Tag: Christianity

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.

Free will and fiction

Mike Duran lists the top five cliches of the Christian writer:

Having frequented Christian writing circles for some time now, I’ve
heard all the spiritualized slogans we believers like to regurgitate. Here’s my Top 5 clichés that Christian writers use.

5.) “God’s called me to write.” — Funny
how God never “calls” Christians to be sales assistants, lay reviewers,
work in circulation, be an advertising manager, or write obituaries for
the local newspaper. You’d think that writing novels was the top of the
Christian publishing holiness hierarchy.
4.) “It just wasn’t God’s will that I… (fill in the blank).” –
“God’s will” is a favorite “out” for Christian writers. Most often, the
saying is followed by things like “find an agent,” “sell a lot of
books,” “finish the manuscript,” or “advertize aggressively.” Poor God. I
wish He’d get His act together so your career can finally flourish.

I find the public profession of “God’s call” to be about as credible, in most circumstances, as the way in which people who recall their past lives always seem to have been some Egyptian princess or European queen; no one ever used to be a peasant girl who died of malnutrition and smallpox at the age of twelve.  It’s remarkable how often God is said to call people to do what they quite clearly want to do of their own accord.

As for God’s will, in this, as in so many things, we see the idea of divine omniderigence tends to remove both agency and accountability from the individual. 

Writing fiction is, in its own small way, an act of creation.  The author is the god of his own little world, which may be why the idea of writing fiction is so much more appealing to many would-be novelists than the actual act of writing it.  And yet, even the human author, who has complete and total control over his characters, often finds his control constricted by the desire to make them behave in a self-consistent manner.

In like manner, perhaps an all-powerful God might find Himself constrained, not by any external limits on His power, but rather by His desire for artistic consistency and aesthetic integrity.

Merry Christmas

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
 
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
 
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
 
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

WND column

The Mystery of Christmas

This Christmas is a season for despair and disquiet for many Americans. Approximately 47.7 million of them, one in every six, are on food stamps.  That is 16.1 million more than were being fed by government assistance in December 2008. More than 100 million working-age Americans do not have a job. The U.S. share of global wealth, as measured by GDP, has fallen from 31.8 percent to 21.6 percent in the last 10 years. A full 28 percent of Americans have no savings, not even for emergencies.

Most of us are having smaller and less luxurious Christmas celebrations this season. We are buying fewer and less expensive presents for each other. What has been a vague feeling of uncertainty has given way to the sober realization that we are facing more than an economic bump in the road; many are beginning to recognize that the decades-long party has ended, and the consequential hangover is just beginning.

The loneliest time of the year

A female commenter at Alpha Game describes how Christmas can be hard on the lonely:

This is my second Christmas with no family and no friends, and I’m at the point where I’d lay down my life for someone who made me feel like he or she cared.

This is one of the downsides of the secular aspect of Christmas that stresses holiday togetherness.  It can be very hard on those who don’t have friends and family to witness the merriment of those who do.  However, it is important to remember that in some cases, the apparent happiness is a mirage, or at least, a collective self-delusion.

When I was in college and for several years afterwards, my family had literally picture-perfect Christmases.  As the White Buffalo, an occasional guest at our Christmas Day dinners, once commented, the experience like living in a Christmas commercial for Neiman Marcus.  From the moment that the guest arrived in the beautiful white marble foyer amidst the softly falling snow and was immediately handed a hot buttered rum by my grandfather, to the postprandial arrival of Big Chilly and his family to partake in the devouring of the pumpkin and pecan pies, everything was aesthetically perfect and utterly enjoyable.

Those gorgeous images are now pleasant memories.  But the family is as dead as my grandparents, fractured by lies, greed, deceit, and sociopathic self-interest.

And yet, there is still no shortage of joy.  We have new traditions, with new family members who have never known what they are missing.  There is no snow; the grass is green as I look outside the window today.  Instead of the dulcet strains of Handel piped throughout the vast house, I hear Maddens on the PS/3 in the next room.  There is no one to serve hot buttered rum and no one will drink it.  No one will arrive after dinner, their eyes bright with anticipation and their cheeks red with the cold outside.

But the ham will arrive, massive and steaming and looking like something out of an Asterix and Obelix comic.  The wine will flow, white and red, and the egg nog will beat its predecessor hollow.  A dash of kirsch will enliven the fondue and if the presents are not stacked halfway to the ceiling, the good cheer of the recipients will be in no way diminished, not even by comparison.

And yet, these new traditions too are an illusion.  The children will grow.  The butcher will retire.  One day I will follow in the footsteps of that smiling server of hot butter rum.

The only thing that will remain, one thousand years from now, is the original reason for the celebration.  It is the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, we celebrate; that fact will remain as true tomorrow as it is today and as it was yesterday.  And no celebrant of that holy birth can ever be alone, because she is bound into the great shining web of believers, past and present.

So don’t allow yourself feel alone this Christmas season because you are not.  Buy some toys and sweets and bring them to a shelter.  Join the Salvation Army and help them feed the homeless.  Go to one of the midnight services that will be held around the world on Monday, preferably at a strange church where you know no one, and permit yourself to be engulfed in the worldwide joy at Jesus Christ’s birth.  Even if you have no hope, remember that the Word became flesh in order to bring hope to the hopeless.

Mailvox: Free will and Romans 1:24

JJ asks about an approach to omniderigence that is new to me:

I’m a long time VP reader and a believer in both God and free will
who has encountered the latter part of Romans 1 as an argument against
free will. My opponent claims that either God prevented jews before from
committing the various sins listed, or caused them by making them sin
as a punishment, when the Bible says that He gave them over to sin.

My take on the question is as follows: Paul does not explicitly state
that God was preventing the jews’ free will either before or after. By
abandoning them to their sin it simply means God gave up hope on them
and the sins listed after weren’t his causing nor will, and God didn’t
prevent them from committing the various sins listed at any time. This
raises the question if the listed sins were even happening only after
God abandoned them or did they go hand in hand with idolatry and
suchlike?

Am I twisting the Scripture to suit my wish to see free will when
there is none? What is your view of the latter part of Romans 1?

P.S. Please pardon my english if it’s clumsy, it’s not my native tongue.

 The obvious thing is to look first at the entire section, beginning with Romans 1:18 and titled “God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity”.  Romans 1:18-25 states:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  

For
since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal
power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from
what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For
although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave
thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts
were darkened.  

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.  They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”

There are a number of interesting points raised by this passage.  First, God doesn’t treat everyone equally.  He deals with them in response to their actions.  Second, our thoughts are not always futile nor are our hearts always dark.  Third, our sinful desires are from our hearts, which are somehow distinct from God.  And fourth, this passage is indicative of the existence of free will, not evidence of its absence.

When one “gives X over to someone else”, one is not dictating their actions, one is withdrawing one’s own influence over X and permitting other influences to take precedence.  If Man had no free will, God would have nothing else to give him over to; He would simply be giving Man over to Himself.  But that would be to make God the author of the very sinful desires and wickedness that inspires His wrath. which would indicate a schizophrenic Supreme Being.

JJ’s opponent’s argument is easily dismantled because it depends upon the idea that the Jews were not committing the sins referred to in this passage prior to the giving over.  I don’t believe that to be the case, given the numerous references to sexual immorality in the Old Testament.  But the argument is also erroneous on the basis of the passage itself, as I suspect even some of those belonging to Team Calvin will agree.

God hates strength and beauty?

This post by Bruce Charlton on the evils of weightlifting strikes me as not only perverse, but downright irrelevant in the way that only the True Churchian can manage:

One of the evil signs of the times is the increased prevalence of intensive weight-training. This is part of a narcissistic, self-regarding, self-advertizing and physiologically- and psychologically-deranging package of extreme exercise regimes, extreme diets, and extreme chemical intake (especially androgen and growth hormones, but other drugs as well – continually expanding).

While Charlton points to the drugs as a useful red herring, it is clear that his argument is actually directed against all weightlifting and intentional body improvement.  If he lifted regularly himself, he’d know that the difference between a smoothly sculpted quasi-swimmer’s physique and a bulked-up bull’s physique is mostly in the amount of weight one lifts, not the time spent in the weight room and/or pool.  It would be interesting to know if he similarly objects to swimming and jogging, which can take up even more time than lifting does.  And while it cannot be denied that vanity plays a part in the pastime, he’s missing the personal challenge aspect that is much more important.  It’s not vanity that causes the lifter to go for that one more rep when his muscles are burning as if they’re on fire and his energy is rapidly dropping to zero, it is the desire to master the weakness of the body.

More importantly, he is spurning the manifold benefits of the discipline involved, discipline that is so obviously lacking in modern society.  It is simply ludicrous that in a post-Christian West, where a ludicrous percentage of the population has lapsed completely into gluttony and sloth, waddling from one sugar distribution point to another like addicts seeking their next fix, Charlton’s criticism is focused on one of the only elements of the population successfully resisting this decline into mindless obesity.

Who is giving into the flesh, the man who is ruled by his desires or the man who mercilessly tames them?  Indeed, the routine Charlton describes is more akin to those regarded as the holiest of men throughout most of the Christian era, the ascetics who mortified their flesh.  I am not saying weightlifting is akin to holiness; its purpose is not the glorification of God, after all, but neither is it the “rooted, habitual sin” he claims it to be.

Possibly influenced by the Greek ideal, Paul writes the following in 1 Thessalonians 5:23: “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Chris.”   Because weightlifting strengthens and preserves the body, because it strengthens one’s ability to tame one’s bodily desires and temptations,  it is not only compatible with a Christian life, it is advisable.


Moreover, weightlifting provides more than strength and self-discipline.  I always appreciated the sign over the mirror in the free weight room at the Northwest Fitness Center in Fridley, which said something to this effect:

This place is for the weak, that they may become strong.  This place is for the strong, that they may become humble.

The iron knows no mercy.  The iron strips away pretensions.  The iron reveals character.  This is not the hallmark of evil. 

All that being said, I think Charlton’s position is born more from ignorance than fundamental wrongheadedness.  No man who is so sound on the weaseling and treacherous  mendacity of Rowan Williams can be totally misguided.

Mailvox: The evidence for God

I really fail to understand why so many Christian apologists have such a difficult time answering such easy questions:

Don’t know if you’ve ever seen this before.  In my opinion this little kid embarrassed Eric Hovind. Eric may even have a valid point he’s trying to make but I’m not sure exactly what it is. I know its hard to present a coherent summary of evidence for God very quickly (your debate with Dominic has really given me some food for thought when thinking about evidence for the existence of a deity) but what would you give as a very short, snappy answer to someone who asked “What is your evidence for God?”

I don’t know who Hovind is, but I tend to agree.  I stopped watching after Hovind said “without God, you can’t know anything.”  Even if that is perfectly true, it’s an incredibly stupid answer.  One might as reasonably answer “without oxygen, you can’t know anything”, and to as little effect.

The correct answer concerning the evidence for God is precisely the same as it is for practically everything else in the historical record, which is to say the copious documentary evidence available.  We can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than we can doubt the existence of Alexander the Great, Abraham Lincoln, or any other human being who existed before the invention of audio and video recording and for whom there are physical artifacts that support the documentary evidence.

Can skeptics produce plausible explanations for why so much false documentary evidence of God exists if He does not?  Sure.  Just as I can plausibly explain that the myth of George Washington was invented in order to provide Americans with founding Romulus-style figure of reverence in order to compensate for their lack of kings and common history.  I mean, there were no cherry trees in Virginia.  And isn’t it ludicrous to take literally the myth of Washington’s rjection of the proffered crown when the story is a patently a straightforward imitation of the Roman dictator Cincinnatus.

As for the other part of the question, where the boy declares that communication with God is simply a part of one’s brain talking to him, I would have asked the kid how he was able to distinguish between one part of my brain talking to me and an alien transmission from Alpha Centauri.  I would have also asked him precisely what part of my brain was doing the talking, and to what, precisely?  I would have pressed him until it became obvious that he knew nothing of neuroscience, was simply parroting something he’d been told, and that his assertion was actually less credible than the God hypothesis.

It’s one thing to claim that your brain must be talking to itself when you’re the only one who hears it.  It’s another when other people hear it too.

Most modern Christian apologists are incompetent because they approach the discourse as a chance to explicate theology rather than understanding that it is a form of intellectual combat where the goal is to discredit the interlocutor.  So, like Hovind, they explicate a little theology that looks like an irrelevant evasion while simultaneously managing to get intellectually discredited by young boys.  Frankly, I’d be surprised and a little disappointed if I didn’t have the kid in tears and questioning his faith in science within minutes after asking such a pair of stupid questions.

First things first.  Destroy the interlocutor.  Answer every question directly, on his terms, and then go after the vulnerabilities they reveal with a flamethrower.  Only then, when you are standing upon whatever quivering ashes remain, can you explicate further if you wish.

Happy Thanksgiving 2012

I hope this Thanksgiving finds you with many things for which you are grateful.  Among the many things for which I must give thanks to God are my loyal and intelligent readership, who are as quick to correct my errors as they are to commend my insights.

Even though we dwell in a place where the American Thanksgiving is not celebrated, Spacebunny presented an impeccable turkey, accompanied by her excellent mashed potatoes and other side dishes, then followed that up with home-baked pumpkin and French Silk pies.