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I Don't Care About God's Nonexistence

By Will Sack •
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Some of the most fundamental truths of ourselves, our universe, and the ways we interact with it are irreversibly solipsized beyond credibility. This validity is lost because, as any sane individual would avow, absolutism of the ego is the driving maxim of the victim of perception-related fallacy. And yet, the desire to be the sole purveyor of reality is evolutionarily inherent, since we are ultimately driven to survival, not truth. This characterizes the problem of atheism and its nucleic intellectual inconsistency. The modern atheist often highlights the evils of establishment religion -- its abuses, its overreaches, its tendencies to autocracy. But this modern atheist is unable to sufficiently answer the question that undergirds the quintessential theological rebuttal: according to what? What is evil if there is no arbiter to determine it? If religion is evil according to the Christian ethical perspective, then that ethical perspective is self-defeating. If it is self-defeating, the
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A Materialistic Problem with Veganism

By Will Sack •
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Artist: Sue Coe The concern and desire to minimize suffering in all of its forms is the fundamental ethical expression. But diametric or even somewhat overlapping ethical perspectives seemingly possess wildly disparate preferences to which forms of suffering ought to be diminished first. Christians, for instance, so often accused of anthropocentrism and cosmic self-involvement, have, however unjustifiably, relented to the basic, universal omnivory that serves a species-wide preservationistic function. And while the New Testament is cited for lifting dietary restrictions as they relate to meat-based diets, the predominating Christian theological tradition has exceeded a position of allowance and became synonymous with the man-centric pretext that undergirds the global, and specifically American, meat industrial complex and consumerism. The creation myth alone, whereupon animals are "given" to humanity, is powerful enough of a driving force to maintain the momentum of ethically
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What's So Wrong With Identitylessness?

By Will Sack •
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Artist: Kwangho Shin A tellingly compelling obsessive tendency of mankind is the search for identity, which, while typically and inextricably interchangeable with the ever-vexing search for meaning, is also an isolated enterprise that more often than not meaninglessly hinges on answering the "existential" query: who am I? Even though this question and its askers have ostensibly multiplied in today's world -- which could be explained away by the cultural resurgence of self-worship -- the quest for self-identification is a species-long one. The king to whom you've pledged most allegiance, the nation from which you hail, the race with which you share the most characteristics, the belief system with which you most agree, the surnames that signify vast heritages of individuals caught in the same struggle for survival and selfhood... these are the identifiers that so many people have died justifying in a meager effort and failure to apperceive the human predicament. Why thi
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The Greatest Western Misconception is That the West is Misconceived

By Will Sack •
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It isn’t uncommon in our modern-day climate to be critical of our own nation and the ideals that served as the engine for it. It, after all, goes with the territory in our postmodern age. But it wasn’t until we, as a people, devoted ourselves to that ethic of skepticism -- the ability to uncouple from some monocratic consciousness -- that we could begin to indict and rectify the sins of unchecked authority. Following the paradigm shifts of the Civil Rights Era, the American people became open to the prospect of questioning the inadequacies of the Establishment and its inability to solve the crimes of racism, refrain from martial jingoism, nor clarify why there continues to be a symbiosis between the two. By the time the population fully reckoned with the Vietnam War, which had uncoincidentally been festering under the surface of the civil rights struggle, the reality finally came to light that colonialism hadn't died. The televised nature of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in particul
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What is the Obsession with Vintage Logos Lately?

By Will Sack •
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Recently, a plethora of mega-conglomerates and corporations have been undergoing rebrands and redesigns, ostensibly more frequently in the 2010s and '20s than the lifespan of the companies altogether. We saw this with Pepsi and Windows, most notably. Throughout the 2010s, a particular sort of minimalism and modernization overtook the creative corporate consciousness, with nearly every popular logo and brand going through various kinds of sleek, simplified reinvention. Pepsi abandoned the trademark horizontal "S" curve for a more abstract swoop. Windows graduated from its embossed, reflective windows for white-and-cyan slanted quadrants. Countless other corporations followed suit, and some rather appealing logos resulted in spite of the conforming, postmodern rebrand shift.                                  In the 2020s, however, a new shift is taking place. As the rest of corporate America scrambled to keep up with the changing, minimalistic times, a fresh (or a more anton
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Is God Evil? Debunking the Free Will Anti-Theodicy

By Will Sack •
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The alien concept that God could be evil comes from a combination of the problem of evil and a challenge to Christian apologetical logic. Theologians and skeptical secularists would be familiar with the notorious "problem of evil," which articulates the complication that arises out of the belief in a good God and the simultaneous recognition of near-omnipresent evil. How, in other words, could God be all-powerful and all-good if evil still exists? Apologists with responses are swift and numerous. These answers to this proposed "problem of evil" are known as theodicies. And one of the most popular theodicies is one localized around the moral necessity of free will. This particular theodicy goes something like this: God offered humanity paradise in the form of the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, was placed within the Garden to give humanity the choice between paradise (and the consequent submission to God absolutely) and autonomy in an
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Gen Z vs. Jesus on Being "Salty"

By Will Sack •
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Gen Z is admittedly creative when it comes to slang invention. The far-reaching utility that the internet offers has undeniably served as a primary catalyst for the expansiveness of the etymological bog that so many new-age colloquialisms hail from. The scrapyard of the worst of humanity's anonymous selves, and simultaneously the mega-factory of endless creation, the internet unsurprisingly forms some of the strangest concoctions (and sometimes monstrosities) of man's imagination. These concoctions are often distortions of aspects of the real world. One such distortion is the concept of "saltiness." A neologized term meaning angry and snippy these days, "salty" has had a wide variety of meanings. Critical, impolite, tough, grounded, pertaining to salt -- these are just a few of the wide-ranging definitions of the word. But the term as it has surfaced throughout the internet is one relating to vexed behavior. Irate gamers who lose are salty. Incensed commente
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Featured Posts

Gen Z vs. Jesus on Being "Salty"

By Will Sack •
Image
Gen Z is admittedly creative when it comes to slang invention. The far-reaching utility that the internet offers has undeniably served as a primary catalyst for the expansiveness of the etymological bog that so many new-age colloquialisms hail from. The scrapyard of the worst of humanity's anonymous selves, and simultaneously the mega-factory of endless creation, the internet unsurprisingly forms some of the strangest concoctions (and sometimes monstrosities) of man's imagination. These concoctions are often distortions of aspects of the real world. One such distortion is the concept of "saltiness." A neologized term meaning angry and snippy these days, "salty" has had a wide variety of meanings. Critical, impolite, tough, grounded, pertaining to salt -- these are just a few of the wide-ranging definitions of the word. But the term as it has surfaced throughout the internet is one relating to vexed behavior. Irate gamers who lose are salty. Incensed commente
Read more

Netflix Needs To Be Stopped

By Will Sack •
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  Since its inception in August of 1997, Netflix has risen to unbelievable prominence and, to my surprise, dominated the media business. The streaming platform has become so popular that the trademark "N" is recognizable everywhere. I had heard of Netflix as a youth, when it was still in its infancy -- a quaint little library of movies and TV shows. Like an electronic Redbox or something. My family acquired a subscription for it in the early 2010s, which was honestly pretty astonishing to a prepubescent me, especially since I was able to watch the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender , one of the greatest cartoon influences in my young life, now a cultural icon, ready to be explored further in live-action on Netflix. But I'm not excited, and neither are most Avatar  fans because the cartoon series was a masterpiece, and the last time it was adapted into live-action, fans were let down, and not let down easy. Netflix's audacity to touch it is admirable, but it seems
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What's So Wrong With Identitylessness?

By Will Sack •
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Artist: Kwangho Shin A tellingly compelling obsessive tendency of mankind is the search for identity, which, while typically and inextricably interchangeable with the ever-vexing search for meaning, is also an isolated enterprise that more often than not meaninglessly hinges on answering the "existential" query: who am I? Even though this question and its askers have ostensibly multiplied in today's world -- which could be explained away by the cultural resurgence of self-worship -- the quest for self-identification is a species-long one. The king to whom you've pledged most allegiance, the nation from which you hail, the race with which you share the most characteristics, the belief system with which you most agree, the surnames that signify vast heritages of individuals caught in the same struggle for survival and selfhood... these are the identifiers that so many people have died justifying in a meager effort and failure to apperceive the human predicament. Why thi
Read more