Skip to content

Category: culture

7

Published on 7 Comments on Living Beyond the End of the World

The Mayan Calendar has run out, giving tweet-fodder to wits all over the world. Some of the better ones:

And perhaps my favourite...

What's it like to live beyond the end of the world?  What's it like to find yourself on the other side of judgement day unscathed?

Well Christians ought to know.  We are 8th day people.  Through Christ we've been taken through the history of the old world, beyond the limit of the old Adam and into a whole new calendar.

From creation, the week has proclaimed God's work in giving life (cf Exodus 20:8-11; Deut 5:12-15).  Day 6 is the pinnacle of His work - the Day of Man.  Day 7 is the Day of Completion.  On this day, the finished work of giving life is celebrated and rest is brought.

When Jesus died on the 6th day, He was summing up Man and the death he must die ("on the day you eat of it you will surely die" - Gen 2:17).  On the 7th He rested in the tomb.  The 8th day was the first day of a whole new week, a whole new world.

And ever since, the Lord's people have been 8th day people, celebrating His resurrection into new creation life.  We don't live like old covenant people, with the day of rest and completion yet future.  We have no work to do in order to arrive at the end of the world.  Christ has taken us through our death and judgement - through the End and out into a New Beginning.

"Worldly" people are 6th day people. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we're dead.

"Religious" people are 7th day people.  Appearing in their own person at the End and hoping to be let through.

Christians are 8th day people.  We've burst through to the other side.  The old calendar is gone.  The old code is gone.  The old man is gone.  There's nothing ahead to judge or condemn us.  It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

57

Published on 57 Comments on Fear and Faith: Derren Brown undone in 60 seconds by his own subject

I'm 9 days late to this, but last Friday Derren Brown's "Fear and Faith" aired - watch here.

It was 10 minutes of fascinating viewing padded out by some seriously underwhelming logic by way of explanation.

The show centres on the challenge Brown sets himself to elicit "a religious experience"  from an atheist.  To be fair the emotional "conversion", when it came, was indeed dramatic.  In a candlelit church, Derren spoke to atheist Natalie and through various NLP-type techniques evoked feelings of father-hunger, a sense of awe at the mystery of the world, regrets over her past, that kind of thing.  Having anchored those feelings and established some triggers, Derren left and - BOOM - the "conversion" was dramatic.  There were tears and exclamations of both sorrow and joy, almost simultaneously.  Alone with the candles and the stained-glass images, "I'm sorry"s came flooding out along with "I love you"s.  It was a salutary warning of how prone we are to emotional manipulation.  This woman was an avowed atheist and her discussion with Derren contained no "God-talk" whatsover.  He simply spoke about feelings of love, awe and regret in a "religious" setting and his techniques produced a "conversion" the envy of many an evangelist.

So lesson number one - beware Christian evangelists using manipulative methods!

But then lesson number two has got to be: Beware atheist evangelists too.  Because Derren's preaching was seriously misleading.  Throughout the programme he put two and two together and made 600.  First came the trivially true assertions: "religious experience can be explained by psychology".  In the same vein he asks "Can our experience of religion be explained by psychology alone?" And he expects the answer yes.

Well of course the answer is yes, Derren!  Of course "our experience of religion" can be explained by psychology!  Even psychology alone.  My experience of falling in love with my wife could be explained in entirely psychological terms.  And if Derren did it, I'd be all ears.  I'm sure there'd be insights - certain needs from my childhood met in 'some sort of spouse figure', yes, yes.  All useful, all true.  And, I suppose, such psychology might - at another level of explanation - be put down to biology, and biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry explained by physics... or something.  I'd be genuinely interested in all such analyses.  But...

A) the further we "progress" into those materialistic explanations, the less satisfying they are as an account of what is, irreducibly, a personal experience.

And, crucially....

B) the claim that, because there might be a perfectly satisfying psychological explanation, my wife doesn't exist needs unmasking as the rank idiocy that it is.

Yet Brown's whole show is set up on precisely this absurd foundation.  Derren says he's out to prove that "religious belief comes from us, not from the existence of the divine".  Which is exactly parallel to saying my love for my wife comes from me and not from the existence of Emma.  Well of course it comes from me - my religious and my marital experiences come from me. But what's that got to do with the truth or otherwise of the object of those feelings??

David Bentley Hart nails this in Atheist Delusions as he turns his withering wit upon Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell". Dennett, a philosopher and one of the four horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse, similarly attempts to describe religion as an entirely natural phenomenon. Against this Hart writes

Not only does [Dennett's project] pose no challenge to faith, it is in fact perfectly compatible with what most developed faiths already teach regarding religion. Of course religion is a natural phenomenon. Who would be so foolish as to deny that...

...It does not logically follow that simply because religion is natural it cannot become a vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not in some sense oriented towards ultimate reality (as, according to Christian tradition, all natural things are)...

...As for Dennett's amazing discovery that the "natural desire for God" is in fact a desire for God that is natural, it amounts to a revolution not of thought, only of syntax.  (David Bentley-Hart, Atheist Delusions, p7-8)

How else would you measure a religious experience anyway, if not via natural methods?  What else could provoke such an experience, if not natural phenomena?  The God who meets us in a Jewish carpenter, a library of ancient texts, men and women of faith, water, wheat and wine... His encounters with us do not happen in the 7th dimension.  He meets us where we are.  (That's the meaning of Christmas by the way).  But since He meets us where we are then He meets us in naturally measurable and naturally explicable ways.  Neither Dennett nor Derren will have any objections from Christians at that point.

Where we might raise an eyebrow is during the galactic leaps of faith they employ to tell their naturalistic story.  Derren speaks of pareidolia whereby the human brain naturally sees personal significance in randomness - seeing "a man in the moon" when really there are only craters and shadows.  This is, according to Derren, "probably the biggest contributor to religious belief" in our evolutionary story.

Notice the irony though.  Derren is trying to tell you a story - the naturalistic evolution of all things, including belief.  His story is all about going from randomness to personality.  And now, here we are, persons at the end of a random process, telling other persons not to read personal significance into randomness.  Eh?

The only way you could take that move seriously would be to reduce everything personal down to randomness.  That sounds bleak, but Derren makes other such moves in just that direction. He happily gives accounts of morality and religion entirely based on the survival benefits they bestow in the grand evolutionary scheme.  But if he were consistent I suggest he should also add love, beauty and truth to that same heap.  And at that stage of course the whole endeavour collapses.

Which is very depressing.  And the show was indeed very depressing.  But for me it was saved by the last few minutes in which Derren interviewed Natalie.  He revealed that her conversion was all a psychological trick - the emotions were real, but God was not, yada yada.  Yet in my view her response, completely unscripted, torpedoed Derren's whole enterprise. And I think he knew it.

When asked whether she now viewed her experience in the church differently, she said

It has added a kind of artificial element to it for me now...  But inducing an emotional reaction to something, if it’s through external influences is always artificial in a way...  If I’m listening to an amazing piece of music, that’s an emotional stimulus that’s come from an artificial source...

Amen Natalie!  Preach it.  All emotions come from somewhere beyond us.  To explain the feeling doesn't explain away everything to be said about the experience.  At this point Derren talked right across her and didn't let her speak again.  He forcefully asserted...

The emotions are real, that’s the point. It’s just important to me that you don’t feel it has to be attached to something supernatural or superstitious. Because it wasn’t.  And it’s not even like it came from me, it certainly didn’t come from God, it came from you. They were perfectly real emotions, they are things you can carry with you for the rest of your life but you don’t have to attach them to a superstitious belief.

Carry the emotions Natalie - that's Derren's take home message.  Keep hold of the emotions.  Emotions that can be conjured up in 15 minutes by a TV showman.  Emotions based entirely on our ancient and selfish survival instincts.  Emotions which probably reduce down to randomness anyway.

And don't ever ask yourself why you live in a universe in which father-hunger, awe and regret can trigger such feelings.  Boil it down to selfishness in the struggle for survival, that'll satisfy. That and the emotions.  Induced for entertainment.  As a trick of the mind.  Take that away with you Natalie.  Cos that's all this evangelist can offer.

9

Published on 9 Comments on Five minutes on the bible and slavery

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson introduced the Declaration of Independence with these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This bold and attractive vision of human flourishing is articulated in the context of some very specific views of God, of humanity and the good life.  Yet without this framework it's difficult to imagine anything less self-evident than the truth that "all men are created equal."  If you divorce this conviction from its theological foundations, it's one of the  most instantly falsifiable "self-evident" truths going!  When you look at the mass of humanity born in such differing circumstances, with such differing opportunities and capacities, who on earth are the "we" who are able to see "equality" when all that's really "self-evident" is endemic inequality?

The answer is that the "we" who hold this vision of equality have soaked for long centuries in a view of God, the world and humanity which has been completely alien to the rest of thinking people.

Take Aristotle in Politics:

For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule...

Aristotle took inequality to be the thing "self-evident."  He repeatedly called slaves "living tools" and was quite comfortable with that arrangement.  Same with Plato:

...nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. (Gorgias)

According to these brilliant pagan minds, equality is not taught by nature.  The very opposite.  Whatever "human nature" was, clearly some humans conformed closer to the ideal than others.  So who could object if some were given more human "rights" than others?

The point is this: if observations of "nature" were all we had to go by, who on earth could disagree with the inequitable status quo?  Of course nature produces more powerful and less powerful creatures, superiors and inferiors.  If nature is our teacher why not endorse a class of rulers and a class of the ruled?  Why not support the inequalities which nature clearly intends?  Why fight it?  On what grounds?  With what justification?  From where could you get an alternative vision of humanity?  The only humanity we've ever observed has been one of profound inequalities!

Thus it seemed absolutely right to have a perilously steep hierarchy of being - the emporer at the top, the slaves at the bottom, with every subject knowing their place.  Who could possibly object?

Except that the ancient Scriptures kept speaking of another way.  The God who gets dirt under His fingernails forming humanity (Genesis 2), who wants to walk with His creatures in the cool of the day (Genesis 3).  The Saviour who would fight for us and take the blow (Genesis 3:15).  The Son who would give Himself in atoning death (Genesis 22).  The LORD who is Servant and Sacrifice (see Isaiah 42; 49; 50; 53).

And then He comes to a humble "servant" (Luke 1:48) as a humble servant (Philippians 2:5-11).  The whole pyramid is subverted as God becomes a Slave!  And He becomes a Slave so that we, the slaves of sin and Satan, might become sons and daughters in His royal family.  He descends to the depths and raises us to the heights so that now we might all feast at the same table - royals and commoners, masters and bond-servants.

And through this divine stooping, Christ shows us a radically different way of assessing "human nature."  The Son "became flesh" - just common or garden humanity.  He became a Jewish pauper with nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him (Isaiah 53:2).  Whatever might be deemed "ideal humanity" had nothing to do with the properties inherent in it.  The Man Jesus was valuable not because of the attributes of His humanity but only because the Son had chosen this flesh to be.  Thus a Christian account of "human nature" does not look to the properties and capacities of particular persons but declares that humans as humans are inherently valuable.  From there it's a hop, skip and a jump to declaring their "unalienable rights".

But wait - doesn't the bible (particularly the OT) endorse slavery?  Well distinguish Hebrew slavery from Greco-Roman practice and distinguish both from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.  Hebrew slavery was nothing like that which Wilberforce fought.

Certainly the Western mind has difficulty with the idea of selling oneself into slavery for a limited period (we prefer other forms of economic slavery), but those OT provisions were always temporary arrangements.  In everyone's lifetime Jubilee was always just around the corner (Leviticus 25) - and the great hope was the Messiah who would bring ultimate and eternal liberation (Isaiah 61; Luke 4:16-21).

In the NT, Paul counselled slaves (in this new Greco-Roman context) to seek their freedom if they could (1 Cor 7:21-24) and declared slave-trading to be sinful (1 Tim 1:10) thereby cutting the jugular of the whole practice.  But really, it was the intellectual revolution of the gospel that was so much more subversive than any 'revolt of the slaves' could be.

And it's a revolution that we need to continue today.  It's estimated that there are 27 million slaves in the world right now and so often it is Christians who continue to be at the forefront of the fight against human-trafficking.  Why?  Because Christians actually have an anthropology that treats each human with "unalienable rights" rather than as "living tools".  Anyone who seeks to take some high-ground on the issue of slavery must produce an account of human nature that will actually protect the weak and the vulnerable from being used.  But on what grounds will they justify such a stand?

I live in a country that kills 200 000 of the weakest members of our species every year because of the will of the strong.  Our culture can claim no high ground in protecting the "unalienable rights" of all people.  We have our own hierarchies based on the properties and capacities of individuals and we discriminate with extreme prejudice.  If we want real equality we must return to the only true foundation: the Master who became Slave.

1

Published on 1 Comment on Pause for Thought: Triumph through Adversity

My final entry for Radio 2's Pause for Thought competition:

Triumph Through Adversity

AUDIO

Three Australians in a pub compare their scar stories. One points to purple flesh on his calf: “Box jellyfish” he complains. The second says “You big girl’s blouse” – shows his left hand missing: “Shark Attack!” he says.  The third simply takes off his shirt revealing a massive scar from his throat straight down to his belly button. The other two say “Jeepers, what happened?” He replies “Post-mortem.”

We love a scar story.  Do you have one?  It’s a tale of triumph through adversity.

Think of the Paralympian on the podium winning gold. And you know that this gold has come through a furnace: a life-time of struggle, a car accident, a war wound, but through the furnace: Gold. We love triumph through adversity.

Recently Derren Brown was asked why his magic shows are so different.  He said “Magic tends to be about people clicking their fingers... and it happens.  Which is a God-like whim... What’s more interesting dramatically – he says – is a Hero-story... somebody who’s struggling with something and then goes through a journey but at some cost to himself.”

Derren Brown’s absolutely right.  We’re just not interested in the God-like figure – all triumph and no adversity.  We all respond to the Hero’s journey – struggle through adversity.

But what if the God story IS the Hero story?

At the end of John’s Gospel, Doubting Thomas is confronted by the Hero of the Bible.  The Risen Jesus shows him His scars – proof of a love that took Him to hell and back.  And Thomas blurts out “My Lord and My God!”  Thomas has seen God, because He has seen His scars.

We’ve all got scar stories. The Bible says even God’s got a scar story.  If that’s true then, in all our struggles, there really IS Triumph through adversity.

1

Published on 1 Comment on Pause for Thought: Lost and Found

Here's my second round entry for Radio 2's Pause for Thought competition

Lost and Found

AUDIO

This week, universities up and down the country are holding Freshers’ Weeks. I’ve been at a couple this week and I’ve discovered two realities that are powerfully at play in Freshers’ Week.  The first is that EVERYONE is utterly LOST.  Folks are far from home, with a new environment, new people, new rules, new routines, and everyone’s LOST.

That’s one reality.  The other is that everyone’s trying to FIND themselves.  I still remember my mother’s parting words to me on the first day of uni.  I think she’s now embarrassed by them, I’m certainly embarassed by them, she said with tears (and I quote) “Glen, I want you to FLY... Just... fly.”  It’s the Bette Middler school of parenting I believe.  But we know what she meant!  In new environments we want to FIND the person that we want to be. We want to flourish and thrive and maybe even fly, I dunno.  We certainly want to stop feeling lost.

That’s Freshers’ Week – but it’s also life.  So often we feel lost and we want to find ourselves.  But let me tell you – If you are LOST, the last thing you need to FIND is YOURSELF.  Because you’re lost.  And finding a lost person is NOT that much help. Lost people who find themSELVES find that they are Lost.  Which is no great find.  When you’re lost, you need to find HOME.  And when you’re HOME then you can just BE yourself.

Jesus was always telling stories about how HE had come to find the lost.  He’s like a searching shepherd finding lost sheep.  He’s like a searching woman, finding a lost heirloom.  He’s like a searching father, finding a lost son.  Read more in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 15.  Jesus comes from HOME – that ultimate Family Home of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and He’s come to FIND the lost.

If you’re lost, you don’t need to find yourSELF.  You need to find home.  The good news Christians proclaim is that someone from Home has come to find you.

Published on Leave a comment on Pause for Thought: We are the champions

Recently I entered a Radio 2 competition to present Pause for Thought.  Unfortunately I didn't win, but what a consolation prize: meeting Vanessa Feltz at the final!

Here's my round one entry: We Are The Champions...

AUDIO

We Are The Champions

It’s official, the Olympomania Geiger counter has gone nuclear.  As an Australian who’s lived half his life in the UK I’ve undergone a bit of a conversion experience, I’ve been caught up in Team GB hysteria.  For the last fortnight I’ve been, in the words of Dylan Moran, ‘roaring advice at the best athletes in the world.’ And when you catch yourself screaming at the planet’s greatest sportsmen: “NOT LIKE THAT!” you realize you’ve been gripped by something bigger than yourself. There is a deep connection between us and the athletes – they are our champions.

Just this Friday, the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, published a poem about the Olympics with the line: “We are Mo Farah lifting the 10 000m gold”.  And on one level that’s just ridiculous.  I’m not Mo Farah, I’m part-man, part-sofa. Brushing my teeth is about as aerobic as I like to get.  But there’s something deeper going on.  Our champions belong to us and their victory is our victory though we haven’t expended a calorie of effort.

And here is the very heart of Christian faith.  You see I’m probably like you – I’m an arm-chair critic when it comes to life.  I talk a good game, but my own performance is laughable by comparison.  Step forward our Champion, Jesus.  He comes at Christmas as our representative, wearing the colours of Team Earth.  He lives our life for us, He dies our death for us, faces off against our biggest enemy – the grave – and beats it hands down.  Now His victory is our victory – though we have not expended a calorie of effort.

Put it like this:  If Usain Bolt is my competitor, I have no chance.  If he’s my Champion, I can’t lose.

If you think God just sets you standards, then of course you’re going to fall short. But Christianity says there’s a Champion.  And if He’s your Champion, you can rejoice like an Olympomanic long after the Games have gone.  Because His victory is your victory.

 

 

3

Published on 3 Comments on What Jimmy Savile, Jeremy Forrest and Lance Armstrong teach us…

Three prominent stories in the news reveal the same human condition.

Jimmy Savile's molestation of minors was even recorded in his autobiography.  It's not even disguised, it's right there on the page.  He remembers an incident in the early '60s when he managed a dance hall in Leeds. Police asked him to keep a lookout for an attractive 16 year old girl who was missing.  He told the female PC if he found her, he would keep her for one night as his reward.  She did indeed turn up at his club that night and, as he writes, it was ‘agreed that I hand her over if she could stay at the dance, come home with me, and that I would promise to see her when they let her out’.

This is precisely what happened and he 'handed her over' to the police at 11:30 the next morning.  Jimmy adds, she ‘was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well-known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me’.

Scores more stories like these are emerging a year after Savile's death.  People knew.  People were told.  Savile even told us.  But somehow we couldn't quite allow the truth to confront us in all its stark horror.

Today is the day Jeremy Forrest appears in Eastbourne Magistrate's Court.  The 30 year old maths teacher, who's been married for a year, ran off with a 15 year old student.  They ended up in France before the authorities caught up with them. Back in May he wrote a blog post entitled "You hit me just like heroin."  After speaking of the difficulty of an unnamed moral decisions he concludes: “At the end of the day I was satisfied that if you can look at yourself in the mirror and know that, under all the front, that you are a good person, that should have faith in your own judgment.”

As the relationship with his student grew, you can imagine the secrecy and the insanity ratcheting up in equal measure.  With no-one to break in from the outside and say "This is nuts!", they end up fleeing to France.  And then what!!?  That should have been one of a thousand questions bringing them up short.  But no.  He 'looked in the mirror', was content with what he saw and acted accordingly.

The third story is about Lance Armstrong.  The US Anti-Doping Agency has released "staggeringly voluminous supporting documents" for the decision to strip Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles.  ESPN journalist, Bonnie Ford, writes "After today, anyone who remains unconvinced simply doesn't want to know."

But what's fascinating is the admission by Ford that there would indeed be many who don't want to know.  She concludes her article saying:

Armstrong will always find a place to race and people who want to race with him, or at least come to watch. He is stubborn enough to be capable of existing indefinitely in a sort of parallel universe where he is still who he purported to be -- a purveyor of hope on wheels. And there will always be people who loved those three-week travelogues every July and don't want to give up on their longtime protagonist, either.

Sunflowers and lavender and Alpine switchbacks are far more appealing images than syringes and blood bags and a cult of personality channeled into coercion. Armstrong's legacy lies now not only in the eye of the beholder but in the willingness of that beholder to take off the blinders and see.

Here's the common thread... no-one wants to take off the blinders and see.  With Savile, for Forrest and for Armstrong's fans, we just don't want to know.  As the saying goes, there's none so blind as those who will not see.

But that's all of us, according to the bible.  "All men are liars" said Paul in Romans 3.  Calvin said this should be the first principle of Christian philosophy!  And Thomas Cranmer's anthropology was well summarized thus:

"What the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies." (Ashley Null)

Our minds are brilliant at justifying what we already love.  We don't see because we don't want to see.  This is part and parcel of our human condition.

When people pretend to a dispassionate appraisal of "the cold hard facts" and pledge to follow them "wherever they lead", we can admire them.  But we also have permission to smile and shake our heads.  It's just not how we tick.

So is there an answer to our universal flight towards fantasy?

Well Paul and Calvin and Cranmer would say Yes.  The answer comes in the Word.

We need to be confronted with Truth from beyond.  We need a Voice that contradicts us - that judges us and frees us.  If it only judges us, we'll flee it indefinitely.  But in Jesus, we have a verdict that condemns us as sinners, but then raises us as justified.  It tells us - Yes, Savile really could be this evil, but still there's a way to confront it and deal with it.  No, Forrest cannot look in the mirror and see a good person, but still there is a way back from this madness.  No, Armstrong is not a hero but we don't have to divide between truth-deniers and Armstrong-haters.   

This is a problem that besets us all.  We are all, continually, involved in justification.  Either justification of ourselves or justification of our heroes and principles.  Christ alone can free us.  He brings truth and grace.  Truth to judge our lies.  And grace to raise us again on His footing.  The only answer to self-justification is Christ's.

3

Published on 3 Comments on Happy Friday

I remember the second half of Titanic being almost watchable.  That verdict would have been completely undone if they'd gone for this astonishing Telenovela ending.

What lies ahead includes some swearing, blasphemy and the most cringe-worthy dialogue ever conceived.  Even worse than Rose's earlier line "I'll never let go, Jack. I promise."  Uttered as she let's him sink into the Atlantic.

Anyway, you've been warned...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2tYHcXNwAk]

For 49 more alternate movie endings, go here

.

3

Published on 3 Comments on RIP Neil Armstrong

 

 

 

 

He might well have died 40 years ago.  Certainly the authorities were worried enough that this sobering speech was drafted for Richard Nixon...

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown...

Read the whole thing here.

Thankfully, they came back with stories to tell, and photos to capture our imagination.  To me, this picture is as captivating as any they took.  It's not simply the wonders of space, but wondering at space that should make us stop and think.

RIP Neil Armstrong.

 

3

Published on 3 Comments on Not the God story, the Hero story…

Chris Addison chats to Derren Brown on Radio 4's Chain Reaction (UK listeners can get it for another few days).

From 19:30 Derren talks about his journey towards atheism.  But then at 25:36 he's back on magic and showmanship.  What he says here is very revealing - not only about the stories we respond to, but the god he rejected:

Magic tends to be about people clicking their fingers and saying "Oh, this will happen" and then it happens.  Which is a God-like whim and is therefore not dramatically very interesting.  What's more interesting dramatically is a Hero-story.  All drama that interests us is about somebody who's struggling with something and then goes through some journey but at some cost to himself, and so on.  And that's what we need more of in magic, people treating it as a Hero's journey rather than as a whimsical God-like figure who could make anything happen.

Whimsical, struggle-less, finger-clicking Gods do not win our love.  Struggling, suffering, journeying Heroes do.  Very true.

But what if the true God is the Suffering Hero?

And on that subject, isn't The Dark Knight Rises the most Christian film you've ever seen??  Astonishing!

Twitter widget by Rimon Habib - BuddyPress Expert Developer