This last month I've read three books by Stephen King: On Writing, Misery and From a Buick 8. All three were very different, and not necessarily in a good way.
Book 1: On Writing by Stephen King
This book is a memoir/instructional guide about and for the craft of authorship. King recounts his childhood, his commercial success and his near death experience all within the context of his love for writing. Although at first, the whole thing seemed a bit narcissistic, On Writing developed into a pretty interesting read.
The part that most influenced me was a bit on how writing is an archaic form of telepathy. If I imagined a room and wrote about it in detail, and someone else, somewhere else, read what I had written, they, more or less, could imagine the same room. This exchange, as King points out, requires no verbal communication and is therefore a form of telepathy. A romanticized notion, perhaps, but King's goal in bringing this up was to stress the idea that good writing is a careful balance of details. Write about what's important in a scene; don't go overboard or don't leave too much out.
King continues on in a weave of details about his life and writing habits that left me admiring his discipline. According to this book, he writes and reads for 4 to 6 hours every day of the year, including all holidays and birthdays. He claims that the only instance where he ever stopped writing for any period of time was after a reckless driver rearranged the lower half of his body and just about killed him.
A long time back, I read The Gunslinger; the first book in the Dark Tower Series and also the first King book I ever read. It was like a nightmare fever dream - a David Lynch meets Clint Eastwood sort of ordeal. I finished it, gave it a - "meh" - and didn't continue with the series. Then, just last year, a friend said that King's On Writing was a must read for all wanna-be authors. He bought me a copy and suddenly I felt obligated to read it despite my prior experience with King.
It was a quick read and I, like my friend, would certainly recommend it for anyone aspiring to become an author. King, after all, is a multiple best-seller. He has had many of his books adapted to film and, therefore, certainly has some valuable things to say about being a successful writer. However, everyone's writing process and influences are different, so it can't be expected of this book to make you an instant bestseller. It simply has some good nuts-and-bolts style instructions buried within a real-life, rags-to-riches soliloquy.
It also got me thinking that I should maybe give King another chance. Within a section on character design in his memoirs, he discusses Annie Wilkes, the antagonist from his novel Misery. I was intrigued by the sounds of the character, as King claims she is his most impressive creation, and decided to read that one next.
Book 2: Misery by Stephen King
This book terrified me out of my darn cocka-doody wits! I saw a scene from the film when I was younger and remember thinking it wasn't going to be entertaining. An author, Paul Sheldon, is trapped in a isolated house after a car accident renders him crippled. His caretaker, Annie Wilkes, is a psychotic ex-nurse and big-time fan of his romance books. How bad can that be? Oh sweet God!
I started reading with the impression that the book was going to be a little dull. The entire thing takes place in a single location, Annie Wilkes' mountain house. How could an entire novel with only one setting be any good? King was right. In this case, it's all about the characters.
Annie Wilkes was the most horrifyingly, psychotically depraved character I've ever read of. At first you wonder what the big deal is. She's keeping Paul against his will, but she's keeping him alive and things don't seem too bad. Then, King slowly starts to turn up the crazy. In one scene, Paul accidentally spills a bowl of soup. Annie gets upset at his carelessness and cleans the mess off of the floor with a mop and bucket. Paul says "sorry" - Annie says, "No big deal. Here's your medicine. Why don't you wash that pill down with this" - and then she makes him drink the dirty mop water. Pretty shocking. It's quite clear at this point that she's bat-shit crazy.
That scene was the first step down the road to a depraved character unmatched in modern literature. The stuff Annie Wilkes does later on just keeps topping itself with horror. These events are peaks of insanity in an already subtly insane character. Much like getting a foghorn blasted in your ear at intervals as your plane is falling from the sky with both engines on fire.
The tension of Paul Sheldon's plight to escape this evil woman's clutches are extremely entertaining and for the parts that drag a bit, there's King's unique prose. Also, despite a few necessary red herrings at the end, the characters act logically within the context of the story and things flow nicely. That always bothers me when I'm reading a book and some character or another does something completely unrealistic or some event completely breaks the flow of a book for the sake of plot progression. This book is a definite must-read.
Book 3: From A Buick 8 by Stephen King
With Misery finished, I was excited to read another one of King's books. I was given From A Buick 8 as a present from a cousin and decided to try that one next. If it was anything like Misery, I knew I would love it.
Well...I didn't. It sucked. Basically it's a story about a car (a Buick 8-cylinder) that some cops find. It has a portal to another dimension in the trunk. Weird stuff comes out of the trunk. No great danger if you don't stand close to it. Um...that's about all.
I'm surprised at the big differences between these two books (Misery and From A Buick 8). King is solidified as a great writer in my mind after having read Misery, no matter the garbage From A Buick 8 represents, but still...
I mentioned above that I hate when characters do things illogically within the context of a story. After Misery, I thought King was a safe author as far as that was concerned. However, in one scene in From A Buick 8, the cops bring in a belligerent junkie. The evil Buick, being stored in a shed behind the police station, starts lighting up all crazy. The two cops leap from their car, leave their prisoner in the back seat, and run to see what's going on. A creepy, slimy creature vomits itself from the Buick's trunk and basically just squeals around, looks ugly, gets bit by a dog and gets shot to death by a bunch of screaming cops. The cops head back to the car and discover the belligerent junkie has kicked out the back seat window and escaped. Where is he? It turns out that instead of running away from the cop station, like any one not in this book would do, he decides to come back and see what the hell is in that awesome shed surrounded by cops, filled with glowing other-dimensional light and ringing with gun shots!
"Curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought him back." King repeats this phrase throughout the book until you feel like you're going to shit your own head out of someone else's ass. It felt like I was reading a completely different author. I'll tell you what comes out of the Buick's trunk since you really want to know - *spoiler alert!* - a giant bat that's already dead, a giant fish that's already dead, some leaves, some bugs, and a giant humanoid with tentacles for brains that gets killed a paragraph later. Now I'll tell you what didn't come out of the Buick's trunk - anything with a purpose, anything dangerous, anything that explained why the hell there was an abandoned Buick 8 with a portal to another dimension in the trunk. Every time something poured out from the other dimension, King described it as "looking totally like [insert object you are familiar with], but not really at all like that." Don't waste your time with this one.
Summary
King's a good author, no doubt, and I'll be reading more. I've got Bag of Bones on order next and I've heard good things about Carrie and The Stand, but, as I've heard it said and only now believe, King is either hit or miss.
On Writing - I recommend for anyone with a stalker-like interest in King's semi-dull, personal life or anyone wanting to be a writer and willing to dig out a couple gems of knowledge from a memoir by one of the highest selling authors of all time.
Misery - highly recommended for anyone wanting to learn how to write entertaining stories in a single setting or anyone who enjoys psychologically twisted tales of horror.
From a Buick 8 - Don't waste your time. Curiosity kills cats like this book killed its own plot development - efficiently.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Racial Minorities and Science Fiction
This month's post is in regard to something I've recently discovered about the realm of popular science fiction creators - racial minorities. I am as white as a piece of rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm and my social interactions are unfortunately limited to similar shades of pastiness. Hopefully that fact serves as a framework when reading this post.
As a child, I read a book called The Ear, The Eye and The Arm by Nancy Farmer. It was a young adult science fiction book that took place in futuristic Africa. Mutant detectives were hired to track down the kidnapped children of an African warlord. I loved the book and for the longest time, I thought the author was black due to the extensive insight into African mythology and culture, but, as it turns out, she wasn't. This started me thinking that perhaps minorities had no interest in the genre.
In hopes of absolving myself of total racial ignorance, I would like to point out that I do have a few friends that are racial minorities. My own wife, in fact, is Hispanic and with her comes a heaping pile of Hispanic in-laws, none of whom display any interest in science fiction. My mother-in-law considers casseroles as "something white women make" and I started to think maybe minorities view science fiction as "something white boys read". I was bothered by this idea. After all, some white boys make rap, so it would seem logical that some minority or another would contribute to science fiction. It stands to reason, and yet there seemed to exist a gaping, interracial void.
When one calls to mind the greatest sci-fi contributors, one is blinded by whiteness: H.G. Wells, Issac Asimov, George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood (I don't care what she says, Oryx and Crake is social science fiction), Bruce Bethke, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan, Robert Heinlein, Olaf Stapledon, Joss Wheldon, and the list goes on - are all of Western European descent and whiter than the day is long. So, too, is every Best Novel Hugo Award winning champion of the science fiction genre since 1953. I was curious what cultural differences determined that there be no significant Hispanic, black or Asian contributions, at least in terms of popular success, to American science fiction.
I began to just accept that it was, indeed, a cultural difference. I thought maybe it had to do with the space race being predominately a Caucasian concern during the time science fiction first gained popularity in America. The idea started to get under my skin.
In terms of global literature, the African/Middle Eastern culture, specifically, was the first, by modern speculation, to form advanced written languages and societies. The richness of ancient African/Middle Eastern development led to astounding things: functioning batteries, advanced engineering and highly efficient human governments to name a few. I imagined that any culture with so rich a history would have tapped into celestial and speculative fiction long ago.
Indeed, the earliest instances of science fiction could be attributed to some of the tales from the Arabian Nights. One story in particular that I remember dealt with a mechanical horse that carried the hero through the sky. A robot rocket horse, if you will. However, many people (Carl Sagan and Issac Asimov among them) attribute the birth of the science fiction genre to Voltaire with his book Micromègas. Voltaire was French and also just as white as his frilly lace cravats.
With this brief history in mind, I was pretty much convinced that sci fi could be labeled a "cracker genre". Then, I was introduced to a science fiction author named Octavia Butler. The Butler novel that was suggested to me by a friend (who was the crackin'est cracker you ever saw - straight from Oklahoma) was The Parable of the Sower. This book was not only science fiction, but dystopian future science fiction - my absolute favorite. I devoured the book and when I returned to discuss it with my friend I remarked how it was unique to read a dystopian story in which the protagonist was female.
"She's an old black lady," my friend said.
"What? Who is?" I asked. I started looking around.
"The author, Octavia Butler," he answered. "She's an old black lady."
I almost dropped a load in my white-boy britches.
Octavia Butler, in one short conversation, had become the messiah-anomaly of my literary world. I discovered that she had been writing since 1971 and had a whole slew of science fiction books. Upon doing some more research, I discovered two more black science fiction authors: Samuel R. Delany (who looks like a black version of Gandalf) and Nalo Hopkinson. I had already read Delany's book Dhalgren, another awesome dystopian future novel, without even realizing he was black. Nalo Hopkinson, I know nothing about and have yet to read her works, but in a literary genre dominated by whites, I was happy to learn that there were, in fact, "people of color" represented.
My hopes for diversity in literature were renewed and I delved deeper. It was then that I discovered the Carl Brandon Society. This amazing group focuses on "increas[ing] racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction." Apparently I wasn't alone in noticing the interracial void. Here's how the Carl Brandon Society began:
You can learn more about this group at www.carlbrandon.org
To sum up, I'm excited that other cultures are contributing to American science fiction. There are untapped cultural histories and mythologies that will most definitely add to the genre. A perfect example of this is Janelle Monae, who fused Funk, Soul and R & B music to her sci fi concept album - Metropolis:Suite 1. This was to be the first in a multi-suite tribute to Fritz Lang's Metropolis by which Monae develops a story about a android named Cindi Mayweather. The first album debuted at number 115 on Billboard's top 200 but the final installment - Archandroid - came in at number 17. I think this proves that unique, cultural combinations can attain popular success and bridge fanworlds together. These crossovers are beneficial to the artists by expanding their fan bases and beneficial to the genre by introducing completely new concepts.
As a child, I read a book called The Ear, The Eye and The Arm by Nancy Farmer. It was a young adult science fiction book that took place in futuristic Africa. Mutant detectives were hired to track down the kidnapped children of an African warlord. I loved the book and for the longest time, I thought the author was black due to the extensive insight into African mythology and culture, but, as it turns out, she wasn't. This started me thinking that perhaps minorities had no interest in the genre.
In hopes of absolving myself of total racial ignorance, I would like to point out that I do have a few friends that are racial minorities. My own wife, in fact, is Hispanic and with her comes a heaping pile of Hispanic in-laws, none of whom display any interest in science fiction. My mother-in-law considers casseroles as "something white women make" and I started to think maybe minorities view science fiction as "something white boys read". I was bothered by this idea. After all, some white boys make rap, so it would seem logical that some minority or another would contribute to science fiction. It stands to reason, and yet there seemed to exist a gaping, interracial void.
When one calls to mind the greatest sci-fi contributors, one is blinded by whiteness: H.G. Wells, Issac Asimov, George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood (I don't care what she says, Oryx and Crake is social science fiction), Bruce Bethke, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan, Robert Heinlein, Olaf Stapledon, Joss Wheldon, and the list goes on - are all of Western European descent and whiter than the day is long. So, too, is every Best Novel Hugo Award winning champion of the science fiction genre since 1953. I was curious what cultural differences determined that there be no significant Hispanic, black or Asian contributions, at least in terms of popular success, to American science fiction.
I began to just accept that it was, indeed, a cultural difference. I thought maybe it had to do with the space race being predominately a Caucasian concern during the time science fiction first gained popularity in America. The idea started to get under my skin.
In terms of global literature, the African/Middle Eastern culture, specifically, was the first, by modern speculation, to form advanced written languages and societies. The richness of ancient African/Middle Eastern development led to astounding things: functioning batteries, advanced engineering and highly efficient human governments to name a few. I imagined that any culture with so rich a history would have tapped into celestial and speculative fiction long ago.
Indeed, the earliest instances of science fiction could be attributed to some of the tales from the Arabian Nights. One story in particular that I remember dealt with a mechanical horse that carried the hero through the sky. A robot rocket horse, if you will. However, many people (Carl Sagan and Issac Asimov among them) attribute the birth of the science fiction genre to Voltaire with his book Micromègas. Voltaire was French and also just as white as his frilly lace cravats.
With this brief history in mind, I was pretty much convinced that sci fi could be labeled a "cracker genre". Then, I was introduced to a science fiction author named Octavia Butler. The Butler novel that was suggested to me by a friend (who was the crackin'est cracker you ever saw - straight from Oklahoma) was The Parable of the Sower. This book was not only science fiction, but dystopian future science fiction - my absolute favorite. I devoured the book and when I returned to discuss it with my friend I remarked how it was unique to read a dystopian story in which the protagonist was female.
"She's an old black lady," my friend said.
"What? Who is?" I asked. I started looking around.
"The author, Octavia Butler," he answered. "She's an old black lady."
I almost dropped a load in my white-boy britches.
Octavia Butler, in one short conversation, had become the messiah-anomaly of my literary world. I discovered that she had been writing since 1971 and had a whole slew of science fiction books. Upon doing some more research, I discovered two more black science fiction authors: Samuel R. Delany (who looks like a black version of Gandalf) and Nalo Hopkinson. I had already read Delany's book Dhalgren, another awesome dystopian future novel, without even realizing he was black. Nalo Hopkinson, I know nothing about and have yet to read her works, but in a literary genre dominated by whites, I was happy to learn that there were, in fact, "people of color" represented.
My hopes for diversity in literature were renewed and I delved deeper. It was then that I discovered the Carl Brandon Society. This amazing group focuses on "increas[ing] racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction." Apparently I wasn't alone in noticing the interracial void. Here's how the Carl Brandon Society began:
"Carl Joshua Brandon was a fictional black fan writer invented by white writers Terry Carr and Peter Graham in the fifties. A hoax that lasted for over two years, Carl Brandon was nearly elected to office in a fan writers association, and was for a time one of the most popular fan writers in the genre. But the existence of a lone, fictional black writer underscores the fact that a fictional voice had to be invented for people of color, because we had none in fandom.
We named ourselves after Carl Brandon in much the same way that the Tiptree Award named itself after the fictional male writer James Tiptree, Jr, a pseudonym for the feminist SF writer Alice Sheldon. Just as women can now write under their own names, so can people of color now write (and publish) our own stories. We've got much further to go yet. This is why we're working to make fandom a more rewarding place for people of color, to build a readership for the speculative writing of people of color, and to help the world understand that we can't create a just future if people of color aren't includ[ed] in its imagining."
You can learn more about this group at www.carlbrandon.org
To sum up, I'm excited that other cultures are contributing to American science fiction. There are untapped cultural histories and mythologies that will most definitely add to the genre. A perfect example of this is Janelle Monae, who fused Funk, Soul and R & B music to her sci fi concept album - Metropolis:Suite 1. This was to be the first in a multi-suite tribute to Fritz Lang's Metropolis by which Monae develops a story about a android named Cindi Mayweather. The first album debuted at number 115 on Billboard's top 200 but the final installment - Archandroid - came in at number 17. I think this proves that unique, cultural combinations can attain popular success and bridge fanworlds together. These crossovers are beneficial to the artists by expanding their fan bases and beneficial to the genre by introducing completely new concepts.
Friday, June 4, 2010
The Sound of the Planets
I've been interested in space since the 5th grade. It used to be my all-consuming desire to be an astronaut which was, in no doubt, due to the influence of the Star Wars movies. I've since moved on to more realistic life goals: win an Oscar before I turn 30, cure cancer before I turn 40 and drop kick a walrus before I turn 50. Astronaut was out.
Despite relinquishing my space based career, I have maintained a thirst for all things space related. I'm sure many of my future posts will be on this topic, but this particular write-up is about the sounds of the planets.
In the early 80's, the Voyager satellites, on their journey beyond our solar system, inclined their electronic ears toward the gas giants and a few Jovian moons. What they heard is absolutely terrifying.
Sound does not travel in space, it's true. The audio transmissions were the combined result of a number of detectors: magnetometers, radio wave receivers, etc. Similar to radio waves (which are actually light waves at enormous wavelengths) caught by antennae and converted into an electric signal, so too did the Voyagers translate the electromagnetic flux of select heavenly bodies into sound. I'll start with the least nightmarish:
NEPTUNE: This, the eighth planet from the sun, doesn't sound scary at all. In fact, I think it sounds a bit like a rain-forest sound-scape minus the really obnoxious birds that just like to show off. I imagine that Neptune is so mellow due to it's distance from the sun. All in all, a sort of relaxing audio canvas...
Listen to Neptune.
URANUS: Moving one planet closer to the sun, we seem to get a bit more activity. Still not too scary: imagine the rain-forest sound-scape from Neptune and combine it with a the lonely sound of a highway overpass in the middle of the night with the occasional semi cruising by. Throw in a couple grasshopper noises and maybe the sound of some serial killer swinging a tow rope over his head - that might get you close to what this sounds like...
Listen to Uranus.
MIRANDA: This is a moon in the Uranus system. This one's not too bad either. I would describe it as the sound you'd get when taking a microphone out into a really windy blizzard. There are some parts where the volume peaks, however, that sound a bit more like a myriad of tortured souls screaming for mercy. This is where the creepy begins...
Listen to Miranda.
JUPITER: This planet is the king of our solar system. It's 317 times the mass of the Earth and projects a massive magnetosphere. As active and as large as Jupiter is, the sounds are minimal though not too relaxing. Imagine the blizzard sound again, but thrown in the mournful wail of La Llorona as she searches for the bodies of her drowned kids down by the river. There's also an occasional church bell sound that rings out faintly as though in the distance...
Listen to Jupiter.
IO: This Jovian moon looks like the acne ridden face of McDonald's fry cook. The boiling surface is littered with volcanoes that erupt their molten pus miles above the surface. All this geothermal activity means that Io should have a lot to say, and it does. The sound sent back by Voyager can best be described as a 747, with two failing engines, coming in for a landing at Mach 12. Then it sounds as though the plane changes it's mind once the pilot realizes that the runway is blanketed with giant locust swarms that have just begun to awaken. I'm pretty sure I hate Io...
Listen to Io.
SATURN: Oh God. This is so terrifying I can't listen to it for more than a few seconds. If hell has a sound, this is it. Take a pack of starving, hell-born wolves and set them loose in an auditorium full of special-ed children and you may be somewhere in the vicinity of this sound...
Listen to Saturn.
EARTH: This may be hard to believe, but the most terrifying sounds in the solar system emanate from our own beloved planet. When the Voyagers first began their journey in the late 70's and early 80's they tested their instruments on Earth. This is what they heard, prepare yourself for the most horrific sound you will ever experience...
Listen to Earth.
Thanks for reading :)
Despite relinquishing my space based career, I have maintained a thirst for all things space related. I'm sure many of my future posts will be on this topic, but this particular write-up is about the sounds of the planets.
In the early 80's, the Voyager satellites, on their journey beyond our solar system, inclined their electronic ears toward the gas giants and a few Jovian moons. What they heard is absolutely terrifying.
Sound does not travel in space, it's true. The audio transmissions were the combined result of a number of detectors: magnetometers, radio wave receivers, etc. Similar to radio waves (which are actually light waves at enormous wavelengths) caught by antennae and converted into an electric signal, so too did the Voyagers translate the electromagnetic flux of select heavenly bodies into sound. I'll start with the least nightmarish:
NEPTUNE: This, the eighth planet from the sun, doesn't sound scary at all. In fact, I think it sounds a bit like a rain-forest sound-scape minus the really obnoxious birds that just like to show off. I imagine that Neptune is so mellow due to it's distance from the sun. All in all, a sort of relaxing audio canvas...
Listen to Neptune.
URANUS: Moving one planet closer to the sun, we seem to get a bit more activity. Still not too scary: imagine the rain-forest sound-scape from Neptune and combine it with a the lonely sound of a highway overpass in the middle of the night with the occasional semi cruising by. Throw in a couple grasshopper noises and maybe the sound of some serial killer swinging a tow rope over his head - that might get you close to what this sounds like...
Listen to Uranus.
MIRANDA: This is a moon in the Uranus system. This one's not too bad either. I would describe it as the sound you'd get when taking a microphone out into a really windy blizzard. There are some parts where the volume peaks, however, that sound a bit more like a myriad of tortured souls screaming for mercy. This is where the creepy begins...
Listen to Miranda.
JUPITER: This planet is the king of our solar system. It's 317 times the mass of the Earth and projects a massive magnetosphere. As active and as large as Jupiter is, the sounds are minimal though not too relaxing. Imagine the blizzard sound again, but thrown in the mournful wail of La Llorona as she searches for the bodies of her drowned kids down by the river. There's also an occasional church bell sound that rings out faintly as though in the distance...
Listen to Jupiter.
IO: This Jovian moon looks like the acne ridden face of McDonald's fry cook. The boiling surface is littered with volcanoes that erupt their molten pus miles above the surface. All this geothermal activity means that Io should have a lot to say, and it does. The sound sent back by Voyager can best be described as a 747, with two failing engines, coming in for a landing at Mach 12. Then it sounds as though the plane changes it's mind once the pilot realizes that the runway is blanketed with giant locust swarms that have just begun to awaken. I'm pretty sure I hate Io...
Listen to Io.
SATURN: Oh God. This is so terrifying I can't listen to it for more than a few seconds. If hell has a sound, this is it. Take a pack of starving, hell-born wolves and set them loose in an auditorium full of special-ed children and you may be somewhere in the vicinity of this sound...
Listen to Saturn.
EARTH: This may be hard to believe, but the most terrifying sounds in the solar system emanate from our own beloved planet. When the Voyagers first began their journey in the late 70's and early 80's they tested their instruments on Earth. This is what they heard, prepare yourself for the most horrific sound you will ever experience...
Listen to Earth.
Thanks for reading :)
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The Beginning
My first post is about religion. Don't worry, I'm not going to preach and this topic, most certainly, will not become a trend. You see, I have grown to be a very disillusioned individual when it comes to religion. I spent 16 years at a Christian school and my family, namely my father, is radically religious. I followed for a while, it's true. I was fed thoughts and taught, upon pain of hellfire and rejection, to regurgitate everything I heard. It wasn't until I began reading on my own that I began to question things. I was led to believe that the questions I had were to be treated like a cancerous blight on the face of my salvation. Even so, questioning began to make me feel better.
When I say I felt better, it's not to say that Christianity made me feel bad, but rather that the blind pursuit of biblical ideals made me catatonic. So, too, the church-going culture, or "fellowship" (a term that, to this day, triggers my gag reflex) caused me discomfort. The music, portrayed as being pleasing to the Great Unearthly Being, grated on my every last earthly nerve. I was once told that Heaven would consist of "an eternity of singing praise to the enthroned Old Man". My immediate reaction to this image of eternity was revulsion. I couldn't fathom standing around for all of eternity, watching the guy next to me screw up his face in cathartic concentration and pump his open palm into the air.
At first I thought these prejudices were indicative of my spiritual degradation. I didn't have an aversion to what was being taught, necessarily, but more so, an aversion to the people teaching it. I realized, through these discoveries and through other actions by "good Christian" kids in the youth groups, that the "body of Christ" (as they refer to themselves) is just as morally stunted as the "misguided" non-Christians. I began to picture the allegorical "body of Christ" as a slobbering, diseased husk of a hobo curled up in a pool of excrement. As a result, I stopped going to church.
I have a close friend that was in a similar situation. He had begun to question whether or not Jesus was the Son of God. Even though the Christian culture would demand he be ostracized for such a taboo doubt, the best and most fulfilling discussions were (and still are) to be had with this friend of mine. In many ways, we've begun searching for answers together.
I plan to make this blog a multifaceted depot for anything from fiction to philosophy, but I wanted to start it all here. The journey I've made through the robotic world of Christian thought has led me to where I am today. I revile religion in general, not because I desire to be recalcitrant, but because I don't feel that religious people are up to the task religion presents. It's not an exclusionary tool, as so many are wont to use it, but instead a method by which to know ourselves. Though this may, at first glance, seem a solipsist and new age point of view, I don't intend it that way. Knowledge in general is what I'm after.
I exist; this is the basis for my search of knowledge. Christians would advise that the search should be based in the Bible. Of course they would say that. It's in their programming, but I do not wish to be a robot. At the same time, however, I do not wish to dispel a philosophy based solely on my dislike for the culture it inspires. To summarize, I've come to the opinion that consciousness gives birth to knowledge and spirituality comes from applying that knowledge to existence. In general, I don't feel that religion makes the application. The knowledge they apply has been passed on through ambiguity.
"Beware of false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance." -George Bernard Shaw
Thanks for reading.
When I say I felt better, it's not to say that Christianity made me feel bad, but rather that the blind pursuit of biblical ideals made me catatonic. So, too, the church-going culture, or "fellowship" (a term that, to this day, triggers my gag reflex) caused me discomfort. The music, portrayed as being pleasing to the Great Unearthly Being, grated on my every last earthly nerve. I was once told that Heaven would consist of "an eternity of singing praise to the enthroned Old Man". My immediate reaction to this image of eternity was revulsion. I couldn't fathom standing around for all of eternity, watching the guy next to me screw up his face in cathartic concentration and pump his open palm into the air.
At first I thought these prejudices were indicative of my spiritual degradation. I didn't have an aversion to what was being taught, necessarily, but more so, an aversion to the people teaching it. I realized, through these discoveries and through other actions by "good Christian" kids in the youth groups, that the "body of Christ" (as they refer to themselves) is just as morally stunted as the "misguided" non-Christians. I began to picture the allegorical "body of Christ" as a slobbering, diseased husk of a hobo curled up in a pool of excrement. As a result, I stopped going to church.
I have a close friend that was in a similar situation. He had begun to question whether or not Jesus was the Son of God. Even though the Christian culture would demand he be ostracized for such a taboo doubt, the best and most fulfilling discussions were (and still are) to be had with this friend of mine. In many ways, we've begun searching for answers together.
I plan to make this blog a multifaceted depot for anything from fiction to philosophy, but I wanted to start it all here. The journey I've made through the robotic world of Christian thought has led me to where I am today. I revile religion in general, not because I desire to be recalcitrant, but because I don't feel that religious people are up to the task religion presents. It's not an exclusionary tool, as so many are wont to use it, but instead a method by which to know ourselves. Though this may, at first glance, seem a solipsist and new age point of view, I don't intend it that way. Knowledge in general is what I'm after.
I exist; this is the basis for my search of knowledge. Christians would advise that the search should be based in the Bible. Of course they would say that. It's in their programming, but I do not wish to be a robot. At the same time, however, I do not wish to dispel a philosophy based solely on my dislike for the culture it inspires. To summarize, I've come to the opinion that consciousness gives birth to knowledge and spirituality comes from applying that knowledge to existence. In general, I don't feel that religion makes the application. The knowledge they apply has been passed on through ambiguity.
"Beware of false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance." -George Bernard Shaw
Thanks for reading.
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