The Clearing

Finally, I saw light poking through the trees.  A clearing!  Clara had been wrong; there was a way out.  I’d have to go back and tell her.

“Welcome back,” she said, walking over to me.  Wait a second.  How could she have gotten here before me?  She told me that she would wait for me in the village.  Then I realized what must have happened.

“I must’ve gotten turned around,” I responded, looking around.  Sure enough, there was the other end of ribbon she’d had me lay out.

“That’s what I thought the first time,” Clara told me, taking it from me.  Then, in one fluid motion, she pulled the ribbon taut.  The other end went rigid as well.

“What?” I was dumbfounded.

“It’s not caught on a tree, either,” she said, shaking it vigorously, sending waves into the wood. “Watch.”  A few moments later, the waves emerged from the forest, smaller but undoubtedly the same.

“How…?” I trailed off.  She shrugged.

“All I know is this: the only way out of here is to cross the bridge.”

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 Falling No Comments

Divine Retribution

The Tanakh is often described as portraying the Jewish God as an angry, vengeful god.  In comparison, the New Testament supposedly depicts the Christian God as a kind, forgiving god.  I suppose this makes sense; the New Testament is full of passages about how God loves us despite our sinning, whereas the Tanakh is full of passages in which God, having been slighted by the Hebrews, almost gets rid of them all, ultimately contenting Himself by killing a few and terrorizing the rest with horrifying threats if they don’t shape up (“YOU’LL HAVE TO EAT YOUR BABIES”, for example).  But, well, the actual beliefs of His followers seem to indicate the opposite.  In particular, their views on the afterlife and the coming of the Messiah seem switched, in my admittedly limited understanding.

The Jewish view of death is that you go to a vaguely Purgatory-esque place for a number of months and then go on to one of the seven levels of Heaven, regardless of what kind of life you lived or what you believed.  There’s no sort of eternal punishment for screwing up in life; even the lowest level of Heaven is pretty awesome, and you’re guaranteed at least that.  It’s just that the other levels are, y’know, more awesome.  To top it off, when the Messiah shows up, you get to come back to life unless your body was snorted by Keith Richards or something.  No matter what you did, God forgives you, though he does reward goodness.

By contrast, the Christian view boils down to this: if you believed in Jesus and weren’t an unrepentant douchebag or something, you get to go to Heaven, which is a totally sweet place.  If not, though, have fun spending eternity in Hell, which is on fire and resultantly sucks.  Even if you lived like a saint, you get endless suffering if you didn’t believe in Jesus.  And that’s it.  It seems a bit petty to me, and certainly retaliatory.

Then, of course, there’s the beliefs of the coming of the Messiah.  The Jewish view, while a bit unclear, is something along these lines: either some dude will show up to lead us to a new age of peace and prosperity or we’ll just enter such an age anyway but, either way, it’s gonna rock for pretty much everyone.  Especially the Jews, though.  Also, as previously noted, the dead get to come back if their bodies were dealt with properly.  Cool.

Meanwhile, Christianity seems to say that Jesus is gonna show up again (I say again because we killed him the first time because we’re jerks), at which point all believers will die and be whisked away to Heaven.  Everyone else gets to suffer a variety of horrors heretofore unmatched until they die, at which point they’re sent to Hell to suffer some more.  Harsh.

To be fair, my understanding of these topics is incomplete and probably at least a little wrong.  Still, it seems odd that the “vengeful” God would let people mostly off the hook while the “forgiving” God would punish the crap out of people.

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Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 Thoughts 3 Comments

The Mansion

“You don’t understand.  We’re not in some nice mansion.  This is a tomb.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yes it is!  There’s a corpse in every bed.  Paintings of the dead adorn the walls. The pantry is full of fake food.  And the windows have no view because, as you may have noticed, we’re underground!

Monday, November 1st, 2010 Stories No Comments

On Madness

One of the most horrifying concepts to me is the idea of slowly going insane.  When it comes down to it, your mind is the only thing you really have; anything else is explicitly temporary, imagined, or subject to abrupt revocation.  Losing your mind is bad enough, but being painfully aware that you’re gradually being betrayed by the very thing that defines you?

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Sunday, October 31st, 2010 Thoughts No Comments

Recovery – Day 2102

The Fog pushed away as I walked on.  William kept close to me.

“Don’t let it touch you,” I warned him, briskly making my way to Cat’s ultimate location.

“Why not?”

“It wants to get in.”

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Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 Fragments No Comments

Romanticized

I worry somewhat that we over-romanticize things.  The idea of the Wild West, for example, has been turned into some sort of glamorous time period in which cowboys could roam free, unfettered by such petty things as laws and relationships, while somehow remaining righteous.

War, too, is often turned into some sort of noble and glorious thing, with men fighting for their country.  This is particularly true for wars that we see as battles of ideals, such as the American Revolutionary War or the American Civil War, especially if we won the war.  Soldiers regret only that they have but one life to give.  After all, what does the life of a single man matter in the greater context of ideals?

Also of worry is today’s view of pirates.  Our view of the Golden Age of Piracy greatly resembles that of the Wild West. Bands of buccaneers would go and take what they wanted, laws be damned.  They were just searching for treasure, which was often buried on islands but occasionally happened to be located on someone else’s ship.  That’s okay, though, because they had a code of honor; while they sometimes had to do bad things, they weren’t bad men.

The Wild West was a time of extreme hardship and corruption.  War is and has always been hell.  And pirates were thieves and murderers.  These ideas have persisted largely because stories about the romanticized forms are, in general, more interesting than the realities.  That’s fine, but when people start to believe the idealizations over reality, there’s trouble.

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Saturday, October 16th, 2010 Thoughts No Comments

Science and God

Until recently, scientists were largely religious men who wanted to better understand God’s creation. More and more, though, scientists have been rejecting the notion of God.  Why is this?  I don’t think that science and religion are necessarily irreconcilable.

The attitude of the Christian Church certainly plays a part in this.  All throughout history, men with strange ideas about the world that don’t seem to fit with the Bible have been persecuted.  Rather than find a way to resolve the apparent contradiction (which would, incidentally, strengthen the idea that the Bible is God’s Word is Truth), the Church found it easier to disregard the idea as heresy.  Now, with science quickly approaching the point where it can seemingly explain everything, religion is increasingly viewed as unnecessary.

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Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 Thoughts No Comments

Fragmented

Like that of everyone else, my mind is a jumble of thoughts and stories. Now I have somewhere to put them.

Friday, September 17th, 2010 Thoughts No Comments