The Illogical Reason To Embrace Logic

There is such a thing as an illogical reason to believe in or hold to logic.  When non-rationalists believe anything, they can only assume: knowledge is impossible without absolute certainty, and one cannot have absolute certainty without intentionally, rightly grasping the foundation of truth and knowledge, which is logical axioms such as the necessity of truth.  This axiom can only be true because if nothing is true, then this is itself true—but logical axioms are not merely true of other things because they are true in themselves.  If nothing logically follows from anything, then it follows logically from the nature of reality that logic is false; things do still follow or not follow logically, and independent of any other examples, this is intrinsically, absolutely true.

And, for instance, if contradictions are possible, then would necessarily be true that what is sometimes called the logical law of non-contradiction is false, or else contradictions would be impossible.  This means that even if the latter is false, it still is true that conflicting concepts cannot be true simultaneously, logically requiring that contradictions are impossible either way.  No matter what, independent of other examples of particular issues, non-contradiction is true because the alternative would nonetheless entail that this logical law, which contradicts it, is false.  In turn, since all logical axioms cannot be false, any concept that contradicts them must be false.  

Believing any concept without logical proof, solely found in the self-evidence of these axioms or in what necessarily follows from something in light of axioms.  Even if someone does not directly think about or realize these strictly logical facts that are true because they cannot possibly be false, they are still relying on them and other logical truths (either by assuming or by metaphysically depending on them) about things like mind and belief, such as that belief does not require that the thing believed is true, or that one cannot believe or think at all without already existing as a conscious being.  While not an axiom in the same purely logical sense, it is also self-evident and logically true that one cannot deny or ignore the existence of one's own mind without existing as a mind to have such asinine thoughts.

This too is a logical truth, albeit not about pure logic.  Because logic is inherently true, it is unavoidable.  Not even the most passive, philosophically negligent person can go a single moment without metaphysically or epistemologically relying on logic.  Only the logical possibility of their own existence makes it possible for them to exist, because their being does not contradict logical axioms.  It is just that anything they believe, even if they believe something true and demonstrable for what is in isolation a correct necessary truth, is only assumed since they do not know logical axioms.  At best they attach their belief to some form of subjective, arbitrary persuasion divorced from recognition of transcendent logical facts.

Logic is not a mental process; though grasped by the mind, it is not a construct or perception or some kind of illusion.  Reasoning is a mental process that can be done in alignment with objective logical truths or in deviation from them (irrational reasoning).  Many people reason on the basis of appeals to intuition or authority figures, not intrinsically necessary truths, making anything they believe invalid even if the conclusion itself is demonstrably true or at least logically possible.  Reasoning can be done illogically, but logic itself simply is true, unaffected by belief or a person's reason for believing any part of their worldview.  Non-rationalists might like to selectively pay lip service to logic to feel validated in their fallacies or look "intelligent" before others, but at most, they are still enslaved to assumptions.  How many of them have even thought of these truths about axioms enough to actively misunderstand or reject them?  Few, if any!

It is possible to have a correct belief for utterly illogical reasons.  The supreme example of this is believing in a truth about pure reason itself like logical axioms on the basis of something like emotional comfort or personal approval, since logic cannot be false without still being true and hence is epistemologically self-evident without reducing down to anything else and also the supreme metaphysical part of reality, the only self-necessary reality at that.  To assume that logic is true or in any way believe this for an incorrect reason, for any reason other than its own inherent truth, is irrational.  Assumptions do not become valid to any extent because the thing assumed is true or even if the thing assumed is inherently true.

Jonah And Sheol

The pathetic translation style of the King James Bible calls Sheol/Hades/the grave, Tartarus, and Gehenna hell, which can contribute to some confusion about what exactly Sheol is despite other passages being clear.  In the belly of the fish, Jonah prays to God, and God does hear and deliver him.  Jonah says that he called out to God from within Sheol prior to this (2:2).  The fish itself was rescue from what could otherwise have been death in the storm while he was still on the boat with pagans in the first chapter.  The prophet says he was in Sheol in a verse that has been misunderstood by some, like author of 23 Minutes in Hell Bill Wiese in that very book, to mean that Jonah, if he did not literally die and see hell, encountered a vision of a realm of agony and saw its torments and alleged bars within.  The end of the chapter also has Jonah say he was delivered from the pit (2:6), a phrase often used in other places alongside the mention of Sheol.

Like in Isaiah 38:18 and Psalm 30:3 and 88:3-4, Jonah 2 is using "the pit" as a figurative or even literal reference to the physical holding place of a corpse [1].  Even if Jonah had died and received resurrection from God in the fish, the Bible is very direct in saying what Sheol is.  No one who goes there, righteous or wicked (Job 3:11-19), experiences suffering or bliss.  The collective human dead are unable to perceive even the self-evident logical axioms and the direct contents of their own mind (Ecclesiastes 9:5) and sleep (Daniel 12:2, see also the aforementioned Job passage) without perception or activity of any kind, physical or mental/spiritual (Ecclesiastes 9:10).  All of this is very different than what is commonly equated with Christian doctrine by the likes of Bill Wiese.  This is not even everything they get wrong.

This sleep only ends at their resurrection where the body is restored and their spirit is awakened again (Job 14:10-17, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Revelation 20:11-15).  The righteous or repentant rise to eternal life free of pain and the impact of sin and the wicked or unrepentant rise to condemnation and eventually destruction, or true eternal death: the permanent nonexistence of the soul (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Isaiah 66:22-24).  Not everyone is given immortality, but only the righteous (Romans 2:7, John 3:16, Romans 6:23), and only God is immortal on his own (1 Timothy 6:15-16).  For everyone in the meantime, there is unperceiving, dreamless sleep before resurrection to face either an everlasting life of reward or a likely very painful death in hell.

The dead cannot praise God because they cannot think in order to do so (Psalm 6:5, 88:10-12, Isaiah 38:18-19).  Since Jonah says he called out to God from within Sheol, and other verses state that Sheol is not a realm from which a person can think, remember, pray, or experience anything whatsoever, he only came close to death.  Again, had he died, the Bible clarifies that he would not have gone to any immediate afterlife.  Sheep and humans alike go to Sheol (Psalm 49:14).  It is not a hellacious or heavenly afterlife people reside in before Gehenna and New Jerusalem.  It is the grave for the body and unconsciousness for the mind.  Moreover, tormenting people for longer periods of time before the final judgment based on when they lived and died (some would suffer far longer than others) would be unjust anyway.

Jonah did not go to an afterlife while in the stomach of the great fish, and certainly not to hell or a hell-like place.  Bill Wiese is a fool for either mistaking his hallucination which does not align with the real Biblical doctrine of the afterlife for an experience with the Biblical hell or for contriving the story completely for the sake of money or notoriety.  Anyone else who reads Jonah 2 and makes assumptions about Sheol or hell (which are not the same things), especially ones that so obviously contradict other parts of the Bible, is likewise a fool.  The chapter teaches that Jonah was near death but was delivered only to soon spurn the mercy of God, which he himself was a recipient of, when it was shown to Nineveh.  Little to nothing about Sheol is clarified in this passage alone and what is taught in other places is not what many have likely heard.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-pit.html

Proverbs 6 On Stirring Up Conflict

The New Testament is not exactly subtle about encouraging or prescribing peace (Matthew 5:8, James 3:17-18), depending on the verse.  Paul even lists peace among the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22 as an evidence that someone is not living for sin—though there are still logically and Biblically erroneous ways to regard or pursue peace, like doing so for the sake of emotionalism or tolerance of evil.  Yet, one broadly accepted idea is that the Old Testament promotes a form of arrogant or harmful disunity, while the New Testament "overrides" or "corrects" this.  This is not so.  The New Testament does declare that discord and dissensions can be signs that someone is wicked and devoted to their own selfish disregard for God and morality (Galatians 5:19-21).  So does the Old Testament.

There are not only six or seven things that are evil and hence detestable, but Proverbs 6 includes a person who stirs up conflict as one of the things God hates.  The sinner and the sin alike are despised.

Proverbs 6:16-19—"There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community."

Stirring up genuinely needless, unwarranted strife is irrational and morally analogous to but not as evil as killing someone without justification.  Yes, there are many justifications provided in the Torah for putting someone to death due to what certain sins objectively deserve, though there are still many ways to kill someone illicitly and thus be guilty of murder.  Gratuitously aggressive conversations or attitudes obviously would not be as wicked as something like murder, but conflict-stirring behaviors and killing both should be limited to particular circumstances, and even then, there are ways to err even when basic strife or killing are required or acceptable.  According to Proverbs 6, God hates not just unecessary interpersonal strife, but also those who unrepentantly promote it.

The New Testament does not introduce anything new or amend the particulars of the Bible's moral philosophy when it does speak of pursuing peace as an obligatory thing.  No, actions that establish or could facilitate peace between personal enemies or opposing nations are overtly mentioned among the universal requirements of morality in the Law (Exodus 23:4-5, Deuteronomy 20:10).  But according to the Old Testament there are of course times where seeking peace is neither mandatory nor permissible.  And the New Testament absolutely does not say anything contradictory about the matter.

You do not have to pursue peace inflexibly or relentlessly to be righteous.  Ecclesiastes 3 says there is a time for war and a time for peace.  The general populations of the Promised Land deserved merciless slaughter because of their egregious sins (Deuteronomy 9:4-6), some of which are detailed in places like Leviticus 20:1-23 and Deuteronomy 18:9-13.  To make peace with them would in fact have been the immoral course of action (Exodus 34:12-16, Deuteronomy 7:1-5, 20:16-18), though the Torah prescribes peacable actions in other contexts as clarified above.  As for the New Testament, Jesus himself claims that he did not come to bring peace to those who oppose the truth (Matthew 10:34-36, Luke 12:49-53) even as he calls peacemakers blessed (Matthew 5:8).  Discord due to one party holding to truth (such as, on Christianity, the truth of the gospel) is only wrong for the other party.

There are simply ways in which seeking or avoiding peace can be evil.  Someone bent on producing conflict not for the sake of honoring the truth, hating falsity, or opposing irrational people, but for personal satisfaction or to manipulate a situation to carry out some other sin, is vile.  A traitor to both reason and morality, this person is an abomination because their intentions and actions are abominable, detestable as Proverbs 6 puts it in the NIV.  The words of Jesus, Paul, and James in New Testament writings do not suddenly depart from the Old Testament to condemn aversion to peace.  Yahweh always hated baseless or egoistic conflict.

"We're Like Family"

One might hear the words as a representative for a company tries to make their business seem like an appealing place to work—"We're like family."  There might be positive intentions behind this, even if the idea does not match the real nature of a specific organization, but there are also sinister reasons a company might be accurately or falsely presented as a "family" of sorts.  Biological family bonds are not even in themselves anything to defend or crave or regard highly at all, for family relationships, other than those created by consensual marriage or procreation, are utterly involuntary.  Short of literal forced labor, one has a degree of freedom to enter or refrain from entering a workplace, making this somewhat different from true family already.

It is also that family does not deserve loyalty or praise simply by virtue of being family; they have to be rational and righteous to deserve anything more than the bare minimum required to honor their human rights.  Now, a corporate employee using the words "We're like family" had the chance to realize that family is not by necessity a positive thing and has perhaps considered this possibility, albeit probably not as a rationalist and thus only in the grip of assumptions rather than true knowledge.  Perhaps they did not.  Either way, as I like to point out, family of an immediate or extended kind can be one of the greatest sources of misery in this life.  It is possible for biological family to be positive, negative, or neutral, but in a world filled with mostly non-rationalists, it is always more likely that it will be negative.

The same is true of coworkers, managers, and employers for the same reason: it is always more probable that a given person will be irrational than not, perhaps expressing their stupidity in egoism, hypocrisy, and so on, because it takes initial effort to go from making assumptions to aligning with reason.  As long as rationalists are a minority, it will not be commonplace for biological family, which cannot be chosen outside of marriage or procreation, or coworkers, who can somewhat be "chosen" in the sense that a prospective employer can be rejected, to be worthy of deep personal respect or friendship.

A given company might still have workers and/or leadership that truly do foster relaxed, close, or otherwise positive relationships between the organization's members, not that being rational is the same as being genuinely friendly or inviting.  This might be what is meant if the phrase "We're a family" comes up in a job advertisement or interview.  There is nothing impossible about this being true since it is consistent with logical axioms.  However, these words can also be intentionally or otherwise (by idiots who believe it when it is false) used to make a company appear far more incredible than it really is or manipulate people into putting in more effort than their jobs require or deserve.

Perhaps financial desperation or personal willingness to tolerate bullshit long enough to get through a shift will bring someone who sees right through many uses of this phrase to accept a job offer anyway.  There is not anything inherently irrational about this.  It does not change that many businesses using this phrase likely have not at all thought rationalistically about the nature of family or are only trying to present an exaggerated or outright maliciously deceptive image to interviewees or new hires.  Family can be refreshing or family can be oppressive; a workplace can be pleasant without being explicitly like family and can be like family in all the worst kinds of ways, neither of which is likely what it is hoped that interviewees will focus on when the words "We're like family" are used in this context.

The Parable Of The Rich Fool

It is not some subtle, esoteric truth that the Jesus of the gospel accounts is harsh in his condemnations of loving money or general wealth beyond what their nature renders valid.  The more popular statement in Matthew 6 about how no one can properly serve God while equally serving money is hardly the most scathing thing Jesus says about the matter.  He warns against greed and materialism before presenting a parable in Luke 12 to highlight how promptly and justly one's life could be ended because of greed, ironically depriving the sinner of the opportunities to enjoy their possessions as they have fantasized about.  It is true that money and wanting money are not intrinsically evil according to the Bible, but that is not the point Jesus emphasizes the most in the parable.

Luke 12:13-21—"Someone in the crowd said to him, 'Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.'

Jesus replied, 'Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?'  Then he said to them, 'Watch out!  Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.'  And he told them this parable: 'The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest.  He thought to himself, "What shall I do?  I have no place to store my crops."

'Then he said, "This is what I'll do.  I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain.  And I'll say to myself, 'You have plenty of grain laid up for many years.  Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.'"

'But God said to him, "You fool!  This very night your life will be demanded from you.  Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?" This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.'"

Clearly, the exact words warn against greed and being materially wealthy and yet lacking riches toward God.  Possessing wealth is never a problem, yet misusing wealth, obtaining it illicitly such as by theft or environmental exploitation, or prioritizing it over grander matters like God is always erroneous.  No one errs by being born into wealth or by obtaining it through any permissible method with any motivation that is not irrational or sinful.  Exalting it to anywhere near the very central focus of one's life is stupid in an amoral sense (living for a social construct or mere material gain rather than ultimate truths is inherently asinine) and illegitimate in a moral sense.

Whereas the parable of the rich fool focuses more on the sin of greed, other parts of the Bible more sharply emphasize that having riches is not evil.  Wanting to build larger barns and fill them is therefore not automatically a flaw.  Material prosperity is a reward that might be divinely granted to righteous individuals (according to verses like Deuteronomy 15:4-6, 10, 28:4, 8, and 11-14), though it does not follow logically from being righteous that one will have a life of physical or monetary wealth.  But the figure of Job whose name is the title of a crucial Old Testament book also illustrates this.  Both before and after his extreme trials, Job receives extensive material wealth from God along with new children and a long life (Job 1:1-12, 42:10-17), which could not occur if having wealth or enjoying its benefits is evil.  Again, having money or broader wealth is not a moral failure; how one prioritizes it, pursues it, and uses it can be vile.

Other portions of Luke itself elaborate on the ethics of wealth in a way that affirms such things.  Four chapters after the parable of the rich fool, Jesus acknowledges that there are ways to use wealth productively and legitimately on God's behalf (16:8-12) while at the same time clarifying that greed is detestable to God (16:13-15).  Among other people, prosperous Americans who asininely think their illusory reputation of being Christians exempts them from the need for correct beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors regarding money are condemned by such verses (not Americans specifically, of course).  They are rich fools like the central character of the aforementioned parable in Luke 12 and like the rich young ruler of the synoptic gospels who is seemingly unwilling to surrender his wealth despite it being a personal obstacle to his own future eternal life.

Loving money more than its nature merits as a social construct with pragmatic benefits is a horrendous logical and moral error.  The Gentile city of Sodom is in part destroyed for sins rooted in greed and the arrogance that can so easily accompany it (Ezekiel 16:49)—something which I will quickly point out further contradicts the "Noahide Laws," Rabbinic Judaism's racist, relativist tradition of human invention, in that the supposed mere seven sins of Gentiles do not include even sins like those Ezekiel 16 directly ascribes to the inhabitants of Sodom.  Greed and a multitude of things that underpin it (irrationality, egoism, etc.) and can spring from it (unjust violence, neglect of other people, disregard for God, and so on) are far more detestable than so many in my allegedly "Christian" or "once Christian" nation dare to accept.

Individuals and cities deserve annihilation for it, and still it remains a common pitfall of superficial devotees to Judeo-Christianity which can prove very difficult for them to let go of.  Rich fools or fools who want to become rich for invalid reasons are plentiful and, while no one is stupid because they are rich, the wealthy must be careful to ensure they do not allow themselves to remain or become fools out of a disproportionate sense of security.  For such people, greed is a reason for their execution by God, either in this life as in the parable and the case of Sodom or in the second death through burning to ashes in hell.  Whatever wealth they possess does not signify divine favor.

Nora Armstrong

One of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond's achievements is having a more diverse group of Galactic Federation personnel than has ever been previously seen in the franchise.  Yes, some of these characters are developed more than others, but they are not all of one gender or race.  Still, Sergeant Ezra Duke is not the first named black Galactic Federation soldier in the games.  That would be Anthony Higgs from Other M.  Nora Armstrong, a private under Duke's command and very competent with vehicular technology, does stand out even moreso in that never before has Metroid portrayed a female Federation soldier who both is crucial to the plot and has their name provided.

Unnamed female Galactic Federation troopers can be heard along with unnamed male troopers in the opening to Beyond before Samus is teleported to Viewros.  Not even in Metroid Prime 3 and Other M was this the case, despite both games featuring many soldiers and sometimes high-ranking people of the Federation.  Although, the former game had a briefly shown, plot-relevant female non-combatant Federation worker and another named female bounter hunter working with the Federation, and the latter had Madeline Bergman, a Federation administrative figure of great relevance to the story.  It was culturally revolutionary at the time, of course only because the culture was largely based on gender stereotypes of both men and women, for the original game to reveal that Samus herself is a woman, so even simply for this reason apart from others, it is odd for the series to have not featured more prominent, named female characters.

However, Nora is not a non-combatant.  She is a soldier brandishing a firearm.  As with the other Federation personnel Samus encounters on Viewros, Nora is familiar with the reputation of Samus although she has never met the bounty hunter.  Armstrong's awe of the central protagonist is evidenced through things like her excitement during their first meeting, some of her optional lines at the base area, and the hug she gives Samus after the latter seemingly defeats Sylux once and for all near the very end of the game.  Her personality is one of ebullience in most situations and one of firm devotion to seemingly anyone she harbors strong respect for.

Crucially, Nora never says she admires Samus just because she is a woman, although it is clear that she appears to be very deeply inspired by the franchise protagonist.  Similarly, Nora's gender is not emphasized any more than that of the other soldiers teleported to Viewros: not at all.  She is merely another GF soldier involved in the events of Beyond.  This is where Nora's gender is actually most significant for the character—while Armstrong is not developed as much as she could have been as an individual (like the other NPCs), the very fact that she is a female character whose gender is not emphasized gratuitously as relates to her profession is important.  Her portrayal entirely avoids conveying the erroneous perception that women are by nature typically incapable of proficiency with technological repairs or combat and Nora is just some fluke exception [1].

There are other examples in gaming of two female characters working together throughout a story to achieve some goal, such as Chloe and Nadine in the 2017 PS4 game Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.  Nora and Samus are not the only such pair.  But one convention that remains fairly common is having male characters in particular sacrifice themselves for others.  In the Great Mines, Nora tells Samus to continue without her during an onslaught of Grievers and even intentionally seals Samus off so she cannot assist.  Nora, like the other soldiers and Vue the machine, acts with the willingness to sacrifice herself for Samus leading up the very end of the game so that Samus can proceed.  The end of Beyond shows Nora and all the other Federation soldiers, Vue included, hold Sylux down so that Samus can leave Viewros in a teleporter moments from malfunctioning.

It has thankfully become somewhat more common in recent years for female characters to sacrifice themselves for characters of either gender whom they are not personally connected to on the level of, among other things, biological family (for instance, this happens in the 2019 and 2020 films Sea Fever and Underwater, ironically both about an ocean setting).  Nora's sacrificial behaviors are not the strongest examples of this, but they are examples within a growing trend acknowledging that women are capable of platonic heroism and self-sacrifice just like men.  Not only does this more genuinely depict the versatility of women's potential behaviors, as opposed to always having them be the ones saved or having them only endanger themselves for loved ones, but it also pertains to the necessary uplifting of men—who are not obligated to sacrifice themselves for others and are not expendable because of their gender.  Accordingly, Nora does not react with dismissal or any sort of gender complementarian expression when her sergeant, Ezra Duke, places himself in danger's way to ensure Nora and Samus can proceed without as many obstacles ahead of her own opportunity to hold off Grievers alone.

As simple as the character might be in certain ways, Nora Armstrong is indeed a pivotal newcomer to the Metroid series, if not always for how she is developed, then for the ways in which she is not treated as a female character.  One could not know from the game itself what the exact intentions were for the character, but Nora and her relationship with Samus exemplify how women do not have to collaborate in ways that glorify someone because they are a woman, how it is of course logically possible for women to be competent soldiers, and how women have the same capacity for benevolent self-sacrifice as men.  All of this is affirmed without ever drawing any exaggerated attention to her being a woman.

[1].  Besides the inherent logical errors that render all gender (and racial) stereotypes necessarily false in themselves independent of concrete examples and introspective or social experiences, if men and women were by nature different in nonphysical ways, there would not be any examples of men and women who defy stereotypes, nor could there be.  Any exceptions at all from the alleged stereotypes would also require that the traits in question have nothing to do with gender:

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

The Oppressive Nature Of Unpaid Internships

To build their resume out of pragmatic necessity, interns might endure weeks or months of unpaid labor.  For the intern, this arrangement provides experience, a glimpse into a company or industry they might not have seen up close before, and a networking avenue.  For the organization, the benefit is free labor!  While there might be some appealing or useful aspects of an unpaid internship for the intern, the fact of the matter is that any labor is unpaid is unjust.  That is, if it is just for employees to receive compensation, and interns do work as employees do, they would deserve compensation on the same grounds.

The possibility of securing future employment does not supply a person with the means of paying for necessities like housing, food, and water in the meantime.  Unpaid interns work for the chance at perhaps receiving a job after the term ends, with no wage or salary along the way even if they work full-time hours.  Obviously, this takes advantage of interns with no other opportunity to turn to in the field they are establishing themselves in (while/after potentially spending a great deal of money on education to make entry into that field more accessible).  It is also exploitative by default to perpetuate a system of prolonged, unpaid professional labor altogether, even if someone has the resources to survive.

Compensation is the only foundational reason why professional work is done.  The intern's money-related needs do not vanish simply because a company has them in an evaluative trial period.  Rent or the mortgage must still has to be paid, the car still uses gasoline that must be replenished, and food and water must be obtained somehow.  An array of companies, jobs, and industries severely underpay employees as it is, failing to grant them livable compensation or pay that also takes relevant factors like seniority or value provided into account.  Unpaid internships on one level by design place workers in an even more precarious situation, as they lack even the greater relative security of regular employment (which can bring benefits beyond pay or at least extend beyond the length of an internship term).

Since many American employers hold more power than employees and revel in gratuitously expressing it, of course it is not unusual for them to invite unpaid labor to test if a worker is "a good fit" when it by nature takesadvantage of people.  The fact that interns need work experience and thus might tolerate such internships anyway is because the hiring system tends to be based around the asinine prioritization of experience over intelligence and willingness to learn.  This means that perfectly competent or teachable people who would work if given the chance get overlooked because they lack an arbitrary amount of experience as measured in years.  Such workplace exploitation is inherently rooted in irrationalistic philosophical ideas!

Other manifestations of unpaid labor are more common inside an established job well after someone's unpaid internship days—staying longer at the office while working after clocking out due to managerial pressure, completing work clocked out on weekends when a boss demands it, and so on (some of the same figures who push their employees for this might also insist working from home is illegitimate and all work must be done at an office!).  One and all, these circumstances have the same foundational form of exploitation at heart: the worker is not paid for his or her work that the organization still benefits from.  No one who rightly recognizes the oppressive nature of one should struggle to see the logical necessity of the others having this same quality.

Reading And Gaming

With films, television, and music, the experience is a passive one.  The viewer or listener does not have to do anything but watch or listen.  Their minds could of course be actively dissecting the artistic components of the work and any philosophical concepts tied to it, as well as any logical facts about the subject matter or the medium itself, but apart from something along these lines, there is nothing about using such media that in itself requires any sort of active engagement.  This is not some grand deficiency of cinematic media or music (music by itself or accompanying images or text, including in a film or television show).

But reading is different.  To genuinely read, one must actually see what a text says and proceed to see what comes next by paying enough attention to discern the words and what their exact arrangement says.  Now, this layer of mental action involved in reading does not mean people who read are intelligent as some pretend, perhaps to make themselves feel significant or to sell more literature; that is determined strictly by whether they voluntarily embrace the truths of rationalism, starting with self-evident logical axioms.  Exposure to texts one and all, the ability to read, the desire to read, and the habit of doing so are entirely unrelated to whether someone is intelligent.  They can still grasp the necessary truth of pure logic either way, and without looking to mere words for prompting.  Preference for literature over a more cinematic medium is just that: mere subjective preference.

All the same, there really is an element of mental effort required in the experience of reading that is not by default part of watching a movie or television show or listening to music.  It does not matter how abstract or excellent a work of the latter forms of media is.  Someone does not have to do anything to continue using it besides just watching or listening.  Although books tend to get a disproportionate amount of celebration over the fact that the reader must put in some amount of active effort, one medium clearly goes far beyond even literature in its foundational requirement for action on the user's part—that of video games.

In fact, a video game already encompasses or could encompass, depending on the degree of technological advancement, literally every basic aspect of a book or any other medium.  Video games can have onscreen text in the form of subtitles, documents, or lore descriptions embedded into works of a much greater artistic scope than the format of a book ever could allow for, even with illustrations or physically interactive aspects like noise-making features or varied textures.  But video games can also have audio that includes music and spoken dialogue, and they can contain cinematics passively viewed rather than actively played as would constitute the majority of the content in most titles.

This is the only artistic medium that can combine all aspects of the other mediums in at least some form.  Visuals and audio can be integrated for conceptual exploration, immersion, and storytelling, all while the player must in many cases almost constantly do something on both a physical and mental level to progress, far beyond reading words.  The player is responsible for handling button inputs, environmental navigation, puzzles, dialogue choices, and so on.  There can be many more layers to a game than other mediums allow for on their own, all of which need to be actively selected or managed by the player.

The video game format amounts to the most interactive entertainment medium by far and is the one that requires the most attention from a person, while any sort of abstract concepts addressed can be explored much more thoroughly on the artistic level due to the combination of various sensory aspects.  Reading and gaming have the need for active engagement from the user in common, beyond both of them being things that are inevitably governed by logical truths and both of them being artistic media.  But gaming goes much further with this, with some games leaning into it even more than others.

In The Universe Or Part Of It?

Is a person in the universe yet separate from it or part of it?  Logic reveals, as is often the case, a complex set of truths consisting of individual truths which tend to be quite simple.  The consciousness of a person (or another animal, if they are also conscious as they outwardly appear to be) is bound to their body.  Their body is confined to a position in the material plane occupying what would without any physical substance existing there be empty metaphysical space, an immaterial existent [1].  Nonetheless, one's body is not the same as any material existent outside of it despite both being physical in nature.

Yes, most people probably have gone nowhere near discovering how to prove that a material world, or some sort of physical substance, exists, which is actually quite difficult to initially pinpoint [2].  For anyone who has not discovered this, skepticism in this matter is the only rationalistic position to hold, for most entire categories of sensory experience do not require that there really is a physical world behind them.  Nevertheless, the typical non-rationalist might easily be compelled by basic perception to just assume that there really is a universe outside the mind, and their other assumptions, if they have given any thought to this aspect of the issue, will determine if they believe that humans are merely in the universe or part of it.

But I am certainly in the universe.  More specifically, my body is part of the external world in the broadest sense, that of all matter rather than strictly the cosmos beyond my body.  My consciousness is, like any mind, immaterial, occupying my body, the latter of which is a part of the universe in one sense and in the universe in another, since my body is a biological entity distinct from the environment around it.  One's consciousness has a very nuanced relationship to the material plane in that it is nonphysical, so it cannot possibly be part of the universe itself, but it is very much intertwined with something physical because it is "inside" the body.  In turn, through the body, one can experience physical sensations that seemingly correspond with various components of the natural world outside the body.

None of this necessitates that the immaterial mind lives on once the body dies, belief in which is the great error of some who do believe that the mind is not physical.  Its immateriality does not mean it must or will continue to exist after the death of the body without a physical vessel to inhabit.  In fact, unconsciousness is literally what the Bible itself says immediately awaits the human dead, such as in Ecclesiastes 9.  Certain popular concepts have neither demonstrable logical veracity nor alignment with Biblical theology, an immediate afterlife without a body among them.  What is true whether there is no afterlife, an immediate afterlife, or a delayed afterlife (with or without a body) is that consciousness is not part of nature.

Somewhat more complex a matter than it might seem at first, the issue of to what extent humans are part of the universe as opposed to inhabitants of it has to do with the foundational nature of and distinction between the mind, the body, and the broader physical cosmos.  We are both inside the universe and separate from it, depending on the aspect of the human being in focus.  It is untrue that we are outside of the universe in the entirety of our beings, just as it is untrue that out individual presences and humanity as a whole are nothing but a small part of the material world in its seeming vastness.

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

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

Achan's Sin And Punishment

The victory over the city of Jericho was not to involve any personal plundering of its wealth.  The items of gold and silver were to be put in God's treasury, and Joshua had warned against taking them, lest a person bring about their own destruction (Joshua 6:16-19).  Articles of these metals or of bronze and iron were put into the treasury of Yahweh's house (6:24).  A man named Achan nonetheless takes several items for himself, a robe, silver, and gold, which he buries under his tent (7:1, 19-22).  God subsequently refuses to grant the Israelites military victory until the devoted items are destroyed or removed (7:2-15).  Achan is brought along with the illicit items, his sons and daughters, and his animals to the Valley of Achor, and there he is stoned (7:24-25).  Verse 25 also says that once the people of Israel had stoned Achan, they stoned the rest, and then burned them.  This could mean that it is only the animals of Achan that are killed by stoning after him (see Exodus 21:29 for this sort of act getting prescribed elsewhere), not that his sons and daughters are stoned too.

However, if it refers to the children and the animals alike being stoned afterward, the Bible clarifies enough elsewhere to establish that the sons and daughters would have likewise been guilty, but because of their own participation instead of their familial affiliation with Achan.  The story of Joshua 7 already hints at this.  First, however, what do other parts of the Bible say regarding this, particularly Mosaic Law, where the Bible's only universal, clear moral doctrines are put forth?  Plainly, on the level of criminal justice, miscellaneous dealings of God, and the eschatological judgment, each person is judged and punished according to what his or her own deeds deserved:

Exodus 23:7—"'Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty.'"

Deuteronomy 24:16—"Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin."

2 Kings 14:5-6—"After the kingdom was firmly in his grasp, he executed the officials who had murdered his father the king.  Yet he did not put the children of the assassins to death, in accordance with what is written in the Book of the Law of Moses where the Lord commanded: 'Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.'"

Ezekiel 14:19-20—"'Or if I send a plague into that land and pour out my wrath on it through bloodshed, killing its people and their animals, as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, they could save neither son nor daughter.  They would save only themselves by their own righteousness.'"

Ezekiel 18:19-20—"'Yet you ask, "Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?"  Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live.  The one who sins is the one who will die.  The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.'"

Ezekiel 33:20—"'Yet you Israelites say, "The way of the Lord is not just."  But I will judge each of you according to your own ways.'"

Revelation 20:12—"And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.  Another book was opened, which is the book of life.  The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books."

The individual nature of moral guilt and the justice of punishing the wicked person, not their relative, would be true not just of capital punishment, but of corporal punishment and monetary damages/restitution as well, which the individual laws always independently say to impose on the offender only (Deuteronomy 25:1-3, Exodus 21:18-19, Numbers 5:5-7, and so on).  Also, the capital punishment prescriptions even in isolation from Deuteronomy 24 say to only kill the guilty person, which Exodus 23:7 already encompasses as shown above.  A kidnapper's family is not to be executed, only the kidnapper (Exodus 21:16).  A murderer deserves to be killed, not any sons, daughters, husband/wife, or extended family of theirs (Numbers 35:31).  If Achan alone committed the sin of stealing items devoted to destruction/God, then he himself, not his wife or children, would deserve whatever penalty corresponds to God's nature.  Joshua 7 does not mention a wife of his, but it does say that his sons and daughters were brought to the place where he is stoned to death.

In light of all this, what would be the level of complicity in Achan's sin on the part of his family?  It would very difficult for Achan to take the prohibited items for himself and bury them under his tent without his children observing, helping, or being informed and then doing nothing.  Thus, they would likely at best be negligent in exposing his sin and at worst direct accomplices.  Since the Bible is clear that children should not be legally punished and will not be soteriologically punished strictly for the actions of their parents and vice versa, if the text does indeed mean that the children were stoned to death and then burned, as opposed to Achan and his animals (the "them" could refer to either or both), then it would have to be true if the Bible is correct that the children participated in the sin.  In either case, the logical distinction between a guilty person and their offspring is not denied and Joshua 7 does not contradict Exodus 23:7, Deuteronomy 24:16, or any of the concepts behind other similar statements in the Bible.  An example of a story where someone is more likely to have violated these obligations of justice is found in Daniel 6, though the execution method is already contrary to Yahweh's prescribed methods.  Royal administrators convince the King Darius to execute anyone who prays to a god or person other than the king, Daniel disobeys and survives a night in a den of lions, and the administrators and their wives and children are thrown to the beasts to die (6:24).

The king himself already deserves to be stoned to death for enticing people to worship anything other than Yahweh (Deuteronomy 13:6-10), so even aside from whatever illicit torture and executions he is guilty of, all of Daniel's positive words towards the king (Daniel 6:21) would have to be insincere flattery or pragmatic manipulation in order to not be erroneous.  In having the families executed along with the advisors, Darius then commits a second capital sin (Exodus 20:13, 21:12-14) stated in the text.  Yes, the families of the administrators would also deserve to die if they themselves enticed anyone to worship other gods or actually carried this out (Deuteronomy 17:2-5).  However, this story is not one of someone having the family members killed at the explicit command of God, which would necessitate that they were deserving of death even if their capital sin is not mentioned.  It is an account of someone amazed about a miraculous event to the point of seemingly reacting very irrationally, adding to his stupidity and guilt.  If the families of these men were not actually worshipping other gods or outwardly supportive of such things, in this case, they would deserve to be spared, because they are not the same person as their husbands or fathers.

In the story of Achan's demise, it is made clear that he sinned by coveting what did not belong to him and then acting on it in such a way as to deserve death.  The way that God relents from his anger after Achan dies acknowledges this is what his sin deserves (Joshua 7:26).  For the aforementioned reasons, if his sons and daughters are punished as well, they one way or another would have joined in his immorality.  Even so, a legitimate logical error in the moral doctrines of Joshua or a case of it contradicting the Torah would not render the Torah's moral philosophy and stories logically impossible, as it would only at most mean that Joshua contradicts them.  If there is such a thing as moral right and wrong, then it could not be the case that a child deserves to die just because their father or mother has done something, and Deuteronomy and Ezekiel affirm this.  If Joshua denied any of this, then the book of Joshua would be wrong, but not necessarily the moral ideas of the Pentateuch.  Joshua does not actually say anything contrary to it.

Game Review—Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch)

"I believe we have done everything we could here, but ultimately, we could not save our kind.  I am overwhelmed with helplessness.  I trust the words of Chatoya, that someday our savior will appear . . . I am Tahrgun.  And I am utterly defeated."

—Log entry "Prayer"

"Sollan be with you."

—Reger Tokabi

I remember when I first saw the teaser trailer for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond back in 2017, only to have to wait almost a decade for the eventual release.  This long-awaited sequel masterfully maintains the spirit of Metroid Prime from the music of the title screen and Fury Green to the story that features ruins once inhabited by a very Chozo-like species without merely retreading the same thematic and narrative ground.  It accomplishes some distinctly new things, such as introducing an entirely new means of environmental traversal, psychic abilities, a fictional religion (which is unfortunately very minimally developed), and an inversion of the sterotypical function of the chosen one in media.  The game also returns Sylux to the forefront of the story after foreshadowing something major involving him for multiple games across platforms.  For the most part, Metroid Prime 4 is an excellent update of what made the original game of the subseries such a stellar triumph of first-person platforming, exploration, and shooting, reunited with franchise elements first incorporated in later Metroid games, like named Federation troopers and voice acting.

Production Values

Some of my many screenshots do not reflect the stable smoothness of the game in motion, making it appear to contain more jagged lines and edges than is really the case during ordinary play.  I selected images with more overt clarity.  Metroid Prime 4 is a gorgeous game, one of the absolute best looking on the original Switch system.  Miscellaneous details even go beyond graphical excellence because they reflect a significant attention to detail directed to Samus, her power suit, and the general world in the design process (franchise veterans will notice some of them as variations of things in past games).  In some portions of the icy, snowy region of Viewros, for example, her arm cannon is covered with frost when she is exposed to cold winds or otherwise away from heat sources.  In rain or otherwise falling water, water droplets are visible on her visor and arm cannon.  The player can briefly see a reflection of Samus' face in her visor if she is close enough to certain explosive events, like the impact of a charged power beam.  Moreover, her face is shown for a very short time over the map screen when you pause.

The same high quality visuals are present in the character models, and particularly in the facial animations, of the Galactic Federation soldiers Samus collaborates with.  Among the troopers, who are fully voice acted, there is even a fair amount of diversity, including a black man (not the first in the series thanks to Other M), a woman, and a man who seems to be of Native American descent.  It is only fitting that a series which very explosively pushed back against the illogicality of gender stereotypes would include a naturally implemented diversity decades later (more will be said about this outside this review).  Thankfully, it is not just the human characters that look great: some creatures Samus and/or her companions face look outright incredible, especially for a Switch game.  Even with the Switch 2 bringing the era of its predecessor to a slow end, Nintendo once again displays some of the best visuals on the first Switch while climbing even higher than before.  If anything, though the audio is excellent as well, from the weapon and animal sounds to the GF vocal delivery and superb sountrack, it is out of place for Samus to be so quiet.  She actually does not speak at all.  This is all the more somewhat tonally strange since she talks very openly in Other M, which also features many Federation soldiers, and even speaks briefly in the Switch's own Metroid Dread of 2021.

Gameplay

While the blend of exploration, puzzles, and shooting is one familiar from the previous games, the psychic powers are entirely new.  Some psychic abilities are connected to returning abilities like the double jump, unlocked with the psychic boots, but with some sort of additional feature.  With the boots that grant a double jump, Samus can stand on special platforms that only materialize when you use the psychic visor.  The psychic visor itself takes the place of the scan visor as the only alternative to the standard combat visor, though you can still fire shots.  In fact, you can use the new Control Beam to dictate where the shots go after they are fired, using either the analog stick or motion controls.  This is required to defeat some enemies.  While the boost ball function can now traverse varied psychic pathways, with the player simply observing as the game controls the direction of the morph ball, the Psychic Glove is also entirely new to the series, allowing Samus to retrieve airborne morph ball bombs to her fist and telekinetically hurl them at a target.

As for non-psychic alternate weapons, rather than taking the form of the plasma beam and the like, elemental "shot" types are acquired through progression in the main story.  These draw from a shared secondary ammunition pool that can be significantly expanded by collecting optional items.  Using these weapons is also vital to completing a series of underground puzzles, ranging from extremely simple to highly complex (the spider ball tracks!), that yield special charge attacks for each of the three elemental shots.  Despite the novel way they are presented and named, elemental beam or beam-adjacent attacks are not new to the franchise.  The Vi-O-La motorcycle is a much more original inclusion, and perhaps as controversial as it is innovative (in that it is a genuine series first).

This vehicle is obtained early on once Samus gains the suit interface to ride it, and it can be summoned in the game's central area, an expansive desert, and dematerialized at will.  Actually, it is very similar in function to Epona in some Legend of Zelda games.  Since the desert is vast and it harbors somewhat essential crystals, Vi-O-La does at least fulfill a crucial role given the environmental layout.  If you space out the crystal runs so that you do not rush to get the amount of crystals necessary to beat the game, traversing the desert is not forced on the player for any particularly prolonged duration.  However, there are plenty of items in the desert, so a completionist will have to visit most spots to find every expansion.  As for the green crystals, after collecting enough to advance to the finale, it is still possible to fill up the crystal meter all over again to unlock items in the main menu's gallery; this is not required to complete the story.

Likewise, it is not mandatory to find every single energy tank and missile, elemental ammunition, or power bomb expansion, but other images in the gallery are only unlocked by finding all collectibles or by scanning all logbook entries or both.  Specific items appear at certain thresholds, like filling 25% of the logbook.  Still other unlocks are accessed by finishing Beyond in hard mode, which only becomes available after beating normal mode.  To see every image and cinematic, you must achieve a variety of goals, not necessarily in the same playthrough—though at least two are necessary to unlock everything.  Yes, hard mode is more difficult, such as by having save stations only save progress and restore health as opposed to also replenishing comsumable ammunition.  But like with Metroid Dread, the patterns of enemies like bosses can be exploited to avoid most damage.  And if some items are difficult for a player to locate, each area has an inactive scout drone that can be made to send out a pulse that identifies the locations on each region's map.  Activating scout drones is purely optional, albeit helpful for some discoveries.

Story

Samus arrives to help the Galactic Federation as Sylux attacks the latter to steal a mysterious artifact, using an army of space pirates and metroids.  The artifact is accidentally powered up and teleports Samus, a handful of Federation soldiers, and Sylux to the planet Viewros, which seemingly is absent from all records.  To return to the original planet, Samus works with the Federation troopers to secure a series of keys tied to a teleportation device atop the massive Chrono Tower.

Intellectual Content

I recognize that the last game review that was posted involved a game where supernaturalism and science are very particularly intertwined, and there is another game review to be released in the near future that addresses its own explicit convergence in a very different manner.  Metroid Prime 4 stands on a mixture of supernaturalism and science fiction as well due primarily to its prominent psychic abilities.  Consciousness is nonphysical even if the existence of the immaterial mind is only sustained by the physical brain, and these powers go even further than base consciousness does beyond the direct results of neuron activity; they are obviously mental, triggered by thought and intentionality.  Of course, Beyond says Samus had latent psychic abilities, meaning the capacity was present but inactive, and Other M shows her Power Suit appear and disappear over her Zero Suit at her whim.  Now, the place of Beyond in the timeline is not clear from the game itself, but perhaps this entry shows why she can will her armor on and off in the aforementioned Wii game; this newest game is not the only one to show Samus have some sort of unusual mental power.

In spite of not doing much to explore the specifics of how there is already no logical contradiction between the immateriality of consciousness and the workings of the physical world, Metroid Prime 4 does heavily rely on a mixture of overtly supernatural and science fiction elements that in various ways is no stranger to the series (Chozo ghosts in the first Prime, etc.).  It partially leans into this with the central prophecy of the Lamorn, the former inhabitants of Viewros.  Like the Chozo of the first game's Tallon IV, the Lamorn are very spiritual, with their own affinity for prophecy alongside their great scientific advancements.  However, while a chosen one does arrive as anticipated, Samus comes too late to rescue the Lamorn.  She finds a world overtaken by the tragedy of a failed attempt to uplift the planet.  A Lamorn who left holographic messages for the future chosen one even points out that they does not have absolute certainty that there will come a savior, echoing the general thoughts and struggles articulated in various logbook entries.  In actuality, it is unclear if the Lamorn had a genuine prophecy or just desperately held on to the hope that someone would eventually honor their legacy with the Memory Fruit, without there being any one individual foreseen to accomplish this.

One more thing about the game's approach to spirituality before moving to a topic already tackled here [1]: one of the Federation units, Tokabi, shares barebones information about the religion of Sollan he is allegiant to.  Something so novel to the franchise and so major a philosophical issue merited far deeper exploration, but at least the seeds have been sown for a more precise dive into a fictional religion that Tokabi's limited comments suggest is one of egalitarianism and redemption.  As a rationalist and a Christian, I know there is only logical proof of one uncaused cause (there could be more!) and that there is evidentially high probability that the Judeo-Christian Yahweh is that God.  Still, there are great depths to the potential for fiction to touch on many aspects of religions, those adhered to in real life and only in stories, that I rightfully wish Beyond had trended closer to even though Sollan is not Yahweh.  Ironically, because I am a rationalist and a Christian, I appreciate paganism of one kind of another being explored in storytelling all the more!

Now, it is time to once again acknowledge a foundational parallel between the fate of the Lamorn and the fate of soldiers under the command of Sylux shown in a memory of his which Samus psychically experiences, one only seen in its entirety upon completing the game with 100% of the items and 100% of the logbook filled.  Just as Samus did not arrive in time to save the Lamorn who prophesied her coming, she once did not arrive in time to prevent the soldiers fighting under Sylux from being killed by an enormous weapon of the space pirates which he wanted to seize control of.  This seems to be the real origin of what likely became a much more complicated relationship later on.  It does not mean she did so maliciously or negligently, but her timing adds a layer of legitimate weight to why Sylux has such bitterness towards Samus.  Sylux himself appears fairly little in the game, but his presence is integral to the plot, and the characterization we do see in this one entry is far more layered than some have come close to recognizing.

Conclusion

Certainly, Beyond would have benefitted from more elaborate characterization of some NPCs (though the optional voice lines at the informal base do help develop some of them) and more details about matters like the religious philosophy of Sollan, but for the most part, everything included plays the role it needs to.  Many complaints would really be about subjective preference, an irrelevant factor.  At times radiating the same pillars of the original Metroid Prime and at times implementing very new elements to the subseries, Metroid Prime 4 is largely a triumph of gaming and a fitting adventure for Samus Aran.  A very personally driven villain, whose backstory we probably only see very minute glimpses of at most, and graphics that are usually quite incredible, the extreme heights of the platform's utilized capabilities, are just some of the ways that Beyond takes the first-person Metroid games further than before.  This sequel is far removed from being a blight on the franchise.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-characterization-of-sylux.html

Alleged Bible Contradictions: Exodus 21:16 And Deuteronomy 24:7

As a rationalist, I am fully aware that I cannot know if Yahweh is the real uncaused cause, if there is such a thing as good and evil, and so on.  I, like anyone else who makes no assumptions and aligns with reason, can still know that if good and evil exist, certain things are excluded from one category or the other because of logical impossibility.  Eternal torture cannot be good if there is such a thing, because it is inherently disproportionate to any deed punished.  Opposing eternal torture therefore cannot be evil.  Similarly, if an act like kidnapping can be committed against people of one's own country or foreigners, as is the case, there would be no moral difference between such targets if kidnapping is immoral.  The act is the same; everyone is a person despite their nationality and ancestry.  In Exodus 21:16, the Torah says to execute kidnappers.  In Deuteronomy 24:7, the Torah says to kill Israelites who kidnap fellow Israelites.  Nothing about these two moral prescriptions excludes the other or contradicts the baseline human equality taught by Genesis 1:26-27.

Exodus 21:16—"'Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper's possession.'"

Deuteronomy 24:7—"If someone is caught kidnapping a fellow Israelite and treating or selling them as a slave, the kidnapper must die.  You must purge the evil from among you."

If kidnapping any person is an evil deserving execution, then an Israelite kidnapping another Israelite has to fall into the same category.  It would be Exodus 21:16 that clarifies Deuteronomy 24:7, if anything, and not the other way around as I have seen some pretend.  All the same, even the Deuteronomic prohibition of kidnapping does not itself contain any sort of differentiation between the treatment of Israelites and foreigners abroad (as with Deuteronomy 15:3, 23:19-20; contrast particular instances like these with Leviticus 19:33-34, and it is clear that foreigners not residing in Israel are in view).  Deuteronomy 24:7 does not say that foreigners may be permissibly kidnapped by Israelites or foreigners.  It does not discriminate against foreigners.  Neither does Leviticus 25:44-46, for that matter—this Leviticus excerpt speaks of buying, not kidnapping, foreign slaves and making them slaves for life, which is exactly what Deuteronomy 15:12-18 permits between Israelite men and women, with the vital fact that lifelong servitude is strictly voluntary after the sixth year (and does not override human rights like those of Exodus 21:26-27).

It is logically possible (consistent with logical axioms and other necessary truths) that a deity would prescribe the punishment for kidnapping more than once, especially if the second case was in the aftermath of a kidnapping of one Israelite by another after the revelation at Sinai (Exodus 19-23).  The context of Deuteronomy is already that of summarizing a host of laws ascribed to divine revelation, some of which are repeated or expanded from Exodus (compare Exodus 23:4-5 and Deuteronomy 22:1-4) and Leviticus (compare Leviticus 19:13 and Deuteronomy 24:14-15).  Moses is reminding people of what has already been affirmed after the giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, though in Deuteronomy, unlike certain portions of Leviticus and Numbers, there is no listed series of events that might have prompted the Israelites to seek God and receive individual laws.  For instance, in Leviticus 24, when someone curses God, Moses asks what the deserved penalty is, and then God reveals it.  In Deuteronomy 12-26, Moses only recites laws from Yahweh in largely miscellaneous order without any details about such situations that might have naturally brought certain issues to his mind.

On every level, there is no contradiction.  Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7 are not independently inconsistent with logical axioms.  If the concepts articulated in each verse are true, they are still dependent on one thing logically following or not following from another, on truth existing, on contradictions being impossible, and so on, which are true regardless.  For each of these axioms to be false, they would still have to be true.  This is why logical axioms cannot be false: to focus on one of them, the nonexistence of truth means it is true that there is no truth, which obviously entails that truth cannot be nonexistent.  Consistency with logic's inherent veracity is necessary for mere possibility, which the idea of objective morality and kidnapping deserving death do not violate (this does not mean they are true, only that they are not impossible!).  The kidnapping laws of Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7 likewise do not conflict with each other, the only other way there could be a contradiction.