Tag: Christianity

Cheerful Chavez Day!

While it is obviously intended as some sort of stupid snub to Christians, Google is only managing to look petty and underline the importance of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ by pointedly refusing to acknowledge the worldwide holiday:

On Easter Sunday, Google is honoring the birthday of the late labor organizer Cesar Chavez by placing a Chavez portrait within the middle “o” of the Google logo that appears on the homepage of the popular search engine. While Google frequently decorates its logo to celebrate various holidays and special events, it is unclear why the company chose specifically to honor Chavez’s birthday, instead of Easter Sunday.

No doubt some Christians, and even some sympathetic non-Christians will be outraged about this.  I’m not, because regardless of what the godless lords of Google may intend, I know that on thousands of Google-hosted sites, the Resurrection is being proclaimed and celebrated today.

Remember, sooner or later, EVERY knee will bow.  Sooner or later, EVERYONE will acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord. Obviously, this will be later in the case of Google. So what?  I’d much rather see a company in Google’s position illustrate the significance of Easter by this sort of intentional and painfully glaring omission instead of providing some sort of token nod in the form of bunny rabbits and painted eggs.

And really, what can you expect of a company that has to remind itself on a regular basis to not be evil?  If you worked next to a man and had to listen to him repeatedly telling himself, “don’t be evil, don’t be evil”, what would you conclude about his tendencies?

But in light of Google’s effort, if not their success, to control their natural instincts, I should like to wish everyone, not merely those readers who happen to belong to the United Farm Workers union, a Cheerful Chavez Day. (raises fist) Sí, se puede! Stay strong, my brothers!

UPDATE: The amusing thing is that, as Steve Sailer demonstrates, the sanctimonious seculars at Google couldn’t even find a picture of the very important man whose birthday they are celebrating today.

Christ is risen

“On the evening of that first day of the
week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear
of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” 

Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But
he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my
finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” 

A
week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with
them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and
said, “Peace be with you!”  Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” 

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” 

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.””
– John 20:19-29

The other day, Moonshadow wrote: “I’m looking forward to your Easter blog post. My circumstances are difficult and I’m in need of some hope. My trust in God has been sorely tested over the years, but it still remains.”

One of the great misconceptions of the various flavors of Churchianity is that Jesus Christ is some sort of icon, a magic token that will Make Your Life Better so long as the proper incantations are uttered. The Prosperity Gospel proclaims that Jesus will give you a bigger house and a nicer car. The Liberation Theology declares that Jesus is a divine socialist who came to redistribute wealth on the basis of everyone’s needs. The Feminist Gospel asserts that Jesus will relieve women of the oppressive burden of household and sexual drudgery. But regardless of his particular flavor, the Churchian is known for neither his love nor his faith, but his tolerance and his conformity.

This is not Christianity.

We are, all of us, infected by the Churchian disease to some extent. We have all listened to women pastors tell us how safe they feel cuddled in Jesus’s strong and protective arms, to televangelists with slicked-back hair promising miracle cures and new jobs, to priests who promise that if we only endorse homosexuality with sufficient enthusiasm, the Church will rise in the estimation of the world and both pews and coffers will be filled again to overflowing.

This is not Christianity.

Christianity is about the Divine becoming Man amidst blood and animal shit.  Christianity revolves around an innocent man rejected by his people, despised by the elite, declared a criminal by the court, and murdered by the government under the false color of law. Christianity describes a world that is fallen, sinful, and ruled by an evil, sadistic, prideful, immortal liar.

We Christians today are weak. We are soft, fat, and flaccid in our faith. We are the beneficiaries of the greatest explosion of global wealth and one of the longest periods of peace in the history of the world, and we are quite understandably daunted by the sober realization that this Golden Age is rapidly coming to an end. We are lotus eaters, hedonized if not entirely hedonistic, and the soothing whispers of Mammon have enervated our will, our strength, and even our faith. We are the sad and pathetic heirs of the Church Militant, an embarrassment to our predecessors and eminently unworthy of our Lord and Savior.

And yet, we are who we are. We, who worship Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, are the remnants of the victorious Divine Invasion.

On this day many centuries ago, there was little more than twelve frightened and despairing men.  From that small and unprepossessing foundation, the Risen Lord Jesus Christ constructed a Church that brought the Good News to all mankind, that civilized barbarians around the world, that remains the oldest and greatest human institution, and that, despite its corruption and decadence, continues to resist the every-hungry Gates of Hell.

If God could do that with men like Peter, the denier, and Thomas, the doubter who believed only what he could see, what can He not do with those He has blessed because we have not seen and yet have believed?

Jesus never promised us a rose garden on this earth, ruled as it is by the wicked prince who killed him. He promised that we would be hated. He promised that we would be condemned. He promised that we would see our families and our nations divided. He promised that we would be persecuted. He promised wars and the rumors of wars. And yet, somehow, when what he promised comes to pass, we find ourselves troubled and our faith shaken by the very things that should serve to confirm it.

It is not hard to see why so many people of every culture and creed around the world are frightened and losing hope. If you are not concerned, deeply concerned, about the state of the world today, you are either in denial or you are not paying attention. The rule of law is dissolving and the collective illusions upon which our civilization depends are rapidly fading away.  We have lost our trust in our institutions, in our traditions, in our icons, and in our leaders. We have lost our confidence in the certainty of the Worker’s Paradise, in the exceptionalism of America, in the inevitability of the shiny, sexy, secular scientopia, and in the idea of peace on earth through the good will of the globalist bureaucracies.  We have lost our faith in Progress.

We are rapidly coming to understand that there is no hope to be found in Man or the things of Man’s making. But the truth is, the observable historical reality is, there has never been any hope but one. And the foundation of that hope is precisely what we Christians are celebrating today: the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

He is Risen! Christ is Risen!

Persecution in America

It’s fascinating, is it not, how those who deny Jesus Christ, from Roman emperors to petty academic professors, are observably obsessed with forcing others to symbolically reject the name of Man’s Lord and Savior:

A professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Davie campus named
Deandre Poole teaches an “Intercultural Communication” class from a
textbook by the same name.  The textbook calls for an exercise where
students write the name of Jesus in large letters on a piece of paper
and then stomp on it.

Enter Ryan Rotela, a student in the class who happens to be a devout
Mormon. Rotela refused to stomp and complained to Professor Poole,
telling him, “Never do the assignment again because it’s offensive.” 
Rotela also told the professor that he was going to complain to the
university.  Then, according to Rotela, FAU responded by suspending him
from Poole’s class.

It gets worse; the university is now going after the student, not the professor.  That’s obviously questionable.  But as the PJ Tatler rightly puts it, the more important question is this: “Why was there only one student in the class who found stomping on Jesus objectionable?”

Never forget, this is the sort of “tolerance” that the atheists and pagans grant to the Christians after successfully demanding respect and tolerance from Western Christian culture.  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the genuine tolerance that was given to them may have been a serious mistake of cataclysmic proportions for everyone, including the atheists and pagans who have been granted free reign and are foolishly using their freedom to bring down a civilization more than a millennium in the making.

White smoke spotted

“The Catholic church has chosen a new pope. White
smoke is billowing from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, meaning 115
cardinals in a papal conclave have elected a new leader for the world’s
1.2 billion Catholics. The new pope is
expected to appear on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica within an
hour, after a church official announces “Habemus Papum” – “We have a
pope” – and gives the name of the new pontiff in Latin.”
And a million conspiracy theorists held their breath… and were disappointed.

“Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio from Argentina has been elected the new leader of the Catholic Church. The 76-year-old – now known as Pope Francis I — was the archbishop of Buenos Aries and was appointed by Pope John Paul II. Bergoglio became the first pope from the Americas elected and the first from outside Europe in more than a millenium.”

Mailvox: to forgive or not forgive

BR asks about the consequences of cheap and easy grace:

As always, thanks for the work you do.  Your blogs are exceedingly useful to me in organizing my own thoughts on everything from politics to relationships.  Unless I’m completely confused, I believe you consider yourself a Christian.  As you seem to also be a Man of Reason, I assume a large part of your Faith is also rooted in Reason.  I love Reason-based Faith.  One of the main reasons I don’t subscribe to any religion is because I find too many people in religions that subscribe to the fallacy that Religion and Reason are not compatible.  I tend to dislike Atheists for the same reason.  Yes, The Irrational Atheist is queued on my Kindle.

Today’s question is on the Christian Principle of Forgiveness.  Does Christ want us to forgive people who harm us in the absence of any sort of reparation?  And I mean harm, not mean words that hurt our feelings.  Words and actions that cause our standard of living to be reduced.

It seems that most “mainstream Christians” believe Christ taught that we should forgive people who harm us regardless of whether that person makes any attempt to undo the damage they caused.  However, this seems to be to be in direct opposition to Christ’s own actions.  God forgave us our sins not in a vacuum, but only because of Christ’s sacrifice.  This to me is more Redemption, than Forgiveness.  Sinning comes with a price tag, however that price was paid for us.  Had it not been, we would not have been forgiven.  If you and I went to dinner, and I paid the bill, you would not say that the restaurant forgave your debt to them.  The debt was still paid, just not by you.

This position seems to be taken most often in regards to unintentional harm.  Harm done not out of malice, but through negligence and carelessness.  However, this still seems to be at odds with other aspects of Christian theology.  I am not Christian, and therefore will not receive the benefit of Christ’s sacrifice.  Yes he died for my sins, but until I take the additional step of acknowledging his sacrifice and committing to his principles, I don’t get the benefit.  In other words, I have to do something to gain forgiveness.

I agree that a person who makes reparations for harm they unintentionally do should be forgiven.  If a person accidentally rear ends my car, but pays for all of the repairs, it is absurd for me to hold a grudge against them.  On the other hand, if the person accidentally read ends my car, but refuses to pay for the repairs, it would be equally absurd for me to forgive them.  However, it seems to me this is exactly what many mainstream Christians seem to think should be done.

 I’m bringing the question to you because I think it dovetails with the “saving Western Civilization” aspect of your blogs.  It seems one of the biggest problems we have in modern society is everyone going around doing whatever they want without regard to the consequences.  Obviously, when their actions only harm themselves, I don’t care.  When their actions cause harm to another person, they simply say “I’m sorry”, and expect that to somehow be enough.  Unfortunately, “I’m sorry” doesn’t make my car functional again.  This problem is further compounded by the above “forgiveness fallacy”, because society now refuses to hold these people accountable.  I don’t mean in a criminal prosecution sense, but in a social consequences sense.  Because everyone is so eager to forgive everyone else, there are no social consequences for bad behavior.  Because there are no social consequences, the bad behavior continues, and the harm done to others by the bad behavior continues to mount.  This harm ultimately results in misplaced resources, which leads to a lower standard of living.

An example:  I rent my spare room to a tenant.  The lease requires that rent is paid by a certain date, and defines penalties for failure.  The first time my tenant missed his rent, I slapped him with the fine.  He was never late again.  I could have chosen to “forgive” him because he simply forgot to pay, and not levied the fine, but then what reason would he have to pay his rent on time?  The harm done by not paying his rent goes beyond simple financial transactions.  I have my own bills to pay, and depend on his rent to make them.  If he is routinely late on his rent, I have to hold more cash reserves to ensure I can pay my bills on time.  This additional money just sitting around “just in case” is an inefficient use of resources.  It’s either unavailable to purchase goods and services, thereby reducing the number of people employed in the production of those goods and services; or it’s unavailable for investment, which costs me money due to lost opportunities (as well as costing another person an opportunity due the reduction of loanable funds in the system).

Taking the example further, if he were routinely late, but always paid the late fee, I would actually be doing him a disservice to completely forgive him this constant “sin”.  By not holding him socially accountable for this lazy attitude, I provide him no incentive to correct his behavior.  Even though it’s his choice to effectively pay a higher rent than the market demands, it reduces his standard of living.  While I could certainly take the position that it’s none of my business, such lack of concern would seem to be at odds with Christ’s message.  In other words, letting your child eat chocolate cake for breakfast is not love. 

Cheap and easy grace, as well as ready forgiveness for sins not repented, is the hallmark of modern Churchianity.  It is also indicative of a false and overtly anti-Christian religion that cloaks itself in Christian language.  The parents who make a showy scene of publicly providing unrequested forgiveness to the murderer of their only daughter when the man responsible refuses to even admit the crime aren’t demonstrating their Christianity, they are simply posturing emotionally, because repentance is required as a part of the process of forgiveness.

God doesn’t forgive the unrepentant and therefore neither should the Christian.

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” – Luke 23:39-43

Notice that Jesus doesn’t tell both criminals they will be with him in paradise, only the repentant man.  When he does ask his Father to forgive the unrepentant, he does so because “they know not what they do”.  So, my conclusion that the Christian can forgive, without repentance, those who do their harm in ignorance, but not those who willfully intend a harmful course of action.

I would, of course, be remiss if I did not point out that BR is making the same mistake I once made, which is to judge the -ism by the -ist.  This is logically fallacious, particularly considering that Christianity not only accounts for, but depends upon, the imperfection of Man.

The intellectual costs of Calvinism

It is really rather remarkable how many historical and intellectual crimes can be quite reasonably be traced back to Calvinist thought and be considered the natural consequences of Calvinism:

It was, indeed, Adam Smith who was almost solely responsible for the injection into economics of the labour theory of value. And hence it was Smith who may plausibly be held responsible for the emergence and the momentous consequences of Marxism….

Paul Douglas properly and with rare insight noted that Marx was, in this matter, simply a Smithian-Ricardian trying to work out the theory of his masters:

“Marx has been berated by two generations of orthodox economists for his value theory. The most charitable of the critics have called him a fool and the most severe have called him a knave for what they deem to be transparent contradictions of his theory. Curiously enough these very critics generally commend Ricardo and Adam Smith very highly. Yet the sober facts are that Marx saw more clearly than any English economist the differences between the labor-cost and the labor-command theories and tried more earnestly than anyone else to solve the contradictions which the adoption of a labor-cost theory inevitably entailed. He failed, of course: but with him Ricardo and Smith failed as well… The failure was a failure not of one man but of a philosophy of value, and the roots of the ultimate contradiction made manifest, in the third volume of Das Kapital, lie imbedded in the first volume of the Wealth of Nations.”

Adam Smith also gave hostage to the later emergence of socialism by his repeatedly stated view that rent and profit are deductions from the produce of labour. In the primitive world, he opined, ‘the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer’. But as soon as ‘stock’ (capital) is accumulated, some will employ industrious people in order to make a profit by the sale of the materials. Smith indicates that the capitalist (the ‘undertaker’) reaps profits in return for the risk, and for interest on the investment for maintaining the workers until the product is sold – so that the capitalist earns profit for important functions. He adds, however, that ‘In this state of things the whole produce of labour does not always belong to the labourer. He must in most cases share it with the owner of the stock who employs him’. By using such phrases, and by not making clear why labourers might be happy to pay capitalists for their services, Smith left the door open for later socialists who would call for restructuring institutions so as to enable workers to capture their ‘whole product’. This hostage to socialism was aggravated by the fact that Smith, unlike the later Austrian School, did not demonstrate logically and step by step how industrious and thrifty people accumulate capital out of savings. He was content simply to begin with the alleged reality of a minority of wealthy capitalists in society, a reality which later socialists were of course not ready to endorse…..

Modern writers have tried to salvage the unsalvageable labour theory of value of Adam Smith by asserting that, in a sense he did not really mean what he was saying but was instead seeking to find an invariable standard by which he could measure value and wealth over time. But, to the extent that this search was true, Smith simply added another fallacy on top of all the others. For since value is subjective to each individual, there is no invariant measure or yardstick of value, and any attempts to discover them can at best distort the enterprise of economic theory and send it off chasing an impossible chimera. At worst, the entire structure of economic theory is permeated with fallacy and error…. There is a more fundamental and convincing reason for Adam Smith’s throwing over centuries of sound economic analysis, his abandonment of utility and scarcity, and his turn to the erroneous and pernicious labour theory of value. This is the same reason that Smith dwelled on the fallacious doctrine of productive versus unproductive labour. It is the explanation stressed by Emil Kauder, and partially by Paul Douglas: Adam Smith’s dour Calvinism.

It is Calvinism that scorns man’s consumption and pleasure, and stresses the importance of labour virtually for its own sake. It is the dour Calvinist who made the extravagant statement that diamonds had ‘scarce any value in use’. And perhaps it is also the dour Calvinist who scorned, in the words of Robertson and Taylor, real-world ‘market values which depended on monetary whims and fashions on the market’, and turned his attention instead to the long-run price where such fripperies played no part, and the grim eternal verities of labour toil seemingly played the decisive economic role. Surely this is a far more realistic view of Adam Smith than the Quixotic romantic in quest of the impossible dream of an invariable measure of value. And while Smith’s most famous follower, David Ricardo, was not a Calvinist, his leading immediate disciple, Dugald Stewart, was a Scottish Presbyterian, and the leading Ricardians – John R. McCulloch and James Mill – were both Scottish and educated in Dugald Stewart’s University of Edinburgh. The Calvinist connection continued to dominate British – and hence classical – economics.
– Murray Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, 16.5: “The Theory of Value”

While one cannot conclusively ascertain the truth or falsehood of Calvinist theology except through its various departures from scripture, I do find it more than a little informative that the mental gymnastics and contorted interpretations that we have witnessed on numerous occasions here in the past can also be observed in the approach of various notable Calvinists to non-theological matters such as economics.

I am not entirely convinced that Smith’s Calvinism is entirely to blame; I don’t see that a contradiction between the search for an invariable measure of value and a dour Calvinistic tendency to exalt Man’s toil is either necessary or intrinsic.  After all, even after witnessing centuries of futility in attempting to not only define objective value, but make substantive policy decisions on the basis of objective price, leading economists still insist on ignoring the basic concept of subjective value and its inevitable consequences.

Nevertheless, when contemplating the vagaries of Calvinism, one cannot ignore the “fruits” test to which all Christian theologies merit comparison.  After all, if it is reasonable to view my libertarianism as a natural intellectual consequence of my aprevistan free will theology, then surely it is every bit as reasonable to suppose that fatalism, irresponsibility, socialism are at least a possible consequence of a omniderigent Calvinistic theology.

One of the fascinating things about Rothbard’s magnum opus is the way in which the atheist Rothbard came to see the importance of the religious perspective, both overt and implicit, in the formulation of economic theory, past and present.  Indeed, it would not be exaggerating matters to regard economics to be less a science or a philosophy than a series of competing theologies masked by a thin pseudo-scientific layer of statistics and mathematical equations.

Music from the Responsible Puppet

The Responsible Puppet writes:

Several years ago I wanted to teach my kids the weekly bible verse from
our church’s five year bible memory program so I started making up
songs. One of the pastor heard about it and asked us to sing at the
yearly bible verse kick off. After that, people started asking us to
record.

We started off slow and rough and we have
now produced five CDs. The most recent CD is the entire Sermon On The
Mount (every word, every verse), using several musical styles and the
gifts of nearly fifty musicians and multiple song-writers. It’s good,
main stream, not highly-produced family-friendly music. It includes the
Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and many other favorite passages.

Just to be clear, this is the RP’s deal, not mine.

Mailvox: where are the miracles?

DL has a question concerning the apparent absence of Old Testament miracles:

I would like to say that I have been reading your blog for over half a year, maybe a little bit longer now. You write about a lot stuff that I have thought for years, it has just given me the evidence and confidence to speak my opinions besides just sitting quietly by while people say stuff I don’t really agree with.

The point of this email is to ask your opinion on a problem I came across during a debate I was having with a friend over the existence of God. This debate has been going on for a while and slowly the tides is turning from him controlling the debate to about a mutual battlefield. The idea of God being omniderigent really put a cap over some of his arguments.

Things were going ok until I was asked the question of “Why doesn’t God do any of the big miracles that he did in the bible today?” What he meant by this is the parting of the Red Sea, destroying a city with fire, and raising people from the dead. I was unable to come up with a completely logical solution for this question. I done some research on apologetic websites on why God would do this and the answers are a little unsatisfactory and doesn’t really answer the question in a logical way.

I would think the answer is fairly obvious.  First, God clearly does miracles for specific reasons.  Consider the repeated response of the Israeli people to His miracles; they kept returning to their false idols and their evil ways, and rejected Him for an earthly king.  Why would it surprise anyone if He stopped bothering to intervene on their behalf when they repeatedly turned their backs on Him after witnessing them?  Jesus himself had the people turn on him despite his miracles and even pointed out that people would not believe regardless of what they had seen with their own eyes.

Second, what would the point of any such divine miracles be?  The Bible makes it clear that there will those who believe without seeing, and Richard Dawkins makes it clear that even if God Himself appears and tells him that he is wrong about His existence, he will not believe.

When X doesn’t happen, the correct question is not “why did X not happen?” but “why does X happen and is there reason to have expected it to happen in the first place?”

Do caterpillars fear the cocoon?

I know all atheists are not in denial concerning their mortality.  But it is informative to see how people tend to become more open-minded towards religious matters as they approach life’s finish line.  I tend to suspect the relative irreligion of the young is more indicative of an erroneous belief in their own immortality than any sort of genuine disbelief.

 My father has lived in a state of blissful denial his entire life. He
used to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day, and until he was seventy
he drank a quart of scotch a day. His diet consists of steak, salami,
potatoes, bread, cheese, mayonnaise, ice cream, and pie.

By this afternoon, my father’s pain was alleviated substantially, and
he began bitching about how he was going to get off the oxycontin after
he recovered. He told me recently that until he was eighty, he honestly
thought he’d live forever. I didn’t say, “Really? You thought you’d
live in your house here in Los Angeles for trillions and trillions and
trillions of years, making your wooden toys, watching Bill O’Reilly, and
eating salami sandwiches with an inch of cheddar cheese, for all
eternity?”

I didn’t say that because my father’s fear of death is irrational. It
would be cruel to subject him to that sort of conversation…. When my father was eighty-three, he had an operation on his hand.
Since he takes blood thinners, any surgery is risky. They had to prepare
to do an emergency transfusion. In discussing his fears with him, I
mentioned that I couldn’t donate blood because I lived in Britain for
two years during the eighties. Due to the risk that I may have ingested
the prion that causes Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, I’m permanently barred
from donating blood. This made my father terrified that he might get
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease if he got a transfusion.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It has a forty-year incubation period.”

His face fell. “Are you saying I’m not going to be here in forty
years?” He was horrified and his feelings were hurt. I thought he’d
laugh, but I’d scared him. He went to bed chilled to the bone at the
thought that he might not live to be 123.

We are all going to die eventually.  After a long life of joy, happiness, love, and good works, one hopes, but regardless, sooner or later, the final day will come.  This is why it is vital for us to make the most of our lives, to balance the urgent need to make a living and support our families with truly important matters such as serving God, spreading the Good News, and making some sort of positive mark to permit future generations to realize that we were here.

We can spend our days seeking mindless pleasure, but hedonism burns out fast and leaves little more than a burned-out shell behind.  We can live in fear and denial, or we can live in nihilistic stoicism, attempting to manufacture our own meaning and desperately trying to convince others of what we do not truly believe ourselves.  Or we can live by faith, trusting God, accepting that we are merely caterpillars and death is nothing more than a cocoon we must endure before we can take flight.

And what is true of men is true of nations.  America is entering its cocoon.  Who is to say with any certainty that what will eventually result will not be better than what came before.

Of language versus substance

Let me be first perfectly clear about one thing.  I could not care less about the so-called “Christian” market.  I have never been a CBA author, I will never be a CBA author, and while I am an evangelical Christian, I am not of the evangelical Christian culture.  I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the works of the modern authors who are popular within that world, and as a writer, I consider my peers to be George R. R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and Steven Erikson, not Jerry Jenkins, Ted Dekker, or whoever happens to be writing the books du jour in that market.

To me, a Christian novel is one that is written from a worldview perspective that contains the idea that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of Man in some form.  It doesn’t matter if the idea is overt or an analogy.  That’s it. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are clearly Christian works, as is Ray Bradbury’s excellent short story, “The Man”.  And yet, none of these three works ever so much as mention the words “Jesus Christ” or even portray various Christian activities such as baptism or communion.

My view is clearly not the most common opinion.  And while I certainly respect the right of my fellow Christians to place a more stringent series of requirements on what they believe is, or is not, Christian fiction, I really don’t care in the slightest what their opinion happens to be.  To a certain extent, I suspect that the divide centers on the idea that a Chinese novel must be either a) written by a Chinese man and set, at least in part, in China, or b) written in the Chinese language.

Now, I am a Christian, and the various books and stories in the Arts of Dark and Light series overtly utilize something that is clearly recognizable as Christianity in a manner that is historically consistent with the medieval milieu.  Some characters are observably “Christian”, others are pagan, others are simply… something else.  But I don’t write in what could be described as the contemporary Christian language.  And therein lies the difference.

I hadn’t intended to say anything about what happened right before A THRONE OF BONES was published, but as it happens, my publisher at Hinterlands has broached the subject in a surprisingly candid article about his decision to publish the book on the Speculative Faith Blog.  He writes:

Things were going along pretty well until two days before the book was to release. I got a note from the folks at a prominent Christian fiction writers group in America saying that if we released this book, they would take MLP off their list of approved publishers. That meant that all MLP books would not be eligible for their annual award.

As much as I believed in this book and its author and our goals, I was not prepared to let one book sabotage the chances of all my other authors receiving an award I think has value.

Oh, the drama. Was I going to cancel the book? Was I going to go through and remove everything this organization found objectionable? Was I going to hurt all my other authors? Was I going to succumb to what some folks said amounted to blackmail? (I didn’t think it was blackmail, by the way. I saw it as them adhering to their guidelines.) Remember, this was all happening 36 hours before the book was set to release.

I finally asked the organization if it would change anything if I created a new imprint and released the book under that imprint. They said, “Oh, yeah. If you did that, the problem would go away.”

“Really?” sez I. “All my other books would still be eligible for the award?”

“Sure.”

And thus, Marcher Lord Hinterlands was born, a brand new imprint for one book (so far).

A Throne of Bones by Vox Day released on December 1, 2012. It weighed in at just under 300,000 words and over 850 pages in hardcover. It is currently our overwhelming bestseller both in hardcover and in e-book.

I am one of those who saw the situation as something uncomfortably akin to blackmail.

Now, I should also mention that I am entirely happy with the solution; what author wouldn’t like having their own personal imprint?  Nor did I have a problem with the organization telling Jeff that my book would not be eligible for any of the awards they give out.  I also think that the way in which the situation was speedily resolved to everyone’s satisfaction was a testimony to the way that Christians with strongly differing opinions can come and reason together to find a way past their differences.

However, having been blackballed on at least two occasions at different publishing houses, (I’m not being paranoid, I was told as much by the individuals within the publishers who originally approached me and asked to publish my work; on more than one occasion I’ve been paid to NOT write a book), I think it is unwise for Christian organizations to be seen appearing to practice the same sort of blackballing, and worse, guilt by association, that I’ve seen in certain secular publishers.  On the one hand, I think it is wrong for secular publishers to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing their specific left-wing ideology on the market, on the other, I think it is wrong for Christian publishers and other professional organizations to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing a highly antiseptic view of what is, and is not, Christian, particularly when that view appears to be based more on cultural values than upon genuine spiritual or doctrinal issues.

The most problematic aspect of the situation, in my opinion, was that the organization asked to see the manuscript before it was published, thereby causing it to look as if they were behaving in an inappropriately censorious manner.  While they certainly have the right to act in whatever manner they see fit ex post facto, the attempt to intervene prior to publication was, in my opinion, totally unacceptable and amounted to the same sort of ideological policing that I have criticized in the SF/F market.  I tend to suspect that they were merely trying to anticipate a potential problem and head it off at the pass, which is what ultimately happened, but nevertheless, I don’t think that anyone except the author and the publisher should be addressing these sorts of issues prior to publication.

I leave it to the readers to decide whether my books are Christian fiction or not.  I don’t care.  I consider them to be epic fantasy, written in the tradition begun by George MacDonald and exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien.  And to those who will roll their eyes at the idea of “a Christian answer to George Martin” and imagine it is meant in the Stryper sense, let me hasten to disabuse you of that notion.  A THRONE OF BONES is neither an homage nor an imitation, it is a challenge.  It is intended as a literary rebuke.

I believe Martin and some of the other authors of epic fantasy have not extended the sub-genre so much as they have betrayed it.  And in doing so, even as they have attempted to make their works more “realistic” than those of their epic predecessors, they have actually made them much smaller in terms of the human experience.  In their colorblind rejection of what they suppose to be “black and white” morality in favor of their beloved “balance” and “shades of gray”, they have inadvertently turned their backs on the full rainbow spectrum of colors.  They paint ugliness, but no beauty.  They sketch images of hate, but none of love.  Their sex isn’t erotic, it merely the slaking of appetites.  Their work, for the most part, is quite literally and intentionally soulless.

I’m not at all interested in attempting to become their polar opposite, as some erroneously see it.  Still less am I trying to write some saccharine, watered-down version of their works.  Instead, I’m attempting to embrace the whole.  Good and evil.  Love and hate.  Joy and sorrow.  Beauty and ugliness.  Art and philosophy.  I am not saying that I have been, or will be, successful in this, I am merely pointing out that to claim that A THRONE OF BONES is an imitation of Martin, or any other author, is not only to miss the point, it is missing the entire conversation.