Financial "Literacy"

The American trend of conflating literacy with intelligence (rationality) is reflected in the way familiarity with personal finance concepts or competence in living them out is phrased: people often refer to this as financial literacy.  It goes quite nicely with what many people seem to think about how it is impossible to have true knowledge, perhaps apart from matters of immediate personal sense experience, without consulting a formally published book, an online article, a YouTube video, a TED Talk, etc.  I am not saying that these resources are incapable of incidentally helping someone pragmatically achieve a personal financial goal or prompting them to pinpoint or focus on an actual logical truth.  Those things would very well be the case.  

But reading books (or articles) does not make one more intelligent; literacy is not rationality.  Discovering and grasping logical necessities makes someone intelligent.  This inevitably begins with recognizing logical axioms such as how there must be truth because otherwise it is true that nothing is true.  While this might be dismissed as too easy, not only is relative ease irrelevant, it is the very nature of logic that it is both inherently true and immediately accessible.  However, though all truths are really abstract logical truths, including necessary truths about finance, it is neither self-evident nor apparent from logic alone, without any experiential prompting, that a given country has a certain currency or that it takes a certain amount of that currency to typically live in that nation, for instance.

Not everything is this far removed from everyone's ability to verify (and yes, hearsay cannot prove anything about the aforementioned economic matters beyond that there is hearsay, of course, though it acts as evidence).  Of course public figures might love for you to believe that without them and their resources (including those for sale), there is little to nothing that can be known about money, wealth-building, and so on.  If not in the industry for marketing and moneymaking purposes, perhaps they like feeling important because others supposedly need them and their expertise.  And none of them have likely ever considered the real nature of reason starting with the self-evident, supremely foundational logical axioms.  All of reality hinges on these.  As slaves to assumptions, they cannot be genuinely intelligent, but they often gladly or blindly perpetuate a culture that mistakes having conversations, reading/viewing/listening to sources, or accepting non sequiturs because of who is proposing them for being an intelligent person.

I write online articles, yes.  But as a rationalist, I do not encourage or pressure anyone to believe in something because I or anyone else believes or proclaims it.  I only promote the awareness and celebration of logical facts using a written medium; never do I hope someone will neglect consulting logic itself instead of my words or any sort of subjective impression of veracity derived from reading my blog.  Nor do I in any way want people to sidestep looking directly to reason about a matter until after they have read one of my posts.  But many appear to feel validated by the approval of other people or to feel safer by embracing a consensus, or even apart from consensus, putting themselves at the mercy of agreeing with a supposed authority figure.

Assumptions, fallacies, and emotionalism do not become valid when rooted in a person's own mind instead of those of others.  Subjectivism and any kind of personal assumption are likewise illogical, because reason alone is true in itself and delivers one from the abyss of unverifiability.  Belief in assumptions that one embraces due to personal intuition or preference is still irrational, just like assuming that anyone else's ideas are right, no matter who is the one thinking of or proposing them. 

Ironically, though logical axioms and other purely logical truths, as well as logical facts about the existence and nature of one's own consciousness, are the only things that can be known wholly apart from some form of external prompting, they are precisely the things that many people acknowledge the least and often seem least competent with handling.  For instance, logic is often confused for a mental reasoning process rather than a set of independent necessary truths.  Many either tend to ignore the likes of logical axioms entirely or thoroughly misunderstand them.  Due to the combination of people 1) failing to look past emotional persuasion or the practical components of everyday life and 2) latching onto cultural conditioning to accept various philosophical assumptions (even when they are demonstrably false or utterly unprovable), as long as they are promoted by "experts" and figures with societal influence, there are few rationalists indeed.

By nature, no one needs to be educated by teacher figures or prompted by any kind of conversation or media to realize strictly logical truths about finance, though there would be no particular reason to have ever thought of money at all apart from some sort of social experience.  That nuance would likely go right over the heads of most personal finance educators!  And what might examples of those logical facts about finance (personal or otherwise) be?  For instance, all money is a social construct with no inherent economic value; the values assigned are arbitrary despite numbers and their relationships being matters of logical necessity independent of human belief and activity.

Spending more than one makes, given long enough and with no mitigating factors (like having the excess covered by family or friends), will deplete one's financial resources and result in debt.  And there is no contradiction between spending some money on non-necessities now, given that it is money one actually has and can afford to devote to such an end, and saving for an adequate retirement.  No one needs prompting from other people or resources to realize such things, though many act as if they need something like conversational or lecture-based teaching to ever discover basic logically necessary facts about personal finance.

On the contrary, to know something like if it is likely that a distant region is on the brink of a recession or what options are available for high-yield savings accounts, one must go beyond looking to pure logical proof and look to fallible, experiential evidences, some of which might be "expert" testimony as presented in news reports or any other sources such as the ones listed in the third paragraph.  Even so, one must still rely on logic to know anything that can be known about the issue in question, and there hearsay is still objectively irrelevant, including from any expert, to the truth of an idea.

Most people are simply so passive that they never even consider the difference between concepts related to a priori and a posteriori epistemology, and no, they do not need to learn these formal Latin words through sources or education to know logical axioms and other necessary truths with absolute certainty.  All they have to do is look to reason.  "Financial literacy" is a phrase people would contrive almost solely if they they believe in some error regarding epistemology and intelligence, particularly by conflating literacy with intelligence, revering familiarity with literature or sources (not logic), and accepting appeals to authority.  "Financial rationality" is the objectively more accurate phrase.  Familiarity in the ultimate sense with personal finance is not about literacy at all.  It is about transcendent logical facts and grasping them through rationality!

"Like Sheep They Are Appointed For Sheol"

Apart from all the passages that with great clarity affirm that there is no perception, and thus no conscious afterlife, in Sheol, the place/state of the dead according to the Old Testament, one Psalm equivalently compares sheep to humans by saying that like sheep, humans go to Sheol, the Hebrew word for the destiny of the dead.  People who have already assumed that the human dead are conscious before return of Christ (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18) and the judgment at the great white throne (Revelation 20:11-15) would probably balk at such a comparison, but it is there in Psalm 49.  I quote the English Standard Version below for its habit of actually using the word Sheol in English: 

Psalm 49:13-14—"This is the path of those who have foolish confidence; yet after them people approve of their boasts.  Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol; death will be their shepherd, and the upright will rule over them in the morning.  Their form shall be consumed in Sheol, with no place to dwell."

Not only does Psalm 49:13-14 very clearly appear to equate the condition of dead sheep with that of dead humans, but it also specifies that the form of the human dead will be consumed in Sheol.  This aligns with Sheol equating to unconsciousness for the mind as well as the literal area holding a physical corpse, which decomposes.  This is also consistent with how Revelation 20 contrasts Hades, Sheol by a Greek name (compare Acts 2:27 to Psalm 16:10 in Hebrew and Greek respectively, or in the ESV), with the sea that also holds dead bodies rather than conscious, unembodied spirits.  The human body is dust and returns to dust, as Genesis 3 and Ecclesiastes 3 say.  Psalm 49 certainly points away from any sort of immediate afterlife for humans ahead of eschatological resurrection (Daniel 12:2, Job 14:10-12, both of which also would suggest soul sleep on their own), whether pleasant or unpleasant, and other places in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, are even more clear in their directness and simplicity about what happens to human consciousness at death.

A host of other passages that use the word Sheol (at least in Hebrew or certain English translations) establish that there is simply no mental activity at all in this realm of the dead.  All are unconscious, unless atypically roused for a time, as with the prophet Samuel, whom Saul contacted through a medium in 1 Samuel 28.  See Job 3:11-19 for a very prolonged description of how Job longed to die precisely because there is no suffering for the dead.  While that passage does not use the word Sheol, it does plainly speak of the state of the dead and addresses how it is the same for everyone, rich or poor, slave or free, righteous or wicked.  Here are some additional verses from the English Standard Version that do mention Sheol, one of which is also from Psalms:

Psalm 6:5—"For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who will give you praise?"

Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10—"For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing . . . Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going."

These are just some passages that obviously affirm the unconsciousness of the dead.  Others, with or without the word Sheol, do the same.  For instance, the aforementioned Job 3 is extremely blatant in putting forth genuine soul sleep and presenting Sheol as a blessed relief from all human agony, not a place of torment for anyone.  Even passages that might go unnoticed in their ramifications for soul sleep, like John 14:2-3, could only be correct if the dead are not conscious before resurrection—to summarize, in these verses, Jesus says his followers will only be with him after his return, not before, and so they cannot go be with him in heaven before then if John 14 is accurate.

Returning to Psalm 49, do sheep go to an afterlife of bliss or torment?  Would this afterlife be an intermediate state before the resurrection, prior to entry to Gehenna where the unrepentant wicked are at some point permanently put to death (Matthew 10:28, Revelation 20:15) or to New Jerusalem where only the righteous live forever, as all others perish (John 3:16, 36)?  If not, then how can people be thrust into a conscious afterlife when they go to the exact same place as dead sheep?  The Bible already describes what happens to humans in Sheol elsewhere, and it involves no kind of experience, but the utter lack of it: they enter a status of total unconsciousness.  Psalms teaches that the same happens to animals, albeit probably without any future resurrection.  In this regard, the fate of animals and humans is the same for a time according to genuine Christian doctrines.

Golden Parachutes

The issue of golden parachutes is about company figures, usually executives, receiving large amounts of money or stock options when they leave, something very foreign to many workers who could be terminated for minor or illusory offenses.  Most arguments for or against golden parachutes really have the basis of assumed ideas--like that the incoming CEO, who can arrange for a golden parachute beforehand, will leave because of misconduct and thus a parting gift would be immoral--or false ones--like that CEOs are just so instrumental to a company that there is no proportionality or limitation on how much they would deserve to be paid, even upon their departure.  Regardless, losing an executive position is softened immensely by such measures.

A CEO, not that golden parachutes have to be exclusively given to them, might destroy a company's profitability, reputation, or culture and then leave while receiving more money than most employees would ever earn across their entire career.  Then, they might obtain another executive role and repeat their same ideological, moral, or pragmatic mistakes, perhaps gaining another golden parachute on their way out.  There is a degree of distinctive double standard in how some executives and general employees are treated in the corporate world of a society like America, and severance is relevant.  Typically, an ordinary employee would not get severance for misconduct termination as opposed to resignation or a layoff, and even then it is hardly enough to retire on, but executives tend to be paid far better while actively working and when leaving.

For example, Roger Ailes of Fox News received 40 million dollars for his 2016 resignation as an executive in response to sexual harassment charges.  It is not that an executive will always by logical necessity be some heinously tyrannical or incompetent person who will inevitably leave because of moral or pragmatic problems of their own making, but that even such people are in a sense rewarded or given far more than is necessary to survive.  Yes, other more positive or neutral functions of a golden parachute could be intended.  It could be used to persuade an executive from another company to switch organizations or to deter hostile takeovers.  If the acquiring company would have to pay extreme amounts of money upon the exit of the then-former executive, the takeover might not be as appealing anymore.

Still, executive overcompensation is reported to be a major problem in America, even aside from the entire subject of golden parachutes.  Executives do not work 300-400 times harder than employees designated manual labor or consumer-facing positions despite receiving up to this many more times the money, and their often incredible compensation already alleviates much of the stress over the literal survival or basic comfort that other people might labor for because they have to.  Is there anything, say, Biblically immoral about taking care of high-level leadership?  No, but this kind of disproportionality is logically invalid and would be morally unmerited, especially when it comes at the expense of paying workers at or above a truly livable wage/salary.

For a valid reason, many common employees will not be enriched with millions of dollars if they step down from their positions.  Departure is not something that deserves this amount of money.  Whether it is used to mitigate the risk for an incoming executive who is in turn leaving a separate company for the role, to make it easier to get rid of unwanted executives quickly and relatively quietly, or for with other motivation, the way golden parachutes are handled in America is extremely disproportionate by default--this is already on top of their base executive pay--and can end up directly benefitting someone for doing little to no work or for a legitimate scandal outing them.  Only one of these issues is inherent to the general structure of golden parachutes in my culture at this time, and it is a significant flaw.

Fallacious Misunderstandings Of "The Real World"

The phrase "the real world" gets thrown around quite casually by certain people who are not even referring to the natural world at all, much less in any sort of manner reflecting genuinely absolute certainty about what is real and what is not, wherever that certainty is achievable for humans.  Perhaps the reader's experience differs, but I have encountered people many times who remark that the alleged real world is that of employment, commerce, networking, or some other social/cultural thing—as if "the real world" is the social construct of business and the organizations and relationships contained therein!

However, the likes of business are literally constructs that do not exist apart from the action of beings such as humans (or any other logically possible group that hypothetically exists).  The world is the material substance outside of one's mind, either in the sense of the singular planet/locale or the entire cosmos.  Whatever matter exists is "the real world," although only a fool believes that they can know that the world of matter really is as it visibly appears.  It does not logically follow from the nature of almost all sensory perception, and certainly not from the mental experience of sight or sound, that there is anything beyond one's mind which is physical, metaphysically distinct, and exactly as perceived.

Not only is the "world" of business invented and subject to any human-instigated change which is logically possible, meaning it cannot be the "real world" in any sort of foundational sense, but except through a single logical proof, there is no way for a human to even know that there is any sort of external world at all [1].  Either way, to assume that there is a material world because there appears to be one is stupidity, yet a form of stupidity that many non-rationalists seem to easily fall into.  The "real world" is just the world as it really is, and very little can actually be demonstrated (by logic) about the world.

Now, logic is the grounding of truth itself, which is itself true independent of everything else because of self-necessity, which in turn makes it epistemologically self-evident.  One ramification of this is that logic exists because the opposite is impossible, with or without anything else.  It is neither physical matter, which does not have to exist, nor a social/mental construct, which only exists if a conscious being creates it or sets it up.  Yet it is independent of the "world", which can only exist in the first place because this is logically possible.

How many people ever discover the supreme independence and centrality of the laws of logic at even the most basic level, that of inherent truth and epistemological self-evidence?  Not many, it would appear!  Yet some of them are quick to confuse something invented by humans as if it is the most foundational or important aspect of reality!  What delusional, inept thinkers they are, desperate to achieve success by their society's arbitrary standard, one irrelevant to the truth about the actual layers of reality money, business, and other sociological constructs and practices stand upon.

Likewise, there is nothing supremely foundational about the actual external world and whatever laws of physics really operate beyond the veil of perception.  Electrons, molecules, soil, vegetation, and so on, along with "laws" like gravitational attraction (really, they are often just the behaviors of material substances under given conditions as opposed to anything separate and transcendent) are secondary at best to the laws of logic, which depend on nothing else.  Not even God can create or undo what cannot be false!  Despite all of this, the natural world, to the extent that it exists outside of one's consciousness, constitutes the real world.  Social constructs of the sort like commerce and traffic customs are contrived inventions that, while not logically false concepts like other social constructs (including racial stereotypes), in no way reflect nature itself.

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

The Slave Gored To Death By A Bull

Among the laws pertinent to injury, death, and slavery in Exodus 21 is a five verse passage on an instance where a bovine has attacked someone and killed them.  The full text in question is below, detailing Yahweh's moral requirements for how to handle the situation depending on whether the animal has ever attacked previously.  If it had killed someone, it was not even to have been left alive to do so again.  Of emphasis in this post, though, is the issue of whether the punishment if the owner has not taken the right precautions (by having the animal killed if it has killed or penned if it has only attacked) is different depending on if the dead person is free or a slave.  To some people, it might like seem like the punishment is indeed lesser all around.  This would only be an assumed concept foreign to both the literal wording of Exodus 21 and what is logically entailed by the concepts behind the words.

Exodus 21:28-32—"'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.'"

With murder, Exodus 21:12-14 and 22-23 make it clear that the penalty is death, in accordance with Genesis 9:6, and so Exodus 21:20-21 not specifying the exact punishment for killing a male or female slave with a rod would not mean that execution is not the penalty.  This idea would not follow logically from a lack of specification in verses 20-21 as it is, but since multiple other verses in the same chapter clarify that death is the deserved penalty for murder, and an abusive master or mistress who kills their slave with a rod has committed murder, it simply does not have to say it yet again here.  Other parts of the text already do.  Why would it be any different for negligently allowing an animal to kill a free person or a slave?  Then the matter would hinge on if anything is said directly prescribing a different penalty for the death of a slave through refusal to pen up a dangerous animal, as with how Exodus 21:26-27 does give a different penalty for the injury of a slave by their master/mistress from that of injury to a free person in Exodus 21:23-25 (and one more advantageous to the slave).

First of all, aside from the issue of consistency with Exodus 21:12-14, 20-21, and 22-23 in not prescribing different punishments for the murder of a free man or woman and of a slave, Exodus 21:28-29 speaks of a bull goring a man or a woman, with verse 31 including boys and girls as well.  An adult slave is a man or a woman, short of rare cases of intersex status (which does not alter their human rights at all), a person regardless.  Verse 28 teaches that if a bull gores someone to death, it must be killed.  Verse 29 mentions a bull that has already gored someone—but not killed them, or else it should die—and how it should be penned up.  It is only if the bull has gored someone before, whether or not it resulted in human death, and not been respectively killed or penned up by the owner who saw or heard of this so that it kills someone else that the owner is also to be killed.  They are permitted, though, to pay a potentially enormous amount of monetary value to escape this capital punishment.  When Exodus 21:32 prescribes paying the owner of a male or female slave 30 shekels of silver if a bull gores them to death, this is perfectly consistent with the killing of a servant by a bull that has never previously been aggressive.  Whoever the victim is in Exodus 21:28, slave or free, the owner is not to die in this scenario anyway.

Now, nothing about verse 32 requires that the owner of the animal never be killed as long as the victim is a "mere" slave, even if the owner was negligent.  In the case of an unconfined domestic/agricultural animal that kills a male or female slave after attacking people in the past (the animal belonging to someone other than the master of the slave), the 30 shekels could be given to the master or mistress as part of the monetary payment to redeem the animal owner's life (Exodus 21:30).  Nothing about this conflicts with the literal prescriptions in the preceding verses.  It does not matter if the first or second scenario of Exodus 21:28-29 involved the death of a slave instead of a free man or woman.  The comment about paying the slave's owner does not have to refer to an exception from what to do if a free person is killed with or without the animal having a violent history.  

At worst, Exodus 21:32 clearly still treats the death of a male or female slave due to an attack from a farm animal as the loss of a person, not of a subhuman entity.  The animal must be killed no matter what.  But differing penalties based upon whether a slave or a free person is killed by someone's animal is not inherent to what the text conveys other than that a monetary payment is always involved in the former instance, to make restitution for the loss of service to another party; no one is said to never deserve capital punishment if the victim of the animal is a slave.  Nowhere does the passage present penalties that conflict with the concept of egalitarian equality of human lives concerning livestock and murder by negligence.  Slaves, too, are humans with all the rights thereof, including the right to not be treated as a disposable resource by having dangerous conditions dismissed.  The payment of 30 shekels of silver to the master of the dead slave is entirely consistent with the exact instructions if a bull spontaneously kills someone or does so after showing previous aggression because it was never confined.

The Sheep And The Goats

Jesus says that at his coming with angels, he will divide the righteous and the wicked he finds, putting the sheep (the righteous) on his right and the goats (the wicked) on his left (Matthew 25:31-46).  The righteous are granted entrance to a kingdom of God, while the wicked depart from Christ into the hellfire he says was prepared for the devil and his own angels.  This did not happen in the gospels or the book of Acts before his ascension, so it would have to take place at his return.  His words about the sheep and goats are not the only place where Jesus talks about his then and still-future coming as having angels.  Matthew 24:30-31 also says that the Son of Man's coming will involve angels gathering God's people from one end of the heavens to the other.  That angels are with him at his coming, which is visible and bodily unlike what the delusions of preterism hold (Acts 1:7-11), is attested to even by some parables of Christ.

Matthew 13:37-43 addresses what Jesus means by the parable of the weeds (13:24-30).  In this narrative, weeds are allowed to grow with wheat until the harvest, when they are separated and burned.  In the clarification provided by Jesus, the field where the seeds are sown is the world, the harvest is the end of the age, and so on.  Jesus says here that angels are represented by the harvesters in this story and that at the end of the age, these beings will bring sinners to the furnace, paralleling how he says in Matthew 25 that the wicked alive at his return will be sent to hell to perish (John 3:16)—for these people, hell is not an afterlife because they do not die beforehand, and even aside from many other verses, it is clear from Matthew 25:46 that eternal punishment is contrasted with eternal life.  Any alternative to eternal life entails by necessity that someone does not live forever, and thus the wicked do not exist forever.  

The much shorter parable of the net in Matthew 13:47-48 is also immediately given the same kind of explanation for that of the weeds in the following two verses.  Here, Jesus again teaches that angels will separate the wicked from the righteous and put them in the fire at the end of the age as the fishermen of the parable divide good and bad fish from their net.  Also of note given the errors of preterism is that Jesus is saying these things both to clarify symbolic stories and outside the context of Revelation, which means that any genuinely figurative descriptions in Revelation would still not mean he is not being literal.  Thus, Jesus is not speaking figuratively when he explains; he is clarifying what his figurative stories about weeds and a net literally mean.

The separation of sheep and goats happens literally at the Second Coming, as certain aforementioned parables of Jesus in Matthew as well as his direct teaching on the separation from chapter 25 establish.  This prophecy could not have happened non-visibly and non-literally back in 70 AD for many reasons, among them how Jesus never ushered in an actual lasting kingdom on Earth after that time as predicted (Matthew 13:43, 25:34).  Revelation 20:1-6 combined with 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 presents the first resurrection, that of the righteous (mentioned together with that of the wicked in Daniel 12:2), as occuring when a rider on a white horse called the Word of God (not said to be a Jesus in Revelation 19:13, but affirmed in John 1:1-4, 14) comes to defeat the beast and his army, which is in turn succeeded by a thousand year kingdom of Christ that continues in New Jerusalem when heaven comes to Earth (Revelation 21-22).  Resurrection and other such things did not happen in 70 AD!

The separation of the sheep and goats is not the final judgment of Revelation 20:11-15.  It cannot be, since the bodily resurrection of the wicked happens before the judgment of the great white throne, whereas Jesus says the sheep and goats are divided right at his coming.  For the goats, the lake of fire is their destination, yet they go there alive.  Revelation 20:11-15 says its wicked are brought back to life from the ground and Sheol/Hades and that the lake of fire is for them a second death (and a literal second death as taught by 2 Peter 2:6, Romans 6:23, Matthew 10:28, and so on).  Of course, there is also the chronological impossibility of the Son of Man's coming bringing about the final judgment when there is at least a thousand years between the two events.  The timing of when the sheep and the goats are judged is actually of great importance in that it would have to be consistent with all the other things taught by the Bible about eschatology, and it ultimately is.

Aristotle Did Not Invent Logic (And Could Not Have)

The real nature of logic is so metaphysically simple and immediately knowable that no one could possibly have any excuse for overlooking it save for living in a permanent state of unconsciousness, especially the longer they have been alive, or being extremely young.  It is also so abstract that it is extremely easy for fools to neglect it, deny it, or misunderstand it gravely.  Of the utmost simplicity since it could not depend on anything other than itself, as it is always the other way around (all other things by necessity hinge on logic), the laws of logic are true in themselves.  If it was not true that one thing does or does not follow by logical necessity from another, it would be true that it follows from the nature of reality by logical necessity that logic is false, but this requires that logical necessity is still true.  Similarly, if nothing was true, then this would be true, so it is impossible for there to be no truth.  These and other logical axioms, like a thing being what it is and contradictions being impossible, cannot be false.

In their ideological stupor, as they have not understood these inherent truths for what they are and think of logic as some other thing, certain people claim the Greek philosopher Aristotle of the 3rd century BC/BCE invented logic.  What can only be true cannot be invented, but whether or not Aristotle had erroneous ideas about the laws of logic, this does not so much as mean he is the first person to allegedly formally ponder them.  Even if unrecorded in writing, this would not have to be true that no one else has correctly or incorrectly reflected on reason (and this, like all truths, is a matter of logical necessity and possibility).  Anyone can become a rationalist because reason is inherently true, and so it is universally accessible.  All a person has to do, whatever their historical era or gender or race or social standing or personality or experiences and beliefs up to that point, is stop making assumptions and identify that logical axioms cannot be false, necessitating that a multitude of other truths which are incapable of being false and thus also absolutely certain are also true.  Logic is not subjective comprehension or laws of nature or physical objects/environments or a characteristic of the divine entity.  Logic governs all other things because it cannot have been any other way.

Reason is inherently true, yes.  To be false, it would still have to be true.  Thus, Aristotle cannot have made it true or done anything more than at best discovered or articulated aspects of it (and from what I have read of his works, he is absolutely not a rationalist).  Logic is not just true of other things--a brick is a brick, but the law of identity and the deductive truth that if an object is a brick, it is not a tree are not the same as the physical objects themselves.  No one needs to receive education to realize this, for it is true independent of sociality and teaching and awareness.  Anyone can discover such things if they actually try in a rationalistic manner.  My consciousness exists and I could not perceive or have knowledge, which is exclusively contingent on alignment with the necessary truths of reason, without being conscious in order to think, but logical truths are not my thoughts: they are true independent of my thoughts.

Indeed, I cannot perceive anything, even if I was still a pathetic irrationalist in the passive grip of certain assumptions and philosophical neglect or in active assent to other assumptions, without existing in order to perceive passively or think actively; however, this too is a logical necessity that depends not on consciousness, but on reason itself.  Did Aristotle realize such things with no assumptions?  If not, then he would not have been rational, for one's own conscious existence is the only immediately self-evident thing alongside the logical axioms it itself depends on--even that I am perceiving an individual sensory experience is not self-evident, since that is a separate fact contingent on me already being conscious, and doubting or denying this does not rely on it.  Did he say anything at all which contradicts this or other logical necessities that he did not recant?  Then Aristotle would still be irrational.  Regardless, he cannot have invented logic because necessary truths cannot be created, altered, or rendered untrue.

The glorification of famous historical figures (and people still do this with pastors and scientists and authors), as if philosophical ideas matter because of them and not the other way around at best if they were selectively rational, or as if fallacies become true because they cling to them or necessary truths cannot be known without their literary prompting, is wholly irrationalistic.  Living earlier in history does not make a person's philosophy or the person themself rational or special.  Aristotelian philosophy does not matter unless it conforms to logic, and yet even if it was true—and Aristotle made many assumptions and claimed many things which are demonstrably false due to pure reason or assumed other things, therefore not holding to strictly rationalistic epistemology.

Newton is sometimes credited with "discovering" gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree when literally anyone who had basic visual human experiences had observed gravitational effects.  Perhaps few people pondered it, but many would have perceived it in daily life.  Newton neither invented nor discovered gravity [1]; it would have seemingly been around as long as the universe and, if it truly spanned the entire world as sensory evidence strongly suggests, would have been noticeable for anyone else inhabiting the same world as Newton.  However, logic is far more fundamental than gravity.  Gravity cannot exist apart from the physical universe, and it might not be universally constant across the entire cosmos, which no limited human can observe all at once anyway (and subjective sensory perceptions cannot prove gravitational phenomenal are really occurring as perceived beyond our mental imagery).  Logic, in contrast, cannot be created or start to exist no matter what, not even if God wished it [2], because logic cannot be false.  It is always inherently true independent of all else, the latter having to be consistent with the former to even be possible.

Historical philosophers tended to be, to rather extreme degrees, fucking idiots revered by fools of later generations only because of fame and because they impacted later fools who looked to tradition or literature and the like instead of reason.  Even when they are right on a given point, without being genuine rationalists, they could not have known the truth in question.  As a non-rationalist, Hume could not have known that one event following another on its own never proves the former caused the latter, as opposed to believing this via assumptions.  Why?  Since reason is inherently true, even believing something that is true and otherwise demonstrable apart from starting with the recognition of logical axioms for what they are, and making no assumptions along the way to that recognition, means that someone cannot know.  They have made assumptions, which are by nature not knowledge.  Aristotle, in this manner and many others, was not rational.  More significantly, logic is true in itself independent of historical events or belief or anything else.  It cannot have been invented even by the preexisting God.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful, and it is true in itself no matter what you believe or prefer.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/08/crediting-newton-with-too-much.html

[2].  For just some of my elaboration on such metaphysical facts, see here:

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

A Rod Of Iron

Perhaps it refers to Christ, and perhaps not, but someone referred to as God's Son/son (the capitalization is ambiguous) is spoken of as ruling the nations with an iron scepter in Psalm 2:7-12.  A more popularly recognizable translation might be "a rod of iron."  Addressed to the church in Thyatira, Revelation 3:26-27 certainly applies this to general Christians, quoting Psalm 2's iron rod comment and referring to their rulership as an extension of the authority Jesus has received from Yahweh.  This broadness might not be the primary intention behind or emphasis in the original passage.  Still, it is said in the New Testament to parallel something that Jesus reserves for righteous people other than himself.  This reigning connects with far more of Biblical philosophy than just the triumphant words of Psalm 2.

Just as Paul says that Christians will eventually judge the world and angels (1 Corinthians 6:2-3) and Jesus tells parables that imply his followers will rule over regions after his return (Luke 19:11-27), Revelation 20 mentions those who participate in first resurrection, the resurrection of the righteous (Daniel 12:2, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), reigning with Christ after the Second Coming.  This is when the righteous or redeemed dead are resurrected from the unconsciousness of Sheol (Job 3:11-19, Psalm 6:5), not before the beast of Revelation 13 appears in what some call the Tribulation, or else the first resurrection would not be the first one at all.  These revived men and women rule alongside or underneath Christ as his priests and judges for a thousand years (Revelation 20:4-6).

As for what this reigning would entail, the only way to rule over nations in a righteous manner is to abide by the obligations and penalties of Mosaic Law, God's revelation of what justice is for a variety of sins and situations which does not change (Deuteronomy 4:5-8, Matthew 5:17-19, Malachi 3:6) because the divine nature they reflect does not change.  Justice, to give only some examples, is paying poor laborers their wages the very day of their work (Deuteronomy 24:14-15) and putting slave traders (Exodus 21:16) and idolaters to death (Revelation 17:2-7).  This is how Christians would rule the nations on Christ's behalf, carrying out the obligations rooted in God's nature with whatever firmness they call for.  As if Yahweh not changing and being the grounding of righteousness is not enough, Jesus affirms Mosaic Law on many occasions in the gospel accounts (besides the other passage cited from Matthew, another highly relevant one is found in Matthew 15).

To judge and rule with Jesus would by necessity involve enforcing the commands of the Torah wherever they are not bound in their context to particular times—for instance, Deuteronomy's commands to kill the Canaanites in the Promised Land could not be applicable to future followers of Yahweh after the inhabitants were already killed.  It is over and over stated in the Bible that the righteous will rule as part of their reward from God.  The Bible gives many examples in the Torah of what this would look like.  At this time, heaven has not yet come to Earth (Revelation 3:12, 21:1-4); there are still sinners that deserve terrestrial punishment within the boundaries of God's laws.

Ruling with a rod/scepter of iron within these precise boundaries of true justice would never overpunish.  There are always limitations on this (see Deuteronomy 25:1-3, Exodus 21:22-25, or Exodus 22:3 combined with Deuteronomy 15:12-14), some that exclude entire means of torture that have been rather fundamental to the practice of pagan or secular nations up to the present day.  To punish with physical torment when that is not prescribed could only be unjust and a betrayal of Yahweh's nature.  To use means of corporal or capital or also financial punishment that go beyond what is commanded, especially when it is rigidly prescribed to never exceed them (Deuteronomy 25:3), is evil.  Within the scope of Biblical morality, anything that does not contradict the objective boundaries is not unjust.  The reign of Christians and of Christ in the thousand years would not be one where the general brutality and arrogance of unbiblical governments is continued, for a rod of iron in the intended sense is not cruel.

Start With The Obvious

How does one come to know anything at all?  Start with the obvious.  What this entails is certainly not clear to non-rationalists, who are enslaved to assumptions or philosophical negligence whether they have considered this or not.  The things a typical person might believe are obvious often are demonstrably false or at best not verifiable.  For instance, it might seem obvious that all biological organisms die or that the sun will "rise" and "set" tomorrow.  But upon attempting to truly prove these or other empirical or inductive matters, someone making no assumptions would see that there is no way to logically demonstrate that because one or all such creatures up to this point have died, so would others, or that because the sun has risen and set each day, this cycle must repeat by necessity.

And this is aside from the epistemological barrier prevent us from knowing if what we see in the external world, including various creatures and the sun, is really there!  The future has not happened yet, and while anything inherently impossible cannot happen by virtue of being impossible (as dictated purely by the laws of logic and nothing else), literally anything that is possible could happen with little to no warning.  It does not logically follow that anything but a strictly necessary truth will remain unchanged, and it is logically true that even if someone retreated away from pure reason to experience, future experience has not yet occurred.  On all levels, there is no logical way to truly know if scientific patterns will continue.

As "obvious" as it might seem that you will live to see the next sunrise or that the sun will rise again to begin with, any certainty about matters like this beyond a seeming likelihood is sheer illusion that the irrational cling to out of a pathetic philosophical negligence or stubbornness—folly either way.  It is also impossible to demonstrate that certain other things are true, such as the existence or nonexistence of morality, despite how it might seem "obvious" to irrational people that their subjective intuition reveals such things about reality (for instance, that stealing is immoral).  On the contrary, if logic was false, there would be a logical reason, which could only be the case if it is not actually false.  Logical axioms like the fact that truth exists could not be false without still being true (in this case, because it would be true that there is no truth).

Consequently, it is inherently impossible for logic to be anything but true.  Logical axioms do not become true only when one reflects on them, and they are not mere psychological perceptions, though one must put in some sort of initial mental effort to recognize their genuine self-evidence.  Years ago, I spoke with someone who idiotically questioned the veracity of logic because they asserted that simply not thinking about the laws of logic would make them unverifiable!  The nuance is that they are obviously true, but this is not apparent to anyone who holds to assumptions or ignores necessary truths and rationalistic epistemology altogether.

Logical axioms are not obvious to non-rationalists who go about their lives in the grip of assumptions.  Despite how they will selectively assume logic is true (and must rely on it to argue against it in addition to metaphysically relying on it to even exist, since their existence must be logically possible in order to be the case), they never realize or accept that it cannot be false, because then it would still be metaphysically true.  They do not recognize its utter distinction from all other things, both metaphysical and epistemological.

Logical axioms are self-evident because their falsity still involves their veracity and thus they cannot be dismissed or doubted without someone relying on the fact that they are true, whether they like it or not.  Nothing could be more obvious!  Yet adjusting to knowledge of these axioms or initially realizing their intrinsic correctness can be very difficult for someone who simply operates on whatever assumptions they would like to hold to.  However, because logic cannot be false and is thus self-evident, it is incredibly easy for someone sincerely seeking the truth without making assumptions to recognize these facts.  Everything else hinges on it and every truth or falsity stems from the inherent veracity of logical axioms.  In turn, any willing person can discover a host of other objective truths which stem from them.

It is not self-evident that five added to five equals 10, or that there is some kind of God (an uncaused cause), or that water quenches thirst.  In fact, the latter of these three things is not ultimately provable, as extremely likely as it appears to be, because the accuracy of such sensory experiences and the true relationships between scientific causes and their effects are not logically demonstrable!  But all of these things hinge on logic for their truth and their very possibility.  Logic allows one to explore what must, must not, and might or might not true, and some of these other logical facts are obvious, but only in the sense that they are easily accessible to any willing mind, not that they are self-evident (relying on no more foundational truth or only capable of being denied by one inescapably relying on them).

Starting with the obvious in the only valid sense that this can be done is inherently rationalistic.  This extends far beyond recognizing the intrinsically correct nature of logical axioms and then discovering what follows from them.  For instance, someone might be overwhelmed with where to start when trying to determine what the Bible really claims about a given subject, something which is not self-evident and which could span many of its 66 books.  Starting with what is logically obvious, and then seeing what necessary connections exist between miscellaneous verses, parallels how one must start with logical axioms and make no assumptions in order to know anything to begin with.  Of course, it is not equivalent in regard to how logical axioms are true in themselves, something which sets them apart from all else at the metaphysical and epistemological level.  Nothing is knowable without forgoing assumptions and grasping the only things that in themselves cannot be false.

Wages And Salaries

Concerning hourly wages and annual salaries, there is sometimes an assumption made that the latter is the objectively better type of compensation (perhaps moreso because of the prestige perceived to accompany it).  With an hourly wage, one is paid at a set rate per hour, with the number of hours potentially shifting from week to week or month to month.  With a salary, the annual compensation total remains the same, though sometimes one might work more or less than the customary 40 hour full-time American workweek.  As will be dissected soon below, there are trade-offs regardless of which way one is paid, though culture has conditioned some people to automatically seek or celebrate one over the other.

The only basic alternatives have their own potential drawbacks.  One is task-based wages, which combine elements of a standard hourly wage translated to an individual assignment/objective with the rigid cap of a salary despite the number of hours worked—while completing tasks quickly could make this a very profitable form of pay, a task could take so long that the pay per hour actually worked is no longer excellent.  The other is commissions, which entail someone being paid based on their success in, for instance, selling an item—meaning someone could work laboriously for long durations and receive little to no pay if their performance does not lead to the intended outcome.  Such alternate forms of compensation could themselves be combined with some baseline salary or hourly rate or be the sole compensation granted (which makes commission-only pay inherently predatory).  However, regardless of what exact form of compensation one has, the capacity for exploitation is always present.

While some idiotic but popular ideas about the workplace are being increasingly rejected by a frustrated populace, salaries might still be regarded as superior to wages by default, as if they inevitably are higher than wages.  Even more erroneously, some might assume that people who earn salaries deserve more respect or commendation than those who earn wages.  But logic reveals the non sequiturs of each of these ideas.

Wages do not have to be low.  As uncommon as it might be, it is not impossible for someone to be paid $60, $80, or a host of other such amounts for each hour of their labor.  Someone could have a wage of $400 or more an hour, an incredibly high hourly amount, but could they live off of this in contemporary America if they only had one hour of work each week, or one hour every pay period (typically two weeks)?  No, not without assistance of one kind or another!  The hours of an employee earning a wage are crucial and not simply the wage itself, though wages can be far better than abysmal.  There is nuance of various kinds that appears to often be overlooked as some clamor for prestigious salaries with a high dollar amount or falsely conflate salaried compensation with a comfortable work environment or financial stability.

Salaries can potentially be low; nothing about salary requires that an employee with this form of compensation is paid as much as or more than one with an hourly wage.  An employer could also make working technically unpaid overtime a requirement of sorts, lest they fire someone for not complying with "business needs".  Since a salary remains stable, the hours worked can fluctuate, but a fixed salary does not increase when someone works additional hours each day or additional days each week to accommodate pressures from employers.  Even if they are compensated well, salaried workers can certainly be exploited.  Their free time could be diminished significantly, and if their salary is not at least livable to begin with, then they have a worse arrangement than many workers with hourly wages.

Pursuing a salary over a wage just to have a salary disregards pivotal aspects of the nature of compensation.  While the former may provide a measure of stability from one payday to another, there is no other inherent benefit of a salary for anyone who receives it.  They might make less than someone else who receives an hourly wage, but they aspire to look down on people who do not have a certain kind of job, stooping to an asinine error adjacent to classism.  It is not as if having a salary necessitates that one is bound to be more financially well off than a worker who earns wages.  Another point of relevance to how some approach this issue is that they might only believe that a salary can be less monetarily advantageous than hourly wages on the basis of personal experience.

That is, they have observed a situation or salary listing where the salary was presented as lower than what they have seen wages presented as in another situation.  In this case, concrete, happenstance examples from personal experience are prioritized over the transcendent truths of logic.  Such a person could realize from logic alone that there is nothing intrinsically better about salaries than wages, but that is precisely the problem: the many non-rationalists of the world believe things, whether illogical or correct, due to assumptions instead of logical truth.  Then, certain non-rationalists try to fit into a society operating on these assumptions and often on obvious errors, which compels some to look down on others who hold a particular job or have a given style of compensation.  What these people really want is to be respected on irrelevant grounds or to be accepted by a culture of fools.

Paul On Philosophy In Colossians 2

It is not possible for Christianity to not be a philosophy.  Since all worldviews, whether true or false or religious or not, are philosophies, it certainly cannot be the case that Christianity is not a philosophy and all non-Christian worldviews are.  There is no such thing as philosophy and theology being distinct.  Instead, some philosophies are non-religious in their foundation and their ramifications, with all religions being philosophies by necessity (like all things, this is a matter dictated by logic).

In the book of Colossians, Paul warns against being taken captive by specific types of philosophy, that is, by "hollow and deceptive" philosophy (NIV).  Even translations like the ESV and KJV that might initially make it sound like Paul's worldview is against philosophy itself, as if there is any single philosophy (although only some philosophical ideas can be true!), continue to speak of the philosophy in question being a construct of human tradition, not a truth of logical necessity.  This is not the only place in the New Testament epistles where Paul may initially appear to be quite hypocritical and otherwise irrational without actually holding to something illogical by default.  If Christianity is false or if he only assumed it to be true, then he would still be irrational, but at least he is not pretending like all philosophy is false or like Judeo-Christianity is not an example of a philosophy.

As with some other misinterpretations of Biblical passages, simply reading the full verse already shows that this misconception is indeed contrary to the plain statements in the text.  It is not all philosophy that Paul rejects; if he did, he would be an utter hypocrite, and even more erroneously, he would be denying basic logical facts: everything is philosophical, and all philosophies are true or false, with Christianity being no exception.  There can be none!  First and foremost, for his ideology to be even possible, it must at least be consistent with what is logically true either way, and he absolutely does not hold to anything which contradicts these truths.

Colossians 2:8 (NIV)—"See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ."

According to his own words, Paul is only writing against a certain kind of philosophy, namely that which is erroneous, invented by people, and (if Christianity is true) contrary to the nature and teachings of Christ.  Paul's philosophy is hardly anti-philosophy.  Whether or not any other tenet of his worldview is correct, he does not mishandle this particular point.

Rationalistic philosophy is inherently true, moreover, because logical axioms being false still involves them being true, and other necessary truths are rooted in these axioms.  True rationalism is not a human tradition or construct, but a philosophy centered on the objective, intrinsic truths of logic [1], which cannot be false and apart from which there is neither anything to know nor a way to secure knowledge.  They depend on neither Christ nor Yahweh, just as they do not depend upon the material world or the human mind.  Paul does not directly mention rationalism in Colossians 2, but he does not deny its truth, nor does he proclaim that philosophy is irrelevant to truth or that Christianity is not philosophical as all aspects of reality are, as well as all false concepts and the reasons why they are false.

He in fact appeals to explicitly philosophical ideas in accounts like that of Acts 17:16-31, where he engages with Athenian philosophers and elaborates upon certain concepts such as the metaphysical dependence of humans on God and cites what certain pagan authors wrote about God (17:28).  Yet valid philosophy is both grounded in and illuminated by the laws of logic, not education, books, personal exposure to literature, and appeals to authority (including scholars and authors).  Paul vitally does not say one must read works like the ones he quotes or even the Bible itself in order to know anything which can be known, including some facts about the concept of theism and its relevance to Judeo-Christian philosophy, or that one must fixate on conversational prompting or cultural popularity in order to explore a worldview or rightfully give one's allegiance to it, if applicable.  

Later, in Romans 1, he advocates for specific philosophical ideas like theism and moral realism; while he does not go into a large amount of detail into how to epistemologically prove miscellaneous things he is committed to, he plainly presents it as logically apparent that God has an eternal nature as the uncaused cause (Romans 1:20) and that worshiping idols is asinine because they are merely images created by people to resemble other things in the contingent world of matter (1:22-23).  Unlike what "Christian" presuppositionalists assume, the New Testament author does not say one must or can only assume that God exists or deny rationalism itself in any other way, metaphysically or epistemologically.

Paul obviously does not dismiss philosophy in all its forms.  More fundamentally than that this error does not reflect what he really says in the Biblical book of Colossians, any rejection of philosophy entails an anti-philosophy philosophy, which contradicts reason and the Bible itself, as the Bible plainly puts forth a particular philosophy containing many individual ideas.  Paul does not stoop to this hypocrisy or genuinely make it seem as though he does in his exact wording, which, again, is starkly clear if one reads the entire verse even in versions besides the NIV.

[1].  Not all logical truths are intrinsic in the ultimate sense, since only logical axioms are true in themselves because their falsity still entails their veracity.  Some logical truths do depend on others, with only logical axioms being true independent of all else.  However, other logical facts are still necessarily true because they stem from these self-necessary truths.

The Pit

The phrase "the pit" is used from time to time in the Old Testament in conjunction with words about death.  In American culture, shaped by generations of assumptions and fallacious, evangelicals might interpret this to speak of something like the miscellaneous torments of hell in the infamous written work Inferno by Dante Alighieri.  Anyone who thinks this would be making assumptions, and ones that are easily refuted.  They might think, like the idiot Bill Wiese (author of 23 Minutes in Hell), that the Bible teaches sinners immediately go to an afterlife of torment now before the eschatological judgment of Revelation 20, and that such torment is experienced eternally.  They might also think the pit is something departed spirits are trapped or tortured within inside hell.

Psalm 30:3 sees David say that God rescued him from Sheol and spared him from going "down into the pit."  The pit is mentioned alongside Sheol, the location/state of the dead, here and elsewhere.  In Psalm 88:3-4, the Psalmist says "my life draws near to the grave (Sheol).  I am counted among those who go down to the pit."  Verses 10-12 from the same chapter touch on how the dead do not praise God because they are in the "land of oblivion."  King Hezekiah says in Isaiah 38:18 says that the grave (Sheol) cannot praise God and that those who go down to the pit cannot hope for God's faithfulness.  Already in this same verse from Isaiah, Hezekiah acknowledges the easily discovered Biblical doctrine of soul sleep.  The dead do not praise God because the dead experience nothing until their resurrection.

Hezekiah adds in Isaiah 38:19 that it is the living humans and the living alone who praise God.  Psalm 6:5 teaches the same: "No one remembers you when he is dead.  Who praises you from the grave?"  The pit is not something remotely similar to a region of hell in Dante's Inferno.  It is an actual pit to hold a corpse or a figurative way of referencing a tomb or grave.  Not even the righteous praise or remember in death because they are not living.  The Biblical stance on the intermediate state is that no one is conscious whatsoever (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10).  The dead, righteous and wicked, perceive nothing and perform no mental or physical tasks in Sheol—and more will be addressed with this soon below.

In Psalm 49:12-14, people are said to perish like animals, and those who trust in themselves are declared to go to Sheol like sheep.  People, like sheep, go to Sheol.  Do sheep either suffer any sort of moralistic torment or experience pleasure in an afterlife according to the Bible?  If humans do, so would they, according to Psalm 49:14!  It is just that the Bible tells us over and over that Sheol is not a realm of consciousness for the dead.  It is the location of the body at burial or decay and it is the state of unconsciousness for the spirit/mind, as the dead think, perceive, and do nothing (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10).  All the dead, whether they were rich or poor or righteous or wicked, sleep together without any awareness (Job 3:11-19).  This sleep continues until their resurrection to face a second and permanent death for their sins or eternal life for their righteousness/repentance (Daniel 12:2, John 5:24-29, Revelation 20:11-15).

Only Isaiah 14:9-10 (and perhaps Ezekiel 32:21) out of the entire Old Testament might seem, in total isolation from the rest of the Bible, to suggest that there are conscious spirits of the dead in Sheol.  However, the context of Isaiah 14 is about various categories of things rejoicing at the downfall of Babylon's king (14:3-8) so that even land and trees are singing and speaking.  Is the passage literal about these points?  If not, then it is not literal about the spirits of the dead reacting to the demise of Babylon's ruler.  The rest of the Bible contradicts a conscious intermediate afterlife anyway!  Other passages in the Old Testament are as unambiguous as language can be in conveying that Sheol is a place/state devoid of all thought, effort, joy, praise, pain, and dread, or it does not say enough to clarify this and still does not contradict how the Bible teaches unconscious soul sleep before resurrection.

The pit is just a cavity in the ground to hold a corpse or another way of referring to the grave, Sheol, which is for the body just the literal earth that contains human remains.  For the mind, Sheol is a realm where all human consciousness sleeps before awakening with the restoration of the body to either live forever with God or be killed once and for all among his enemies (Romans 6:23, Matthew 10:28, 1 Corinthians 15:26).  No one is in hell right now according to the Bible.  Those who will be there will ultimately face destruction (Matthew 7:13-14) and be eternally shut out from the gift of blissful life in New Jerusalem (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9).  In Sheol, where the Bible says we all go in the meantime, there is neither suffering nor pleasure.  There is a total lack of experience.

Professional Empowerment

Looking to a job for the most foundational or overarching kind of empowerment is invalid from the start because it treats a social construct as more than just that: a means contrived by a community to achieve the end of generating an income, passing time, or (this one is inherently superficial and irrationalistic) clinging to social status in a broader sense.  Money, professional productivity, and this sort of status are meaningless on their own as it is, yet in this world of non-rationalists, so many people talk and act as if they derive a sense of foundational, penetrating empowerment from their jobs.  They want to at least come across as if they love their work and experience existential joy because of it.  Plenty of employers could want this solely because it is easier to overwork and underpay someone who truly delights in their career.

Now, some people might put on a mere facade of relying on their careers for existential stability or feeling genuinely empowered by their work in order to simply not be excluded from job opportunities, of course.  Despite how jobs are social constructs, many of them utterly meaningless in nature other than the way they provide a living for a person, someone is probably not going to admit if they really just want or need money and do not have any deep passion for their work when interviewing a new job, for instance.  Unfortunately, employers have power even if they are the kind that erroneously believes it is immoral for workers to recognize their jobs as (very likely) nothing more than a burdensome and intrusive way to stay alive without breaking away from formal civilization, or without resorting to sins such as theft to stay alive and comfortable.

Reason is true in itself; there is an uncaused cause.  Whatever is morally obligatory, if morality does exist, is what we should do and should care about because that is its very nature.  None of this is what many jobs are meant to be oriented around, the truths and issues of real significance in reality.  The workplace is not structured to generally reflect the intrinsically lower, utilitarian aims of professional labor and to emphasize reason, God, and morality over both profit, at least for those at the top, and emotionalistic empowerment, at least for anyone who loves working due to their natural personality or cultural conditioning.  Is a given job made to glorify rationalism, God, and morality?  Is it a job that possesses a truly critical pragmatic role for society and its individuals, like that of keeping electrical power active or repairing vehicles?

For many jobs, these qualities are absolutely not present, even if there are degrees of default professional proximity to things of great philosophical substance.  Artists who produce quality art, even if they are not rationalists (likely almost all of them), are at least doing something that brushes up against more of reality's depths thanks to the their work's philosophical themes, personal expression, and creativity than the efforts of a CEO who helms a company with greed and social status as his or her motivations.  Doctors who provide quality care, even if they are not rationalists (again, likely almost all of them), at least help people.  Many jobs are not this important or deep on their own, regardless of how many who have the jobs are not deep whatsoever, and there is nothing wrong with working them, as long as they are not immoral in themselves, simply to make a living.

There is also nothing problematic about enjoying professional work or seeking deep fulfillment in it, given that someone does not stoop to fallacious beliefs in order to facilitate positive emotion.  Still, unless it is aimed at honoring some objective truth that is more foundational than subjective empowerment or social constructs, a job is one way or another, past how it is emotionally perceived, just a means of providing you an income or passing your time because you happen to prefer investing yourself into labor over something else.  Pursuing professional empowerment beyond these parameters is otherwise something delusional people with an irrational worldview scramble after as if their preferences and satisfaction make something true or good, and some employers might absolutely try to take advantage of this to enrich themselves by standing on the backs of a passionate but exploited employee.

The Environmentalism Of Deuteronomy 20

After detailing exemptions from military service in exclusion of a draft and prescribing the killing of combatants in warfare (which does not mean what some people think about sexism in the respective treatment of men and women here [1]), Deuteronomy 20 provides commands concerning treatment of the environment.  During sieges of cities, verses 19-20 say that non-fruit trees can be used for making equipment of benefit to the military operation as a campaign stretches on, but that fruit trees should not be eaten because they can provide food.  These plants should not be treated in the same way due to their ability to sustain people.  The passage rhetorically asks if such trees are people that they would need to be besieged.

The environment should not be totally devastated in military efforts, no matter how long the offensive lasts or how useful the cutting down of fruit trees might be in performing a siege, with the exact boundary between the permissible using of natural resources and the sinful kind being declared.  The fruit trees mentioned in the text are at least in part to be spared, however, because of their utility of a different kind for the human soldiers.  Their fruit can be eaten and provide sustenance for righteous warriors, an entirely kosher category of food—though plants are alive like animals, the only prohibited subcategories of food in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 are specific types of animal flesh.

As part of nature, fruit is among the material things that God either directly created or allowed to come about, and something connected with the broader environment that has moral value by virtue of God making it very good in an expression of his divine power (Genesis 1:1, 1:31).  It is still the case that general nature itself, but even then not necessarily plant life [2], is seemingly just a vast but inanimate physical thing, though panpsychism is logically possible.  The people that dwell in the universe are the ones made in God's image (Genesis 1:26-27) moreso than even the animals that share the breath of life (7:22-24) with people (2:7).  In light of this, a major aspect of the Biblical obligation to preserve or protect the environment is that doing so is good because it helps the people living within it.

There is explicit environmentalism in this portion of Deuteronomy, though Genesis 1 already describes the universe and the living things in it as very good left to themselves.  At the same time, that environmentalism absolutely hinges somewhat on the usefulness of what the environment offers to its human inhabitants.  This ramification, even on a pragmatic level as opposed to a moral one, is integral to Biblical environmentalism despite how the planet, from its local land to its atmosphere, would not require human presence in order to be very good on the Christian worldview.  Yahweh is good, and he created the universe to reflect this in its initial state in the words of Genesis.  Humans remain the higher creation.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-torah-on-treatment-of-wartime-male.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-possibility-of-plant-consciousness.html

Leviticus 19 And Moral Universality

Unlike Leviticus 18 and 20, Leviticus 19 does not say quite so directly that the practices listed therein are obligatory or wicked for all people in various places, whether Jews or Gentiles, but it certainly does not present them as matters of culturally relativistic ethics or as largely relevant only to Israelites.  Various deeds are simply prescribed or condemned in themselves.  This alone contradicts Rabbinic Judaism's misconception of the very limited moral revelation in Genesis 9, where God declares murder evil, clarifies that murder deserves execution, and prohibits eating any animal flesh with blood in it.  Supposedly, the Torah and general Old Testament proclaim that Gentiles, non-Israelites/non-Jews, only have to uphold seven obligations revealed to Noah after the great flood.  Besides murder and eating blood, this base set of merely seven sins for Gentiles include idolatry and theft.  

Genesis mentions a smaller number of commands (one of which has nothing to do with the "seven"; see 9:1, 7) and does not even imply they are exhaustive.  Nevertheless, some Rabbinic Jews will go back and forth about whether these seven sins are really seven categories, as some will try to arbitrarily reframe Rabbinic Judaism's, not actual Judaism's, concept of the Noahide Laws when confronted with how much they do not address whatsoever or necessitate by logical extension.  For example, despite God only mentioning murder in Genesis 9, certain Rabbinic traditions rest on the assumption that God actually prohibited murder and other injury.  Injuries ranging from minor wounds to permanent damage to an eye or the loss of a tooth are only directly addressed elsewhere in the Torah (Exodus 21:18-19, 22-27).  Also, in very specific cases, inflicting injury is itself required in just punishments (Exodus 21:22-25, Deuteronomy 25:11-12).

As I have frequently written about, moral relativism and racism are illogical, a more foundational problem than that they are immoral by the Biblical standards Rabbinic Jews misunderstand.  And yes, there is nothing about racism (or sexism, ageism, or classism) in the Noahide Laws beyond not murdering or stealing, and so on, in any sort of racially discriminatory way.  An act that is wicked by nature cannot be permissible for Gentiles but not for Jews and vice versa.  Two differing legal systems cannot both be correct at once.  Such facts are logically true independent of Biblical doctrines or Rabbinic consensus/belief if something really is evil.  In fact, anything contrary to logic is false by default, since logic being false still entails a logical reason for why it is false, whatever that reason would be.  Hence, it is inherently true.  Does the Torah contradict logic by teaching one moral standard for Jews and another for Gentiles?  

No.  More than this, it contains many plain statements of holistic moral universality even when no particular examples are mentioned, such as in Genesis 15:13-16, Deuteronomy 4:5-8, 9:4-6, and 20:16-18.  This is one ramification of the egalitarian standing of all people before God (Genesis 1:26-27); Jews do not have a greater metaphysical status than Gentiles.  From the broader Old Testament, verses like Ezekiel 5:5-7 and Ecclesiastes 12:14 convey that the laws revealed by Yahweh reflect moral obligations for all people.  Additionally, certain sins entirely outside the scope of the literal seven alleged Noahide Laws are indeed said in the Torah to be evil when committed by Gentiles in their own communities, far away from Israelite presence, including in Deuteronomy 18:9-13, a passage of relevance to some of the actions prohibited in Leviticus 19.

This chapter of Leviticus indeed mentions many sinful behaviors that other parts of Leviticus or the extended Torah state are evil for Gentiles, with many of them not even being among the asininely incomplete list of the Rabbinic Noahide Laws.  That Israel receives these moral instructions is irrelevant to whether they are binding on all people to begin with, and Leviticus 19:3 combined with Leviticus 20 gives a clear example early in the chapter of something outside the scope of the Rabbinic Noahide Laws being wicked for Gentiles.

Leviticus 19:3—"'"Each of you must respect your mother and father, and you must observe my Sabbaths.  I am the Lord your God."'"

I will focus on the portion of the above verse connected to regard for one's parents.  A person's father and mother (with a strict emphasis on gender equality as is also present in many of Yahweh's laws) must be specially respected as their parents and not just as generic people.  Yes, Leviticus 19:3 and its immediate and extended context say nothing about this being required only of Israelites; yes, relativism is logically impossible anyway.  And yes, Gentiles have parents as do Jews, so there is nothing about the nature of honoring one's father and mother limited to having a particular ancestry.  Honoring one's parents also has nothing to do with murder, idolatry, and so on by itself.  Yet Leviticus 20:9 condemns verbally cursing one's father and mother before verses 22-23 address how God loathed pagan, Gentile societies for this among other sins.

Of course, the content of Leviticus 20:9 could not be mandatory for Gentiles without Exodus 20:12's and Deuteronomy 5:16's command to honor one's father and mother also applying to them.  In turn, attacking one's father or mother (Exodus 21:15) and refusing to submit to their legitimate correction and instructions (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) would also be evil because their wickedness extends from dishonoring one's parents being evil.  If an act objectively deserves a given punishment as these verses teach, moreover, then implementing that exact penalty when applicable, and not merely avoiding the sin being punished, is by necessity also universally required.  The capital punishment obligations could not be culturally relative either—as if Jews themselves have collectively upheld the punishment prescriptions for these sins even among their own communities!

Along with mediumship, dishonoring one's parents by cursing them is one of the two sins prohibited in Leviticus 19, which is addressed to an Israelite audience although it does not follow that its obligations are only for Israelites, that is then explicitly declared a depravity even when Gentiles practice it in the very next chapter.  Neither is among the Noahide Laws as contrived and misinterpreted by Rabbinic Jews, yet Leviticus 19 condemns dishonoring one's father and mother and practicing mediumship as sins in themselves, and Leviticus 20 acknowledges that these sins are wicked no matter the race or nationality of the person engaging in them, or when or where they live.  Indeed, they warrant capital punishment according to Leviticus 20:9 and 20:27, verses that also affirm the gender equality of men and women as victims and perpetrators of sins respectively (and they are not the only ones in Leviticus 20 alone that do this).  It is of significance that these emphases on gender equality are included within Leviticus 20, one of several Torah sections that addresses the universality of morality between Jews and Gentiles while simultaneously touching on how men and women have equal value, rights, and obligations (except for in a handful of genuinely anatomy and physiology-related matters).

Leviticus 19:26—"'"Do not eat any meat with the blood still in it.  Do not practice divination or seek omens."'"

Here, two things are condemned.  I will address both sins in question in this case, starting with the consumption of blood.  Eating blood is first revealed as immoral to Noah as early as Genesis 9:4 and is among the Rabbinic Noahide Laws, though the sin is misunderstood severely by followers of Rabbinic Judaism rather than rationalism and true Judaism, which Christianity is a fulfillment of rather than a substitute for.  It is not one of seven prescriptions in Genesis 9 given to Noah because seven are not provided, nor does Genesis say there are only seven obligations or seven categories of obligation for humanity at large.  However, Genesis 9:4 is misunderstood in other ways by some Rabbinic Jews (a Rabbinic Jew is someone of a particular fallacious worldview and as opposed to a Jew; I am not stereotyping anyone).  The obligation is often articulated as if the core sin is eating the limb of a living animal.  What is the connection?  If someone dismembered part of a still-living creature and immediately ate its flesh, it would contain blood.  While this could be one way a person consumes blood, it is neither the exclusive nor the primary act condemned in Genesis 9:4 or in the later parts of the Torah relevant to the subject, including Leviticus 19:26.

Ironically, that one of the alleged Noahide Laws in the sense meant by Rabbinic Jews is reiterated as part of Mosaic Law only reinforces that the tenets of Mosaic Law are obligatory for all people except where there are logically necessary exceptions—the Jew-Gentile equivalent of how women cannot be obligated to have their foreskin removed by circumcision because they have no foreskin.  The same is true of murder.  Genesis 9:6 first declares it a universal sin, with Exodus (20, 21, and 23), Leviticus (24), Numbers (35), and Deuteronomy (5, 19, and 27) all likewise condemning murder.  That Genesis 9 does not specifically mention miscellaneous sins like neglecting to pen up a dangerous farm animal so that it kills a man or woman (Exodus 21:28-32) or harvesting all of one's crops (if in an area with poor people) so that the poor cannot freely eat from the edges of one's field (Leviticus 19:9-10) does not mean these actions or inactions have not always been inherently sinful for all people.  They are simply not specifically mentioned in Genesis 9.  Other parts of the Torah condemn them, and logically and Biblically, there is nothing about them that is restricted to post-Sinai Jewish obligations.

Rather, the Biblical text details the specifics of other universal obligations, whether related or unrelated to avoiding murder and eating blood, primarily throughout the chapters of the Torah from Exodus 20 to Deuteronomy 27.  But it is clear even from Genesis 6 that some forms of unspecified violence besides murder are Biblically wicked and from Genesis 26:5 and Exodus 18:15-16 that Yahweh had revealed at least a number of his laws to individuals or their communities before the moral revelation tied to the Mosaic Covenant.  That a special covenant is made with the Israelites in no way means the Bible teaches that much of morality is relative to one's Jewish or Gentile ancestry apart from a mere seven exact actions, something that would render the moral philosophy of Judeo-Christianity contrary to logic and thus not even possibly true if it was actually what the Bible put forth.  It is not.

Besides pertaining to the eating of blood as already condemned in Genesis 9:6, which even fallacious Rabbinic thinkers rightly accept as binding on all Jews and Gentiles, Leviticus 19:26 condemns divination and seeking or by necessary extension interpreting or encouraging the interpretation of omens, practices outright condemned elsewhere as intrinsic sins and part of the reason why the pagans living in the Promised Land before the Israelites deserved to be driven out or killed.  Deuteronomy 18:9-13 states that behaviors like divination, sorcery, interpretation of omens, and trying to communicate with the dead (whether successfully or not, for the dead are not even conscious left to themselves according to verses like Ecclesiastes 9:5 and 10) were evils embraced by certain Gentile nations.  

In the context of straightforward denouncement of non-Israelites who engage in these and other behaviors, the direct statements of Deuteronomy say that whoever does such things is detestable or an abomination, depending on the translation, and is regarded as such by God.  Despite the likes of divination falling into the same category as sorcery and the practices of a medium (mediumship), which is condemned in the very next chapter (Leviticus 20:6) as a sin of the Canaanites for which God hated them (verses 22-23), it is not condemned directly in Leviticus 19 except in verse 31.

Leviticus 19:31—"'"Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them.  I am the Lord your God."'"

Shortly after, using the same pattern as Leviticus 18 by bringing up certain sins before declaring non-Israelite nations guilty of them, Leviticus 20:6 lists the practices of a medium as a depravity prevalent enough in the Promised Land to be one of the foundational reasons why the pagan offenders would be displaced according to verses 22-23.  Verse 27 demands capital punishment for every man or woman who acts as a medium or spiritist.  Now, some proponents of Rabbinic Judaism's illogical and unbiblical Noahide Laws might conflate mediumship with idolatry and thus still consider it wicked for Gentiles on their relativistic, racist moral framework of seven universal sins.  Select forms of consulting the dead could stem from idolatrous philosophy and practice, but Leviticus and Deuteronomy go beyond calling mediumship and spiritism evil only when coupled with idolatrous belief or practice.  They clearly condemn all cases of engaging in them for any reason.  Neither curiosity nor personal grief over the death of a loved one nor desperation, as compelled King Saul to seek guidance from the dead in 1 Samuel 28, legitimizes the act for any Jew or Gentile because the act itself is evil.

Leviticus 19:35-36—"'"Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity.  Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin.  I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt."'"

In addition to the act necessarily being immoral no matter who commits it or is victimized by it if it is immoral in the first place, using dishonest weights and measures, such as in a business context, is said to be something God hates people for in Deuteronomy 25:13-16.  "For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things," says verse 16.  The text does not say God hates any Israelite who does these things.  Even then, since something being truly immoral means it is immoral for everyone capable of engaging in it without regard to race, nationality, or gender, a statement like that would still not necessitate that Gentiles are morally free to use dishonest weights and measures in their business and personal dealings.  Such words would still not convey that God only hates Israelites who sin in such ways or that these behaviors are not sinful for anyone outside of ethnic Israel.  

As something related to theft, for the businessperson using dishonest standards of measurement to take more money from clients without providing proportionate or promised value in exchange, the contents of Leviticus 19:35-36 would fall into a subset of the obligation to not steal even on Rabbinic Judaism.  However, the handful of true "Noahide Laws" in Genesis 9 do not mention theft or deception whatsoever, as objectively incomplete as they obviously are on numerous levels by Biblical standards.  And dishonesty pursued in a context like business dealings is really what the text mainly emphasizes as evil in both Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 25.  One way or another, Rabbinic Judaism's Noahide Laws are illogical and unbiblical yet again.  Exploitative deception is not itself one of the seven supposed obligations for all humans.

It is obvious to a rationalistic reader that the aforementioned passages connected with various verses in Leviticus 19 make it clear that individual sins like cursing one's parents, practicing divination, contacting the dead, and selling to customers in a deceptive, exploitative, or arbitrarily inconsistent manner are absolutely evil when done by any Gentile or to any Gentile.  Already, one can find multiple sins tied to the same chapter of Leviticus that fall entirely outside the literal scope of the Rabbinic Noahide Laws.  Leviticus alone, Deuteronomy alone, and the connections between the two books single out such sins as universal, aside from the logical ramifications of how other sins must be universally binding on all people if they are genuine sins and aside from the more broad ways the Torah treats morality as universal among Israelites and Gentiles.  

What of other miscellaneous parts of Leviticus 19 which are not individually emphasized as inherently wicked for all people in one way or another in Leviticus 20 or the book of Deuteronomy?  Leviticus 19:14 and 32 are clearly about the human rights of the disabled and elderly in their position, for instance.  One could be a Jew or Gentile and be disabled or elderly, so there is nothing about the nature of the statuses, rights, or obligations these verses deal with which is logically contingent on being an Israelite.  Nor do Leviticus 19:14 and 32 state or suggest that these commands do not reflect rights and obligations all people have, independent of what person or group the moral instructions are issued to by God.  If they did so, I again point out that this would be logically erroneous and would disqualify such parts of the Bible from being even possibly true.

Still, some moral prescriptions revealed in Yahweh's laws throughout the Torah do strictlty apply to Israel and/or Gentiles living among them.  It is just that these do not have to do with issues like gender equality, Sabbath rest, or making restitution for specific sins, but with actions that by nature do not apply to moderners or Gentiles living away from ancient Israel.  See Leviticus 19:23-25 for an example.

Leviticus 19:23-25—"'"When you enter the land and plant any kind of fruit tree, regard its fruit as forbidden.  For three years you are to consider it forbidden; it must not be eaten.  In the fourth year all its fruit will be holy, an offering of praise to the Lord.  But in the fifth year you may eat its fruit.  In this way your harvest will be increased.  I am the Lord your God."'"

When the Israelites of the time period described in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and so on at last entered the Promised Land, they were obligated to not eat from any fruit tree they planted until the fifth year after the planting for the sake of expressing gratitude and praise to God.  This cannot be obligatory for later Israelites or for Gentiles living in other regions because it is inherently tied to a very exact historical time and place.  The Promised Land was already secured by ancient Israel according to the books following Deuteronomy.  I will again bring attention to how a multitude of passages throughout the Torah regard behaviors far beyond the seven Noahide Laws contrived by irrationalistic, relativistic Rabbis as evils on the part of those living in the Promised Land before the Israelites (Leviticus 18:5-30, Leviticus 20:1-23, Deuteronomy 9:4-6, 18:9-13, etc.).  If anything, that the likes of not eating from a fruit tree planted in the newly conquered Promised Land until five years later only apply to Jews actually highlights how anything else also necessarily applies to all Gentiles in all historical periods.

As explicitly clarified by Leviticus 20, all parents deserve to be respected by their sons and daughters, whether they are Jewish or Gentile parents.  Similarly, all disabled people deserve to not be taken advantage of in their heightened vulnerability, regardless of their race, geographical location, and place in the historical timeline.  All people have the right to not be exploited as consumers/buyers, and accordingly, all people sin by using fraudulent or oppressive business practices.  The same is also true of numerous other aspects of Mosaic Law.  Just as murder is inherently, equally evil (Genesis 9:6, Exodus 20:13, 21:12-14, 20-21, and so on) whether the murderer or victim is a Jew or Gentile, all other forms of sinful violence (such as those condemned in Exodus 21:15, 18-19, and 22-27) are evil no matter if the one carrying them out is a Jew or Gentile and regardless of where and when they live.

By strict logical necessity and by exact Biblical clarification, the particulars of Mosaic Law, whenever they are not logically confined to literal Jews or the ancient world due to the nature of the obligation in question, are on Judeo-Christianity clearly reflective of universal moral rights and obligations that neither were invented by God for the sake of a covenant nor have anything to do with relativism or racism.  Just as all men and women are bound by the same objective moral duties save for the anatomy-related exceptions (there are no fallacious stereotype-related exceptions), the same is true of all Jews and Gentiles save for exceptions like the one dealt with in Leviticus 19:23-25.

All people must acknowledge the equality of men and women as offenders and victims in matters of violence and let the abused go free (Exodus 21:26-27).  All people must make restitution for theft and adjacent sins (Exodus 22:1-15, Numbers 5:5-8, ect.).  According to the Old Testament long before the New Testament reaffirms the universality of Yahweh's Laws not limited by nature to specific people or historical times (such as in Matthew 5:17-19, 1 Timothy 1:8-11, and Romans 13:8-10), all people must not curse their rulers (Exodus 22:28), take advantage of widows or by extension widowers or any other people in their vulnerability (Exodus 21:22-24), or legally punish someone apart from two or three consistent witnesses or evidences (Deuteronomy 19:15).  And regardless of the Bible, cultural and race-based relativism are logically false.  Any moral standard that exists would transcend ancestry and social norms.

Logic, people. It is very fucking helpful.