Gremlins vs. Zombies: The Grempocalypse

The worst thing that could ever happen is that you get your pet gremlin wet* on the same night that a radioactive thunderstorm turns all the dead people into zombies.

Sure, the gremlins would fight the zombies, and the zombies would fight the gremlins, and that would super exciting, especially since the rain would turn the gremlins into more gremlins, and the zombie bites would turn the gremlins into zombie gremlins, and then the zombie gremlins would have to decide which side they would fight on, or if they would form their own army, and fight them both.

But eventually, they'd turn on you. Fun's over, and all of a sudden, you find yourself running through the streets, praying for Gandalf's eagles to swoop in at the last minute to save the day like they did in the Battle of Five Armies. Maybe you can make it until sunrise, and hope that the gremlins have re-killed all the zombies before bursting into flames. The giant birds never come, the sun doesn't rise and you aren't even left with the choice of whether to be turned into a zombie or become gremlin food - the choice happens to you.

Yet, there's a market for these spectacular, doomed experiments in fantasy:

Alien vs. Predator
Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons
Mermaid Yakuza vs. Terminator
Wolfman vs. Dracula
Moriarity vs. Fu Manchu
King Kong vs. Godzilla
Giant Squid vs. Sperm Whale

and of course, the penultimate conflict:

Satan vs. _________

Please tell me you didn't fill in the blank with "God." Because this particular titanic struggle between nasties doesn't include Him, for pity's sake. The word that belongs in that blank is "Us."

As one-time (and in many cases, current) subjects of the "god of the air" we also are locked in mortal - rather, immortal - combat with Old Scratch and his maniacal kin. But we aren't guys in white hats. If the devil is Predator, we're Alien. He didn't think up lying, pride and greed all by his lonesome, you know. Or if he did, we've become quite practiced at the dark arts of his making.

Winner gets to take on God. Unlike, however, the final target in Gremlins vs. Zombies, God isn't about to take off running. In fact, He's got just the sword to cut us to ribbons: His very word that formed us out of nothing is the same thing that will send us on our merry way to the wrong side of Winner-ville.

Yet he doesn't do that. In his wisdom, he reserves the destruction for Satan and his blokes, but for the other half in the wicked match-up? Mercy. Sacrifice. Humilty. A free ticket out.

Weird God, that God. Weirder than Jesse James vs. Frankenstein's Monster.



*A refresher: 1) Never get them wet - they'll spawn more gremlins. 2) Never feed them after midnight - it turns them evil. 3) Never expose them to light** - it hurts them.

**Unless, of course, they've eaten after midnight - then sally forth, Gremlin Hunter. Sally forth.

BloodWaterGodMagic vs. Charlie Brown

Thanks in no small part to Charlie Brown's Christmas Special, we (Christians, non-Christians, and Anti-Christians alike) have been duly guilted into struggling against the insidious and confounding spirit of "commercialism" at Christmas.

Television advertisements extoll the "magic of Christmas" and suggest that that deep and meaningful magic is contained in a Lexus. If you want the magic, you ought to buy one.

I think the ads may be right.

You've got to remember that I come from a magical land of barbed wire and hog manure citadels. The rocks where I make my bed are ensorcelled, and my cave buzzes with the childlike whispers of the faerie-dazzled.

So I don't have the knee-jerk rejection of claims of magic that most humans do. Even if they come from a car dealership.

The fact is this: Christmas is magical. You know this to be true.

The question is, what is the source of the magic?

Some will say that it is a cultural magic: society has determined the Christmas season to be one of familial homecomings and bonding, a time to party with friends and receive presents.

Others will note that there is an inherent magic in the acts of Christmas: that, at some level, Father Christmas is a real spirit, and that gifts are his icons, imbued with some fragment of that unidentifiable joy.

Another possible source is a social-personal one: that there is, as part of the so-called "collective unconscious" a natural "need" for Christmas magic, a sort of primordial, protean phenomenon structured to salve a person's spirit whilst drawing him into the Unknown Greater.

These all have their merits, but none of these notions have the ability to completely describe the source of Christmas magic. After all, gifts can disappoint, depression afflicts, acutely, the lonely at the holidays, and Christmas or its pagan alternatives are celebrated widely, but not universally.

Besides, anyone who knows magic knows that its true source is more, well...sacrificial than that. Whether eye of newt or iocane powder, real magic has components that are rare and hard fought, almost exclusively bought at the risk, and often loss, of blood or life.

Some time ago, near a gnawed-on feed trough, a god burst forth through the blood and water of his mother, in the helpless person of an infant named Yeshua. Certainly, there were miraculous spirits in the world, and strange tidings and joy, but those were ripples from the source of the magic of that hour: a wriggling, swaddled and bloody baby born amidst dung and wheat mash. Those ripples continued out, and later drew rich and educated men to bring extravagant gifts to the toddler to celebrate his reign.

They may as well have left him a Lexus.

That's why I don't have a huge problem with the so-called "commercialization" of Christmas. All of it, the presents and food and excess and laughter, can be taken to points of abuse or exhaustion, but they don't have to be, and, often, more than often, they are not. And these things only exist as radiating ripples of the Magic of Christmas, which has its source in Our Savior, born a man, all those years ago.

The so-called "True Meaning" of Christmas is not "Stop Being Materialistic." It is "Start Living Abundantly in the One Who Loves Abundantly."

And sometimes, just sometimes, an abundant life may be found in the driver's seat of dazzling new Lexus.

Game Theory Answers Ancient Religious Question

What I find most remarkable about the modern mind is how frequently it is shocked to find that the ancients actually weren't insufferable gits.

Yet another source in my bibliography for my forthcoming imaginary work of non-fiction: We Are the Stupid Ones (But Won't Remember That Anyway). Coming soon, courtesy of Totally Random House Books.

How to Kneel Before General Zod

The Kinks in Christ's Kingdom

The Kingdom of Heaven doesn't always seem that great.

If Jesus ushered it in, drew it near to us with his very life, sometimes it is difficult to grasp why it is so unspectacular.

I account for this in a lot of ways:

a) God is humble. It is this very unseemly part of his character that rubs me the wrong way. I like blasting my way through, showing off my superior marksmanship and dazzling feats of cultural bravado. His humility makes me look downright stupid. His kingdom is humble, too. Apparently, keeping me entertained isn't one of its house rules.

b) Kingdoms are expansive, not personal. The Kingdom of Heaven demands more in contribution than it pays out in benefit. Thats what a Kingdom does: stretching out authority over a large community of people. The bad news is that there are no idols to the individual in a Kingdom. The good news is that spreading the authority over everyone means that every one matters.

c) I am the Kink.* Because the Kingdom is contributive as well as experiential, present as well as future, I matter to it, at least as far as I view it. There is a part of me that I try to withhold from God. There is treasure I won't store here, words I won't put here, hope I won't place here.** If it could be done, I rob heaven of its potential.

*And not in the rockin' good Davies brothers kind of Kink.

**Please note that I write "here" and not "there" because that is what we mean when we talk about the Kingdom of God. It isn't some cloud fairyland on a far distant shore in outer space. It is, at least in portion, here. Now. Look it up.