Unhealed Wounds and a Sense of Proportion

Wading into the hot soup of religion here, so put on your gumboots and pick up a spoon.  Remember: we can talk about these things.  It's okay.

When I was an entirely clueless young undergraduate at Temple University, rather than the almost entirely clueless adult I am now, I left class with a friend whose name I no longer remember to go to another class.  This friend was Indian and pleasant, two qualities that are relevant to the remainder of this anecdote.  As we walked past SAC (the Student Activity Center), a completely bald young man wearing an orange robe stepped in front of us, proffered a flower, and asked if we'd like to go to a talk that was being hosted shortly.  Without missing a beat, my Indian friend said, very politely, "No thank you, I am a confirmed Hindu," and we breezed by him.

This made quite an impression on me at the time.  The Hare Krishnas on campus were generally considered pests, but my friend had somehow put the fellow off in a way that was firm, courteous, and final.  Back then, I didn't know a single thing about Hare Krishnas or Hindus, so it all seemed irrelevant, even meaningless.  There was no difference between a proselytizing Hare Krishna and a homeless man asking for a dollar: neither had anything I wanted, and I had nothing to give to either.  Such people were time vampires: grant them a second, and they'd take an hour.


As a Jew, I was proof against the blandishments of other faiths.  Judaism is as much a culture as a religion, and to give up one would mean to eliminate the other.  Whether or not I ate bacon cheeseburgers on Rosh Hashanah and then fasted on Yom Kippur was immaterial: I had a religion, and it was as much a part of me as my blood.

Recent events from the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision to the idea of "separation of church and state" being used to eliminate all expressions of faith from the public sphere tell us that religion is still a massively complicated set of issues that can't be legislated, argued, or compromised into simplicity.  Not by me, not by anyone.

However, an important point needs to be made: there's a gigantic difference between a Nativity scene placed on the front lawn of City Hall at Christmastime, and someone sticking a Bible in your face and demanding you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.  Degree matters, especially in a world we share with people who don't agree with us.  Today's hypersensitive, politically-correct culture didn't start in a vacuum: it started with this lack of proportion.  It started when someone discovered that he had the power to make everybody else cater to a whim based on that lack of proportion.

Many of us are actively offended by proselytizing, by witnessing Christians and Mormons at the door.  That's perfectly okay.  Nobody's saying you shouldn't be offended.  But before you call the Freedom From Religion Foundation, do one small thing: ask yourself why.  Try to determine the reason why you're so offended.  We all have to deal with things we don't like, disagree with, or otherwise find offensive: why is this so off-putting?  If we're offended by what we see on TV, we change the channel.  In a novel, we close the book.  On the radio, we tune out.  In the street, we turn away.  But when it's religion, it's got to be dealt with, and usually through legal means.

Why?  What happened to our sense of proportion?  What, exactly, is being assaulted here?

Dig deep.  The things that hurt us most are the unhealed wounds.

Whereupon I Give Away the Whole Store

The difficulty of depicting angels as properly angelic and God as an all-encompassing force for good in fiction is that we do not live in a culture of moral absolutes.  Likewise, we cannot rely on an ultimate moral arbiter if we cannot or will not define evil.

Kristen Lamb's point about the value of Dungeons & Dragons alignments in characterization is well-put, but it falls apart at the macro level, especially in dealing with the apocalypse.  It can be argued that the end of the world is always an individual situation, as each character will react to it in an individual manner according to his ethics and situation.  But when you deal with the larger issue of a God that ends the world, aided by His angels, character alignments don't hold up for Him, and even Lawful Good characters can protest the injustice of it.  Even if it's being done for the best of reasons, according to God.

This is the central concept behind my Armageddon trilogy: the relevance of Biblical ethics in today's ultra-modern society.  Nowhere in it do I preach, nor is it my intent to advocate for a particular moral stance within the text.  Rather, it's an attempt to bring prevailing Western belief systems into immediate conflict.  Mankind in the face of Armageddon is the ultimate existential crisis.  So how does one resolve it?  Is it possible?

During a rare moment of respite near the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, one character says, "We must be guided by our own ethics, not what we think God wants us to do. We must get comfortable with the idea that we can disagree with Him and still keep our integrity."  To many of us, this is an absolute impossibility.  It can't be done.  For others, it's a necessity: the God of the Bible is the ultimate source of evil, oppression, and ignorance.  Both points of view cannot be correct.  But can they both be ethical?

For Hell's point of view, there's this: “I know what I am, but you lie to yourself every day. You’d burn the world clean of everyone who doesn’t kowtow to your…God, and call it goodness.  That’s if you win.  You wanted Armageddon. You started this war, but we’re going to fight harder. And when we win, the world gets to go on. That’s not so bad, is it?”  In a nutshell, Hell claims to be fighting for its own survival.  Despite the unspeakable ugliness of Hell's tactics, isn't that reasonable?  Don't they have a right to resist God's plan to end the world, if the alternative is an eternity of torture in the Lake of Fire, or oblivion?

Between Heaven fighting to create the Day of God (or, in the series, the New Kingdom, the merging of Heaven and Earth into one eternal paradise) and Hell fighting to maintain the status quo (or so it claims), there are those who don't want the New Kingdom, but properly refuse to ally themselves with Hell.  As one character puts it at the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, when everything's at stake, "We offer a better way: freedom. Freedom to strive, to progress, to no longer be subject to the whim of an angry God or a monster that feeds on torment."  Put that way, how can you disagree?

You can, though.  You definitely can.  Especially if you've embraced the God of the Bible as an all-encompassing force for good.  After all, if there's a choice between the salvation of your eternal soul and the death of your temporary physical body, why would you choose anything but God's side?  Especially when you'll be given a new body of spirit made flesh at the beginning of the New Kingdom, when Heaven has crushed the forces of Hell and turned the Pit into the Lake of Fire.  If Heaven wins.

There are more questions asked than answered, obviously.  And there's no way to make every character happy (no way to make every reader happy, either).  Sometimes it's the struggle that matters: working these things out for yourself.  If my sympathies lie anywhere, it's there.