Strange Love

A friend recently remarked that she really loved old-time songs she termed "hellfire and brimstone," but she felt the old-time songs didn't love her back.

She was right, but she was wrong.

The Westboro Baptist crowd is an exception I'll describe in hopes of making my point by contrast. I once watched one of their YouTube videos where the girl spent five minutes repeatedly saying, "You're going to Hell," in a perky voice with a smile on her face. One cannot say this with a smile on your face and have an infinitesimal of love in your heart.

I think there is a sort of sadistic personality type who enjoys inflicting emotional pain on others. Such people are beneath contempt.

Such people are NOT the folks who were writing and performing the old-time "hellfire and brimstone" songs.

What were they thinking?

My earliest memories of church involve crying. "Hellfire and brimstone" sermons are not as common as they once were, but if you read any of the old-timers' books about soul winning, they say there ought not be a dry eye in the place. The fellow who wrote the book on "Hellfire and brimstone" just happened to be a Christian philosopher named Jonathan Edwards. He reasoned that a sinner doesn't love God, but he may love his own skin enough to seek a way of escape and thereby acquaint himself with the good news parts of the Gospel. Upon learning what God has done for the sinner, the sinner may think it fitting to love God back.

If you really believe those around you are at risk of destruction, the compassionate thing to do is warn them and share what you know about how to escape.

This line of reasoning makes the "hellfire and brimstone" warnings an expression of love. So, my friend is indeed loved back. But it's a strange love. The only way you can distinguish this love from Westboro's hate is whether the person saying it is crying or smiling when s/he says it.

Now, when writing a plausible villain. The conventional motives are money, jealousy, hatred and revenge--Plus whatever other negative emotions I've overlooked. Better motives are unconventional, positive emotions.

Provided you can make them plausible.

You see, it's because I love that young girl that I inflicted all those tortures upon her and eventually burned her at the stake, because God would judge her witchcraft more harshly and perhaps my efforts turned her to repentance and the joys of Heaven. 

Right.

Religious fanaticism is a dangerous thing when writing villainy department because a) it's overdone, and b) most writers doing it are functionally illiterate of religion. Their villains come off as off-key and get all the trust-cues wrong. And I hate when they do that.

So, I suggest something different.

My favorite villain is the Operative in Serenity. He's perfect because he's not motivated by the stale and trite things. He says he's motivated by Faith. Not the concrete Faith in God that J. Gresham Machen wrote about, or the vague objectless Faith in Faith that Soren Kierkegaard wrote about. His faith in the government who empowers him and sends him on his killing spree.

In a post-Christian, or post-Theist society, there are some folks who will still need to find something bigger than themselves to put meaning and purpose in their life. If they are Atheist, then the government is the second-best thing. Thus, I see a government fanatic is a better villain than a religious fanatic.

Mindful of this, consider this quote by C. S. Lewis:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

So, next time you're wondering about your next villain, perhaps you'll consider some sort of overbearing altruist.

Seals Under The Log

Well, no, they weren't Seals, exactly.

This story starts over 20 years ago. I might have seen something and sent an email asking for a sample issue, but I am unsure. All I know is that I was surprised when I went to the mailbox and found a large manilla envelope addressed to me. Curious. It was postmarked from London, England. Very curious. I carried it inside and opened the envelope.

It contained a single issue of a magazine published by a church in London. The one that C. H. Spurgeon preached at over a century ago. I didn't have time to read it so I put it on the hearth beside my fireplace. And there it sat. For years.

Then it got moved to the basement where all the magazines that pile up get put into bigger piles. To maybe get read someday. But we all know someday never comes and the magazines get tossed out unread. And there it sat. For more years.

Is it a miracle that the magazine did not get discarded unread? No. Miracles don't work that way.

The timing of the next part is fuzzy, because I don't quite remember the sequence of events. But these things happened. I got cancer and I taught Sunday School.

I think teaching came first. And the topic of one of the Sunday School lessons was, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" I'm also fuzzy about how it came to be that I flipped through the pages of the magazine. Was it just random browsing? I think maybe it was.

This magazine had a picture that caught my attention. I don't think I would have read the article had I not seen the photo. A bunch of strapping lads were carrying a honking huge log. They seemed to be having a very bad time of it.

I looked into the article to find out what was up with the picture. Turned out the lads were volunteers undergoing the rigorous training for the British SAS. Those dudes are ninjas. Think of them as tea-swilling Navy Seals with a posh accent.

Most of the bad things that happen in my life are the results of me doing something evil, stupid, or both. It's not rocket surgery to figure out that someone who is in prison for Armed Robbery got there because he did something bad. Other bad circumstances, like divorce, follow prior bad acts like sleeping with your spouse's best friend. We're lucky when we can identify a causal link between a bad action and a bad outcome.

I'm too stupid most of the time to see I'm suffering now because of something bad that I did that led up to it. When a train goes off the rails, there's a lot of twisted wreckage strewn about. My moral derailments cause a lot of grief in my life.

Was God punishing me with Cancer for some prior bad act?

Reading the magazine I learned the log carrying was part of SAS training. All the punishment these lads were experiencing was not because they were bad. It was because they were good. These are the cream of the British military and they suffered because they were the best of the best.

I'm not the best of the best. I'm just a guy who does what he can and trusts in the imputed righteousness of Christ. I hope you'll see it inhere within my life. My Cancer wasn't a judgment, but a kind of preparation. I did not volunteer for it, but I got through it. People said I was brave. I shrug. I got through it.

If someone you know has cancer and you think it is not fair that such a good person should be so afflicted, it might just be God is training some kind of ninja.

Hedonistic Altruism

This has nothing to do with writing or anything except perhaps human nature.

After church today they had the Sunday School picnic which is an excuse to bring dishes and lay on a big feed and eat outside whilst hanging around with friends. This put us on the road home a lot later than usual.

My wife, Mary, and I saw a kid pushing a Honda Spree northbound as I was headed southbound.

As you may know, I ride a Honda Metro on beautiful summer days like today. My brother rides a Puch Maxi that dates from the '70s. So, I whipped the van around and pulled alongside the kid. "Can we help?" I feel a sort of kinship to all moped and scooter riders.

The kid turned out to be a teenaged girl of short stature and a butch haircut.

She said yes and I tried unsuccessfully to start the scooter. It fired a couple times, but I couldn't get it to catch. The next time the battery gave up the ghost. Besides, I didn't have any ether to spray into the carburetor.

She indicated that she was headed toward a friend's house who lived nearby.

Between Mary, the girl, and I we managed to manhandle the scooter into the back of my van. The only tricky bit was getting the stand to engage. Next time we'll put a scooter facing backwards, not forwards. We gently drove up to her friend's house careful not to tip over the scooter.

Having dropped off the girl and scooter at her friend's house, we bid her farewell and went home. I felt good. We'd helped a damsel in distress. Mary expressed how good it felt to help out. We made out way home basking in the warm glow of having done a good deed.

The Savior speaks of the Scribes and Pharisees who made a big show of their alms-giving and religious observance. He advised them to do good deeds in secret that they might be rewarded later publicly. Then he said of the hypocrites that they have their reward. I always understood this to refer to the praise of other men who witnessed their displays of piety.

Now I understand this a little differently.

I've been stuck on the side of the road before. And I've felt helpless in the face of non-cooperative machinery. It is not fun to push a dead scooter a mile or so home. So, I know it meant something to that girl when we stopped.

That made me feel good. It made me feel like a better person than I really am. And I could sense just a bit of admiration in Mary's voice when we were heading home. She thought I was a better person than I really am, too.

And that feels good, too.

This probably is nothing new to most of you. It's no secret that the high-profile altruists like Mother Theresa derive great pleasure from their acts of Christian love.

I don't think they are phonies like the Scribes and Pharisees, but I do think this pleasure is the bulk of their motivation.

The Savior was right. They have their reward, because I know for a fact that I have mine.

My Faith Has Found A Resting Place

I'm having breakfast with my friend Ed and after we'd finished eating, we went outside and sat in the lawn chairs in front of the restaurant to finish our conversation. The topic included Soren Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical as well as a more general discussion of the character of deity.

Then I made mention of the leap of faith.

You see, you can see the chair and you can believe the chair will support your weight, but you actually have to sit in the chair and put your weight on that chair. This is a key distinction in believing Christ and believing in Christ. That matter of head knowledge versus heart commitment that us Evangelicals go on about. If you've been around Baptists like me for any length of time you may have heard this.

And slowly, gently, the back legs of the chair collapsed and I tipped back. I ended up resting on my back with my feet sticking up in the air. I was trapped sort of like a turtle until I could extricate myself with Ed's help from the chair.

I hope deity, or the ghost of Kierkegaard, or my old philosophy prof at least gets a chuckle from this story.

Honor Thy Father And Mother

Christianity shares the moral foundation of Judaism in that it asserts unconditional, perpetually binding obligations upon all mankind: the Ten Commandments. Whether you believe in these things or not, it makes sense to understand what they say, how they reflect human nature, and their relationship to culture.

American society routinely disrespects parents. I've known several professed, devout Christians who have no problem talking about how legalistic their parents were and dysfunctional their families were. I've seen Christian preachers get all Freudian about their childhood wounds rooted in a father's absence or a mother's over-protectiveness.

Had these same people said, "sh*t" or "f*ck," they'd be immediately castigated as sinners. But they slide through slanders of their parents without problem. This makes me think American Christendom regards the 5th Commandment as just a mere suggestion.

Conversely,when I see a Bollywood movie wherein the parents arrange a protagonist's marriage to the "wrong" partner, I shake my head in disbelief at the conflict. Americans are culturally programmed to feel no obligation to honor their parents' wishes in matters of the heart. Any American Evangelical would just shrug and walk away, while thinking herself more righteous than the Hindu who honors her parents.

(A common misconception is that one performs the Ten Commandments to get something nice. A better view is that one performs these obligations because they shape one's character in a beneficial way. In the Bollywood movie, dealing with the disappointment of parental opposition to a potential lover and honoring parental wishes certainly appears to build character. It certainly makes the story more interesting.)

In particular, I think it is interesting when someone honors parents who are not honorable characters. We're all human and we all make mistakes. Parents are certainly make their share of mistakes and some parents are downright evil. What does it say of a child who nevertheless honors that parent? I think it is wrong to excuse evil, but nobody requires a child be an accuser (except totalitarians).

In these cases, I feel much more sympathy toward the character, because my mind revolts at the injustice. It is not fair that the boy or the girl should be denied happiness just to honor the parents' demands.

The first objective of the novelist should be creating sympathy toward the protagonist. Americans like underdog stories. Most commonly the underdog is the poor kid who suffers at the hands of the mean girls. Or the sports team with a disgraced coach composed of a motley crew who faces off against an all-star team. But I think the adult child honoring a dishonorable parent is an even more sympathetic figure.

Who among us hasn't at one time or another said to our parents, "That's not fair."

The writer just needs to create a situation where it really is not fair to evoke the reader's sympathies. Be careful here, some of your readers are like me. I said, "That's not fair," when I was just being a jerk and I didn't know any better. The situation has to be undeniably not-fair.

You can work in a twist, too. Perhaps your protagonist is a scion of a very rich family who says, "If you marry that girl from the wrong side of the tracks, you are disinherited." The twist is to test the kid and the love-interest to see if their love is bigger than money. Just try not to be obvious about it.

Of all the Bible stories, I like the story of Joseph best, because he doesn't become bitter despite being mistreated by his brothers, falsely accused, tossed into jail, and suffering his fellow-prisoner's broken promise.

Here's a fellow who's better than I could ever be because he keeps on doing his best while suffering serial reversals. And when he has a chance at payback with his parents dead and his brothers at his mercy, he points out their evil toward him was part of a larger purpose that saved many lives.

That, dear writer, is what you must do. Feel free to be your own Old Testament deity.

Make your protagonist suffer every possible misfortune or injustice. The greater the heroism in scene N, the greater the unfairness for it in scene N+1. (This is the only thing what prevents Horatio Hornblower from becoming a Marty Stu.) Your story arc should drag  your protagonist through Purgatory. Honoring dishonorable parents is a great way to make your readers sympathize with your protagonist.

Bonus points if your protagonist can win Paradise in the denouement.

Religion and Politics

OK, you can just say, "I hate Steve," now and get it over with. I have friends who have the good sense to say, "Never discuss religion or politics," and this is good advice, too. So, I'm not going to follow that good advice.

It all started when the Pope resigned and they named a replacement Pope. I'm not Catholic, so I don't have a dog in this fight. But I am a Christian, so am not completely disinterested. Whenever anything like that happens I hear stupid things said about Catholicism.

To hear some people talk about Catholics the only things Catholics do is cover-up pedophile priests, discriminate against women, and oppose birth control. Funny how a major world religion should be built upon such narrow interests.

The stupid things I hear said about Catholicism are usually in the form of questions, "Will the new Pope allow female priests (priestesses)? Will the new Pope come out in favor of gay marriage? Will the new Pope declare Zeus the king of the gods? Will the new Pope tell everyone to worship Caesar?"

I knew these were stupid things, but a caller on a radio show said something that crystallized my thinking on the subject: Politics and Religion are opposites.

The laws of a country should follow from the desires and values of that country's citizens. The will of the people can change and that changing will engages politics to change a nation's laws. Is it illegal to marry your same-sex lover? That law is a reflection of the political consensus of a nation at the point of that law being enacted. Should the political consensus change, then the law can be changed to reflect the changing consensus.

For instance, amphetamines were dispensed over-the-counter at the time that Have Spacesuit Will Travel was written. But the consensus of their legality changed by the time Breaking Bad was written. Apparently, the consensus is moving the other way with marijuana legalization.

People should be free to choose their legislators who'll enact laws that reflect the people's will. This is politics.

Religion is the opposite. Religion is what humans do about God. Jews, Christians, and Moslems teach that God dispenses moral laws. These laws reflect each religion's God-concept.

I can speak best for Christianity. Christianity teaches that God does not change. Human understanding of God may change, but the essential deity disclosed by General and Special Revelation does not change. And the essential moral character of deity does not change. What must change is me. I must accommodate my internal moral compass to what has been disclosed to me by Christianity.

There's an old joke about Moses coming down from the Mount saying, "The good news is that I got him down to Ten Commandments, but the bad news is Seven is still in there." The joke works because we all have times when we wish some part or another of the moral law weren't there. But we must accommodate ourselves to it. It does not go the other way. I cannot accommodate the moral law to my preferences.

And you cannot impose your preferences upon any religion's moral law.

I happen to think it abhorrent that people expect to be rewarded for murder with virgins in Paradise. Therefore, I don't belong to any religion that thinks so.

You may have similar notions about one thing or another that the Pope or Catholics believe. If so, you shouldn't belong to a Catholic church.

It's OK to find another church whose beliefs are not abhorrent to you, but it is not OK to try to change that church to make it after your own image. That's how people make Golden Calves.

Covetousness Is Evil

I was talking to Kemp, the fellow who did the trailer for Finding Time, and I mentioned Amanda Palmer's TED talk on "The art of asking."My daughter was within earshot and she asked in disbelief, "How do you know Amanda Palmer?" And I said, "She did the TED talk. How do you know Amanda Palmer?" And she named a band I'd never heard of that made "angsty" music.

The entire exchange had this weird vibe. Like she thought I ought not know who Amanda Palmer is, and that she thought I ought not know that my daughter knows who Amanda Palmer is. So, maybe there was something more than generational going on here.

My daughter knows my music tastes run more toward Southern Guitar Rock and away from angsty oughts alternative/punk/folk. Ms. Palmer says her music is not for everybody after all. So, I'm comfortable being part of that not-everybody.

After I saw the TED talk, I got to remembering that I'd heard about the "Kickstarter Scandal" of last fall. The TED talk was the perfect response. Someone says something nasty and snarky about what you're doing and you can articulate a response in a TED talk that more people will see than read The Newyorker.

I suspect that the Kickstarter Scandal was a faux flap caused by jealous people who didn't get a piece of the action. Or that was intentional obtuseness by people who prefer the current model of record companies, record promoters, etc. and would like to ape Microsoft's FUD strategy for fighting Linux. If you have a healthy income that comes from the status quo, any innovation that threatens to disintermediate you is a scary, scary thing. I think we saw that last year with the campaign of hate against Linda Chorney.

(The Microsoft FUD campaign against Linux was to hire the now-defunct SCO to bring a nuisance copyright-suit against various Linux vendors in hopes of scaring potential Linux customers to use Microsoft instead.)

I think Ms. Palmer's Kickstarter scandal has something to say about humanity as a species and the USA in particular. In response to the flap, Ms. Palmer issued an apology. Not the "I'm sorry" kind of apology you normally associate with the word, but the "Socrates" kind of apology that consists of a reasoned explanation of one's actions. (I certainly hope she is not about to be force-fed hemlock.)

It seems that when you run a Kickstarter campaign that grosses almost 1.2 megabucks people think you convert it into gold coins and dive into it like Scrooge McDuck. Or that somehow having that kind of responsibility turns you into Mr. Monopoly with an affinity for wearing striped pants. The Occupy Movement is somehow involved and the entire question of "the rich" paying their "fair share" comes to mind.

The Scarlet Letter that many want to sew onto Ms. Palmer's breast stands for "avarice." And they think she's earned this letter because she invites local artists on-stage to play with her. Doing so means that she is not paying union scale, nor FICA taxes, either. In her defense she said those exploited artists "like" doing it.

In her defense, I say, nobody holds a gun to anybody's head. Except the taxman.

When I was a child, evil, godless Commies had nukes aimed at us. We feared they would corrupt our precious bodily fluids. Happily, now I drink fluoridated water, those nukes are rusting in their silos, and the hammer and sickle flies over Pennsylvania avenue.

The godless aspect of Communism stems from an inherent contradiction between the Judeo-Christian ethic and Communism. When you hear people talk about redistributive economic justice, you are witnessing a violation of the 10th Commandment. Moses came down from the Mount carrying two tablets of the law and the second finished with, "Thou Shalt Not Covet."

The advocate for redistributive economic justice covets the stuff of the 1%. S/he/it need not covet it for himself/herself/itself--as much as to buy goodies for the downtrodden. This helps buy the votes of the downtrodden, so everybody wins except the 1% who are moving to Singapore. The covetousness of the Socialist is insatiable as Monty Python observed decades ago with lupins.

The 10th Commandment is why Christianity and Socialism are contradictory. Try to remember this next time you're voting for Santa Claus.

And when Moses came down from that Mount the other tablet said, "Thou Shalt Not Steal." Stealing used to be easy to understand. You take one of Moses' stone tablets and he doesn't have it any more. He'd have to laboriously carve words into a replacement. This is stealing.

But what if Moses had the law on two CDs, and you illegally copied one. He'd still be able to boot up Judaism. Would that be stealing? No, it is not stealing. It's a violation of US Copyright law. It's an amazing thing that corporations have managed to confuse the two notions.

Part of Ms. Palmer's $1.2M went into the production of CDs. If you take one of those CDs from her, she no longer possesses it. But if you make a copy from your friend, your friend still possesses the CD.

When you violate US Copyright law, you diminish a bit of scarcity from this world. Publishing companies would prefer that you fill the silence of your life with music, ebooks, and software that they sell. As these things are scarce & in demand, you are inclined to pay more. As they are not-scarce or not-in-demand, you are inclined to pay less. Therefore, your violation of US Copyright law takes bread from the mouths of publishing companies.

Just because I say this is not stealing, I don't want to give you the impression that US Copyright law is in any way illegitimate. Copyrights are mentioned in the Constitution. So some form of copyrights are legitimate intellectual property. In its current form, US Copyright law is the best law money can buy. Try to remember this next time you're voting Republican. Or Democrat.

Amanda Palmer has gone from being a musician with a record deal (from whom each violation of US Copyright law cost her money) to a musician with no record deal who encourages everyone to copy and share her tunes. But she asks her fans for help.

Only 25,000 people provided the money for Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter campaign. The people wanting to pin the scarlet letter on her chest are different people. I hold that unless you were one of the Kickstarter supporters, you have no standing to complain about how that money gets spent.

Ms. Palmer is comfortable with giving away value to her audience and asking for help. There's a sense in which she's like the waitress who quits the job where an 18% gratuity is added to every bill and taken another job where she earns tips on the basis of grace and not law.

I hopes she does well and I hope more people follow her example.

I Hate When They Get That Wrong

Humans clump together in tribes. The criteria for the clumping vary and are multidimensional. And humans may simultaneously belong to multiple tribes. Of course, I'm not talking about the Iroquois or Ottawa, but groups whose members share a particular affinity.

I happen to be a Geek with particular interests in Math, Physics, and Computers. Chemistry & Biology, not so much. Medicine, not at all. I also happen to be an Evangelical Christian with interests that are Puritan, Baptist, and Reformed. Moralistic social activisim, not so much. Westboro Baptist nuttiness, not at all. I also happen to write and read with particular interest in Robert Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, and Larry Correia. William Faulkner, not at all. I hang out with "Makers" and am very excited at the prospect of a maker-space growing in Grand Rapids, MI.

Membership in these groups is not necessarily mutually-exclusive.

Each group has its unique folkways, and lingo. Jokes that are funny in one group may well fall flat in another. Each group has its own inside knowledge. And most importantly: each group has its own distinct "trust cues." These are little shibboleths that are deployed within the group to identify whether the person you're talking to is "one of us" or not. Ferinstance, did you know that a "student" at Oxford is the fella/gal up front teaching the class, and the kids learning stuff are called "members." We'll just change up the lingo a little bit to identify interlopers.

You may have heard of "gaydar" that sense that you have of a person's sexual orientation. Sometimes it's as overt as looking for how one wears a wristwatch, or which ear has an earring. This notion extends to pretty much every tribe. Mathematicians have little "tells" that are different from those of Biologists. If I look superior and attribute something to my having "the knack," it means something to Engineers, particularly those who watched the old Dilbert TV show.

Some tribes are accustomed to being picked on. Before Geeks made good money and had all the best job prospects, we lived in terror of the Jocks. If you're in any group in the "before they were cool" time, you've come to expect abuse. When a TV show comes on and the guy has a Bible and handles snakes, all the Christians I know will flinch: We don't talk that way. We don't act that way. That's not who we are.

To successfully engage a tribe, you've not only got to depict its members in a realistic way, but you've also got to have your characters flash some of the "trust cues" associated with that group. It's very important that these trust cues be used by the right people in the right way.

I was watching a "Christian" movie where the pretty girl is socializing with some unsaved jocks. But then one of the actors playing one of the jocks said a word that only an Evangelical would say in that context. Hold it! That actor is a Christian playing an unbeliever. It took me out of the story and I quit the movie moments later.

Did you note the use of "unsaved" and "unbeliever" in the last paragraph? Non-Christians don't say "unchurched" either.

Evangelicals have this code language that's different from the general population. If you can use it, you'll create a more convincing Evangelical character. But you have to use it right, because being just a little bit off will stand out to your Evangelical readers.

And it works the other way, too. I happen to be fluent in Atheist. When I want to sound more like an Atheist I'll use language just a little different. Ferinstance, I say "deity" a lot more than "God."

I found "The IT Crowd" unwatchable because it got the Geek tribe so wrong. Sure, we're

monomaniacal and we lose perspective of the practical. But we're not stupid. When you depict a member of a tribe you don't belong to acting stupid for comedic effect, you might get some yucks from non-members of that tribe, but you've lost any hope of appealing to that tribe.

In particular, some groups pride themselves in their superior intelligence. Physics grad students and post-docs do not come from the shallow end of the gene pool. Such may have low social skills (which can be milked for comedic effect), but they aren't stupid. "Big Bang Theory" exploits this masterfully. Even the "dumb blonde" on the show isn't dumb.

What I'm getting at here is that in your writing, you may want to depict characters who belong to tribes you do not belong to. Part of your research into those characters includes getting to know that group. If you fail, you'll make cardboard characters or worse a caricature.

Black people are insulted by putting black-face makeup on an actor then making him talk like Li'l Black Sambo. It works the same for Geeks, Christians, or whatever other tribe people belong to.

Dixie and the Guru

Rumor had it that he wore a sheet, sat in a lotus position, and rode around campus in an open palanquin.

The occasion was Cedar What, a mock election held every four years at my alma mater. This mocked the Nixon/McGovern election, but the late entry of a 3rd party candidate won instead.

If you check your history, you'll note that some famous White Guy was the 3rd party candidate in '72, but in Cedar What that year the winning dark horse candidate was a black student.

But I'm talking about half of the ticket known as Dixie and the Guru. "Dixie" was the English prof who was married to Paul Dixon, who went on to be President of Cedarville College. "The Guru" was a philosophy prof named James Murray Grier. Years later, we still called him The Guru.



He was my Guru. The man taught me to think.

I said Jim Grier taught philosophy. He was reputed to have an intimidating vocabulary and was one of the two toughest profs on campus. I took Intro to Philosophy from him and I proved the perfect foil. He would present some theory and an objection would form in my mind. I'd raise my hand, and voice the objection. He invariably slapped it down with the greatest of ease. Little did I know I was reinventing each of the classic objections and he needed only recite the classic counter-objections from memory. I entered this class thinking human will was the center of reality and left this class thinking that it is secondary to divine will.

I still got a B in the class. Cedarville didn't use pluses or minuses. That bothered me because any class I put my mind to I could get an A in. So, I took another and another Grier class. It took me until my senior year to learn how to get an A from him.

In his classes, I was the sole Math major and my questions always reflected the technological or scientific perspective of whatever he was discussing.

I suppose this must have had an impact, because years later he was preaching in my church and I raised my hand. He recognized me, and said, "You! No more questions!"

(Along these same lines, I found a tape of when he came to speak to my Calculus class. As I was listening--years later--a question formed in my mind. Seconds later I heard an annoying nasal voice on the tape--mine--ask the same question.)

It wasn't that Jim Grier devised some marvelous new way of thinking, but that he managed to integrate a diverse collection of considerations into a single, coherent whole. The best summary of his thought was, "He's got it all together."

I well recall sitting in Ethics class my senior year when things slipped into place.

Life may be different for you, but for me I figured out little models of how the world worked. Each was effective in its separate domains. Outside those domains singularities appeared that would invalidate the model. And a different model would have to be created and used. Wittgenstein spoke of different languages that people bring into play in different contexts, and that's similar to what I've got in mind.

When I was in Ethics class, he mentioned a certain school of Christian mysticism that I had been a fan of and properly contextualized it. It was just like putting a piece into a jigsaw puzzle--not the first ones around the edges, but that one where you've got most of the puzzle together and then suddenly the pieces start flying in as fast as you can pick them up.

I suppose you could call me a Protestant Scholastic. It's as accurate as Zen Baptist or Libertarian Puritan. At Cedarville I could say I was a "Grierian" and everyone knew what I meant.

Rest in peace Jim Grier. You left big shoes to fill.

The Christmas Chair

It was 1980 and I was working for the government and my bride of less than six months, Mary, was working for WRBS doing the morning drive-time on-air shift. We had just moved from West Michigan to Laurel, Maryland.

All family was several hours away and we were on our own. It was a good time as we found our own solutions to the nuts and bolts of living and we established new rituals for the holidays with neither parents nor kids to distract us. It was a good time.

I had discovered just a little while earlier that I was a Puritan and thus I felt a need to reinterpret and reexamine all the things that I had taken for granted—for instance, Christmas. That first Christmas far from home, making a home, was the time and place to reinterpret the holiday.

Let’s recap. Christmas occurs on the 25th day of December and we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on this day. Thus you might reasonable expect Jesus to have a birthday of 12/25/00 or some such, but this is not the case. Contemporary Christian scholarship now says Jesus was born a few years earlier. Moreover, we also think Jesus was born in a different season than winter. (Else the shepherds would not be out in their fields watching their flocks by night.)

So where did this December 25th business come from? It came from Pope Julius I. In 350AD he declared Christ’s birth should be celebrated on this day. Why this day? Lots of European Pagans celebrated on December 25th, which is close to the Winter Solstice. I figured Pope Julius I intended to glom onto the pagans’ holiday and make it his own--typical Roman syncretism, baptizing a pagan holiday and declaring it to be Christian. A quick review of the Pagan religions operating in Europe during this period will turn up a fair number of coincidences between Rome’s rituals and pagan ones. As a good Calvinist I wasn’t going to participate in any of that Roman Catholic—Pagan syncretism.

This extended to the Pagan practice of bringing an evergreen tree into one’s house. Animism believes that spirits inhabit things. And the spirit of the tree is strong enough to overcome the spirit of winter, as evidenced by the tree’s ability to remain green through the winter. This notion of spirits in trees is why one knocks on wood. It is to invoke the spirit of the tree to ward off misfortune.

That is just Animist thinking, and I was no Animist then and I am not one now.

Thus I decided there would be no Christmas tree in my house. You can keep your Roman syncretism and Pagan Animism. I would have nothing to do with it.

And thus the trap was laid.

The weeks leading up to Christmas came and I did not buy any Christmas tree or decorations. I would see trees on sale at the shopping center, and I’d summon my will to walk past.

Mary and I planned to fly back to Michigan the day after Christmas to see our families. I had the week between Christmas and New Years off, but Mary had to work at the radio station on Christmas morning. This meant that she got up at oh-dark-thirty and left for work hours before I rolled out of bed.

Christmas morning dawned and I awoke alone in the apartment. Padding around in bare feet, I looked around. There was no Christmas tree.

Someone had stolen Christmas, and that someone was ME.

Something snapped and I had to do something. I scrounged around the apartment looking for materials. We were just married so we didn’t have a lot of extras. I found a broom, a sheet, a kitchen chair and a table lamp. The kitchen chair had a cheesy green Naugahyde upholstery seat and the sheet was a pastel green color. I set the chair in the corner with the table lamp sitting on it. Then I fed the broom handle through the back of the chair and placed the sheet over it. It looked like a chair covered with a sheet. Then I took some books (I’ve always had plenty of those.) and put them around the perimeter of the sheet, pulling it out to give the assembly a sort of lumpy conical shape. The lamp beneath gave off a sick pastel light.

It was the best I could do and it sucked.

Eventually Mary came home from work. I don’t know what she thought of the Christmas Chair, but we sat on the couch that Christmas evening in its muted glow. It was good to be together.

The next day, we flew back to Grand Rapids and enjoyed our families with their real Christmas trees for a few days.

The first thing after we got back, Mary and I went to the Big-T Lumberland and found the biggest artificial Christmas tree they sold. It was 60% off.

We still use it decades later. It has gotten threadbare in places. I've patched broken parts and Mary suggested getting a new one last year.

I wouldn't think of it.

Aladdin vs Harry Potter

I'm a Christian, and if you've got a problem with that you may want to stick around because I'm going to complain about some Christians.


Think back to when the Harry Potter stories came out. He was a witch and he went to a school for witchcraft.

You may know that Christians take a dim view on witchcraft. And for good reason. How can you go about building a technological society when you're fussing with toads and newts? Witchcraft is not real and it does not work. Take your most fervent wiccan and she'll take her kids to soccer practice in a car, not a broom. It is the denial of reality that's at the root of Christianity's conflict with the elder religions termed pagan. There is no spirit in the tree that keeps it evergreen and no reason to bring it into your house so that this spirit might protect you.

Christians also take a dim view of the Devil. You may have heard that he was once an angel and he led a revolt of other angels, and these other angels are now what we call demons. Christians take a VERY dim view of consorting with demons.

Though Christians take a dim view of witchcraft, we have no problem with technology. Isaac Newton figured out the law of gravity and tied calculus to it, and gave us a better explanation for planetary motion than angels pushing them about. Christianity and Science will butt heads from time to time, but never about whether something works or not. Do all those funky things with relativity or quantum mechanics bother Christians? No.

With this in mind let's consider Harry Potter. He goes to school and he learns the rules of how magic works. He's a magic technologist. Brooms fly in Harry Potter's world because there's some force he can control that overcomes gravity. Not much different from science fiction, except it's a "science" that doesn't exist. There's not a lot for a Christian to object to in that sort of magic-technology.

Contrast that with the Aladdin story. I didn't hear any Christians whining when Disney made the Aladdin movies. Or decades ago before Larry Hagman became J. R. Ewing and he Dreamed of Jeannie.

What is a genie anyway? If he's a djinn, he's a demon. And if she's a djinni, she's a lady demon. So, Aladdin and Larry Hagman are consorting with demons. They get magic things done by making a deal with the demon and demonic forces are employed by the demon as he wants.

As you may recall I am a Whig, and the greatest Whig was Daniel Webster who had his own dealings with the devil. Mr. Webster argued in court for the soul of the unfortunate Jabez Stone who'd sold his soul to the devil.

The only difference between Jabez Stone and Aladdin or Larry Hagman are the terms of the deal they make with the demonic.

Happily, these are all fictions and we can sleep easy knowing that the devil's not going to come down to Georgia lookin' for some soul to steal. Nor is there any imp in the bottle.

But there are Christians who gets their knickers in a knot. If they're all mad about Harry Potter, point them to the much bigger problem they should have with Aladdin and Barbara Eden.