A Decade Of Rationalism

As of 2025, still in my 20s, I have been a rationalist for 10 years.  A decade of my life has now been devoted to the objective truths of reason that start with logical axioms, dependent on nothing but self-necessity for their truth.  Somehow not as stupid as many around me beforehand, I was still of course foolish and blind like all non-rationalists are to varying degrees, although I have a very paradoxical past in that I actually had discovered logical axioms and some of their more seldom addressed or seldom discovered ramifications before I became fully committed to rationalism.  Thankfully, it did not take long for me to discover a great many things that, as obvious or central as they may be, go neglected or outright denied by most people once I took the plunge.

In the years since I fully devoted myself to reason and first began making no assumptions, I found a rationalistic romantic partner, my wife of multiple years by the time this will be uploaded.  You do not have to go beyond what reason and morality require in your commitment to them, but a truly rationalistic partner can make life much more pleasant and bearable.  This world is not full of rationalists, and many people are at best apathetic towards anything higher than their own meaningless preferences or cultural norms, if not outright hostile towards any worldview rooted in necessary truths and absolute certainty—or anyone who adheres to it, unless they are silent or outwardly submissive.

Anti-rationalists of one kind or another are in no short supply.  Independent of concrete examples and personal experiences, it is always logically more likely that someone one is just meeting will be a non-rationalist as evidenced by some asinine statement that is, while not inevitable, unfortunately quite ordinary and likely.  The anger and loneliness that can come about because of this objective logical truth and personal experiences of this kind can grow very weighty, especially after years and years of logically and experientially recognizing that you will probably never be surrounded by genuine rationalists in this world.  A loving relationship founded on the transcendent truths of logic that govern all other things is an incredible blessing worthy of being cherished.

This year, I have also reflected on how it is by necessity almost always going to be easier to become a rationalist sooner rather than later on.  Of course, it is invalid to remain in philosophical error or negligence, especially since it could only be invalid to ignore or reject what is true in itself, logical axioms, and thus actually self-evident (contrary to the many false, unprovable, or clearly not self-evident things many people refer to as such).  Just as it would be logically erroneous and immoral to wait until one becomes concerned with doing what is morally required, if there is anything, despite it by nature being what one should do, it is intrinsically irrational to delay looking to reason and forsaking any assumptions one has already made.  Nothing legitimizes trying to actively sidestep the veracity of logic or passively ignoring it—not personal preference, not emotional difficulty, not social pressures, and not any other convenience or obstacle.

Why exactly is it easier to become a rationalist sooner rather than later, aside from the illegitimacy of any alternative?  It truly is easier to become a rationalist when one is younger, for one thing.  There are fewer personal assumptions and probably less societal conditioning to reject as one turns to reason for its inherent truth.  It is also easier to become a rationalist before anything related to old age could deteriorate one's memory, making it more challenging but not impossible to discover or hold to logically necessary truths with their glorious abstract nature as concentration and recollection wanes.

Reason does not change with time or mental difficulties.  Aging and other things cannot alter what in itself cannot be false.  But as time elapses, the same potentially long-familiar truths can more and more deeply press upon your mind, filling you with an increasing intoxication with necessary truths, a satisfaction and appreciation that have no fixed limit to their intensity, and a gratefulness that one has already discovered them and lived accordingly.  There are also dark truths dictated by logic, including that I cannot know if morality exists and the fact that if there is an afterlife, it is logically possible for it to entail incredible, endless suffering (just not if Judeo-Christianity is true and not if it is a moralistic afterlife!).  Since these truths do not change with age, someone might never entirely emotionally adjust to them.

There are indeed somber possibilities and ramifications regarding being a rationalist for all but one's entire life or for any prolonged amount of time.  Comforting falsities and assumptions lose their illusory glamor.  Uncomfortable truths can be perfectly grasped in light of reason, even if some are only truths about what one can know or about what is possible despite however massively improbable it is.  And relatively few other people will likely ever align with or sincerely pursue ultimate truth alongside you.  None of this nullifies reason's inherent truth.  Thankfully, there is still stability in and are rewarding aspects of being a rationalist that far exceed the stability or reward one could never obtain from anything else but reason.  Any benefits of the truth and living for it, themselves a matter of truth, are secondary to the nature of the truth itself.  A rationalist's life yields both awareness of the truth and all the benefits that come with it.

The Characterization Of Sylux

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond has at last made its debut eight years after its official teaser.  Benevolent bounty hunter Samus Aran returns to the first-person format for her first such adventure in close to two decades.  Centering on obstacles brought about by the egoistic Sylux, another bounty hunter introduced long ago in a DS spinoff, Metroid Prime 4 provides glimpses of his past and why he is so intent on opposing Samus and the Galactic Federation she cooperates with.  The way it does this actually connects with core truths about characterization in fiction.  No, it is not abysmal as some say!  Reading past this point will yield significant spoilers, so do not read further if you want to find out what happens on your own—a review should be finished shortly after I complete hard mode, in which I will briefly address some of these same points along with many others.

For the most part, Sylux is in the background during the story.  Samus has periodic psychic visions of a battle during the game, only in fragments, but with progressively more context.  Upon completing the game with 100% of the logbook scans and 100% of all items collected, a fuller cinematic is added to the gallery in the main menu.  In it we see what is by all appearances key backstory of Sylux.  At first, I wondered during the first vision if it was of the future, but the game strongly implies the events have already occurred by the time more is shown.  Sylux himself fought for the Galactic Federation against the space pirates in a fateful battle an unspecified amount of time before the main events of the game.

Leading a group of Federation soldiers, Sylux approaches a massive energy cannon weapon controlled by the enemy.  He is instructed to not proceed and to wait for Samus and backup forces accompanying her.  However, he tells his units to take the cannon.  But the space pirates fire it.  Sylux falls into a lower spot of the ground in time to spare him from being vaporized like numerous other people.  Samus arrives, and seemingly not long after.  Using only a single shot from her power suit, she renders the space pirate cannon inoperable.  She later walks up to Sylux as he kneels on the ground in the midst of fire and ashes.

Sylux does not speak even when Samus extends her hand to him.  He pushes it away.  The cinematic shifts to his first-person perspective just before he holds up his shaking hands which are replaced by his arms in his purple armor inside a healing pod in the time of Prime 4's main story.  This is the game's way of conveying that he is the very soldier we see push Samus's hand aside.  We see his own hands tremble in the healing pod as if he experiences great remorse, guilt, or fury over the deaths of his troops—or anger over Samus having not arrived sooner to prevent their deaths.  Whatever his exact thoughts and feelings about the incident, he is all but certainly tormented by it or its outcome.

Although Silux does express that he wants the weapon before it is activated to lethal consequences for the Galactic Federation, he did not necessarily have asinine motives, as irrational as his actions were if he truly wanted his soldiers to survive (he himself barely survived incidentally).  There is neither logical proof nor indirect evidence that he wanted the weapon for nefarious purposes or that he had no concern for the lives of his fellow troopers before they were annihilated.  Perhaps he was attempting a heroic capture of the cannon.  Perhaps he thought he could perform better than his commander(s) expected in the immediate circumstances and even had some sort of evidence in favor of this.

Regardless, it would mirror other aspects of the game's story if Sylux rejects the offer of physical support from Samus via her open hand precisely because she did not get to the battle in time to save his troops.  After all, she is teleported to the planet Viewros too late to deliver the inhabitants who desperately looked to a prophesied Chosen One for deliverance.  The species perished before she ever came to their world.  The great savior arrived, but there was no one left among the Lamorn for her to save.  In this way, Beyond not only subverts the standard trope of the chosen one, but it also provides a thematic element that could very much match what happened with Sylux.  Without necessarily doing anything wrong, Samus did appear at the battle after the cannon had already been used.  If she arrived shortly beforehand, the many Federation soldiers killed by the weapon would have likely survived.

Yes, it is subtle.  Yet there is a fundamental parallel between Samus arriving and destroying the weapon after soldiers die and Samus arriving on Viewros after the Lamorn die having hoped that someone would deliver them.  For a franchise that has never featured antagonists with deeply personal motivations, Metroid now has put forth its most tragic, layered villain yet in a manner that aligns so very well with the direction of the broader story.  There is also a parallel between Samus offering her hand to Sylux when he was a Federation leader and her holding out her hand after the final boss fight with him as if she hopes to save him from falling off of the cosmic platform.  While showing more about Sylux, the game reinforces how kind Samus is.  And there is nothing which requires that the contents of the special cinematic are the only reason why he has come to despise Samus and the Galactic Federation.  It might be the first of several unfortunate circumstances that, even if Samus did nothing illogical, immoral, or dismissive, led to Sylux giving into a persisting emotionalistic rage.

Now, why does he eventually become a leader of the space pirates against the Galactic Federation, when it was the space pirates and not Samus who killed his soldiers?  Sylux could always have his characterization depeened by subseqeuent games, including in this regard, but in isolation, he is not poorly characterized in Metroid Prime 4.  Deep characterization does not have to entail some incredibly elaborate verbal explanation of someone's intentions or explicitly draw attention to every philosophical and personal reason (which is still philosophical, but in a secondary way) for a character's villainy to be valid and layered.  The little that is conveyed about Sylux is enough to communicate regret, pain, and loss on his part and to touch on how they can change someone's worldview and decisions if they allow them to.  That is new territory for Metroid.  More importantly, the story of Sylux is rooted in the truth that devastation can stem from yielding to bitterness over loss.

Race Cannot Be A Construct, But Racism Is

According to some, race is only a social construct meant to perpetuate racism (which such people might pathetically assume is just white-on-black racism instead of literally any other combination) or distract people from the excesses and oppression of the wealthy elite.  It is ironic that they might suppose that racism  such as that derived from white supremacy can exist if there are no races to discriminate against or in favor of!  A great many things are indeed social constructs.

Languages do not exist either by logical necessity or in the natural world unless beings create them, and there is no pressing reason to invent a language except to communicate precisely with other non-telepathic beings.  Plenty of things that a host of people think or at least say are put forth in religious texts like the Bible or the Quran ultimately are stated nowhere in the text or might even contradict it.  Regular mealtimes and currencies are likewise contrived by people or hypothetically by some other analogous creatures, having no existence otherwise.

What about race?  Is the color of someone's skin, the correlating physical features like hair type, or lineage something that would not exist apart from a human creating it or acting like it does (though acting like something is true never makes logical falsities correct)?  Race is not a human construct at the personal or societal level.  Attitudes and expressions of racism are in each of their varying forms.  That there are different skin colors people naturally have, separate from the impact of sunlight on the skin, or that some people have ancestors of a particular skin color does not come about from individual or collective belief or cultural tradition.

The real construct in this regard is racism with all of its stereotypes and double standards.  False on every level, for the color of someone's skin or any other physical characteristic necessitates nothing about their rationality, capacity for rationality, moral character, personality, or competencies, racism does not exist without some delusional being to assume its veracity or to live as if it is true.  Skin colors in all their diversity are attributes of people's physical bodies, which as aforementioned do not dictate anything else about them as an individual.  And if one black, Asian, or white person, and so on, has a certain level of intelligence or some particular moral standing or personality, there are no ramifications for the individualistic nature of other people of their race.

Perhaps some people idiotically do think that races among Earth's humans must be more like the alternate meaning of the word race in fantasy and science fiction and entail people of various races being from some kind of different species or subspecies.  This lunacy is at odds with both logic and reported science; having a different skin color, nose shape, or other such physical characteristic does not logically mean that someone is not human or is mentally different, and empirically, biological differences—which are not the same as psychological differences—would appear to have little to nothing to do with anything more than the likes of external appearance or genetic susceptibility/resistance to certain diseases.  That is, race is the color of someone's skin, and there might be a handful of other purely physical qualities that correlate with this.

Now, science is always irrelevant to logic's inherent truth, and even aside from scientific evidence or reality, race is not a social construct.  The kind of person who would say race is invented by society as opposed to things like racial segregation or arbitrary customs assigned to a particular race probably thinks the truth of the matter is rooted in science instead of logic.  But logical necessity is at the heart of all truths one way or another.  Just as gender is not a human construct, though gender "roles" and cultural stereotypes are constructs by logical necessity, contrary to both the truths of reason and to Biblical philosophy, the same is true about race and racism.  This is not a matter of science, which pertains to physical existents/phenomena.

Because it does not logically follow that psychological differences accompany physical differences and it is impossible for one to intrinsically entail the other, it could only be true that the former are made up and do not depend upon race.  Race is not a social or subjective construct, but racist beliefs and practices can only be exactly such things.

Obtaining A Job

All the "hard work" and commitment a person could muster in their lifetime will not erase the foundational role of luck in obtaining a job.  A self-employed worker, given that they have the resources to handle this role themself, would not be confined by the soon-to-be mentioned variables that make someone reliant on an outside employer, but they would still be dependent on there being a cultural environment that makes their business survivable.  Even this still involves a degree of happenstance luck regarding which logical possibility will be realized—their business forming or not forming, continuing or not continuing.

For the typical worker, though, there first has to be a need or desire to hire someone on the employer's part, or else no jobs would ever be created.  This does not mean that all jobs are necessary or utilized well: it is just the case that someone has to create the job to start with.  Businesspeople would perform tasks themselves or allow them to go unfinished otherwise.  No one can be hired for a job that does not exist.  Second, a prospective employee has to hear about the employer's need or be in their considerations already.  Without this condition being met, no one would ever become an employee or switch jobs to begin with.  So far, these are two major conditions that are to some extent beyond any ordinary worker's control, and they are prerequisites for a multitude of jobs.

Then there are the societal trends that popularize one set of skills for a duration or shift away from them.  Being intelligent, something that is true only of the handful of rationalists living at a given time, does not mean someone has particular skills required for various industries; whether or not someone is competent with some professionally useful skill, there is no guarantee of any demand for that exact skill, on top of it not logically following that there must be employers who have not met their hiring quota or that more relevant jobs will be created.  Having skills, which does not at all require that a person is genuinely rationalistic (intelligent), only makes it more likely that someone will be hired if they have the right skills.  Luck is still an integral factor.

Employers can be outright stupid as well and could dismiss a perfectly capable or deserving candidate for a given job.  This, since it pertains to the preferences or whims of another person, reduces to luck at least somewhat.  Things could be done to impress a potential employer, yet none of this will force them to make a certain decision.  Keeping a job is likewise partially contingent on things beyond an employee's control, as they could eliminate an employee or even an entire department for idiotic reasons or due to genuinely shifting business needs.  Ultimately, there is no such thing as total job security no matter an individual's talents and performance.

Some people might like to think that their relative professional or financial success is all due to their own intelligence or capabilities—though if they are not a rationalist, they are a slave to assumptions and have no true knowledge or intelligence.  Their luck is even greater if they still succeeded in such instances!  These truths might undermine their self-esteem and be rejected on such grounds.  Other people might like to think that if they just improve or expand their skills, it could only be the case that they will obtain the job they desire or at a minimum some sort of sustainable job.  This is not so and this truth might be overlooked for its inconvenience.  Amidst all that someone can do to marginally make receiving a job more probable, it is never fully up to them.

A Paradox Of Exercising For Health

All scientific matters are epistemologically probabilistic because they are not logically and thus metaphysically necessary, so there is no guarantee that, due to personal factors or even something unlikely but extreme like the laws of physics not remaining the same, someone who exercises will receive some particular health benefit.  Any benefit for physical (and mental) health is individualistic, as important as it might be for foundational wellbeing.  But it is the case that their is a likelihood of improved stability in health for those who engage in exercise, with any accomplishing more for the body than none.

The (probable) reinforced health that results is not enough to compel some people to care for their longevity through bodily exercise.  The reasons might be legitimate: it can be very difficult, especially if one has to work to survive or is not accustomed to regular exercise, to entrench oneself in the habit of exercising on a consistent basis.  Unfortunately, the longer exercise is abstained from, the more challenging it can be to initiate, and the less potent the benefits might be.  Inversely, there could be great payoff later in life for those who practice even milder forms of exercise.  This is where the issue entails a significant paradox.

Regularly devoting some time to potentially annoying exercise that requires some degree of active effort does involve time one will never get back, but it can also add more time to one's lifespan.  The extended lifetime might even be far more physically comfortable, which in turn lessens the need to devote attention or resources to urgent health and comfort-related needs as an increasingly vulnerable person of older age.  More than the irony of it becoming more difficult to gain health benefits from starting exercise later in life even for those who become very intent on doing so, the time and energy used to exercise earlier one can ensure more of both persists for a longer period.

Again, no exact outcome is logically guaranteed because there is no strict necessity in one health status coming about from a given exercise, however persistent someone practices it.  Scientific truths are not logical facts, with only the latter being inherently true.  Cardio exercise can make heart failure far more improbable, for instance.  However, it cannot eliminate the possibility.  But caretaking one's bodily health by using a portion of the time and energy, as well as whatever health one currently posseses, to exercise will likely grant one a longer life and greater energy.

The paradox of exercising for health is that although it does require time, energy, and health that could genuinely pose psychological or practical obstacles for some people, it correlates with the likelihood of gaining a longer lifespan with more stable energy and health throughout that time; exercise really is nuanced in its relationship to the scientifically correlated consequences.

Rising For The Aged

Among its prescriptions for how to treat the poor, foreigners, criminals under the only law of authority (the divine law), and more without violating their human rights grounded in Yahweh's nature and theirs as bearers of God's image (Genesis 1:26-27), the Torah addresses obligations to the elderly.  Leviticus 19:32 says to stand up in the presence of the aged and to show respect for the elderly, the former being an example of the latter specified within the text.  With one's parents, if they are old enough for this to be applicable, it would overlap with the command to honor one's father and mother (Exodus 20:12, Leviticus 19:3, Deuteronomy 5:16, 27:16), but it is an obligation one has to all the elderly.

Some elderly individuals might have, furthermore, suffered eventual disabilities in the mental or physical decline that can accompany aging, such as loss of hearing or sight, and the same chapter of Leviticus already addresses mistreatment of the disabled when it says to not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind (19:14).  Also, see Deuteronomy 27:18 on how anyone who leads the blind stray is cursed.  While disability can be present independent of biological aging, such as due to birth defects or traumatic accidents, elderly men and women are to be treated well regardless of their health and wholeness.  Even if they cannot see due to failing or departed eyesight, one would still be morally obliged to rise in their presence (just to clarify, this is not the same as remaining standing indefinitely in their presence).

Now, just as the command to not hate an Egyptian (Deuteronomy 23:7) is really about not hating them on the basis of their nationality or ancestry, rather than a condemnation of hating an individual who happens to be an Egyptian because of their irrationality and sin (see Leviticus 20:23 and Deuteronomy 25:13-16 for examples within the Torah itself on how God hates sinners, which means this cannot be evil), it is not that the elderly and/or disabled are never to be cursed or reviled.  For instance, Deuteronomy 27, where it says that whoever leads the blind astray is cursed, also says that whoever withholds justice from the foreigner (27:19) or murders their neighbor secretly (27:24) is also cursed, and the deaf person of Leviticus 19:14 is not immune to this.

What the verse from Leviticus really is about is not cursing the deaf for their deafness, not for any deserving moral reason on the basis of a belief or action within their control.  The age of the elderly or the disability of the unfortunate is not a shield from valid criticism or even, in the right context, outright hatred and hostility, but even then, they are never to be treated unjustly, including by being discriminated against for their age or disability.  Not that concrete examples in one's life are needed, but at the time of this writing, which is long before the scheduled posting date, I myself have elderly family members who are neither rationalists nor true Christians, though they think they are.  They are but evangelicals holding to most of the Biblical distortions and broader philosophical fallacies of the typical self-identifying Christian of America at this time.

Certainly, even if only because they are irrationalists whether or not Christianity is true, they do not deserve any special respect as individuals although they would have the same human rights as all other people if morality exists, and if Christianity is true, one of these rights as according to Leviticus 19 is to be given at least some form of positive recognition in their age.  Anyone who reaches an elderly state is not to be tossed aside on the basis of how long they have been alive or how poorly their body might function.  It still does not logically follow that they could deserve to not be given valid opposition for their philosophical stances or behaviors (an impossible thing), and the Torah already provides enough separate details to directly teach otherwise.  It is disregard due to age or health that Mosaic Law is actually prohibiting.

Returning What Is Lost

To not steal is not enough to be fully righteous in all situations regarding the property of others according to the Torah.  Whether it is an animal or clothing or something else that belongs to another person, one is to help restore lost belongings to their rightful owner.  This is addressed twice in Mosaic Law, once in Exodus 23 and once in Deuteronomy 22 in a broadened manner.  While Deuteronomy expands its wording to account for all lost property, even if it is that of someone unfamiliar or far away, such statements would be unnecessary for the obligation exist in all such cases if what Exodus says on the matter is true.

It does not matter if you do not have a positive relationship with the owner of, say, a lost animal.  Whether frustration or sheer hatred is harbored towards them or by them towards you, for they are called your enemy in Exodus 23:4-5, you are to not allow their animal to continue wandering off, just as one is to give them assistance if their animal has fallen down under its load.  In this way, there is an obligation to both the animal, to protect or care for it, and for the owner, whether they are friend or enemy, stranger or acquaintance.  Yes, if one has this obligation to one's enemy, it would have to be the case that it would exist towards a friend or spouse.

If one stumbles upon a lost animal and one does not know who the owner is or if they live a great distance away, one is to hold onto the lost creature, with Deuteronomy 22:3 specifying, though it would already follow that a different kind of property would not be exempt from this obligation just because it is not listed, that this is applicable to anything that belongs to one's neighbor.  It does not have to specifically be an ox or donkey or sheep.  Any other belonging is to be returned or safely held until it can be passed on.  The final words of Deuteronomy 22:3 literally say to not ignore whatever is lost.  Short of returning a weapon to a sinner like a murder or not having the physical capacity to stop and help, it is moral error to not do so.

Returning what is lost is Biblically more than a supererogatory act, one which is good but not obligatory.  Examples within this category of morally good but optional things would be miscellaneous, spontaneous behaviors of kindness like holding the door open for an able-bodied man or woman.  Giving back a stranded animal or a lost article of clothing, among many other things, as well as holding it in your possession as needed until the owner can be identified, is prescribed.  It is not enough to not take for yourself what is found when it is clear it seems to belong to a particular companion or neighbor.

The Cosmic Horror Of Kirby Star Allies

Cosmic horror can appear in very unexpected places and in atypical guises.  Prior to the last stage of the game, Kirby Star Allies is a side-scrolling platforming/puzzle game about how Kirby collaborates with various enemies to progress, focusing on friendship (very minimalistic friendships.  For the last boss, the game mostly shifts: a group of individuals devoted to reviving a sort of archetypal dark lord succeeds, summoning a being called Void Termina that is fought mostly in a third-person shooter format.  Void Termina is certainly eldritch in the scope of its power, as a being that allegedly seeks to destroy the cosmos, functionally similar to the likes of Cthulhu in more conventional, overt cosmic horror of the Lovecraftian variety.

It is not even that the colorful visual style, the character design for Kirby and friends, and the music keep the game from delving into cosmic horror at the most literal level, because this is untrue.  Only the presentation and atmosphere of standard cosmic horror is absent.  At a conceptual level, this is a cosmic horror setup complete with an apocalyptic cult, a confined, hidden, or slumbering eldritch entity, and the threat of supernatural destruction if this being is released/awakened.  If the tone was different, along with any resulting adjustments to the game's presentation, and Cthulhu or some other such being was substituted for Void Termina, it would be very difficult to miss the cosmic horror elements.

The cute aesthetic and the theme about friendship literally helping Kirby and his companions overcome an enemy like Void Termina change none of these elements.  They are present!  But Kirby Star Allies is a game primarily focused on an animation style presented as adorable and on collaborative friendships, even between former opponents, delivering the universe from danger.  Only closer to the end do the cosmic horror aspects become fairly apparent.  Still, they would be easy to miss if someone is not already aware of/exposed to this subgenre of horror, precisely because of the aesthetic and the almost frivolously nonspecific exploration of friendship.

No one would be irrational for not noticing this, since recognizing the parallels requires familiarity with the fundamental concepts of cosmic horror (at least Lovecraft's brand of it) and not just with logic and the individual game itself.  But no matter how easy it would be for some to never notice anything more than a grand boss at the end of a lighthearted game, Void Termina absolutely has the role of a Lovecraftian-type entity that only makes its appearance in the grand finale after the right conditions are brought about in part by the efforts of a powerful group set on introducing chaos or annihilation.

While cosmic horror is not necessarily Lovecraftian in particular, the finale of Kirby Star Allies does indeed feature subtle Lovecraftian cosmic horror.  Cosmic horror certainly does not have to include tentacles, underwater cities, or other more conventional visual trappings of Lovecraft's own components as emphasized in media inspired by his works.  Kirby Star Allies has none of these exact trappings, but its final fight showcases how versatile the subgenre is.  A pink, spherical character that can befriend enemies by throwing hearts at them does not exclude the manifestation and defeat of an eldritch horror!

Molly's Afterlife

The 16th episode of Supernatural's second season, titled Roadkill, builds to a quiet scene where Sam amd Dean Winchester show the ghost of a woman named Molly her living former husband, who survived the car crash that killed her years before.  Molly has in fact been a ghost for the entire episode without realizing this.  She is one of the many spirits of the human dead the Winchesters encounter whom they release from their attachment to this world.  To fully break a recurring cycle of pain her spirit is unknowingly involved in, the brothers attempt to convince her to let go of this world in favor of whatever the next state of being is, with Sam saying they think she will move on.  "But you don't know where," she says.  She ultimately does move on—to an unknown condition.  In such a simple scene, the show grapples with some of the most vital and urgent existential aspects of conscious life.

It appears to be commonly assumed that if one was in an afterlife, one would know.  It would not have to be the case that someone would know they have died.  They would in truth still be alive at least on a mental level in order to have any kind of afterlife (consciousness is inherently immaterial, after all, so it is already supernatural in the strictest sense).  Or, if they are genuinely dead, they are no longer conscious and hence are incapable of reflecting on anything.  True death entails total mental nonexistence.  Even now, one cannot know if one is not living in some kind of afterlife already, as opposed to the fact that one currently exists.  Just because one is in an afterlife does not mean that any of the major epistemological restrictions one has in this life, such as inability to know the external world as it is beyond perceptions and to know if memories of past events are accurate, would be removed.

Sam and Dean, as irrational as they are leading up to this point of the series (especially Dean!), do not even pretend that they have transcended such epistemological limitations, not even to comfort Molly.  Speaking honestly, the brothers admit they do not know what happens to spirits next, which parallels how the living cannot know what will happen when they die (or even if they will die).  As non-rationalists, they are incapable of knowing anything unless they first become proper rationalists, but not even a wholly rationalistic person can know anything about whether there really is an afterlife more than what is possible in light of consistency with logical axioms and what is likely in light of miscellaneous evidences.  Whether I fear it, hate it, or revel in it, I cannot know if there is an afterlife until I die, though this might still be unknowable then for the aforementioned reason.  I cannot necessarily know I am in an afterlife even if my mind does not die with my body.  I certainly cannot know anything if my consciousness no longer exists (even if only for a temporary period as with the Biblical state of Sheol before the resurrection).

There is no logical guarantee that Molly has not simply ceased to exist, or, far, far worse, that she has not transitioned to some plane where she will suffer eternal torture.  She cannot know beforehand, and neither can Sam and Dean.  Yet she does "let go" of her emotional attachment to this world as she appears to one way or another leave this plane of mental existence.  How perfectly this aligns with what we can know about whether there is an afterlife or which possible kind it is.  All one can know under human limitations are objective logical facts about what is possible or evidentially likely, not whether there is an afterlife, if there is an afterlife for everyone, and exactly which kind one would get.  What afterlife there would be according to a particular logically possible worldview can be known, not whether that is the true afterlife.

The early episodes of Supernatural before the one with Molly only hint at what extended afterlives are like for those who do not hold onto the world, with these people often becoming malevolent spirits who must be confronted for the sake of the living.  The closest thing to "confirmation" of any afterlife besides this, up to the end of the second season, is hearsay from demons speaking about someone suffering in hell after dying.  Roadkill is the first episode where a character deliberates out loud about something pertinent to the show and to all of us, yet at the same time unknowable.  Not everyone might realize it, for there are many non-rationalists, but we each are in Molly's position within this very life.  Is there a continuation of conscious existence with or without a body after biological death?  If so, does it last forever?  Are we already experiencing it?  Will it be blissful or agonizing?

Molly is already a ghost, phenomenologically alive despite her biological death.  Otherwise, her epistemological standing is the same as that of any being with my limitations.  The episode does not change how Supernatural flirts with very idiotic misconceptions of the Christian afterlife (an immediate afterlife rather than soul sleep before an eventual resurrection, seemingly eternal torture for the wicked, human spirits haunting the world, etc.).  I have written about this extensively; as obvious as the Bible's real doctrines are on the matter, they differ sharply from the popular versions of heaven and hell with all of their inherent logical and Biblical errors, which are treated as what Christianity entails in everything from typical sermons to conversations to popular culture, Supernatural included.  But Roadkill does acknowledge crucial truths about the nature of conscious existence that are of great significance to literally everyone, like it or not.  Only a rationalist can know what is possible and impossible, knowable and unknowable, but everyone stands potentially a moment away from either soul oblivion or an afterlife, whether permenent or temporary in either case.  What awaits us, we cannot know.

What Colossians 2 Really Teaches About The Law

According to many people, the New Testament, especially in Paul's epistles, proclaims that the Law as revealed by God in the Torah is no longer something anyone must live out.  Verses like Colossians 2:13-14 are standard texts such people might appeal to.  The irony is that here Paul in fact says something quite contrary to the idea that the Law is temporary, only binding on Jews, or in any other way morally imperfect.  The Law teaches that engaging in or abstaining from specific actions is righteous or evil, and doing what is evil is sin.  In Colossians 2:13-14, Paul says the guilt incurred by sinning is forgiven by God (as clarified by other passages, only for repentant people) so that the wicked standing someone brings upon themself by doing what is immoral, which is necessarily contrary to the Law that reveals ethical duties, is taken away.  The Law is not repealed or made sinful or irrelevant just because someone falls short of it.

Colossians 2:13-14—"When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ.  He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross."

The status of being unforgiven for one's sins is all that is removed for those who submit to God.  Really, this is so overtly apparent to anyone who rationalistically analyzes the Bible—reading without making assumptions about its contents and recognizes what does and does not follow from them.  The obligatory nature of the Law does not end because morality does not end, and the Law specifies a great many details about morality.  Both for Christians and non-Christians, what is good and evil does not change unless a moral requirement by nature is impermanent (such as the those described in Leviticus 19:23-25).  This was the case before and after the revealing of the Law and the death and resurrection of Christ.  Sometimes in the Law and sometimes outside of it, the Old Testament even says its moral tenets are for all people (Leviticus 20:1-23, Deuteronomy 18:9-13, Ezekiel 5:5-7, etc.).

For many reasons, neither would being a Jew or a Gentile make almost any difference in moral obligations at any time.  In addition to the logical impossibility of moral relativism and the frequent Old Testament affirmations that morality, which the Law reflects, is universal, Paul's audience itself points to this.  Paul writes Colossians to a church comprised that seems at least partially composed of Gentiles, so whatever he writes about the Law is equally applicable to them both logically, because morality cannot be racially or culturally relative (it exists or it does not with no conflicting obligations or absences of them), and because it is addressed to them.  Even simply within the New Testament, this already establishes theonomy is valid for all people.

If Paul denied anything that logically has to be true, then he would be inherently wrong.  If he denied anything taught by the Old Testament, including that almost the entirety of morality always has been identical for Jews and Gentiles and that the Law cannot change unless God does, he would be a heretic on Judeo-Christianity, not a legitimate apostle for the same God the Old Testament attests to.  He does neither, nor does he reject what Christ himself says about the Law (most directly in Matthew 5:17-19): that it is of ongoing relevance to how people should live.  Rather than insist the Law is suddenly somehow not binding as of Christ's death, he writes of how Christ's death is central in why sinners can be reconciled to God.

Why would many who identify as Christians sincerely or desperately say otherwise?  First, non-rationalists can overlook literal any truth, even something self-evident like logical axioms or their own conscious existence, thinking them unverifiable or false if they even think about them at all.  It is easy for them to never read the Bible without making assumptions and to hold to popular misconceptions promoted by their pastors or articles written by other irrational people (instead of looking to reason and the Bible).  What they really appear to be after is the emotionalistic high of feeling free from moral boundaries and from the guilt that their own stupidity and sin brought upon them, all in the context of embracing familiar cultural norms.  Anything in the Old or New Testament at odds with such a philosophy is ignored.  They do not want any moral constraints, or at least not more than a handful that are to their subjective liking and convenient enough that their manner of living will not have to change accordingly.

Thoroughly irrational, they would mistake what Paul says later in Colossians 2, in verses 20-23, for a rejection of the Law itself instead of exactly what Paul says he refers to: human constructs that ultimately are contrary to the Law.  Contrived by foolish people, they have no logical necessity or moral authority.  As he says, these mere beliefs and customs perish.  They are not truth.  Ironically, Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32 are emphatic that, on one one hand, the Law is a perfect reflection of objective morality revealed by God (with some exceptions, Moses only communicates to other people what God prescribes), and, on the other hand, human customs that deviate from the Law one way or another are invalid.  Paul's ideas in Colossians 2:20-23 are in no way against the Law, being perfectly consistent with its particulars!

The apostle who wrote the majority of the New Testament does not even really appear to say anything else in these verses.  But delusional pseudo-Christians, operating on assumptions and eager to believe and practice whatever personally appeals to them, would want Paul to mean something different.  Conflating God taking away a person's guilt from violating the Law (which is the same as violating morality) with God taking away the Law itself, they illogically elevate a misinterpretion of a handful of New Testament verses as if they are the very bedrock of all Christian philosophy.  What foolishness!

Why Was Jesus A Man?

To physically manifest in the incarnation, unless he was to have an intersex body or a newly created gender, Jesus could only have been either a man or woman.  There would be no other options without combining the basic categories (as is the case with intersex people) or introducing a new human gender.  Of course, gender is nothing but a type of physical body, especially as reflected in the very different genitalia of men and women.  A person's psychological characteristics like their worldview, moral character, and personality, as well as their mental or physical skills, are unrelated because the physical body is not the same as any of these things.  It does not logically follow, therefore, that a male or female body requires any specific traits in the separate categories.  Moreover, that one man/woman has a given personality or other such characteristic does not mean another will, and the idea to the contrary is rooted in the metaphysical and epistemological fallacy of composition.

Further still, if there was such a thing as masculinity and feminity, there would be no social experience that would deviate from gender stereotypes [1]—which would in turn have to be the exact same across all cultures, or else the idiotic stereotypes would not reflect any true masculinity or feminity, which would be the same for all men and women if it existed.  Gender stereotypes at the philosophical level would be prescriptive on a complementarian moral framework (though something that is good or evil and that can be done regardless of one's genitalia would by necessity have to be good or evil for all), but they would still supposedly be rooted in some inherent psychological orientation of men and women.  It is just that the logical necessity of one person not being the same as another and of a trait like aggression or kindness not following from having a penis or vagina render social experience entirely secondary in demonstrating the falsity of gender stereotypes: logic is true independent of all else.

In accordance with these necessary truth of reason, the Bible teaches that men and women have a metaphysically equal and positive status as bearers of the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2), as well as the same moral obligations (which follows from the doctrines of the aforementioned verses and is taught directly or indirectly in many passages, including Numbers 5:1-7).  Biblical philosophy is neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, but egalitarian, and it could not even be logically possible otherwise, since consistency with necessary truths is a prerequisite for possibility.  Although it is an issue of extraordinarily minor significance in one sense precisely because gender does not dictate personality or moral obligations—save for those of a very small handful of Biblical commands literally having to do with anatomy itself, like male circumcision—why was Jesus a man and not a woman?

First of all, it is not as if there is any sexism in a pseudo-divine being (Jesus is not Yahweh [2] and is very seemingly presented as a created being in verses like John 3:16) incarnating as one gender or the other.  Jesus being a man is not due to sexism in itself or because of anything else in the Christian worldview, but if his gender was brought about simply by virtue of him being male, the opposite would not do away with this problem.  The alternative would entail the exact same flaw if this was so.  If Jesus taking on a male body is sexist because he was not a woman, then so would taking on a female body instead, because he would not have been a man.  He had to be one or the other outside of the alternate possible circumstances described above, and since gender egalitarianism is a basic Biblical doctrine, there is nothing contrary to egalitarianism in Jesus incarnating as either gender.

The gender of Jesus is not something that any doctrine hinges on.  There is no special closeness that Christ has to the Father, who has no gender as an immaterial being (Genesis 1:1, Deuteronomy 4:15-20, John 4:24) and thus is not truly male, because of his male physicality, and he has no psychological characteristics that are specific to men because no such thing exists.  Most importantly, psychological masculinity and feminity are logically impossible; Biblically, no such thing is ever taught, making the Bible consistent with reason.  Jesus is also not distant from the Father because of his gender: women are not morally superior or more spiritually attuned compared to men, despite what some people who claim to be Christian or secular egalitarians think.  All of these traits are possessed on an individualistic level and have nothing to do with one's genitalia, secondary physical sex characteristics, or chromosomes.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/06/refuting-gender-stereotypes-unnecessary.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/04/god-resurrected-jesus-another.html

Spiral's Ending Scene

Originally scheduled for release in 2020, Spiral is distinctive among Saw films for multiple reasons.  It features the new Spiral Killer without even flashbacks to show John Kramer, Jigsaw.  It is also the first entry since 2009's Saw VI to target an institution.  In this case, that institution is the police force of the present day United States.  To be sure, Spiral struggles in some aspects.  But the timing of its rescheduled and final release date in 2021 (preceded by a very incendiary example of police brutality against a black man the year before), the centrality of black characters, and the total lack of emphasis on racism in the film only add even more thematic weight to the ending scene.

Protagonist Ezekiel Banks, a detective and a black man, has just made it to the Spiral Killer—who has viciously come after an department of wayward police officers for offenses like murder.  Ezekiel's father Marcus was once the chief.  The killer has Marcus (played by Samuel L. Jackson) suspended in the air by a series of wires as he is drained of blood.  A SWAT team approaches.  The killer wants Ezekiel to join him, with his father going free upon this condition.  When Ezekiel complies enough with the killer's instructions to lower Marcus to the ground, the SWAT team incidentally triggers the mechanism to lift him upright.  Lights turn on behind Marcus to obscure him.  Shortly, a baton-like shape extends down above his right hand, and the wire for his right arm makes it appear from his outline that he is aiming a firearm at the team.  Going far beyond what is necessary to actually neutralize a threatening person, they fire at him more than enough times to kill him.

The lights do not even activate until after the SWAT units have entered the room; they saw or could have somewhat seen the predicament of Ezekiel's father before the puppetry meant to make Marcus appear hostile.  On two counts, the SWAT team acted far more aggressively than the situation called for.  They ignored visual evidence of his captivity while it was easier to access that evidence and did not stop shooting until well after enough shots to end his life.  Tragically, Ezekiel running out to deter the police after fighting the Spiral Killer did genuinely distract their attention away from Marcus before the backlighting made it more difficult to tell what he was doing.  And Ezekiel shooting a target to lower his father before they entered did make it seem like someone, whom Marcus was perhaps mistaken for, was actively shooting at another person.

The Spiral Killer would probably dismiss this because he would simply want Marcus dead in the absence of Ezekiel's cooperation anyway (Marcus encouraged very utilitarian, unjust police measures), but he is relying upon the very willingness to quickly shoot someone before they have been caught doing something warranting this reaction that contributed to his hostility towards many of the police in the first place.  There is inherent hypocrisy in opposing police who use their power recklessly or maliciously and then staging a plan to punish a police figure using that same sort of unjust violence.  It only deepens the hypocrisy when the killer insists he is trying to help Ezekiel save his father when he is the one who kidnapped him and put him in a murderous situation to begin with (at least he does not pretend he is not killing people as John Kramer did!).

As for racism, especially against black people, while the cast of Spiral is diverse and the police brutality severe, there is never any hint that racism specifically drives any of the police murders or other acts of oppression.  Perhaps this would have been different if it had instead been written and filmed after 2020.  In the context of American police practices and controversies, the ending nonetheless remains defeaning in its relevance to racism against black people: a black man is shot because it looks to the approaching police officers that he is brandishing a firearm, when he in reality is being held up like a puppet by a contraption.  A few moments of better examination, and it could have been easily discernible that he did not have a gun.

The police in Spiral almost certainly are not motivated by racism because they are generally potrayed as a menace to almost everyone outside of their ranks.  Again, the movie is not about racist police, but about aggressive police and less discriminatory expressions of corruption.  But the film still addresses issues very adjacent to America's particular woes regarding police brutality against black people and sexism against men—so many black men would probably not be reportedly murdered or otherwise mistreated by the police if they were women instead, or at least not to the same extent of physical violence, though the color of their skin would still be a target for certain officers.

That Marcus and black men who are shot very hastily in real life are men is absolutely part of the prevalence of unjust police force against black males, since men are assumed by many to be naturally violent or more deserving of harshness.  Either way, a black man connected with the police hierarchy of Spiral is killed by police because he only seems threatening.  At the same time, movie is not specifically about the racism (and sexism) in America that this parallels.  The ending scene is very nuanced as all of these facts overlap.  Though the situation is arranged to provide Ezekiel an incentive to join the Spiral Killer, it is actually far more layered thanks to the hypocrisy of the new Jigsaw figure and the significant similarities of its reckless police actions to those associated with additional forms of irrationality and mistreatment directed towards specific demographics.

Spiral stumbles in some ways, but in isolation and in the context of the greater film, its ending is incredibly well-executed.  One could not know from Marcus being black how intentional the parallels between this in-universe example of police brutality and those in America are.  Still, in addition to being an artistically excellent scene that directly explores the nature of police brutality all on its own, its relationship with both the rest of the movie (with its bold but valid lack of racist characterization) and real life reports elevates it even more.  Spiral in fact has one of the most philosophically deep endings in a cinematic franchise teeming with philosophically charged endings.

Independent Of Examples

Certainly, some truths depend on there being examples of a given thing or a lack thereof.  It is not true that someone is injured unless some particular part of their body is injured, like a foot, a finger, or an ear.  A body with no examples of injury could only be uninjured.  The irony of examples of how examples fall within a broader category!  Likewise, there are no crustaceans in existence unless there is at least one crab, lobster, or other such creature, though there would only need to be an organism from one of the subcategories, rather than a specific kind of concrete example or multiple examples—a crab or a lobster would do, not strictly a crab, for instance.

If there is not at least some example of a living organism in existence, then there is no life; again, it would not be true that the broader category of living things exists except as a logically governed concept unless there is some concrete example, even just one.  But the fact that, whether any tigers exist or not, a tiger is a tiger and that, although a tiger is a cat, the existence of cats does not require the existence of tigers are logical truths that themselves are specific examples of logical axioms applying to something beyond the inherent truth of the axioms themselves.  

They are the grounding of truth itself.  Truth must exist because its absence makes it true that nothing is true.  Something either follows or does not follow from a given concept and whatever follows must be true because then it follows logically from the nature of reality that nothing follows from anything else and is logically true that logical necessity is not true.  Contradictory things cannot both be true because for everything to be possible or true at once, it must be the case that it is impossible for logic to render contradictions false, but then one way or another, whatever is true still excludes anything that contradicts it.  The same sort of self-refutation is entailed by the falsity of what is called the law of identity, although no one needs to look to prompting from others to discover logical axioms because they are inherently true.

This status makes them independent of all else.  Logical axioms are what makes anything true about the examples to which they necessarily apply.  A tiger is a tiger, and not anything else, yes; a particular tiger is that particular tiger and not another.  But the law of identity is still true without the existence of tigers and is why the concept of a tiger is what it is in the first place, with or without actual tigers.  A thing has to be exactly what it is.  This and other axioms, as self-necessary truths, unlike other logical facts that are also true by necessity but stem from them, have veracity entirely independent from the examples that could prompt someone to initially recognize them.

There are other abstract matters where logic similarly requires something apart from hypothetical and concrete examples alike.  If matter exists, then it is true that not everything in reality is immaterial.  Yet, it does not matter what exactly the material object is.  This is just true regardless.  That matter does not have to form a battery, a stone, or a mountain for there to be physical substance.  If matter exists, matter exists.  If a boulder or a car exists, matter exists.  Still, if matter exists, there is not necessarily a boulder or a car.

The nature of examples and the relationship they have to either a broader category or a more foundational truth is of course rooted in logic's ultimate status.  Every single other thing which is true inevitably by nature hinges on logical axioms already being true.  And this includes any examples of why it is impossible for logic to be false because any state of reality or the "nonexistence" of reality still entail a logical reason why each logical axiom would be false, rendering them true either way.  The only intrinsic aspects of reality, logical axioms, cannot be dependent on anything else because of their inherence.  The very core of reality therefore is independent of the examples that follow from it.

Game Review—XCOM 2 Collection (Switch)

"When we first encountered Earth we wept for a broken world.  For a tortured race crying out to the stars in agony.  We answered your call."

—Angelis Ethereal

A highly complex strategy game, XCOM 2 approaches the heights of the genre on the level of mechanics while unfortunately suffering from absolutely horrid technical issues on the Switch.  What does it still accomplish excellently?  One of its greatest pillars is the ongoing urgency its Avatar Project timeline reinforces—I will detail that more below.  You cannot just passively let the in-game timeline progress indefinitely without severe consequence.  In the base game and even moreso in the War of the Chosen expansion, another strength is the increasingly varied enemy types.  By the end of the game, you've come a long way from the mostly human-alien hybrids that frequent the early missions.  

XCOM 2 even has prominent female enemies like the Vipers, Codexes, and Beserker Queen, though the main infantry of the Advent regime seemingly are, as is unfortunately a reflection of stereotypes that pressure men to endanger themselves or ignore everything from domestic abuse to general safety as if they are expendable for being men.  The game also features a natural diversity of human characters, with men, women, and people of many races and nationalities represented or included prominently; humanity at large is at risk from the alien menace, after all.  Another triumph is the War of the Chosen expansion as a whole, which aftually retells the same campaign with a massive amount of significant additions, including deployable characters, Resistance factions, alien boss figures (the Chosen), cutscenes, and soldier traits.

Production Values

It is unfortunate that the performance of the game is so poor.  The game closed on me and often ran very slowly.  More than once, it was all but unplayable in either docked or handheld mode due to the extremely staggered way the animations unfolded.  Restarting the game temporarily helped.  At least the graphical quality is slightly better than the usually atrocious framerate: there are moments where character models like those of Spark units might look more than passable for a 2020 Switch game ported from a 2016 release on more powerful consoles, but so many of the characters and environments are ordinarily bland or pixelated—and this is on top of the terrible lagging.  This is particularly apparent when the game shows a closeup of a soldier in a spot with shadows nearby.  The shadows are extremely blocky, as you can see in the top screenshot immediately below this paragraph.  For whatever reason, shadows and shady areas do not fare well visually on the Switch here.  At the same time, some character models and cutscenes look quite great by comparison.

Gameplay

There is an enormous divide between the main forms of gameplay.  On one side, there are missions, played from a top-down perspective as the player moves units and performs actions like attacks in turns, with some missions only allowing a maximum number of turns in which all necessary objectives must be completed.  On the other side, there is the management of the Avenger, XCOM's aerial vehicle that can move around the world.  The interior of the vessel is shown from the side, and decisions are made affecting what kinds of rooms will be installed, what research projects will be pursued (which take time once initiated), what equipment will be created, and more.  At the level of the global map, you can move the Avenger from one scattered point to another to accomplish a host of goals, including making contact with likeminded people in various regions and scanning for resources.

Those resources are very important.  Each month brings an income based primarily on how many regions you have made contact with, and there are monthly operating expenses.  Generic resources from this income or from completing missions are required to unlock or create many types of equipment.  Other resources come from defeating specific aliens, also necessary for developing select equipment or weapons.  Especially early on, the game can be very difficult thanks to the trials of gradually building up to a high resource count.  Combat is also more difficult early on due to artificial limitations on the number of turns to complete an objective in and high miss rates for player attacks.  A prologue familiarizes the player with the brand of turn-based mechanics at hand.  Shooting a weapon typically ends the turn even if it is the first of the standard two actions available, and it is quite common both for shots to miss and for killing an enemy to require more shots than a single soldier can produce in one turn.  Yes, you do have to reload after enough shots, which counts as one of the standard two maximum actions for a character per turn!

Jane Kelly is the only character in the base game to both remain playable after surviving the prologue and not be randomized—other soldiers, all of whom can die in combat and be replaced by other randomized characters, have their names, nationalities, and appearances generated from a set of options that can be edited by the player later.  Soldier deaths are permanent, though you can return to a previous save and make different strategic choices or see if the enemy actions differ enough to keep the soldier alive.  However, it would be possible to take a new recruit and recreate a past unit by changing the former's name and look to match the latter's.  Among the attire options are the selections from the Anarchy's Children DLC and the special armors acquired in the Alien Hunters DLC.

As for soldiers who are wounded but not killed in a mission, they will heal for a number of days depending on the extent of their health loss.  Because you can to a degree recruit other units to be leveled up ("promoted") through battlefield kills or through special programs on the Avenger, there is nothing so grave about losing a character that it has to damn the player to lose to the aliens.  And you can indeed lose the world to the invaders, or so says the internet.

The Avatar Project is introduced before long, an alien project that can be delayed for a time by advancing in the story and completing certain missions, but not postponed inevitably.  Every month that passes brings the game closer to an enigmatic, apocalyptic event that could decimate humanity unless the player acts decisively.  Even then, it takes time to complete story objectives required to unlock the capability to even reach the missions that slow down the completion of the Avatar Project, so you cannot simply farm promotions and resources indefinitely.  There is an escalating urgency that many games lack.  Moving the Avenger from one place to another and scanning an area for resources, both necessary at some point if you are trying to proceed or get ahead, pass the time more quickly.  Days, weeks, and months go by.

War of the Chosen adds entirely new features like soldier connections, as pairs of units can bond (including a man and a woman in a platonic warrior bond!) to provide advantages in combat such as extra moves.  It also introduces three special factions that XCOM must establish relationships with in order to benefit from special characters from each group, with their own greatly expanded ability list tied to leveling up and their own unique weaponry.  While many new enemies show up, the two most important are the Chosen, three especially powerful, recurring opponents, and the Lost, zombie-like former humans that infest some abandoned city areas.

The Chosen in particular inject even greater urgency into the game, since each Chosen that you have gotten the attention of will actively work against XCOM in the background, such as by permanently lowering monthly supplies, unless they are killed in their own domain.  I say their own domain because they can randomly appear in various missions, but though they can be defeated in the level, they will not truly die once and for all unless you use the new Resistance Ring to send time locating their lair and then destroy a Psionic sarcophagus that revives each of them.  However, as difficult as they can be to ward off in the early phases of the expanded campaign, defeating them repeatedly is not without reward.  Defeating a Chosen grants five Action Points (AP) to a shared pool of XCOM AP that can be used to purchase additional abilities for units, even outside the typical two options with each level-up that ordinary soldiers have.  Though finding or overpowering the Chosen can be challenging, getting five more AP to distribute among the soldiers for upgrades as you prefer is very beneficial.  Complicating matters, however, there is only one chance to permanently repel a Chosen at their respective stronghold.  And you have to overcome various enemies to even get to the Chosen boss.

As for the Lost, this new enemy type is healed very uniquely.  The Lost can swarm soldiers fairly rapidly in their turns, but each soldier gets an additional move for each Lost they kill.  Though reloads cannot be postponed indefinitely, many of the foes can be dispatched in the meantime.  In missions featuring both aliens and the Lost, the two can even fight each other in their own separate turns, diluting the direct pressure placed on the player.  Once, I even faced both in a mission where the Resistance and aliens were trying to secure as many boxes of resources as possible.  This new "faction" adds more nuances to the already very deep gameplay of XCOM 2.  Truly, War of the Chosen is an incredible evolution of the campaign that merits its own playthrough.

Story

Years after an alien invasion of Earth, the resulting extraterrestrial-managed regime scrambles to eliminate organized human opposition in the form of the group XCOM.  Evidence points to imminent, devastating plans for humanity related to genetic manipulation and psionic energy.

Intellectual Content

Most directly, the intellectual content of the game centers on the multi-layered strategic actions and their ramifications.  You can ignore a mission or a problem or you can prioritize one of them over another to whatever consequences result; you can devote resources to one project or another.  This is far more about gameplay mechanics than exploring the nature of reality through various issues, but some philosophical issues pertinent to ethics and science are especially embedded into the game.  One way this is executed is through both the mandatory and optional reverse engineering of alien technology and autopsies of corpses from various enemies, which yields fairly detailed written breakdowns of how their devices and bodies function and might prompt a character to fret over the moral parameters of utilizing scientific inquiries.

In one case, touching on the potential for vast differences between human and hypothetical alien biology, someone acknowledges that an acidic substance might be the equivalent to a certain extraterrestrial being of what water is for humans.  Yet, the heavy emphasis on science is predictably accompanied by various logical errors in the worldviews of some characters (not of necessity, but because many people misunderstand both logic and science).  A minor ramification of this is how scientists and engineers are treated as if they are different categories of people altogether, when to the extent that they observe and create physical things, engineers are simply a particular subcategory of scientists.

Other errors are more foundational or extensive.  Shen admits that the wraith suit technically violates the laws of physics (though this could never be the case with the laws of logic), which is logically possible, albeit highly ironic given that the laws of physics were utilized to craft the suit in the first place and grant it the ability to phase the user through solid materials.  Tygan, however, says in a story mission that nothing is beyond the realm of possibility with the aliens, an utter falsity.  Nothing can violate logical axioms as self-necessary truths, so no supernatural or technological endeavor of the aliens could ever do such a thing.  

This idiotic idea and similar ones are not automatically embraced by someone because they are a scientist, but people who 1) conflate logic and science or 2) think that logical truths are not necessary truths but that scientific truths are absolute or truly verifiable are objectively more likely than rationalists to pursue science personally or professionally.  For all his extreme irrationalism that is thankfully seldom articulated, at least Tygan acknowledges a distinction between consciousness and the body.  When he needs a mind linked to the mysterious Elders, he says he can create an Elder body using technological and biological processes, but he cannot replicate their consciousness.

Conclusion

Layers upon layers of strategic decisions, around 40+ hours of base campaign gameplay (more like 90+ counting War of the Chosen), a fairly detailed exploration of technological research in a science fiction setting that does not deny the immateriality of mind, and well-implemented diversity elevate the XCOM 2 Collection to great heights as far as themes, worldbuilding, and mechanics go.  Not everything is perfect.  The performance in particular needed to be vastly more stable.  If you can look past this or are fine restarting the game perhaps every hour to get more smooth frame rates and movements for a time, you will experience a core game and its expansion that truly do offer more than enough to stand strong in spite of the severe technical flaws.  Besides first-party releases, this is the kind of game that has favorably marked the original Switch platform: a rerelease of an earlier game on a handheld system with a large amount of DLC together in one purchase.  The horrid qualities are very horrid in this instance.  But what is superb is very superb.