their logical necessary ramifications unstated in the Law [1], one loves others as one should; inversely, if one legitimately loves others, one will treat them as the particulars of morality require.

Jesus, unlike Paul in Romans 13:8-10, specifically addresses how one should regard God and other people.  When it comes to people, he teaches the exact same as what Paul does--that loving one's neighbor as oneself in the genuine sense, as clarified by other parts of Mosaic Law since it is impossible to know what is and is not specifically loving from Leviticus 19:18 alone, fulfills the entirety of the Law's prescriptions for human interpersonal treatment.  There is no contradiction.  Jesus speaks in Matthew 22:37-40 of something slightly beyond the scope of what Paul writes in Romans 13:8-10, yet they otherwise convey the same ethical philosophy of love as it relates to the Torah laws.  To contradict the worldview of Jesus on this point, Paul's would have to entail that we should not love God, which he does not say in Romans or anywhere else.

An irony is that neither loving God nor loving other people accounts for all of Mosaic Law in a very narrow sense.  What of non-human animals (Exodus 23:4-5, Deuteronomy 22:6-7, 25:4, and so on) or the environment (Leviticus 25:1-7)?  The Law does not strictly deal with duties directly to God and fellow humans.  Yes, not mistreating animals and managing the environment ethically are still moral matters that pertain to God's nature and treating them well can certainly express love for God.  But helping an animal struggling under a load, not taking a mother bird with her eggs, and allowing an animal to eat as it treads grain by not muzzling it are also very much about helping non-human creatures.  Is an animal of the non-human kind one's neighbor?  Should one love an animal as oneself or as much as a fellow person?  Absolutely not, because humans have greater value on Judeo-Christianity (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2, Leviticus 24:21).

In a less direct sense, treating animals as morality requires is still about loving God, for they are his creations that also have the breath of life and moral value.  Treating people as they deserve is also in a way about loving God, their creator who imbues them with his own image.  But loving God goes beyond how one behaves towards any being but God himself.  Jesus makes it clear that the obligation described in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 contains all of one's obligations to God, just as the obligation of Leviticus 19:18 links to all the exact obligations one has to others regarding various issues and circumstances.  Paul affirms the latter without denying the former and without his philosophy contradicting the former.  Neither Jesus nor Paul mentions animals in the passages examined, but does this mean they overlook how the Law deals with them as well?  No!  And neither does Paul overlook the love owed to God.

[1].  For one of many examples, Exodus 21:26-27 demands the freedom of a slave whose master abuses them, referring to a male or female slave whose eye or tooth is respectively damaged or dislodged.  These two body parts are not the only ones this obligation would pertain to.  It follows that an abusive injury to a slave's leg or shoulder or toe or any other body part would also nullify any promise of servitude and morally release the slave from any obligation to stay.  A great deal of Mosaic Law is like this, providing examples of one thing from which another would follow.

"Whoever Wishes"

That something is mentioned last in a book or close to its very end does not mean it is of supreme importance out of all the contents beforehand.  With a book as lengthy and multifaceted as the Bible, which in turn contains many smaller books addressing different matters, this would be all the more the case.  It is still noteworthy that one of the final statements in the entire Bible mentions that whoever wishes can partake in "the free gift of the water of life" (Revelation 22:17).  Earlier tenets of the Bible, such as human moral responsibility and guilt, logically exclude any kind of nonexistence of free will.  A book could say that humans have moral obligations (this is not just the same as saying that morality exists, but it would entail that humans can do what is right and avoid evil) and that they have no free will, but this would be a contradiction.

The Bible teaches moral culpability over and over leading up to Revelation and even in this book itself (9:20-21, 16:8-11).  To be philosophically consistent, the Bible would have to not deny human volition, or else God would be condemning and punishing people for choices they could never make, which would both absolve people of their sin and make God unjust--the latter in particular being utterly heretical since it is God's nature that makes something good (and deviation from it evil).  Of course, a deity who wants everyone to repent (2 Peter 3:9, 1 Timothy 2:3) yet controls people like puppets would be the only obstacle to his own goal, so Calvinism contradicts this crucial soteriological doctrine very plainly.

As if all of this does not already mean Calvinism, the idea that God fatalistically determines who is saved or unsaved before people are even born (or directly forces their wills to any action so that it only seems like they are making free choices), is unbiblical, Revelation 22:17 says that whoever wishes can be saved.  There is no divine pushback in the Bible against God's own will.  Salvation comes from God, who is said to hope for every sinner's repentance in the aforementioned verses.  It would be absolutely contradictory for God to be the causal reason people sin and the causal reason they do not stop sinning.  Aspects of this would be logically possible in isolation, but not all of them at once: for instance, God could force people's wills, but humans could therefore not be guilty of evil because of their incapability of resisting and because of God's nature being what would ground morality to begin with.

Though all language used by others is ambiguous in that one can only know with absolute certainty what one's own words mean, Revelation avoids as much ambiguity as possible by saying that the water of life--a reference to Christ and commitment to him, which is like never thirsting and receiving a spring of water that wells up to eternal life (John 4:13-14)--is something anyone can choose.  An unwilling person will not choose it, yet this is not because they could not have.  It is because they refuse to.  Calvinism denies this.  The Bible does not say people are puppets with only the illusion of free will or that only some people, namely the "elect," have the ability to make choices themselves.  Emphasizing the universality of free will in that every person can turn to salvation if they desire, one of the last verses of the Bible affirms the capacity of every person to repent and align with God.

Corporations Almost Certainly Do Not Care

A company leader almost certainly does not care that your friendships or marriage will suffer or not be fully enjoyed due to long hours in the workplace.  They are very likely unconcerned with whether or not you receive adequate sleep or have enough money to do anything more than barely survive in the context of modern civilization.  It might have never even occurred to them that perhaps you will descend into depression, constant psychological tension, or suicidal attitudes because of the inherent drudgery and hopelessness of many jobs and what is often ultimately the threat of starvation or homelessness for those who are not compliant.  They are fixated almost inevitably, almost exclusively on things like the thrill of wielding power in an authoritarian, egoistic way and on the social constructs of company policy or money.

Pleasing or appeasing other people like themselves, taking power for the sake of power, cultivating an illusory reputation, and disregarding reason whenever it is personally convenient is what defines a great many people in the workplace.  The latter thing is precisely why they care about reputation or power or money over abstract philosophical (logical) truths to begin with!  As a worker, your ability to make money, and thus to afford things like housing, transportation, food, water, and electricity, among other things, is in their hands, and they could easily exploit this.  Many managers/employers do.  It is always more likely that any talk they have about caring for others is a facade unless they specifically talk like rationalists and do not treat others slanderously, hypocritically, or emotionalistically.

If a manager does say anything suggesting they are not this sort of selfish, power-drunk fool, they are still likely just submitting to social pressure, legal norms, conscience rather than strict reason and what reason reveals.  None of these other things matter in the slightest.  No one is good for abiding by their personal feelings or yielding to cultural constructs rather than to logical necessity and moral obligation.  In fact, this is what makes someone an irrationalist one kind or another.  Believing or acting contrarily to this in any way makes someone irrationalistic no matter their motives, feelings, or life circumstances.  A rationalist will almost always be surrounded by idiots who do not so much as understand why they are not bowing down to social norms and personal preferences of other people who do not know logical axioms or their right hand from their left.  Embracing rationalism--giving up all assumptions and discovering or clinging to necessary truths--is not easy or apparent to the masses because it takes fucking effort at first.

This is why it is always more likely that a random person would be a terrible friend or spouse than one who is rational and righteous.  It is of course true of coworkers and managers and employers as well.  There is no basis for optimism heading to or remaining in a workplace that is not dominated by rationalists, except in that it might still provide the likes of monetary benefit to oneself as an employee.  Establish yourself professionally, but other than as a means of personal fulfillment if applicable, do it only to materially enrich yourself and not to specifically further the goals of an arrogant, asinine fool of a supervisor or employer.  Build up professional power so that you can toy with them since they are non-rationalists, mere insects in a sense.  Company leadership in this world is always likely to not care about anything more than self-serving ends, not self-serving ends that do not conflict with reason or morality.

Sheol Is Never Satisfied

A particular section of the ground or the sea can only hold so many decomposing bodies at one time until they return to "dust," but Sheol can hold as many people as have died.  Habakkuk 2:5 describes an enemy of God who is as greedy as Sheol, which is never full or "satisfied" with the dead it has claimed.  Proverbs similarly says it never has enough (Proverbs 30:15-16).  The wicked go there just like the righteous (Job 3:11-19), something Revelation affirms by saying Hades gave up the dead that were in it before the final judgment: Acts 2:27 quotes Psalm 16:10 and substitutes the word Hades for Sheol, but Hades is Biblically not an intermediate realm of torture for the wicked (Luke 16:19-31 is a parable [1] that would otherwise contradict the blatant teaching on the matter).

If the wicked or unsaved dead, who were not part of the resurrection that already took place for the righteous or saved (Revelation 20:4-6), are resurrected from Hades and the sea before their judgment, why would Hades be referenced next to the sea if one is an afterlife for conscious souls?  As the aforementioned passage from Job says, Sheol is a dimension/state of rest where souls sleep, free from the misery of human life.  Death "claims" people one by one, rich or poor, rulers and the ruled, men and women, old and young, and it is never full, as Habakkuk and Proverbs say.  Human death, introduced by sin (Genesis 3:22-24, Romans 5:12, 6:23), brings more and more into Sheol where they join the hordes of unperceiving minds, if they exist at all, waiting for their resurrection (Daniel 12:2, 13).

Yes, the true Sheol of the Bible is a state of unconsciousness for the souls of the dead (or a dimension where these unconscious souls are suspended), all the dead.  For the body, Sheol or the grave refers to the literal physical location that holds a person's remains.  For the mind, it at most refers to a place/state of unconsciousness, or perhaps phenomenological nonexistence, as the dead "sleep" (Daniel 12:2 again, as well as John 11:11-13, Mark 5:35-40, and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), wholly unperceiving to the point of not even knowing themselves or logical axioms (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10) until their resurrection (John 5:24-29).  There is no present experience in heaven for the righteous or morally righteous punishment for the wicked, not if what the Bible actually says is true.

Death "reigns" in this way until death itself is done away with as the last enemy of God to perish (1 Corinthians 15:26).  Never full, never satisfied until then, death and Sheol are compared to the power of genuine love in Song of Songs 8:6.  Love is said to be as strong as death and as unyielding as Sheol, what the Bible presents as the inevitable, collective intermediate "place" of the dead, where they join together in the same total lack of thought, emotion, and activity, in the words of Ecclesiastes 9.  If love is as mighty as the grip of the physical grave and the unconsciousness of Sheol, it can be quite potent indeed, for the Teacher comments on how death is faced by everyone and how the inability to think or do anything is what all the dead descend to.  It is only elsewhere that an eventual eschatological resurrection is taught.

Sheol is neither a being nor a place where beings experience anything at all, but it is in a sense insatiable.  This makes it a great parallel for the person who has given himself or herself over to greed as Habakkuk directly teaches.  The eye might never tire of seeing (Ecclesiastes 1:8) and many fools allow themselves to be carried away by greed in part because of this.  Biblically, they would simply not end up in torment within Hades after death like the rich man in the mere parable of Jesus from Luke 16, just the same soul sleep or temporary annihilation of the dead before resurrection and the subsequent second death in hell (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6), this one permanent and without the opportunity of resurrection.  How ironic that greed, a sin that could damn someone to destruction in hell after Sheol, is analogous to the of the capacity of Sheol to take more and more.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/07/sheol-and-hades-part-three.html

The Extent Of Divine Hatred

In Mosaic Law, God is said to hate certain people, some of which is reiterated in Psalms or elsewhere.  He is said to abhor people who wear clothing of the opposite gender (Deuteronomy 22:5), deceitful people (Deuteronomy 25:13-16, Psalm 5:6, Proverbs 6:16-19), and people who commit sexually immoral acts such as incest, bestiality, and adultery (Leviticus 20:23 preceded by specific examples of largely consensual sexual sins along with bestiality).  There is no such thing as an inherent contradiction between loving someone and hating them as long as you hate them for the right reasons and never mistreat them, and Yahweh harbors all of these attitudes towards the same people at once (compare John 3:16 or Romans 5:8 with Proverbs 11:20 or any of the aforementioned verses).

Ultimately, the Biblical God hates all unrepentant sinners (Psalm 5:5), but this hatred would have to be proportionate to their beliefs and deeds (Romans 2:6) to be just, so it is not a uniform level of loathing that the petty thief (Leviticus 6:1-5, Numbers 5:5-8) and the slave trader (Exodus 21:16) would receive.  Someone who eats calamari, shrimp, or crab (Leviticus 11:9-12, Deuteronomy 14:9-10) is not as egregious of a sinner as someone who worships other deities or the natural world (Deuteronomy 13:6-10, 17:2-7), so they could not deserve the same level of revulsion.  A murderer deserves more hatred than a trivial liar, but the hatred they deserve is nothing compared to what someone who would torture murderers in unjust ways deserves.

If God hates people who kill the innocent (Psalm 5:6, Proverbs 6:16-17), then he would certainly hate people who commit worse atrocities than murder because the innocence of the victim is wholly irrelevant.  He would have to even more greatly despise people who torture in illicit ways (with some of the only context-permissible types of torture mentioned in Leviticus 24:22-24 or Deuteronomy 13:10, 25:1-3, 11-12), ways that are universally, directly prohibited or excluded by logical necessity from the punishments of the Torah because not even the greatest of sinners could deserve them.  By saying that God specifically hates the people who practice certain sins, and not just the sins alone, the Bible would be teaching that God hates anyone who commits a greater immorality.

If God hates incestuous people, unrepentant adulterers/adulteresses, and people who commit bestiality (the rape of an animal), as Leviticus 20 teaches, then he certainly hates every man or woman who forces themselves sexually on another person regardless of whether it would otherwise have been a permissible encounter (Deuteronomy 22:25-27).  If God hates liars and not just lies, he would of course hate flagrant philosophical hypocrites, who lie to themselves or ignore truths that are absolutely certain if one actually looks to them without assumptions: that it is easy to know one's heart (all one has to do is rationalistically introspect) and that if something is irrational/evil, it is the same for oneself as well.  It already follows separately from Psalm 5:5 that hating certain sinners necessitates the legitimacy or even justice of hating others.

Even so, Yahweh says well ahead of the New Testament that he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11), though burning to death in hell is what they deserve for their errors should they not repent (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6).  It is possible to hate someone while not only still loving them, but also actively hoping they will turn from what is erroneous to what is true and just.  The Biblical deity is like this.  There is love even amidst hatred and mercy that accompanies fury.  As far as people go, if God hates, then since God is the one whose nature dictates what is good (deviation from this being evil), it cannot be intrinsically evil for humans to hate as well if they channel this in the right direction and never let it spur them on to irrationality, emotionalism, or injustice.  How unpopular almost all of this would be in many churches!

The Stupidity Of Blaise Pascal (Part One)

Frequently denying reason's necessary truth and absolute certainty, conflating reason with the intellect (part of the mind which can grasp reason rather than reason itself), and making a wide range of false or utterly unverifiable statements, Blaise Pascal puts his sheer irrationalism on full display in Pensées.  In this series, I will highlight a handful of miscellaneous excerpts from this asinine work and touch on the errors articulated therein.  Since Pascal does not write about just one focused subject in Pensées, the quotations will concern diverse topics, none of which he approaches rightly.  As a Christian and as a broader philosopher, this insect of a man has had a significant impact on the world since his death, but, as is so often the case with other irrationalists like Aristotle and David Hume, stupidity unfortunately does not mean a person and their philosophy is not influential.

"Injustice.  It is dangerous to tell people that laws are not just, because they obey them only because they believe them to be just.  That is why they must be told at the same time that laws are to be obeyed because they are laws, just as superiors must be obeyed because they are superior.  That is how to forestall any sedition, if people can be made to understand that, and that is the proper definition of justice." (18)

Justice is what an action or person deserves, and so any deviation from this, if morality exists, is itself injustice.  If there are no actual objective moral obligations, then human laws are in full mere social constructs that have no true authority.  If there moral obligations, and human laws do not perfectly align with them in accordance with reason (for what is good is what should be done regardless of cultural norms and personal preference or gain), then to that extent that they deviate from reason and morality, human laws also have no authority.  Of course, conflicting laws of various nations cannot all be correct at once anyway, and it cannot be evil to gleefully trample on social constructs and despise those who hold to them.  Human laws are not accurate or obligatory because a leader or consensus appointed them.

Also, contrary to what Pascal seems to say, a moral nihilist or skeptic could obey laws out of irrationalistic love of society despite not thinking them righteous or could obey even just laws only for personal benefit.  It is not true that someone can obey laws only because they think them just.  Of course, if he was truly a rationalistic person and Christian, Pascal would unhesitatingly affirm that on the Christian worldview, the only valid laws are those revealed by God and those which follow from them by logical extension (Exodus 21:1, Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Psalm 119:1-3, 89-91, Matthew 5:17-19, Hebrews 2:2, and many more verses teach this).  He does not ever say such things, and he says completely contrary things about the Bible and general moral philosophy in Pensées, as exemplified above.  He is an irrationalist who does not know logical axioms, the necessary truths about any particular subject, or what the Bible really teaches--all of this will come up again below!

"One must know oneself.  Even if that does not help in finding truth, at least it helps in running one's life, and nothing is more proper." (19)

Knowing oneself, which can only be done by forsaking assumptions and looking to the logical necessities that govern all things and allow for knowledge in the first place, is to know a part of reality [1].  After all, a being cannot know itself if it does not exist as a consciousness, which would make its mind a real existent.  Moreover, to reject or deny or doubt one's own mind requires that one exists in order to do such things.  The existence of the conscious self is in this way self-evident, though logical axioms are more foundational.  It is in fact true that, along with strictly logical truths about reason and other matters, that one's own mind is all that can be known, in the sense that daily life and immediate perception does not prove that everything one perceives really exists, or that it has the exact nature it seems to.  For instance, seeing an apple hang from a tree does not mean the fruit or the tree exists as anything more than a visual hallucination.  A rationalistic person still knows that at least the perception exists as a mental experience that cannot be illusory.  Also, nothing could be more legitimate than knowing reason and all that it entails, so the pragmatism of running one's life is utterly trivial by comparison, not that a person can know anything about their life apart from looking to pure reason without making assumptions.

"And that is why I shall not undertake here to prove by reasons from nature either the existence of God, or the Trinity or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that kind . . . Even if someone were convinced that the proportions between numbers are immaterial, eternal truths, depending on a first truth in which they subsist, called God, I should not consider that he had made much progress towards his salvation." (141)

There is a multitude of errors put forth here.  Reason, not the natural world, proves things because truth itself only exists due to the self-necessity of logical axioms, which God is governed by (for instance, God cannot exist and not exist at once or be both honest and deceitful at once, and he cannot make necessary truths false because they are true in themselves) [2].  Yes, the existence of an uncaused cause is by logical necessity both true and demonstrable [3]; however, reason is true whether or not someone is persuaded by it.  Logical axioms and other necessary truths cannot be false, so they cannot be psychological constructs or merely true of other things like the external world.  Nothing is true apart from reason and nothing is knowable apart from it.  If someone does not know reason, they are the charlatans or the hollow slaves to assumptions and falsities.  

Thus, it is the other way around from what Pascal asserts about salvation being more important than metaphysical reason and epistemological proof.  Without knowing reason, one cannot know Christianity (as well as the evidences for its probable truth), and since reason is more foundational to reality than all else, salvation cannot possibly be the most important thing in reality whether or not Christianity is true [4].  Furthermore, salvation is secondary to morality because there can be no righteous damnation to be delivered from if there is no sin, and sin is deviation from moral obligation.  If something is morally obligatory, then one should do it no matter what.  Still, whether for the sake of salvation or not, the person who assumes anything for or against theism or Christianity is a fool because only a fool makes assumptions, which require that a person has either believed more than what logic necessitates (or in what contradicts it) or has believed something that is demonstrably true without actually discovering the proof.

Also, the Bible does not teach a Trinity or an inherent immortality of all human souls, things Pascal presents as if they are genuinely part of Christian doctrine.  Jesus is not Yahweh, which the Bible makes very clear unlike what Trinitarians pretend (Matthew 24:36, John 5:19-30, 10:25-29, 1 Corinthians 15:27, 1 Timothy 2:5, 6:14-15).  Other than having dissociative identity disorder, a being cannot be three beings in one, for either it is one being with three personas (thus not the literal three gods are one god bullshit of Trinitarianism) or three separate entities altogether.  Classical Trinitarianism is logically impossible.  If the Bible taught otherwise, the Bible would be wrong, not the necessary truths of reason.  Similarly, the Bible teaches that only God lives forever by nature (Daniel 12:7, 1 Timothy 6:15-16), hence why people have to be given eternal life (John 3:36, Romans 2:7-8).  Without this, they will literally perish (John 3:16, Romans 6:23), killed in hell for their sins (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:15).  Eternal torture for finite sins is by necessity unjust according to the inherent truths of reason and according to the Bible (Deuteronomy 25:1-3, Exodus 21:22-25, Romans 2:6).  Indeed, it is the greatest possible kind of injustice, for it would be the worst category of treatment.  No, the Bible does not say the wicked will live forever in torment, but if it did, again, the Bible's philosophy would be what is false and not reason.  Again and again, Blaise Pascal is a total fool who could not deserve to not be mocked or loathed for his betrayal of reason.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2021/07/know-thyself.html

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

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

[4].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-gospel.html

Deuteronomy 23:15-16's Relevance To Divorce

In the very first chapter of the Bible after the giving of the Ten Commandments, divorce is touched upon twice, once directly (Exodus 21:10-11) and once indirectly (Exodus 21:26-27).  The Bible does teach that people are free to leave abusive marriages.  It is not just sexual immorality like adultery on the part of one's spouse that legitimizes divorce!  Beyond just the abused party (one or both spouses as is applicable) having the human right to go free for the sake of justice, there is another part of Mosaic Law relevant to divorce for abuse--and any sort of mistreatment is abuse.  First, I will present Exodus 21:10-11 and 26-27 again to show that the Bible supports divorce for both passive neglect and active abuse.  The latter follows from the former as it is.  

Now, Exodus 21:10-11 does not say that husbands lack the described moral rights of wives, which would be sexist and thus logically inconsistent--there is no anatomical or physiological difference among men and women related to neglect and divorce, so any moral obligations concerning them would have to be identical if they exist.  Genesis 1:26-27 and 1 Corinthians 7:2-5, though, absolutely clarify left to themselves that the rights and obligations mentioned in Exodus 21:10-11 apply if the genders are reversed as well.  Exodus 21:26-27 specifically references both male and female slaves, and if slaves have a right to freedom for mistreatment, free spouses do.  Also, I have included Deuteronomy 15:16-17 to highlight that the Bible very overtly tackles how promises of commitment and servitude for life do not override the human right to escape abuse.

Exodus 21:10-11--"'If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing, and marital rights.  If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.'"

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.'"

Deuteronomy 15:16-17--"But if your servant says to you, 'I do not want to leave you,' because he loves you and your family and is well off with you, then take an awl and push it through his earlobe into the door, and he will become your servant for life.  Do the same for your female servant."

Rather close to a passage that addresses divorce by name without condemning the practice as long as the divorced spouse has actually committed some moral wrong (Deuteronomy 24:1-4), there is a set of verses about not returning a runaway slave to their master.  Exodus 21:26-27 is about how slaves deserve to go free for abuse, yet has logical ramifications for divorce on its own and together with Deuteronomy 15:16-17 (a declaration of lifelong commitment is very explicitly similar to many marriage vows).  Deuteronomy 23:15-16 is similar, albeit more subtle in its logically necessary relevance to divorce.

Deuteronomy 23:15-16--"If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand them over to their master.  Let them live among you wherever they like and in whatever town they choose.  Do not oppress them."

Deuteronomy 23:15-16 does not command slaves to flee abuse, but it certainly allows for this by condemning a third party returning a slave to his or her master.  Nothing is clarified about what exactly was done to the slave beforehand to compel them to depart.  Nonetheless, they are to settle wherever they would like and not be oppressed.  Exodus 21:26-27, in contrast, gives specific examples of abuse and says the slave "must" go free.  The passage also emphasizes gender equality, the male and female slaves being analogous to husbands and wives, and prescribes this freedom even if the slave had promised to serve his or her master/mistress for the rest of their life as according to Exodus 21:5-6 and Deuteronomy 15:16-17.  Together, these passages teach that slaves and by equivalence anyone abused must be released from an oppressive relationship/circumstance despite promises made beforehand and that they can simply walk away if they are not willingly allowed to leave, having the right to not be forcibly returned.

Out of love, perhaps the same love that drove them to willingly declare themself a male or female servant for life, or out of mercy, a slave could permissibly decide to stay with a master after mistreatment.  Maybe their master or mistress has otherwise been righteous and has even gone above and beyond what morality requires in their kindness.  It is still their choice to stay if they truly wish.  Justice on the part of the master is liberating them, and injustice on the part of any third party is making them go back to an abusive person or situation.  Yes, for the sake of love or mercy, a spouse could stay with their partner who has wronged them, but this is supererogatory at best, and he or she is certainly free according to God's laws in the Torah to marry a new partner in the case of any justified divorce.

I emphasize again, a man or woman fleeing an abusive marriage--including an emotionally/psychologically abusive marriage--is never to be pressured to return.  Reason and Biblical morality contradict this.  Submitting to an evil person cannot be obligatory if good and evil exist, even if the person is otherwise righteous as aforementioned; in more than one way, focusing on the lowest in the social hierarchy in ways that would have to apply to everyone else, the Bible makes it clear that male and female slaves do not have to submit to abuse.  Deuteronomy 23:15-16 does not restrict the scope of its commands to cases of physical abuse as opposed to verbal and psychological mistreatment, and thus neither would its ramifications for divorce be limited to specific forms of abuse.

There is no wiggle room with what the Bible really teaches about divorce even less directly outside of statements in the synoptic gospels that are, short of a hypothetical linguistic phenomenon described here [1], sheer exaggeration or woefully wrong according to God's own laws.  If Deuteronomy 24:1-4 did not specify that divorce requires a moral failing on the spouse's part, the universal and perfect law of God (Leviticus 20:22-24, Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Psalm 19:7, etc.) would actually teach in Deuteronomy 21:10-14 that divorce literally due to amoral personal disinterest or displeasure is nonsinful!  What verses like Exodus 21:10-11 and 21:26-27 teach explicitly or by logical extension about divorce is not about frivolous grounds.  Deuteronomy 23:15-16 would by extension also pertain to marriage, more directly about not sending someone back into an abusive relationship than about fleeing the relationship.  That a slave can simply walk away, almost whatever the reason (Exodus 22:3 would be an exception for the sake of justice), and that a spouse should not divorce for amoral reasons (Deuteronomy 24:1) is the only significant difference in applicability.

[1].  Since there is no inherent meaning to words themselves, their meaning is ultimately whatever the speaker means by them.  I cannot know with absolute certainty what other people mean by their words, unlike with my own.  Unless Jesus is using words in such a manner, very differently from their conventional usage, in passages like Matthew 5:31-32, Matthew 19:1-9, and Mark 10:1-12, he is either using extreme hyperbole to reinforce the seriousness of divorce or he is insane (irrational) and a heretic.

Enticement To Sin

Two complementary portions of Deuteronomy fulfill the unique role of describing how a particular sin and trying to convince someone to carry out the sin are both capital offenses.  Certainly, enticing someone to sin is itself an act that is sinful, but there is an enormous difference between doing something and plotting to do it or telling someone else to.  All the same, Yahweh's laws call for the same punishment for both: execution by stoning.  The sins in question are respectively worshiping a false god, the natural world, or anything other than God and, successfully or not, enticing someone to do this very thing.  The relationship between these passages is unique as aforementioned because nowhere else does the Bible address enticement to sin in this manner.  Here are the full excerpts:

Deuteronomy 13:6-10--"If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, 'Let us go and worship other gods' (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), do not yield to them or listen to them.  Show them no pity.  Do not spare them or shield them.  You must certainly put them to death.  Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people.  Stone them to death . . ."

Deuteronomy 17:2-5--"If a man or woman living among you in one of the town the Lord gives you is found doing evil in the eyes of the Lord your God in violation of his covenant, and contrary to my command has worshipped other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars in the sky, and this has been brought to your attention, then you must investigate it thoroughly.  If it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done in Israel, take the man or woman who has done this evil deed to your city gate and stone that person to death."

It could obviously not be as severe a sin to only attempt to persuade someone to do an evil act as to actually do the action in question, but Biblically, both enticement to worship other gods and worshiping other gods both meet or surpass the threshhold of wickedness to make a behavior deserve execution.  Does this necessitate that the same would be true of other capital sins?  An easy example is murder: someone could order another person to commit murder and yet not be the one murdering anyone.  Murder is declared a capital offense in each book of the Torah (Genesis 9, Exodus 21, Leviticus 24, Numbers 35, Deuteronomy 19), but Deuteronomy 22:8 uses the word bloodshed to reference the death of a person who fell from a house without a parapet on its walkable roof, a word used in reference to murder in Numbers 35.  Negligence in taking precautions to protect human life is bloodshed just like murder.  

Exodus 21:22-23, furthermore, prescribes a "life for life" penalty for anyone whose negligence during a brawl results in the death of a bystander.  This does not apply to all accidents leading to death, for not all involve negligence.  Additionally, Exodus 21:28-32 demands capital punishment for whoever "knows", as much as can be the case, that their inaction or passivity is endangering human life if it leads to someone winding up dead, using the example of a bull that has already attacked a human not being penned up even when the owner saw or was told about the incident.  The penalty is the same for active murder and negligence culminating in human death:

Exodus 21:12, 14, 20, 22-23, 28-32--"'Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death . . . 

But if anyone schemes and kills someone deliberately, that person is to be taken from my altar and put to death . . . 

Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result . . . 

If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows.  But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life . . .

If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten.  But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible.  If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its owner also is to be put to death.  However, if payment is demanded, the owner may redeem his life by the payment of whatever is demanded.  This law also applies if the bull gores a son or daughter.  If the bull gores a male or female slave, the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull is to be stoned to death.'"

Passivity in the face of circumstances that jeopardize human life is a capital sin if someone does indeed die just like with intentional murder.  If failing to confine a bull that has attacked a person nonlethally--since the domestic animal that has already killed a person must itself be killed even if it is a truly unanticipated accident and the owner has no guilt--means the owner deserves to die if the creature later kills someone, then directly ordering the unjust death of a human being would have to deserve the same penalty at least.  The latter is the worse offense.  While not as severe as actual murder, it is necessarily greater than neglecting to safeguard human life when evidence suggests others are at risk.  Consequently, due to enticement to sin deserving the same penalty as the sin in question and due to both neglect leading to human death and premeditated murder deserving the same penalty, the person who engages in the intermediately severe sin of commanding another person to commit murder on their behalf likewise Biblically deserves execution.

The same would be true of other capital sins such as kidnapping (Exodus 21:16), sorcery (Leviticus 20:27), rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27), false testimony in a capital case (Deuteronomy 19:16-21), and adultery (Leviticus 20:10).  Any person who entices another to commit such deeds deserves to die for their own sin independent of whether the other party acts according to the invitation.  In the case that one person goes further and forces another to carry out a capital sin, such as by threatening to kill them if they do not work on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:1-3), the person who forces the other to do what would otherwise be a sin (on their part) is the one truly guilty of a capital offense, not the innocent victim (Deuteronomy 22:22-27).  In spite of the focus of this post being on enticement to sin and additional instances beyond that of Deuteronomy 13 where the offender deserves death, it is vital that the person who forces another to sin capitally is the one who really should be put to death.

It is also important and somewhat relevant that another category of sin besides 1) committing an act like worship of other gods or murder, 2) enticing someone else to do so, or 3) forcing someone to do so also deserves execution.  More specifically, formally but falsely accusing someone of having committed a capital sin out of malice--not merely driven by incorrect perceptions or incomplete access to evidence the witness rationalistically realizes is fallible anyway--makes the guilty party worthy of the same punishment the maliciously accused person would deserve if he or she truly had sinned in that manner.  Therefore, there are four pathways to deserving capital punishment by Biblical standards, whether by committing an act independently meriting execution, enticing someone else to do such things, forcing others to carry them out, or accusing someone else of having done them:

Deuteronomy 19:16-21--"If a malicious witness takes the stand to accuse someone of a crime, the two people involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the Lord before the priests and the judges who are in office at the time.  The judges must make a thorough investigation, and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against a fellow Israelite, then do to the false witness as that witness intended to do to the other party.  You must purge the evil from among you.  The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you.  Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot."

In a variety of circumstances, more than just committing an act like murder or rape should be responded to with execution on the testimony of two or three witnesses (Numbers 35:30, Deuteronomy 17:6, 19:15).  Indeed, capital punishment is prescribed for more besides such deeds than maliciously accusing others of having sinned so grievously.  Thanks to the case law of Deuteronomy 13:6-10, one can see the logical ramifications of Biblical justice for other attempts to persuade someone to sin which are not specifically mentioned anywhere in the Torah or beyond.  Not even one's own children, siblings, or by extension parents can be exempted from this.  Thanks to Exodus 21:28-32, anyone not making assumptions and looking to reason can see that if negligence resulting in the death of a man, woman, or child is a capital sin, then maliciously calling for some other party to unjustly kill them directly would at least deserve the same punishment; a host of other verses from the same chapter make it clear that malicious murder or mistreatment leading to potentially accidental murder (as in the instance of the master or mistress beating their slave to death, whatever the intention) is certainly a capital sin.

Enticing someone to sin, whether one has or will carry out the deed and whether they do, is not the worst category of evil possible.  Yet it is significant all the same.  So significant is this form of sin that God's nature requires that no one show any pity to their closest friend or family member when they secretly propose worshiping other gods.  How much worse, then, would publicly pressing a group of people to sin be, or demanding that someone else sin?  When the sin makes the perpetrator deserve premature death via capital punishment, like enticing someone to worship anything other than Yahweh or instructing them to commit murder, it would be evil for anyone to refuse imposing the sentence.  Justice is justice, and very few who profess commitment to Judeo-Christianity would actually dare to entertain that any punishments but those which correspond to their arbitrary community/national norms or subjective sense of morality (conscience).  Deuteronomy's case law about privately enticement to worship anything besides Yahweh is clear as to what is morally necessary.