Swimming in the Skeptic Tank

Let me just say up front: I'm not a believer in UFOs, at least not "UFOs as alien technology." Some of it has to do with the idea that, if any intelligent creature had the capability of travelling millions of light years to observe us, I think they probably have the technology to fly above us unobserved. Most of it has to do with the fact that "I ain't never seen one, so it doesn't exist to me."

("But what about this Jesus? You believe in him and ain't never seen," says you. "That," says I, "my dear old imaginary friend, is a story for another day.")

I'm skeptical, to say the least. But I also realize that professed skepticism is, in and of itself, at a certain level, just another belief system.

So leave it to one of those whacky, moon-eyed, pseudoscientific UFOlogists to lay out, in plain English, the myth structure of a skeptic's worldview. Ouch. This one kind of hits close to home.

I guess if skepticism is beneficial, it is doubly good to be skeptical of skepticism.* After all, skepticism can only kill that which is not true, right?

*Incidentally, the highest earthly attainable level of the Church of the True Skeptic is to be so "skeptical of the skepticism of skepticism" as to be able to skep a stone from one side of Loch Ness to the other. Without proof.

Bad Reviews and Other Helpful Things

Good young Frank Creed has a pretty slick tale about how a bad review can improve book sales.

Considering I had a really rotten nightmare last night, the above post also helped me to cleanse the mental pallette with a laugh.

Nightmares are good.

Easter Is Every Day, Even for Pagans

I have had a very respectful debate with some brothers and sisters for some time, on the question of Christian festivals and their "origins" in pagan worship/festivals.

Basically, good arguments against my position can be found all over. Most recently, the Factotum's Rostrum has an excellent one.

I simply, and respectfully, disagree.

To quote the author: "Eggs and bunnies have nothing to do with the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Our Lord Jesus Christ created eggs and bunnies. He was at the formation of the very first egg, which happens to contain a simple picture of the Trinity in its physical qualities. When I see a rabbit fly from its warren through the woods, I think first of God who made the creature, then of how I should take flight from sin.

Could there be a new earth (and new eggs and new rabbits) without the resurrection? No.

I realize that Easter is a word that has etymological origins in pagan practices. But ask anyone (other than a candy-starved child) what Easter means, and even a pagan will fumble around about it having to do something with Jesus' resurrection. (Don't take my word for it: a non-Christian author such as Neil Gaiman illustrated this tendency in spectacular fashion in a brief scene in his 2001 novel American Gods.)

The term "Easter" has been redeemed.

See, I'm a huge believer in Christian theft and greed. If there is something good, anything good at all, about anything in our culture, the Christian should be first on the scene, stealing it back for God's glory. We should be greedy for souls, engaging all men in a desperate struggle for their joy.
[I think of U2's cover of Helter Skelter: "Charles Manson stole this from the Beatles. We're stealin' it back."]

It may mean we get a little dirt on us. It may cause our brethren to confuse us for pagans. Heck, I may be wrong, and it may not work at all. But I will try, and here is why:

When I go on constant vigil to keep potential "non-Christian" influences out of my life, I lose my salt. I lose my passion. I successfully isolate myself from the troubles of this life, without ever once reaching out to reclaim them, or more importantly, the people who hold those things dear. Simply put, my Master didn't teach me to look at the things of this world as an obstacle course for which a medal was awarded to those who most successfully avoided touching anything. He taught me to put the things of this world to use. His use.

Engage. Play fair. Steal and be greedy. Leave nothing to the pagans for them to insulate themselves from having to deal with the gospel.

And Happy Easter. Always.

Fishing for Judas

So, Seven Angels has decided to tackle Judas.

This ought to be good.

Gained In Translation

I'm fascinated with Japan. I like Scarlett Johannson. However, if Bill Murray hadn't fallen off the exercise machine, I'm not sure I would love Lost In Translation so deeply, maybe not even at all.

I'm sure that's got to be frustrating for a mature actor like Murray. He's been around for thirty years, and here I am crediting him for a dumber pratfall than he ever had to do when he was a kid on Saturday Night Live.

But I love him for that level of humility. Sometimes, I think that's what great comedy is: human frailty, and someone brave enough to be naked about it.

Comedy has become such a small word. It hasn't been the right size since Dante.

The Origin of Origins

I've come across the old saw about Christian holidays being little more than "borrowings" from old pagan festivals, and although there is truth there, the facts are far hazier (like a lot of history) than people are willing to acknowledge.

Really, the question comes down to this: which came first? True worship of God or pagan festivals? Did pagans invent rest and festival or did God first rest on the sabbath?

Is Christianity truly a latecomer, so informed by the pagan world that surrounded its own nativity that it becomes impossible to separate it from "worldliness" except by strict surgical methods? (i.e. Eschewing Christmas, Easter, All Hallow's and adhering to a stern "1st century Christian" practice) Does sola scriptura extend to all practices, not just theology? If so, how does one recognize St. Paul's appeal to personal conscience (which is scriptural, obviously)?

What, then, do we do about Melchizidek? How do we explain the seed of Christian belief that is planted at cursing of Satan in the Garden?

In Genesis, we see the birth of pagan festival ("you will be like gods") almost concurrent with the seed of Christian faith ("He shall crush your head.") The author of Hebrews reflects on Genesis when he speaks of the faith of Abel, of Enoch, of Noah, etc. all of whom "were sure of what they hoped for, and certain of what they did not see."

What was it that these early people hoped for? What was it that they did not see?

Christ.

The primacy of Christ is well acknowledged, but somehow, we resort to fallible human histories when worrying about the "pagan origins" of Christian practice. What then, are the true origins of pagan copies? From what do they draw their inspiration?

Faith is a Certainty

I can't get around this one today:

"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. " [OTT - Old Troll Translation, from Memory.]

So, wait. Faith is being sure? It is a certainty of what isn't seen?

That's not how it is sold, usually. When it is sold that way, too often it comes in the form of faith's counterfeit: a transactional guarantee - sort of like the name it-claim it promises you sometimes see on the television.

By faith, we understand that the universe was formed at God's command. By faith, Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did, and by faith he was commended as righteous when God spoke well of his offerings. By faith, Enoch was taken from this life without experiencing death. He could not be found, for God had taken him away. Before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. Without faith it is impossible to please God, because in order to please God, one must believe that He exists and that he rewards those who earnestly pursue Him.

Faith, in short, is more than "a belief with some doubts." It is less than "a certainty without humility." It is something else: weaker and more powerful, strange and mundane. Evidenced, unproven and sure.

God is way weirder than me.

The Rise of "Liaries" - The Empty Profits of False Memoirs

I may have mentioned once or twice before that one of my favorite works of fiction purports to be a memoir. It is a dark and joyful work.

But it seems as if the publishing industry is interested in the awful opposite: fictional memoirs purported to be true.

The list of fake memoirs, or, as I like to call them, "liaries" grows every day:

James Frey, Mischa Defonesca, Ishmael Beah, Margaret Seltzer* have all published fabricated memoirs.

Every time new evidence comes out against a "memoir" so many commenters shake their heads and wonder why. **

It seems pretty plain to me. Liars lie, and buyers buy. I, for one, am swearing off memoirs until the publishing industry, en masse, works to re-establish my trust that they know how to check a fact or two.

No wonder people have such a hard time believing in the resurrection. The truth is a malleable commodity to our culture. I don't care how "betrayed" the editors of these books "feel." If they aren't cleaving heads and breaking bones, I'm unimpressed.

One memoir I would read is: Editor's Notes: How I Got Snookered by a Lying Author and Then Burned His House to the Ground.

Now, some criminal journalist has taken the conceit one step further: writing fictionalized memoirs of the recently dead. Esquire Magazine has applied their creative efforts to "imagine" and record, in first person, a diary of Heath Ledger's last days. I'm not linking to it, but it should be easy enough to find. Garbage usually is.

Hang them all.

*The Seltzer one is egregious. Everything in it, everything, is fiction.

**Some even try to continue to "support" the "underlying message" of the fake memoir. This is an impossibility for two reasons: a) a lie never has an underlying message and b) the concept is contradictory even if it could have an underlying message. Lies, even artfully crafted ones, cause people to believe in a counterfeit. Faith in a counterfeit is not measured as "good" faith, and, in fact, leads to a person's destruction. A liar with good intentions can destroy as many lives as a liar with bad ones.

Further Notes on Demon: A Memoir - SPOILERS

**SPOILERS** FOR THE EYES OF DEMON READERS ONLY ** SPOILERS

Please keep in mind that you aren't even supposed to be reading this. No humans allowed. I only stuck this journal on the internet so I didn't lose it under a sandwich or something. Spoilers are a rotten thing, but sometimes it becomes impossible to write about the more complex points of the novel without them. So stop reading. Not that you should have been reading even this.

The memoir is not of a demon, but of an editor at a mid-sized publishing house and his interaction with a demon. There is a point in the story where it seems unclear whether the memoir will be contracted for publication.

So, clearly, there were other hands that reversed this course. How would the memoir read from someone who knew Clay, helped to get it published, but never had any evidence that what he saw was real? I wonder if Clay's publisher promoted the book as the diary of a madman, a straight memoir or as fiction (and attributed it to Tosca Lee?)

I can't remember the term for a sequel that is a parallel to another character's experience (as opposed to subsequent to that experience) but if there's a sequel to Demon in the works, I'd love to see Religious Madness (An Inquiry into the Mysterious Events Surrounding the Publication of Demon: A Memoir). I'd love to see Demon retold from a complete skeptic's point of view, someone who has to choose blindness by the end of the retelling instead of admission.

It would make a great faux documentary, too.

In the Aspern Papers, Henry James recounts a gripping tale of a would-be biographer's attempts to wrest private letters of a famed dead poet (Jeffrey Aspern) from his estate. The book cuts into the heart of the agents of public exposure, and the lengths people will go to either maintain their privacy or capitalize on their experiences in public. As I read Demon, I found new parallels to James' classic novel, and I can't help but wonder: how much of Clay's exhaustion-driven, depression scarred, demon haunted memory made it to the page. How much of what he wrote made it to publication? Did his editors posthumously alter the story in anyway?

Who ensures the publication? The Lord? Or Lucian?

This book posseses my mind with holy fire. I aproach it with the obsession of Roy Batty in Blade Runner:

Questions. Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?

Opening Line of a Novel - Important or Just Crucial? You Decide!

Dale James Arceneaux has a lively post on how to stage a good opening for a novel. I disagree with him slightly, in that I believe that the opening for Demon: A Memoir is actually perfect, not just okay.*

As for me, I'm a hundred pager. If I make it to page 100 and am not yet engaged in story, I'll put it down for good. I also realize that I am not the droid that Penguin is looking for.

*The line is this: "It was raining the night he found me." It works because ostensibly, we are reading a memoir. In eight words, Tosca tells us that this is a biography of a man who is sought under unfriendly conditions, that the story is about a relationship between two people who are not intimate with each other, but needful, and that our hero is hiding from something. If you can say that compellingly in less space, I'd love to see it. The paragraph that it introduced is haunting and tense.

In short, the devil had me at "Hello."

Euhemerus, Myth and History

Euhemerus is a greek philosopher widely recognized as the first major proponent of the idea that Greek myths had their origins in non-supernatural historic events.

800 years after Euhemerus, Snorri Sturluson attempted to trace the origin of some of the Norse gods, particularly Odin, back to historic warlords.

The theory that many mythological figures have a source in history appeals to me on an intellectual level, but, somewhat more importantly, at an aesthetic level.* In congress with that notion is that there are supernatural events included in some histories that are quite different in character and tone than legends.**

This relates to the concept of a pre-apocalyptic gainland. From the post-apocalyptic point of view, pre-apocalyptic myths can form from fragments of history, but - and this is often overlooked - pre-apocalyptic history can seem like myth.

Before the flood, there were giants, descendants of angels, no less, roughhousing, slaughtering, sacrificing, and turning worship on its head. People had fallen into a deep corruption, one that we have likely never experienced in our lives. Civilization had become an anti-civilization - cultural anti-matter, a societal plague. It had to be cut off for any chance at redemption.

After the flood, accounts, both mythological and historical were recorded to reconstruct those prior days. Over time, some folks flip the legend with fact, so that, today, to many people the flood and pre-existing society seems legendary and fanciful. We've created a myth that the Flood Apocalypse is a myth. Call it a myth-myth if you must, but the point is that we are a post-apocalyptic wasteland, recovering from the great Flood, yet we have allowed the accounts to fall into legend.

This causes us to miss both the warnings and the opportunities of these last days. If we could only understand the history of the prediluvian period a little better, we might better see the landscape we walk today.

*In other words, it could be proven to me that, for example, Thor has no origins (disregarding the fact that history/science cannot prove a negative) in a historic warrior-king. I'd accept it willingly. But I'd still like the idea.

**I'm thinking here of a historic footnote I came across a few years ago. It was a Roman account of centurions attacking a big snake. A really big snake. Like 50 feet of snake. But it wasn't listed among stories or legends, but just run of the mill accounts of day-to-day activities. I know this stuff can feed wild-eyed cryptozooligists, but I guess I like my cryptids too much to care.

Freaks & Geeks and Gygax

For one flickering instant, our culture acknowledged a tiny, but important, social development of the concept of community imagination. That instant is enough for me.

Thanks, Gary.

UPDATE: Will Wheaton puts up a lovely excerpt of his book, Happiest Days of Our Lives, in his eulogy to Gygax.

Gary Gygax Against the Giants

Gary Gygax has taken off on one last Lejendary Adventure.

I have no idea if he made his saving throw, but when asked how he'd like to be remembered, he said, "I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

He rolled a natural 20 on that one. A hundred times over.

Thief in the Night, but Not for Everyone

Christians are familiar with the phrase "like a thief in the night" to describe the second coming of Jesus. Non-christians may be familiar with the phrase through the cult classic "Thief" film series, which probably scared the Jesus out of about as many American junior high kids as it scared Him into.*

Somehow, the promise of our Lord returning can be quickly turned into a guessing game or a threat (i.e. Look out or Jesus might catch you where you ought not be!) I sometimes picture a bunch of God-fearing people taking a calculated gamble anytime they pick sin. ("Let's see, here. It'll only take 30 seconds for me to illegally remove the tags from my sofa cushions....what are the odds that, in the course of all history, Jesus would come back in that window of time?")

But, we've got it flipped upside down.

In 2 Thessalonians, where a lot of thief in the night language is used, I think there's some phrasing that Christians may be quick to overlook:

But you, brothers and sisters, are not in the darkness for the day to overtake you like a thief would. For you all are sons of the light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of the darkness. (1 Thess 5:4)

We are not of the night.

We are not of the night.

We are not of the night.



* This isn't necessarily a criticism. The film is internationally known and is popular in cultures far harder and more brutal than free Western nations. I have a theory that the more oppressive your government is, the more "Thief in the Night"** and its sequels may resonate with you.

**Which, incidentally, is produced by what used to be one of the most famous indie religious movie companies in America: Russ Doughton Films.*** Russell Doughton**** is still at the helm, although I believe the ministry has shifted more to distribution than to new production.

***Which, incidentally, is located about 8 miles from my cave, in Des Moines, Iowa.

****Doughton, by the way, was a producer of the original Blob,***** starring Steve McQueen.

*****Yes, I went on this long tangent just so I could say I made a diary entry that connected Jesus Christ, my home state, bad science fiction and Steve McQueen.****** So there.*******

******Interestingly, there is a wholly different way that the four of these can be very directly connected, but I'm not telling how.

*******Also, I wanted to break my asterisk record.

Writing Humorous Fantasy

Jim C. Hines has a great guest post at Writer's Plot on humoring right fantasies, or something like that.

[P.S. - Jim's other ramblings can be found at his livejournal site.]