Justify My Love

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     As a Christian we are suppose to be in the world, but not of it, and for me that is one of the hardest things that I struggle with daily. There are things in my everyday life that do not glorify God, or even come close to it. Some people wouldn't think of it, but it is somewhat difficult to be a nerd and a Christian at the same time. A lot of things in the nerd world conflict with the Christian worldview and could even be considered blasphemous.


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     How do I tell other Christians that one of my favorite video games is one where you are trying to survive on an island while mercilessly killing off enemies who are part of a crazy cult? Did I mention that said cult practices human sacrifice? How do I tell other Christians that my favorite series of books is about private detective who is also a wizard that had a remnant of a demon riding along in his head for a a while? Should I mention that having that demon in his head made him capable of using magic that had a touch of brimstone to it? Or should I mention that his brother is a vampire who has incubus like powers and feeds off of women's "bedroom vibes"?



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And how in the world do I justify to other Christians that my favorite weekly television show is about two brothers that go around the country hunting supernatural predators including; Demons, vampires, changelings, ghosts, sometimes angels. Speaking of the angels in this show most of them are d-bags except for one. God is constantly absent and has left a mess basically. Not to mention if the brothers need to summon help or bind a supernatural foe they use occult spells that involve their blood and things that some might think unsavory. It's probably the most blasphemous show on network television in religious terms.

      I've mentioned before in at least two other blog entries that I grew up going to church all of my life and that in the 1980s there was a particular movement by churches to warn us about worldly influences. Church leaders criticized the music industry and Hollywood. Then of course there was the explosion of AIDS and church leaders were quick to say that these diagnoses were the result of living a worldly lifestyle. In part they may have been right back then, but the delivery of such a message was awful. What does that have to do with this blog entry? Well, I think people who started out in that era and have the same interests that I do might have a great sense of conflict within them as a result of past dogmas they've experienced.

     I've come to an age now where I really want to explore my faith and grow in it. Doing so questions have arisen like "Are these interests helping me or hindering me?" and "Are people going to consider me a hypocrite for talking about God to them and finding out I like Harry Potter?" I admit that while searching for Bible verses to help me with this dilemma I didn't find what I hoped for initially. What I did find farther down the list was verses about loving your neighbor and treating them with kindness and showing Christ's love for them. I want to be a beacon for others to lead them to God, but I have to remember that too much piety is a downfall. Nobody likes someone with a "holier than thou" attitude, it is often a turn off. I also remembered that I in fact am a human being who is not perfect. So of course I want to be a beacon, but I also want to relate to others so that they can relate to me in a sense where I could possibly draw them in and share my faith with them.

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     I also feel a strong sense of duty to fight against the stereotypes of Christians have been given(through no fault of our own sometimes) so that we can have a better chance to witness to others. I remember at the beginning of the new millennium everyone was nuts for Harry Potter and they were excited for the first film to come out. There were Christians that came out of the woodwork right away and condemned the film because of the subject of magic/witchcraft and I admit I was one of them. I was all Evil This and Evil That, but then one of my friends who also happened to be a Christian said that I should actually read the book or see the movie to at least give it a chance. I pretty much immediately fell in love with it. I was an idiot to judge it especially after reading the whole series and realizing that the magic is secondary to the actual story. That's when I realized using that kind of judgement while practicing Christianity can be a poison and can hurt your work with God. Oswald Chambers author of "My Utmost for His Highest" says that every way we serve God hurts him. Ouch! When I read that it shocked me. So you can imagine how much it hurts God by judging others when it is not our place.

     By then it was to late for me anyways. I was already a fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, The Sword of Truth Series by Terry Goodkind, The Lord of the Rings(of course), The Chronicles of Narnia, and a huge fan of Indiana Jones. They had cemented my interests in the nerd world and they had all given me stories and characters to love. So, I don't have to justify the fact that my favorite literary hero is a wizard P.I. with an unshakable moral center. I don't have to justify to others that my favorite weekly show is about how strong the bonds of family are between two brothers. Other's don't have to justify to me loving a masterfully written story about a boy wizard who does all he can to stop the forces of evil and to do the right thing, not just the proper thing. God gave us brains did he not? So why not use your imagination which is a result of having a brain. Another thing, I am an adult, I know how to separate reality from fantasy. In the eighties and nineties some preachers were worried about the effects some shows and books would have on our children, but if one is a parent it is that person's responsibility to teach the difference from what is fact and what is fiction.

    If you are a Christian and are feeling conflicted than maybe there is a deeper issue. Maybe the Holy Spirit is knocking at your door and asking where you have been. Are you seeking the Kingdom of God first? After all the Bible says that you cannot serve two masters. After you put God first, and fully commit to keep him first, than hopefully all of those tensions will ease. You'll remember there is only one Judge instead of worrying about what others might think. You'll remember that He has loved you with an everlasting love. You'll remember that God made you an individual. He gave you a soul, He gave you a brain and He gave you an imagination so don't be afraid to accept it. Live long and prosper!

 

    

    



 

The Fantasy Genre and Me

Eons ago when I was but just a child. I was surrounded by pious dogmas of fear and threats preventing me from using my own imagination, preventing me to discern things on my own, preventing me from keeping my mind open. When I was old enough I broke away from those chains and forsoo-

Ahem, well anyways I guess I should get to the point. To do that, I have to delve into my history of how I got involved with fantasy in the first place, so please, hang in there. I guess you could say the thing that got me interested in fantasy, or magic rather, was church. In the 80s it was the time of the Moral Majority which was a "Christian" movement , I guess, to impose Christian morals on everyone in the country through politics. Their argument was due in part to the AIDS epidemic and the introduction of mistism in cartoon and other parts of pop-culture. Churches ate this stuff up and as a result a lot of the cartoons I wanted to watch were condemned as being evil. IF YOU WATCH CARE-BEARS YOU ARE GOING TO HELL!!!  In most cases the Moral Majority backfired on it's self and backfired on me. I wondered what was this thing called magic that got everyone in such a tizzy at the mere mention of the word. Of course I had seen commercials of all these shows I wasn't allowed to watch and it did nothing but feed my curiosity. I remember this one time around the age of six I was sick on a Sunday morning and I couldn't go to church so my sister elected to stay home with me. It wasn't missing church that was the awesome part, it was being able to watch He-Man and saying to myself "this stupid crap is evil?" that was awesome.

    If church made me interested in fantasy/magic, than it was my Dad that got me hooked when he read The Chronicles of Narnia to my brother and I. It was crammed full of magic-ness and it had the words "Deep Magic" in it and yet was written by a Christian. Wait a minute, I thought magic was evil? But this old Christian guy was writing about it with no problem! DOES NOT COMPUTE! Then secretly my family watched the Disney movie Fantasia and after that what the church said about magic was pretty much an annoying gnat from there on out.

   

  I started slowly to bide my time, watching the BBC versions of the Chronicles of Narnia because to my parents it was pretty much harmless. After that I graduated to some cool Jim Henson stuff like the Labyrinth, which is still a favorite, and there was a smattering of other stuff. Oh yeah, somehow I snuck in some care-bear movies, I think it was in part because of how awesome the Disney channel was back then. Something I didn't see coming happened next. My parents switched churches and suddenly at the age of 9 it was okay to celebrate Halloween, score! Now a lot of things became more accessible to me as far as my interest in fantasy was concerned and even though my Mom still thought somethings like Power Rangers were evil, she didn't stop me from watching it. By this time though I was more in to Superheros and there was a fantastic Uncanny X-men show on as well as an equally fantastic show called Batman: The Animated series.

     High school, yeah nothing happened in high school because I was more interested in Drama Club. I think the first Blade movie came out around that time though and the Matrix, that was rad I guess.

     After high school and I mean right after, I said that if I like fantasy so much I should actually try reading some fantasy books and the movie Lord of the Rings was due to come out soon so I started there. Of course it blew my mind and I became a huge fan and made sure to go into watching the movies a huge fanboy and gripe if they changed anything, the movie was great and it made me become an even bigger fan. Much to the annoyance of my first girlfriend I started comparing everything I saw in real life to the elvish architecture or design in the films. Then there was Harry Potter and the list goes on from there. I read a few other series too and I even tried my hand at a few things, none of them I ever finished, but I enjoy going back to them from time to time. I take that back I did write and finish one issue of a comic book, but I couldn't find an artist so it's sitting on a shelf somewhere. Right now my favorite series is, if you couldn't tell already, The Dresden Files, and I've recently read The Name of the Wind and A Wise Man's Fear which is authored by Patrick Rothfuss.

 
  Here is the important part, even though I don't agree with the way that my old church handled things, I understand why they did it. They were trying to protect us kids from thing they thought were influenced by, well, the devil. Even though I don't believe the magic I read about can exist in reality, I still believe in spiritual warfare. I'll admit that I've stayed away from certain things because I didn't like the cut of it's jib in a spiritual sense. When I read the things I read or watch the things I watch I just remember what is the truth and what is not. The things I write I blend with my spiritual beliefs which you could label as Christian and it balances out better than I thought it could. I want to culivate an environment of understanding rather than fear as I feel I believe it works better. I refuse to feel guilty about the things I read, watch, and write because someone behind a pulpit says I should. I can decide for myself what to like and I think I've done a good job of it so far. I also don't believe I'm going to hell because I watched CareBears 2, which IMO is the best CareBears movie.

Harry Dresden: Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.

Discovery.

Where to start when talking about one of my most favorite literary character's of "The Dresden Files"? From the beginning I suppose. I was first introduced to the wizard a little late in the game when several of the novels had been out already. The Syfy channel (then Sci-Fi, and good...) bought the rights to make it into a television series. The advertisements had peaked my interest because they showed this guy who happened to be a wizard in modern Chicago and I wasn't aware of the sub-genre of urban fantasy yet. Anyways, it looked like a promising program. My first clue that it was going to be a bad series should have been when I saw in the opening credits that Nicolas Cage was a producer, but I didn't know any better then yet. The acting wasn't bad though, they cast a British guy Paul Blackthorne to play Harry, and let's face it British actors are superior. However there was something missing in the show and it was in the writing. They didn't seem to treat the source material seriously and it reflected in the scripts. Also the made his wizard's staff a hockey stick which I thought was dumb even though I like hockey enough. Like any show with crappy writing the show only lasted one semi-season of 12 disappointing episodes. Needless to say the show left a bad taste in my mouth and I thought if the show was that bad than books might not be that great either, obviously I didn't know much about Hollywood then and their history of bastardizing works of literature.

Re-discovery.

I forgot about The Dresden Files for along time after that, I think for about 2 or 3 years actually until I hit the internet one night. I was reading some article on one of the Twilight films at one of the forums I frequent and I decided to let loose a reasonable argument of why Edward Cullen was not a true gentleman, and stupid, in the comments section. However I was beat to the punch by somebody else and she said a better example of a gentleman was Harry Dresden, a man who was so chivalrous that it often was what got him in serious trouble. I thought to myself that I should try to give the books another chance especially if someone was using them to bash Twilight. Twilight stinks. Again though I forgot about the books for a while and instead I read the Watchmen which I got as a gift. Then I read a pretty good Christian book called Ruthless Trust, but after those two I read the official sequel to Dracula which stunk to the high heavens. After that I was yearning for a good book and finally I picked up the first novel in the Dresden Files series called Storm Front and I could not put it down, thus started my obsession. I read all of the published 13 books in about nine months.

Harry.

What I like about Harry is that he doesn't compromise on his values. That quality also is what gets him in trouble though. Being a wizard private detective dealing with the supernatural sometimes you might need to find a gray area, but not in Harry's case. With his sense of integrity he has burned a lot of bridges between beings he could have had a reasonable relationship with, even if had meant looking the other way on things he didn't like, but he doesn't have a problem with those burnt bridges. His black and white viewpoints also have alienated the wizarding council he belongs to. The council prefers to keep a bureaucratic and sometimes blind eye approach to diplomacy, where as Harry would just rather do the right thing. He would rather do the right thing so much that one of his most powerful enemies, mocking him, made Harry a headstone that reads "Here lies Harry Dresden: He died doing the right thing". Harry's sense of integrity has also built up a lot of strong and loyal friendships like Karen Murphy, a Chicago police detective, and some truly unlikely allies in within the supernatural world of the books, like his own army of magical sprites who call him The "Za Lord" due to his payment of pizza's to them and the "Knights of the Cross" who are like holy warriors who brandish special swords supposedly sent from God.

Another thing about Harry is that he has absolutely no idea just how powerful he actually is. With every book he does things more and more powerful than the last, which is normal obviously for story progression reasons, but they all have so much substance and yet simplicity to them. I think a lot of the other wizards know how strong he is though, especially on the council and they dare not reveal it to him because I think they are scared of him or what he could do if he every realized it. He can cast huge spells yes, but that's not where all his power lies, he is also smart as a whip and a great improviser. With one of his most powerful spells he pretty much started a war with the vampires and with one of his most powerful ideas he ended the war. His steadfast loyalty to his friends also give him power and it gives them power in return he is constantly risking his life to saves the ones he loves.

I know what you're saying. "but it's a fantasy book". I realize that a lot of people these days might not take fantasy to seriously, but the author Jim Butcher really has built up a solid and strong character as well as a world within these books. Jim Butcher also spent a lot of time researching old fairy tales and myths of several cultures to incorporate into the books and uses them smartly. He is also geek friendly, he was inspired by a lot of the values JRR Tolkien wrote about in The Lord of the Rings, and he has a background playing D&D, but he doesn't really use that kind of writing style, that is to say he doesn't say things like "and then gorgoth summoned flimboz of the eternal flame to smite his enemies!". In fact he makes light of that kind of thing in one book which where he is confronting a billy goat gruff (yes that's what I said)

"Would thou likest Jelly upon they donut?"

"Nay, prithee sprinkles 'pon it, and frosting of white."

Anyways there are a lot of times when I find myself laughing out loud, or saying what the fudge, and even tearing up a little. If you have ever flirted with the idea of reading fantasy or urban fantasy than I strongly recommend you start with The Dresden Files.