The Individual Consumer's Environmental Impact

Many individual consumers are just a miniscule drop in the ocean when it comes to preserving the environment, especially in the sense of mitigating anthropogenic climate change.  It is not that they have absolutely no ways they can contribute or express a concern for the environment.  It is that they have little to no overall impact on the world's health on their own.  Only in masses can consumers have a more direct influence on such things, and even then, while philosophical emotionalism or apathy might stop some consumers from caring, they would not be as "responsible" as the corporations that recklessly spew emissions while only focusing on financial growth for the next quarter, that lie about their environmentalist measures [1], or that do not take sustainability measures sooner rather than later.

There are ways individuals can in some fractional way help.  This could include turning off lights when not in use rather than leaving them on and gratuitously using more energy.  They might walk or bike short distances instead of driving cars to reduce their carbon "footprint."  It could mean using bar soaps instead of bottled ones, with their plastic packaging.  It could entail taking care of one's physical belongings so that they do not need to be replaced as frequently, or intentionally purchasing items that are supposed to be made from recyclable materials so they can be reused.  Green products like the latter might still be expensive enough to deter some people who would otherwise choose them.  Financial accessibility is a part of making "green" options more attainable, commonplace, and desired.

Yes, consumeristic purchasing of unnecessary items and the improper discarding of them does not help the environment, but it is only as a collective, as in at an national or organizational level, that many people would truly have the power to quell destructive emissions or counteract them.  The general way that certain societies, which are constituted by individuals and yet have a far greater environmental impact than one average consumer alone, are structured would have to change to stabilize net emissions.  A country with primary reliance on fossil fuels would need to supplement some of that energy usage with renewable energy sources which do not release more carbon into the atmosphere.  A community that gleefully indulges in overfishing needs to shift their diet to an extent.  A company that does nothing to offset the carbon dioxide it releases needs to take advantage of carbon sinks.

A standard consumer's efforts in America to minimize waste will not clear the air pollution in China, prevent corporate stupidity like Apple shipping phones and chargers separately to "help the environment" (which is indeed worse than shipping them together), or remove the plastic already in the ocean.  Others who do not care about sustainability for humanity's sake or for nature's will likely not be promoted to adjust their worldview.  He or she could nonetheless make choices that marginally produce less waste (such as less plastic to bury or put in the seas), buy products strategically to involve less shipping and thus smaller overall emissions, and so on.  They will still have a minimal impact left to themself.  More than the habits of one typical person need to change to thoroughly benefit the environment, but there is not nothing at all that one can do as a single person to contribute.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2022/09/environmentalism-in-name-only.html

Beyond Lovecraft's Horror

There is probably nonexistence after human death in plenty of stories like Call of Cthulhu, or the issue is simply never explored in many Lovecraftian cosmic horror stories.  The entities like Azathoth, the unwitting divine creator of the cosmos, and Cthulhu, the great dreamer of R'lyeh, outlive humans and far exceed them in power, but the god of this universe only resembles the Christian Yahweh in that he is the logically necessary uncaused cause and does not violate axioms (logical necessities and scientific laws are not the same and the former alone cannot be false or different, no matter what fools believe about Lovecraftian storytelling).  Azathoth is not said to have any kind of afterlife waiting for anyone whether out of moral judgment or sheer power, and he is actually blind to the physical worlds he unintentionally created in his sleep.

To die as a person in this kind of universe is almost certainly to cease to exist as a consciousness and leave the body to be claimed by natural deterioration.  If Lovecraft had envisioned an afterlife for humans in his mythos, though, it would likely have been oppressive or hostile to humanity, full of alien beings, bizarre structures, and psychological or physical torments for at minimum a time.  Inspired by Lovecraft's ideas while going beyond them, a 2014 novel by Stephen King combines the cosmic horror of eldritch supernaturalism and dimensions with the concept of an afterlife.  Very few specific examples of fictional afterlives rival the Null of King's Revival.  With its potentially unending march of the human dead under the bites of "ant-things" that serve incredibly powerful beings like Mother, the Null is a grim destination even if a person's experience in it does not last forever as Mother insists or if it does not collect all humans as protagonist Jamie assumes.

There is still some genuine ambiguity about how the hellscape of the Null and its Lovecraftian Great Ones relate to the blatant depictions of much more peaceful afterlives in other King stories--and it is absolutely not a universal human afterlife at the very least if it is connected with the other narratives as is all but explicitly stated.  In the tale of Revival, there is the possibility that Mother was only projecting an illusion to Jamie's perceptions like Pennywise/It would or, as utterly terrible as this would still be, that the Null is only the afterlife of those who were cured or otherwise in contact with the "secret electricity" that Charles Jacobs suspected was but a part of an even greater force of the universe.  In either case, to just see or think about such a place drives some of the characters who were healed from diseases or addictions by this secret electricity to murder and suicide, which perhaps only brings them to face Mother and her inhuman ant-like slaves for eternity.

The Null goes far beyond Lovecraft's horror because it does not present death as an escape from earthly suffering to nonexistence of the mind or to a pleasant afterlife.  Yes, this fate is all but certainly not for everyone or is a complete fabrication by Mother, but characters nonetheless have visions of this hellish world that is said to be more foundational to reality than the world of terrestrial human life.  They react with despair or terror to its otherwise hidden metaphysics.  Stephen King offered a taste of what a Lovecraftian afterlife could be like, and, in the words of Mother, there is no death and no rest.  There is instead service and suffering for the Great Ones.  Of course, traditionalist and actual versions of religious afterlives like those of the Bible (the true afterlives of which are vastly different from the traditionalist distortions) are very much Lovecraftian, but in the broader sense that there is cosmic horror relating to the nature of reality.  Superhuman beings, human powerlessness, and even the fright of moral condemnation are the source of terror here.  

The last of these is not even a part of the cosmic horror championed by Lovecraft.  This is religious cosmic horror, and yet there are significant distinctions between the cosmic horror of the Bible or general religious cosmic horror as a philosophical issue and the horror of Lovecraft's personal stories.  Stephen King goes farther than both Biblical cosmic horror and that of Lovecraft himself.  Revival is silent on exactly how the Null continues in spite of King's own seeming uncaused cause Gan.  If it awaits anyone in this world, the Null is a non-theological hell.  It is not about justice or even the injustices of supernatural beings who have the power to impose what they irrationalistically think is justice in their eternal conscious torments (which is not what the Bible actually promises the unsaved).  It appears to be something a person could not escape from even if they physically become conjoined with Mother as their soul experiences extreme agony.  It is, again, beyond Lovecraft's specific type of cosmic horror in ways that amplify the stakes infinitely.

Company Policy

At one point or another, many workers, at least in America, will find themselves having to live under overtly counterproductive, invasive, gratuitously inconvenient, or otherwise irrational company policies.  Some of these rules or expectations might be introduced for no reason other than just to change things for the sake of changing them, beyond the likely objective of appeasing the egos of deluded corporate leaders who think that whatever they want must be rational, morally permissible, or pragmatically useful.  When an employee does not submit to them, employers or managers might react harshly, but there is a sharp distinction between policies that all workers are rationally and morally free to honor at will and those they can disregard at whim.

Demanding that people do irrational, immoral, arbitrary, preference-based things is itself irrational and unjust (irrational in itself and unjust if moral obligations exist, that is), but workers, like employers, are free to do any permissible thing they wish.  If a policy benefits an employee monetarily or otherwise, but they do not believe anything irrational (anything contradictory, false, or assumed) or do anything immoral in the process of complying, they can act as they please for their own sake.  This is not selfishness unless they forsake truth or obligations in order to gain.  Inversely, if a policy does not benefit them in some morally permissible way, they cannot be in the wrong merely for disobeying it or only selectively carrying it out.

The employer or manager who makes irrational or non-obligatory demands, however, is in the wrong no matter what.  They are refusing to align with reason by believing or doing that which is irrational and are violating moral obligations by trying to force people to do things they are not in error for forgoing.  Thinking their goals or preferences justify whatever worldview or course of action they are subjectively inclined towards, they treat workers as a means to their own ends when it is really the jobs they offer which are only a means to an end for the workers.  This is yet another way an employer could manifest their irrationalism or egoism: expecting an invalid reverence for company policy.

Because they would have to assume that something false or unverifiable is true, there is an additional layer of irrationality in that even if a policy wasn't itself problematic, they are only driven by assumed ideas and subjective preferences that they think others should bend to.  Of course they might and probably would dislike a worker citing company policy when it benefits them and then intentionally disobeying another policy, but since company policy is a social construct with no inherent philosophical validity or authority whatsoever, this is not hypocrisy if a worker is thoroughly rationalistic.  This difference feeling unjust to an employer does not make it so.

Having a preference as a worker and acting in accordance with it, and with reason and morality at the same time, is not the same as this kind of employer's subjectivism in pretending like their perceptions correspond to reality by default or that their wishes are morally binding.  Again, workers cannot be in the wrong for doing what they wish as long as they do not betray reason or morality (the latter of which would in turn also be a betrayal of the uncaused cause).  Policies of any major corporation or small business, or government or family or club, at that, are of no veracity or significance if they are not perfectly consistent with the nature of truth itself.

The Geometry Of The Earth

Believing in non sequiturs (such as that articulated by "my conscience flares up at killing, therefore killing us evil") is never philosophically unimportant, but certain issues someone could embrace fallacious conclusions about are--the issues, not the fallacies.  The shape of Earth is ultimately one of them.  Yes, the planet absolutely appears to be a sphere on an evidential level, not a disc.  No, it does not logically follow from sensory observation that something really exists or has its perceived appearance, and so of course one cannot prove Earth is spherical as opposed to just discover evidence for this, but this does not mean someone is justified in believing Earth is flat!  Something must be both true by necessity and utterly verifiable, without assumptions, to be justified as a belief.

Flat earthers sometimes confuse a lack of absolute proof for the same thing as logical impossibility or lack of evidence.  None of these are the same.  Of course the sphericity of Earth is not self-evident or inherently true like logical axioms.  Of course it is not demonstrable a priori as a necessary truth that transcends the contingent, malleable nature of the sensory world.  It is also not of high existential/moral importance on its own, unlike, say, the duty to not steal if theft is indeed immoral, the great potential in human relationships, or the nature of life in the face of mortality.  There is still plenty of evidence that Earth is not a flat disc, but a sphere.

First of all (this is not yet evidence for a spherical planet), the associated flat earth conspiracy, which entails that organizations like NASA have fabricated all evidence of a spherical planet, has the typical epistemological failures of other conspiracy theories.  I have even been told by someone that NASA is specifically a sex cult of all things!  Like the presence of an American deep state, it can only be assumed, not proven, because it does not logically follow from anything accessible to the public--conspiracy theories could be true in many cases because they are logically possible, but there is either no evidence in their favor and there is probabilistic evidence against them.  In this instance, something as simple as moving upwards to higher ground as the sun sets can unveil strong evidence for the subtle curvature of the world without secret cabals being directly relevant one way or another.

Not everyone can just go out to the sea and witness the distant curve of the horizon, witness ships disappear if they venture far enough in front of one's position, or travel to space, though each of these things reveals evidence of a kind.  A smooth, open horizon does still offer signs that the ground and water do not stretch on in the exact same uncurving geometry for the entire scope of the world.  Environments and objects drop off gradually, and the world subtly curves, and if one was at the furthest location one can see, it would appear the same way in other directions all over again.  Certainly, any photograph taken from outer space showing a clearly spherical planet could be edited, but this does not make it likely that such a thing is true.  What is much more easy to access is a vantage point where one can go higher and higher as the sun sets.  If Earth is a sphere rather than a truly flat surface, then the sun would not be visually inaccessible after it sinks below the horizon.

As one moves to a higher altitude, it can be viewable again for a time.  If the planet was flat (at least on the side we inhabit in this ideology), the sun and its light could not be seen anymore under these circumstances.  One would have to be right at the alleged edge of the world, though some say the boundaries of the disc have massive walls of ice that could prevent this, and staring downward.  The ultimate unverifiability of general sense experience aside, on the level of perception, there is much scientific evidence for the spherical shape of Earth that does not have anything to do with hypothetically altered images from NASA.  The unprovable and unfalsifiable conspiracy theories can be sidestepped completely if one has the time, the energy, the willingness, and the terrain to just move upwards to keep seeing the setting sun.

While it is not actually very important to know that sensory evidences point to Earth being a sphere to get by and become familiar with far deeper things, there are some who say the Bible teaches that Earth is a flat disc, rather than a three-dimensional circle.  This is often derived from assuming that the phrase "the four corners of the earth" in Revelation 7:1 is entirely literal.  Is it literal when it says there are only four winds, rather than summarizing the four cardinal directions?  The geometric shape of Earth is trivial in itself, but if it is a sphere and the Bible genuinely teaches that it is flat, this would mean that at least any such doctrine of the Bible is erroneous.  One verse popularly cited in defense of a sphere is Job 26:7, which says that God suspends the world over "nothing," or, in other words, that it does not rest on any material objects below it, but this does not mean the verse teaches a spherical planet.

Job 26:10, however, does mention a division between light and darkness.  If this is presented as a natural phenomenon that God only set in motion (as opposed to supernaturally causes) and if this division falls on the world, then this would require a spherical rather than flat Earth because, as already addressed, on a flat disc, light from the sun, terrain variations aside, would not illuminate part of the world while missing another part.  This is also brushed up against in Luke 17:30-35.  The reference to the return of Christ being both at day and night, as well as two people being in bed while two women grind grain (which would likely occur in the daytime), suggests a spherical Earth.  The return happening at day and night in the same instant could only be the case if the planet had specific geometry, while the contrasting activities of the people used as examples are lesser evidences.  People can be in bed during the day and they could work at night.  It is just far less likely.

There is also Isaiah 40:22, but this verse could mean a disc or a sphere by the phrase "circle of the earth," so its affirmation of a spherical planet depends on if the circle in question is three-dimensional.  The Bible is not necessarily focusing on scientific details in any of these cases, as much as some insist.  However, this does not mean the Bible is false, and it does not necessarily mean it is teaching any literal doctrine that conflicts with what appears to be the case based upon scientific experience.  Neither scientific paradigms nor religious frameworks can actually be proven beyond logically necessary details like the mere existence of an external world and an uncaused cause respectively [1].  All the same, empirical evidence points very much to Earth being a sphere and the Bible is ultimately consistent with this.

[1].

A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/08/matter-is-not-illusion.html

B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html

Game Review--Dead Space (Xbox 360)

"I wish I could talk to you.  I'm sorry.  I'm sorry about everything."

--Nicole Brennan, Dead Space

Everything Dead Space does, it does well, combining the isolated spacecraft setting of Alien with a more sophisticated kind of zombie horror than usual and a religion much unlike what many people associate with the word.  The name of the Necromorphs, reanimated corpses tied to an object called a Maker, might in part be a reference to the xenomorphs of Alien as well.  With its silent protagonist Isaac and many upgrades for various weapons and abilities, Dead Space starts with a very vulnerable player avatar that can become enormously powerful by the end of the game if power nodes and credits are used properly.  As the story advances, progressively unusual creatures are confronted: at the heart of the plot are alien reconfigurations of human bodies and the followers of Unitology, a religion emphasizing transformation after death.

Production Values

Though the character models besides Isaac's armored figure lack some of his detail, his suit is incredibly smooth in motion, clearly-animated, and well-textured, standing out as a beautiful presence in a game that came out in October of 2008.  The models for Kendra and Hammond are not as pronounced, but they are also onscreen for far, far less of the game.  They are the only two characters that generally speak after the introduction.  Despite minimal characterization--being frequently separated from them contributes to the isolation, so this is not a detracting quality here--their voice acting is strong, as is that of Isaac's romantic partner Nicole in her handful of appearances.  The silence of Isaac is replaced by dialogue later in the series.  Between the aesthetic and the sound, the atmosphere is maintained very well from the beginning where Necromorphs unexpectedly attack to the end, where Isaac confronts a monstrosity on the planet where the Marker was pulled from.

Gameplay

The survival horror balances vulnerability and offensive measures well, as the beginning of the game sees Isaac start with relatively small amounts of health, a very limited inventory, and only one gun.  Slowly, by story progression or by finding optional schematics, you can expand his arsenal beyond the Plasma Cutter, a pistol-like bolt weapon, and can use Kinesis to lift objects or enemies using a function of the suit.  With each new weapon also comes a new secondary attack tied to that particular tool.  Alternate fire modes, like a different angle for the Plasma Cutter's bolts (which can slice off Necromorph limbs in various positions) or a 360 degree projectile release for the assault rifle (Isaac holds it above his head), vary up the attacks but can use lots of ammunition at once.

Inventory space can likewise be greatly enhanced, including beyond the limits of the entire first playthrough with the level six suit--start a second playthrough on the same slot after beating the game, and this will be available for purchase at the store.  With all healing items, ammunition, and other objects carried over to the new playthrough, the game becomes much easier even apart from the benefits of the level six suit.  This will not make certain segments any easier, such as evading space debris while rushing across the exterior of the ship or using mounted guns to shoot at Necromorph variations, once again, outside the ship.  Using weapons upgraded in the first run through the game make enemy encounters far more easy, though, especially since the limbs and heads or early Necromorphs quickly detach, something that is necessary to kill them rapidly.  As extraterrestrial zombies of sorts, they might not die easily otherwise.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

Boarding the USG Ishimura, a human spacecraft with a distress signal, Isaac Clarke and his boarding party find evidence of enigmatic crew deaths, medical experimentation, and extraterrestrial life forms.  His significant other Nicole Brennan sent him a video transmission from the vessel prior to his landing, adding a layer of personal investment to the investigation.  It slowly comes to light that Unitologists, religious adherents to a relatively recent religious philosophy having to do with an alien artifact, were in control of the Ishimura before its disarray and that the Necromorphs onboard are related to cosmic phenomena far from Earth and that Unitologists were involved in their takeover of the spacecraft.

Intellectual Content

The protagonist Isaac has a Biblical name, as does Jacob of The Callisto Protocol, a much more recent spiritual successor of sorts to Dead Space, which is thematically relevant, if only indirectly, to the religious context of the conspiracy Isaac uncovers.  Unitology is believed by its adherents to be the truth about life, death, and God.  It features the tenets of resurrection and union with God, but the transformation "required" to see God is that of the alien Marker or already-created Necromorphs reanimating a corpse and connecting it with a hive mind.  Exposure to the Marker is supposed to bring insanity, but there are different reactions characters have that show insanity is not an inevitable outcome.  Some characters, like Isaac, only hallucinate.  Kendra equates hallucinations with insanity in her stupidity, for hallucinations are often involuntary sensory perceptions corresponding to stimuli that (allegedly) lack an existence external to the mind.  Beyond being involuntary, hallucinations, however, have nothing to do with what a person believes about their sensory experiences, which cannot be proven to not be hallucinations as it is even if one is perceiving the external world "normally."  Someone who believes in logically contradictory or unverifiable ideas is insane regardless of whether or not they have ever hallucinated anything; someone who makes assumptions or who disregards reason is insane, again, whether or not they hallucinate.  Having such an experience does not force one to assume it, or baseline sensory experiences, are real beyond the mental perception itself.

Conclusion

For its approximately 12-13 hours of zero-gravity navigation, Necromorph assaults, and Unitologist elaborations, Dead Space establishes the franchise's very bleak but promising lore and survival horror bent.  You might not be desperately holding onto ammunition as is more natural in some games, but it is a survival horror experience with more substance than the typical zombie story.  The superficial similarities to something like Resident Evil are there, but this game lacks the cheesiness of characterization and dialogue from some of the other franchise's titles and touches upon deeper things like psychosis and religious irrationalism (with many hypothetical religious philosophies being logically possible even if unverifiable).  Isaac Clarke's expedition to the Ishimura makes for a genuinely excellent game from two console generations ago.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  There is legitimate gore in Dead Space, such as limbs and heads being regularly blasted off of Necromorphs if one is disabling them in the most ammunition-conserving manner.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "fuck," "shit," and "damn" are used.

Biology Does Not Establish God's Existence

How genetic, dietary, environmental, behavioral, and psychological factors all shape the life and adaptiveness of an organism in various ways, and in different animals at that, can be a subjectively fascinating thing.  Non-rationalists, though, only make assumptions if they believe they can know that either God directly created living things or if they evolved from a common ancestor, regardless of whether that ancestor was itself created by God directly or came about due to abiogenesis (an uncaused cause exists either way, so this is about the origin and nature of life rather than God's existence).  General sensory perceptions are subjective and potentially illusory, and the typical person might not necessarily get the chance to interact with many creatures and thus investigate hearsay about them, but living things can have many forms and abilities that are rather strange or useful.  What does not follow is that God himself must have personally fitted each animal to a specific environment or that they must have evolved adaptations to a given environment.

Cave bats are capable of using echolocation in their dark environments for hunting and navigation.  Creatures of the bathypelagic (midnight) zone of the ocean, 1,000-4,000 meters below the surface where no light from the sun penetrates the waters, might sport bioluminescence that provides a major advantage in luring or spotting prey.  Octopuses can camouflage to match their surroundings.  Despite how well matched these animals are to their respective environments, it does not logically follow that one can know God exists or that evolution occurred/occurs just from observing how these organisms behave and adapt.  None of this is even mere probabilistic evidence for either concept!  Not only are the two not in conflict with each other, but both God and evolution would be capable of bringing about life forms of a given kind, and thus either is compatible with our observations of living things.

There is an uncaused cause that exists by logical necessity, so this is not to say that the existence of a divine being of some kind is unverifiable, or worse, impossible, nor is it to say that the existence of macro-evolutionary developments is anything more or less than an unverifiable logical possibility (for anything that does not contradict logical axioms could be or could have been true, no matter how strange it is).  If macro-evolution did occur, though, the existence of an uncaused cause means it was a theistically caused evolution or at least theistically permitted evolution, but the mere presence, diversity, and environmental effectiveness of creatures--and there is nothing about seeing creatures in the natural world that even means they exist as anything but mental perceptions to begin with--is not what establishes God's existence.

Since the universe creating itself, the universe always existing, and the universe or any other thing that is not logically necessary coming into existing without a cause are all logical impossibilities (these facts depending on logical necessity and not the natural world), it is not even true that atheism is possible, and thus atheistic evolution is eliminated from possibility.  As for how whatever animals, including humans, came to exist in their current forms, either direct theistic creation or theistic evolution is possible, and there is absolutely no way to know while under human limitations which is the case; memory and the senses prove only that perceptions and evidences are there, making actual historical events (other than that at some point the uncaused cause created time and matter or started a causal chain that led to them) and scientific paradigms utterly unverifiable.  Evolution, if it occurred, would be a historical and scientific phenomena that would be perceived through potentially illusory sensory experiences.

No, scientific observtion and certainly not the fallacies of inductive reasoning cannot demonstrate whether it is direct creation or theistic evolution that produced the biodiversity we can see today, with all of its environment-specific behaviors and advantages.  This is like how no amount of sensory observation could ever demonstrate that one is living in a digital simulation of the natural world instead of actual nature or vice versa.  Not only is proof reserved for logical truths instead of mere scientific ideas (though the truth about all sensory matters is governed by the laws of logic even if a great deal is unknowable), but all perceived evidence, which cannot prove anything except that perceptions exist, would look exactly the same in either case.  As it is neither logically necessary for direct creation or theistic evolution to have specifically happened over the other, for both are possible, the only options involving God can only be verified on the level of possibility.

When Irrationalists Damn Themselves To Mental Illness

As is the case with death, just because there are unfortunate aspects to mental illness does not mean that every person always deserves to be delivered from it.  With death, that some people could do that which makes them deserve to be killed, or to deserve death even though it would be immoral to murder them, does not change the fact that death would still have its unfortunate side: that anyone could deserve to die would only be the case if there are beings who practice evil, and this would be inherently tragic (evil, if it exists in any form, is that which should not be done, after all).  Mental illnesses like depression and anxiety might be burdensome to an extreme degree at their worst, but there are cases where some people deserve them--just not for the reasons some people might think.

If someone develops, say, depression because they refuse to fully accept logical axioms and the fact that scientific paradigms, political ideologies, and religious philosophies are secondary to purely logical truths, they can only deserve whatever unease and insecurity they have brought on themselves for attempting to flee from reality.  Someone who chooses not to understand or embrace the objective fact that only things which are logically provable can be known deserves whatever emotional suffering they bring upon themselves by this denial or avoidance of the only truths that do not hinge on other truths and that could not have been any other way no matter what.  Since all people can directly know at least the basic necessity of logical axioms because the truth of everything they experience or think about already hinges on them (only things consistent with logical axioms can be true in the first place), and without any other person to prompt them to discover this, there is no excuse for overlooking them across an entire lifetime.

No, I am not saying people deserve an existential crisis or to lose the will to live if they recognize the gravity of something like epistemology and values without making any assumptions, not matter how relieving they would be.  People who refuse to recognize the intrinsic veracity of logical axioms (such as how something which logically follows from another thing is true by necessity and cannot be uncertain, or how something must be true, or else it would be true that nothing is true, a self-defeating impossibility) or who make assumptions about other matters are at risk for existential depression if they were to have their illusions shattered, and since no one is justified in believing in untruths or assumptions, they cannot deserve to not have their peace destroyed.

This is comparable to how someone who is sexually promiscuous cannot deserve to not get STDs.  It does not mean someone should try to give them an STD, and on Biblical standards, that would be unjust even though promiscuity is immoral.  It does not mean someone who contracts such a physical condition should be fully dismissed as a person who is capable of fully aligning with reason.  It is just that someone stupid enough to pursue physical or psychological pleasure or comfort over the necessary truths of reason, the absolute certainty they provide, and total acceptance that their whims do not make something true or morally permissible does deserve, in a sense, whatever STDs they naturally bring upon themselves, without anyone actually ensuring they receive them.  The same is true of mental health decline.  Irrationalists, when confronted, will go to desperate lengths to believe contradictions and assumptions instead of provable truths, and if they can only find psychological security outside of reason and rationalism, they do not deserve it at all.

Irrationalism is false by default, and it could not have been any other way.  Regardless of whether anything, even logical truths themselves, have moral value, axioms and what follows from them is still true, and they are still the very core of all necessity and possibility.  If logical truths have moral value, everyone who does not pursue them and at least understand the mere truth of axioms might have human rights, but they are still objectively inferior to those who choose rationality.  If there is no such thing as moral value, no one has a right to anything, and their suffering is meaningless no matter its origin.  There is simply no possible way for non-rationalists other than extremely young children or people with severe mental disorders (like a kind of psychosis or dissociation that actually interferes with discovering anything past the self-verifying nature of logical axioms and that one's own consciousness exists, not depression or anxiety) to not deserve literally whatever emotional or general psychological torment they bring upon themselves with their own irrationality.

Physical Pleasure And Pain: The Centrality Of Consciousness

A non-rationalist could go their entire life without ever realizing that consciousness is epistemologically more foundational than anything having to do with the body because, even if it is brought into existence by neurological phenomena, it is directly experienced.  The mind is the seat of experience, without which there is no grasping of logical truths, no recollection, no visualization, no emotion, no desire, and no sensory perception.  These experiences could all be hypothetically had without a body.  The other way around is inherently impossible!   Mind is what allows for pleasure and pain.  The body can bring pleasures and pains of its own, yet these things are universally dependent on consciousness to exist in the first place.

Psychological pain can be so great that a person develops a headache, experiences muscle tension, and so on.  The former kind of pain is not the latter.  In this case, it can only lead to the latter, while the first could be present totally independent of the second.  One does not need to have any bodily injuries or sickness, internal or external, in order to feel pain of the mind.  Physical pain, such as that from a cut on a finger or a chronic condition like sciatica, can also lead to additional psychological pain in the form of something like emotional distress.  There are many possible kinds of pain that can be experienced, and pain of the body can incite pain of the mind and vice versa.  In each case, there is by necessity a mental component.

Pleasure of the body and mind have a similar relationship.  Physical pleasure such as that of a massage can lead to mental pleasure--for instance, a state of happiness that is deeply appealing.  There is, for those who actually choose to dwell on it, the more distinctively existential pleasure that something like sex can bring.  Nevertheless, pleasure can be experienced on a strictly mental level with no connected or causally central physical pleasure.  That which can come from embracing the intrinsic necessity of reason, the depths of introspection, or nostalgic memories is mental only.  A physical pleasure like comfortable clothing or a sensual kiss has bodily aspects and still could not be experienced except on a mental level.

All pleasure and pain are ultimately mental, while they sometimes have or could have physical factors that contributed.  A consciousness can experience either kind of mental state without any correlating or causally related state of the body, but nothing about the body, even a neutral condition featuring neither pleasure nor pain of any kind, can be perceived at all without the mind.  Furthermore, a nonexistent or blank, dreamless mind can partake in no pleasure or pain.  Consciousness is plainly more central than the body here. The only way to have the capacity for any experience at all is to exist as a consciousness and thus experience at least this much.  In these matters, it is the mind and not the body that is obviously most central.

Metaphysical idealism--where conscious existence and perception literally causes the presence of matter holds it in place--is at best unprovable, but there are objectively demonstrable ways that certain basic experiences like pleasure and pain all reduce down to the mind even if the body is secondarily involved.  Pleasure and pain cannot be illusions.  The simple perception of their presence, even if they seem to be triggered by a bodily state, would still be experienced no matter its true causal origin.  So much of the external world could be or could have been illusory, but one's own mental states cannot be misperceived as long as one makes no assumptions; they are directly experienced.  The likes of pleasure and pain always require a mind and not causal origination in the body, without the reverse being true.

Biodiversity Of Animals

The diversity of observable animal life is extreme, far greater than the diversity of their habitats.  God (the uncaused cause that exists by logical necessity) and nature, alone or in tandem, can create creatures that might seem incredibly bizarre if it was not for an individual's years of familiarity with them.  Nothing about which animals actually exists can be known beyond direct but fallible sensory perceptions or mere hearsay, though the laws of logic are relied on to even know what one's perceptions or what scientific reports assert.  It is not as if hearing of or even seeing an animals proves it is there.  All the same, the sensory evidence for a much greater spectrum of organisms than many people are familiar with is extensive, and the seeming philosophical/theological truth of human exceptionalism does not erase how subjectively fascinating or objectively diverse animal life could be.

Just one environment can contain an extreme variety of animals.  Oceans, for example, feature parrotfish, which are specially equipped to consume underwater rocks to eat the algae growing on them.  There are octopuses, which can camouflage not just their exterior color, but the very texture of their bodies to match environments.  Other very unique saltwater animals include sea horses, the male of which carries fertilized eggs and gives birth rather than the female, and the female anglerfish in the darkness of the bathypelagic zone, with its bacteria-induced bioluminescence, as opposed to the bioluminescence of fireflies that do not rely on additional microorganisms.  Then there are even creatures of the ocean that lack nervous systems entirely (sea sponges) or that have very inhuman nervous systems (like jellyfish).  These are just examples of diversity in oceanic life, however.

In inland freshwater, one might find electric eels that can paralyze or frighten other organisms with bioelectric shocks, or bull sharks that can dwell in either saltwater or freshwater, unlike many sharks of the world's oceans.  Rivers of Africa are home to the hippopotamus, the so-called "river horse" that coexists with crocodiles, the massive seemingly lizard-like beasts that, as reptiles, have some traits in common with amphibians such as frogs as fellow cold-blooded animals.  Since they can be observed on or from land, such creatures much more likely to be encountered by humans than those in any of the oceans.  Experientially familiar to a multitude of people, though, are the often rather small insects that can invade even modern homes.

The world of insects spans butterflies with their sharp stages of metamorphosis bringing them from caterpillar to a chrysalis-bound pupa to a winged adult, bees and ants with their extreme social coordination, and wasps with their spiked genitalia.  Even smaller than an ant, unobservable by humans except with technological aid, microscopic tardigrades can withstand extreme conditions that would drive plenty of macroscopic creatures to extinction, such as the vacuum of outer space, volcanic environments, or the bottom of the oceans.  And what of bacterial life that cannot be seen but is guarded against by the use of flowing water and soap?  Though they are macroscopically invisible, they can reduce much larger beings like humans to agonizing or lethal sickness.

Cities of increasing number and size isolate so many people from the organisms that could otherwise be their more direct neighbors no matter the environment.  For some, this isolation might lead them to ignore animals until in the presence of an annoying or dangerous creature, but diminished interaction with the untouched natural world does not mean that these beasts, large and small, do not dwell on the same planet or that there is no moral obligation to acknowledge them, and even to promote their flourishing wherever it does not conflict with human flourishing.  No matter how much more metaphysically grand humans might be than their fellow organisms, and whether or not the uncaused cause directly appointed humans to a status of higher moral significance, humans are animals like other creatures, and both human and non-human life can suffer when these truths are neglected.

Moral And Legal Rights

"These people have no rights in their country, but they should" is a statement that would describe some people's stance on various issues, as would "These people have fewer rights than others, and they deserve just as many."  What they are trying to convey might seem clear, but, depending on what they mean, it might be deeply contradictory, for many people never verbally distinguish between moral and legal rights, and in the aforementioned statements, they might be actively confusing one for the other while treating them as different.  After all, if you already have a moral right, even just one, political recognition of that right is not what grounds its existence or nonexistence.  Someone cannot have a right and not have it at the same time, hence why clarity in communication is vital here, especially since legal rights are on their own nothing but social constructs.

The wording of these statements can be misleading to the point of confusing those who use them, but even if they only believe irrationally because of conscience or cultural conditioning, they still believe that people already have rights by virtue of being human, as arbitrary or even contradictory as the rights they specifically believe in might be.  What they rarely if ever do is clarify if they are talking about moral or legal rights, the latter of which is objectively meaningless if the former does not genuinely exist.  This means that even when they are not espousing something invalid due to contradictions, they are communicating so poorly that their choice of words is irrational in itself if they persist in it.  The difference between moral and legal rights is in no way minor, and it is extremely easy for someone avoiding assumptions to grasp the inherent distinction between them.  One, if it exists, is not a social construct.  The other is nothing but a social construct tied to a specific arbitrary legal system.

No one deserves to have legal rights if they do not already have moral rights irrespective of personal approval, societal recognition, or emotional appeal or persuasion.  In fact, it is impossible to actually prove that these rights do or do not exist while subject to humans limitations, just as it is impossible to prove that a chair one is looking at does or does not exist.  Not even the objectively demonstrable existence of an uncaused cause (which is all that the core concept of God entails by necessity) makes it logically necessary that any obligations exist, without which there are no rights no matter what a political leader or legislator believes or says.  All the same, it is both true and knowable that, say, white and black people deserve equal legal rights if neither has moral rights to begin with, and of course, even if moral rights exist, legal rights are still invalid to the extent that they would go beyond moral rights.

No law is valid because it has a majority of the populace or the governing class in its favor (which is why democracy is intrinsically false as a moral-political philosophy), because it is pragmatically beneficial, or because it aligns with someone's subjective conscience.  Even unanimous agreement of all people in every country that this law is good would only mean that everyone agrees, which they could only do in this case, once again, because of emotionalistic belief or societal pressures/manipulation.  A rationalist, even if he or she finds a given law very personally appealing, can perfectly cling to reason in defiance of their culture and subjective wishes because what does or does not logically follow from something is not a matter of perception, opinion, or convenience, nor is it something inaccessible to all but "the people" or "the ruling class."

Movie Review--The Descent

"Well . . . they're totally blind.  And judging from what we've seen, I'd say they use sound to hunt with, like a bat.  And they've evolved perfectly to live down here in the dark."

--Sam, The Descent

A great cast that is probably unfamiliar to American audiences, a simple premise, and a very well-handled creature make The Descent an excellent horror film.  In calling the premise simple, I am referring to a simplicity like that of Alien, an absence of storytelling bloat that allows for a very focused movie that does not take longer than it needs to to before it introduces drama and mystery.  With characters that interact so organically and a general commitment to subtlety over jumpscares, this is a movie that does not trip on the more common shortcomings of horror cinema and films in general.  There is thankfully no descent into mediocrity or artistic incompetence here!  It is not the most thematically complex horror movie, but practically everything about the film reflects a higher degree of talent and care.  Hell, it even passes the Bechdel test while having a cast of almost exclusively women that do not have a weak link between their performances.

Production Values

The first shot of The Descent's species of monster is the opposite of the low-effort jumpscare.  So are the second and third shots, with the creature only getting direct, closeup attention from the camera more than halfway through the entire film.  When it is first seen, a large area near the very entrance of the cave is bathed in red light from a flare, the broad cavern is in view of the camera, with a main character in the foreground on the right and a silhouette in the distant background on the left that soon crouches down.  The contrast between the colors red and black is fittingly revisited after this shot.  Before the creature is seen again later on, though, there are shots of the characters crawling through passageways that would strike terror into the minds of claustrophobes--along with Blair Witch, The Descent has among the best shots of narrow crawlspaces in recent cinematic history, if not beyond the past decades.  Before they even enter the cave, the characters interact with each other in such a natural way that their laughter, sarcasm, pain, and loss establish them as realistic.  As I specified before, this is not a cast that would be easy to recognize for people who primarily watch mainstream American films, but they are absolutely right at home in their roles.  Shauna McDonald plays the most central of all the characters, Sarah, and Natalie Mendoza is her friend Juno, who hopes to use a spelunking trip to rekindle the former relationship they had before Sarah's husband and child died.  The rest of the fairly sizeable cast contributes to the organic portrayal of friendship--and desperation once the trip becomes a nightmare.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

After a rafting trip with her friends, Sarah's husband and young daughter are both killed in a car accident.  The next year sees the friends, along with some new members, reunite to go spelunking in the Appalachian Mountains.  When a narrow crawlspace is sealed by rocks, the women are forced to continue deeper into the caves.  Though the friends appreciate risky pastimes, one of them has brought the group to an unlisted cave system, revealing that they are not in the caves she had mentioned because she wanted them to be the ones to first explore a place no one has supposedly visited.  The underground network is ultimately the living area for a species of evolutionary divergents from humans that have adapted to the darkness.

Intellectual Content

Focusing on friendship and betrayal rather than other horror subject matter like the epistemology of supernatural beings or existentialism in cosmic horror, The Descent explores the relationship of two of the women in particular as the different ways one of them is an awful friend come to light.  Juno, as it turns out, has not only had an affair with Sarah's dead husband, but she also lied to her friends about which caves they were headed to in order to surprise and excite them at the possibility of naming a new area--which of course is why they end up trapped with vicious humanoids.  However, one of the things that is almost presented as a reason for Sarah to eventually wound Juno and leave her as bait for the cave's "crawlers" is that she accidentally pierced the neck of her friend Beth with her pickaxe, expecting to find one of the hostile creatures when she turned around (she had just fought one of them).  When Sarah stumbles upon a dying Beth later on, the latter tells her not to trust Sarah because she is responsible for her injury, but, despite Juno having had an affair and damning the group to get trapped in the wrong cave, it this her unintentional wounding of Beth that is treated as the final straw that makes her deserve to die.  That Sarah makes it to the end as the film's "final girl" puts her in a position classically reserved for the morally superior character in a horror story, and yet near the end, Sarah uses her pickaxe to make Juno scream so she can use her as bait while she escapes.  A morally superior final girl would not murder someone for an accidental tragedy, even if Juno does deserve to die for other reasons by Biblical standards (the only moral standard supported by any evidence).

Conclusion

Even though it does sometimes feature jumpscares, The Descent does not stand on them, and even though not every character can get the same amount of development when the cast is so large, the acting more than carries the story--and there is at least one character who does have a clear arc.  Expertly utilizing its actresses, its color scheme, and the cave sets that were remixed to hide how limited they really were, this is a film that embodies the positive kind of straightforwardness in horror that often works out far better than more popular tactics.  Simplicity is not always gratuitous or lacking in depth.  The Descent shows just how intense a simple premise can be and how emotionally authentic portrayals of friendship in movies need to be.  In addition to this, the way its large female cast is so human and natural without the film specifically calling attention to the fact that they are women is, no matter how underappreciated it is, a genuine triumph for female characterization from almost 20 years ago, well before the push for more realistic female characters was as strong as it is today.  The Descent simply gets so much of what it does right that there is little that could have been improved.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  A driver is impaled by poles early on, which involves blood.  Pickaxes are used to repeatedly hack into attacking creatures.

 2.  Profanity:  "Fuck," "shit" (and its British version "shite"), "bitch," and "bastard are used.

Deuteronomy 22:13-21 (Part Two)

Beyond the case law of Deuteronomy 22:13-21 not being about premarital sex, the Bible obviously teaching gender equality from the start, and the idiocy of a certain misrepresentation of the case law which I have encountered, all of which were addressed in part one [1], there is a little more to clarify up front that helps make it obvious what this passage that mentions virginity and execution is and is not saying.  If anyone denies the formerly mentioned things or the things I am about to state, or makes assumptions having read or not read the Bible without letting go of those assumptions, they are a fool who is worthy of scorn and mockery rather than any sort of friendliness.  More Biblical context is to be detailed before the full scope and ramifications of Deuteronomy 22:13-21 can be understood, such as how virginity is not morally demanded for men or women before marriage, although casual sex is sinful.  This is vital since an easy assumption for non-rationalists to make, Christians and non-Christians like, is that this passage is saying virginity is a moral requirement prior to marriage, especially for women.  It says no such thing, so it cannot be prescribing any sexist expectation for virginity that only applies to women!

As a disclaimer, though I initially intended for this series to only have two parts, it will now be at least three parts long.  There are simply too many examples selected about the relevant categories below to fit in many of the additional points I was planning on including here.

Virginity Before Marriage Is Not A Biblical Obligation

Yes, noncommittal sex is immoral according to the Bible--see Exodus 22:16-17.  However, as mentioned in the first part of this series, parental objection can release someone from the obligation to marry an unmarried, unengaged person one has consensual sex with (again, Exodus 22:16-17), but there is also the issue of people who are divorced.  They are allowed to remarry to new spouses (Deuteronomy 24:1-4), and yet if they had sex in their prior marriage(s), they would by necessity not be virgins at this time.  Sex with the person one is engaged to, likewise, is not condemned among any of the sexual sins of the Torah, which the Bible itself says not to add to (Deuteronomy 4:2).  In fact, Deuteronomy 22:23-24 describes engaged men and women as in a sense already being married.  If sex outside of legal marriage or formal engagement is not automatically sinful as Exodus 22:16-17 entails, then it certainly would not be evil by default within an engagement relationship.

Lastly and most importantly, losing one's virginity against one's wishes is not sinful independent of these other reasons as Deuteronomy 22:25-27 explicitly clarifies, for the lack of mutual consent is what makes what would otherwise be casual sex or adultery or premature adultery (sex with a person whom one is not married/engaged to who is engaged to someone else) rape.  Deuteronomy 22:13-21, then, obviously is not about all people, and certainly not exclusively women, being expected or Biblically required to be virgins before marriage.  So many other Biblical passages already make it very clear that there are illegitimate ways of losing one's virginity or intentions behind this, such as promiscuity, but simply not being a virgin is not sinful.  Not getting married after premarital sex under certain conditions like abuse or parental objections, getting remarried after morally permissible divorce (Jesus touches on how illegitimate divorce followed by remarriage to a new person is adultery against one's former spouse in Matthew 19), having sex ith one's engagement partner before legal marriage, and being raped are all ways that someone could lose their virginity outside of a given marriage without sinning.

The Wording Of Mosaic Law And Gender

Does Deuteronomy 22:13-21 teach that only women are to not lie about their virginity or be killed for such a thing?  Not any more than the rape law of Deuteronomy 22:25-27 says that only male rapists are to be executed, and even then only when they rape a separately engaged woman.  Though the law features a female victim (engaged to be married) and a male aggressor, it says that rape is like murder.  As I love to point out, murder is sinful for everyone (Exodus 20:13) and deserves death every time, no matter the gender of the victim or the rapist (Numbers 35:31).  Mosaic Law does not ignore or deny male victims of sexual assault perpetrated by women or men.  The same death penalty is by necessity deserved by all rapists and the same right to not be raped is possessed according to the teachings of the Bible by women and men, for the act is the same and women are not superior to men so that they have greater rights here.  In this case, the wording of how rape is like murder already on its own establishes all of this without referencing back to how both genders bear God's image as full persons.  Language for men and women does not at all by default convey that an obligation is exclusive to men or women, as if Genesis 1:26-27 would not already necessitate the opposite, except where the likes of literal anatomy is concerned, as with circumcision (Genesis 17:9-14, Leviticus 12:2-3) for men, as only men have a foreskin to remove, or women not having sex with anyone during menstruation (Leviticus 18:19, 20:18), a biological phenomenon men do not experience, despite how men are inversely forbidden from having sex with any woman on her period as well.  

These have nothing to do with the rights and obligations of humans, which both men and women are.  Some laws are stated in such a way that it should be obvious to anyone that they are not about gender, such as the commands to not commit murder (Exodus 20:13) or to not commit adultery (20:14).  Some specify that of course they are applicable to women and men, such as the codified obligation to release one's servants if one abuses them through physical mutilation.  Men and women are directly said to have a right to their release if they are mistreated in this way (Exodus 21:26-27).  Men are not regarded through the misandrist concepts of males "deserving" greater physical harshness or as being apathetic to their suffering, and women are not regarded as deserving physical harshness due to some mythical lower metaphysical status of being female.  Other laws that mention both men and women include the prescription of capital punishment for the worship of other deities besides Yahweh (Deuteronomy 17:2-7) along with the condemnation of shrine prostitution (Deuteronomy 23:17) and prostitution in general (23:18).

In other cases, what might appear a sexist proclamation to irrationalists, like the command to execute sorceresses (Exodus 22:18), has at least two Biblical reasons why it is of course also applicable to the other gender.  Genesis 1:26-27 and 5:1-2 make it clear that women and men are not more or less valuable, close to God, or in possession of moral rights or obligations having nothing to do with their actual anatomy and physiology.  Also, elsewhere in Mosaic Law, one can find things that specify that these sins and punishments are gender neutral: Deuteronomy 18:9-12 says to kill all who practice sorcery or divination, which would include but not be limited to sorceresses.  On a strictly logical level aside from the words of the text, sorcery is the sin in question, and there is nothing about being a man that makes it logically impossible to commit sorcery.  As long as something good or evil can be done by men and women alike, that thing is morally mandatory, supererogatory, or wrong for both genders.  For another example, see how Exodus 21:2-7 might seem to say that only male servants are to go free every seven years, since it says that a daughter sold as a servant is not to go free in the same way.  However, the context is one of marriage to the master's son, who is not a servant (21:9-11).  Aside from the real difference being that she is the master's child and the previously mentioned male servant is not, Deuteronomy 15:12-18 says to free male and female slaves of one's own countrypeople after six years of labor, no matter their outstanding debt.  The awl-piercing to signify that a servant wishes to remain with their master/mistress for life, first referenced in Exodus 21:5-6 using male language, is, once again, of course to be used with female slaves who have the same desire.  

Moreover, see how Numbers 30:1-16 might appear to say men and women have different levels of obligation with vows unless a woman is divorced or widowed.  Nevertheless, Leviticus 5:4-5 addresses vows for everyone prior to this, and Deuteronomy 23:21-23 says afterward that anyone who makes a vow to God must keep it, though there is no sin in refraining from any such oath.  Gender is not referenced!  The situational case laws of Numbers 30 are really about how one's parent or spouse can nullify one's vows, depending on if one is living with one's parents while unmarried or living with one's spouse while married.  The literal wording does not require a different moral doctrine, and a "complementarian" interpretation would in fact contradict Biblical tenets as early as Genesis 1:26-27.  What of how Leviticus 6 uses words like "his" and "he" to refer to a person who steals from or deceives their neighbor needing to make restitution that includes an additional value of a fifth of the property taken (6:1-5)?  Numbers 5:5-7 says any "man or woman" who does such things has this obligation to make restitution by repaying for whatever was stolen/lost, along with an additional penalty of one-fifth of the monetary value.  This is not just about male offenders.

Just to touch on another example, Leviticus 14 says that a man, obviously a stand-in for person in light of logical necessities about equivalence and Biblical statements about gender equality, can be examined away from the camp by the priest to see if "he" can be allowed back after an infectious skin disease.  This person is to remove their clothing, yet another indirect Biblical approval of nudity, and shave off all hair, including that of the beard (14:9).  The priest is to inspect their whole outward body to ensure as much as the senses can that the disease is gone.  Later, Numbers 5:1-4 says to send men and women outside of the camp in cases of certain skin conditions, so even on the level of direct phrasing, the Bible shows once again that it does directly affirm gender equality in these matters.  Male or female language is not about just men or women when dealing with a matter that really relates to everyone, as if male language, like mankind, is not already sometimes used to intentionally refer to all people no matter their gender.  Deuteronomy 13:8-10 uses male language in reference to people who were just said to be daughters, wives, or friends of either gender in verse 6, saying "he" tried to entice people to worship other deities and thus should be killed.

Right after mentioning male and female servants in the same verse, Deuteronomy 15:12 says to let "him" go free in the seventh year, giving yet another example of how the Bible, either left to itself or when translated certain ways, can use male language to speak of people it already said are women.  The obligations are the fucking same in spite of the great delusion of some Christians and non-Christians with this aspect of Biblical interpretation, unless anatomy itself is actually relevant, as already stated.  Of course women and men can deserve up to 40 lashes, not just men (Deuteronomy 25:1-3), for it is not justice for their legal penalties to be worse than women's (Genesis 5:1-2)!  Of course a prophetess who gives false prophecies on God's behalf is also to die just like a male prophet who does the same (Deuteronomy 18:20-22)!  Of course a poor woman who offers her cloak as a pledge is to have her cloak returned by sunset just as with a man, for she too could have no other covering for her naked body during the cold of night (Exodus 22:26-27)!  Of course women can murder, would deserve the same penalty for murder as men, and could be victims of murder (Deuteronomy 19:11-13)!  These are human rights and human obligations the Bible talks of.

Conclusion Of Part Two

More examples could be given, such as how it does not follow from Exodus 21:9-11 speaking of wives having "marital rights" their husbands should fulfill that husbands do not have the same, which Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 7:3 as being possessed by husbands and wives, not just wives.  Biblical adultery is not a man of any marital status having sex with a woman married to another man, which would allow for married men having multiple wives or having extramarital sex that is not adulterous on some occasions, as some think the Bible actually teaches.  Adultery is a married man or woman having sex with anyone they are not married to, as I have tackled before, and as is the focus of an upcoming post in the near future that was already scheduled out anyway.  Yes, "Frodo," since this very post you might be reading was not among my scheduled releases, I have adjusted my schedule for you yet again since you are clearly too pathetic to realize almost any of the things mentioned in part one or two, unless you improbably saw the light of reason since the last time I interacted with you!  Now, the cloth part of Deuteronomy 22:13-21 would be related to gender, but it does not follow that men who lie about their virginity are not to be likewise executed or that a broken hymen is to be treated as confirmation that a woman is not a virgin.  For these and other aspects or ramifications of Deuteronomy 22:13-21, there will be a part three.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2023/09/deuteronomy-2213-21-part-one.html

"Not One Upright Woman"

"I found one upright man among a thousand, but not one upright woman among them all," says the Teacher in Ecclesiastes 7:28.  What might seem overtly misogynistic on a superficial level has nothing to do with gender stereotypes.  First of all, out of the thousand men the author observed, only one was upright morally.  Out of however many women the author observed, none were upright.  This would pertain to nothing other than the exact people examined by the writer, who would not be the whole of humanity at any point in time, much less across all of history.  On a literal level, this cannot be anything sexist in any direction.  Aside from the more fundamental creation narrative of Genesis and laws of the Torah, one can look to Proverbs to find that the Bible certainly acknowledges that women are not incapable of moral greatness.

Proverbs 31:28-29 describes the family members of a righteous and industrious woman (not that industry always overlaps with righteousness) praising her, saying "Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all."  This, obviously, could not be the case if no women are rational or morally upright and would contradict the author of Ecclesiastes if he was supposed to be describing all men or women beyond just the small, happenstance number he analyzed.  The statement of Ecclesiastes 7:28 could be hyperbole, and it could be accurate about the specific people the Teacher encountered, but it is absolutely not a Biblical endorsement of sexism against women.  Either way, it is referring only to the people who were encountered.

The real affirmation of Ecclesiastes 7:28 is that, as any socially experienced rationalist has seen, most people are fucking imbeciles who of course would either not have even tried to know what is humanly possible about the subject of morality (as opposed to making mere assumptions based upon conscience or their cultural background) or would care enough to abide by moral obligations when it is "beneficial" to do otherwise, even if they could know such a thing with absolute certainty.  They live only for emotional gratification, social approval, utilitarian ease (when it comes to moral philosophy, not just matters of sheer practicality), and ideological assumptions, having neither knowledge of nor concern for things like logical axioms, the uncaused cause, absolute certainty, or justice.  One would be fortunate to find anyone rational and truly pursuing or in possession of righteousness, especially by Biblical standards, in a thousand people or more of either gender.

The Bible is thoroughly cynical in the sense of never teaching to expect moral character from people, in the sense that they will almost inevitably be apathetic or prone to unrepentant but voluntary failure.  It absolutely agrees with reason that, since something can only be morally obligatory if one can achieve it (Deuteronomy 30:11, Job 1:1, and Matthew 5:48 are consistent with this), and since it is always more likely for someone to be irrational or evil than the opposite because it takes more initial effort to do otherwise, most people are delusional and avoidably damned (Matthew 7:13-14).  This has nothing to do with gender.  Men and women equally bear God's image (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2), have the same human rights (such as with those of Exodus 21:26-27 or Deuteronomy 15:12-14, with the latter showing that the male language of Exodus 21:2-6 of course prescribes the same obligations regarding both genders), are equally in need of redemption (Romans 3:23), and are equally able to access salvation (Galatians 3:28).

Verses like Ecclesiastes 7:28 do not teach that women are morally inferior to men by default or that there are special, yet surmountable, psychological barriers for women to becoming upright.  Individual women or men are righteous or wicked.  In a given population, some, most, or all men might be irrational and wicked.  The same could be the case of women.  This only reflects the nature of those individuals, and it is a nature that could be exchanged for devotion to reason and the pursuit of righteousness at any time.  Genesis 1:26-27 and Proverbs 31:28-29 are not necessary to realize that Ecclesiastes 7:28 does not positively address misogyny, as if everything in Ecclesiastes falls outside of proverbial declarations that might not be literally or universally true to begin with.