Banned Books Week

I was reading with some interest the list of books that have been most likely to be banned. Harry Potter topped the list and the rest of the list included some pretty similar pop-cultural icons - hardly the sort of insidious cultural damage that I was expecting. Apparently, the types of books most people try to ban these days shows a clear lack of imagination on the part of the banning public. There are some truly horrid books out there that nobody is reading, much less banning. Our banning public needs to get out and read more.

I've read Harry Potter. It contains elements of witchcraft and dark magic. These things are warned about in the Bible as being bad. Apparently, the worry is that children reading these books, and being exposed to their teachings and glorifications of this lifestyle, would then become witches and warlocks as well - thus completely subverting Christianity and bringing about the end times (which are coming, no matter what, when we least expect it).

I'm currently reading a book from Oprah's book club called, "Say You're One Of Them" It is a collection of short stories by an African writer that, while fictional, are based on real-life horrors in Africa. The story I'm currently reading is about an uncle who agrees to sell his niece and nephew into the international sex trade in exchange for a new motorcycle. Hah, Magic and Witchcraft! Take that! I'll see your occult and raise you pedophilia and slavery! Can you imagine the outcry parents would have if their kids were asked to read this book in school? And yet, nobody is trying to ban this book.

I think it's clear that the people who wish to ban books are clearly not the best read people out there. If instead of fighting their ire by seriously considering their ill-formed requests, we simply agreed and replaced the Harry Potter books of the world with the Say You're One Of Them books of the world, I'm guessing that the banning public would demand Harry Potter back on the shelves and this nonsense would be over.

So next time you hear a parent ranting and raving about a particular book with bad words, inappropriate scenes, or some other mularkey, agree with them and suggest that the bookstore/library replace the offending book with a copy of Mein Kampf or some other such work. Quite frankly, it's about time we raised the literary level of our banned books.

The Heart of Admonishment

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump...

I was lying on my bed. It was hot. Was that the beating of the fan blades? Or a Huey come to take me back to 'Nam? Did it matter? I was still beached. And bored.

They came with an indecent proposal. Seems one of their own - a Colonel Lie - was missing somewhere in the jungle at a place approximately one mile from the beach. He hadn't been seen in months and nobody had heard from him either. They asked me to take a boat up there, to fight my way to him, and to bring him back.

Or, if I couldn't bring him back, I was to do something drastic... replace his lawn, perhaps. Co-coach T-Ball with him. I could only imagine the horror.

I guess some people really miss his homilies. Me? I'd rather sit here on this bed listening to the drone of my fan. Cause it's hot. And that's how I roll...

My First New Temptation

My behavior this weekend was boorish. There's a certain appeal every once in a while to cast off that respectable you that you've spent years developing in order to wallow in that old neanderthal self of your college years. The only thing is, I never really had any college years. By the time I was in college, I was already too old and too mature for the kind of college years that most people refer to as THE COLLEGE YEARS. So my approximation of my college years filled with boozing, partying, gambling, lascivious behavior, and other outrageous stunts, was mostly reduced to a kind of crude humor not normally allowed outside a locker room - and it got old in my mind really fast. I only maintained the pretense because nobody goes to Vegas to discuss theology, politics, or the complexities of life. For every moment when Shakespeare was in my mind, I masked it well with some half-baked discussion of some girl's anatomy and had another beer.

Las Vegas style temptation no longer has any appeal to me. Gambling (or should I call it throwing money away) is no longer fun. Drinking lost its appeal years ago. I'm too old to wander around picking up chicks. And all that drunken frat boy stuff stopped being fun after about one semester in college.

As I sat inside the Paris casino waiting for a friend, I watched all the women go by, dressed up for a night on the town, no two alike, no one really having "fun", and it occurred to me that I'd much rather spend time doing something real. Vegas suddenly seemed so artificial to me - a fantasy where the curtains were rolled back and the tiny wizard had been revealed.

Though I may have overdone it before - Kenya, Mississippi, Church, etc... - prompting a need to escape to Vegas for some counter-programming, the rightness of my path became crystal clear to me this weekend. There is a true power and a true desire for real relationships and real fun and real celebration that is other-centered. There is more fulfillment in a quiet moment of real laughter or real tears than in 10,000 nights of the artificial revelry of Las Vegas. I began to see the temptation such a REAL life could hold.

So God has dangled the temptation in front of me - to follow Him without reservation and to leave the glittery world behind. The question is, will I yield? Or will I remain boorish in some vain attempt to stay part of a world I no longer feel any connection to?

Aw heck... I give up. I'm trading in Vegas for a real life.

The Worst Idea For A Romantic Comedy...

Upon leaving the Navy, I was all set to get my life started. I returned to my San Francisco home (now in Pacifica) and my fiancee and got ready to start college and get a job. Shortly after arriving home, I moved into an apartment with my good friend and fellow Navy buddy, Jay.

During the next six months, I had the sorts of adventures and life-changing moments that you see in hundreds of coming-of-age college type movies. Parties, women, crappy jobs, college, sports, and all sorts of crazy exploits surrounded me and my eyes were definitely open and my brain was definitely recording.

At the end of these six months, however, my fiancee dumped me and I was so heartbroken that I decided I'd rather live at home and spend money on a car rather than rent. As it turned out, my friends parents wanted to move back from New Hampshire - so they simply reoccupied the apartment that they had left for my friend and I.

It wasn't until a few years later, however, that I started looking back on this period with a sort of nostalgia. The heartache was still there, but the other events that happened during those six months were almost the stuff of legend. Certainly, I thought, they would be good fodder for a movie script. I began developing this idea for an autobiographical story that would be this romantic comedy.

Except that in real life, I was dumped. And miserable. Mixed feelings about this period aside, I began to play with ideas for a story.

And play.

And play.

And play.

A few years passed (Okay, more than ten, less than twenty... so far) and I started back to film school. After a rather successful attempt at making a horrible movie, I started thinking about the subject of my next film. The idea came back to me. I still hadn't figured out how to tell a romantic comedy where the main character gets horribly dumped and spends most of the movie moping around, but I started really developing the idea further.

Development always stopped however when it came time for my character to get dumped. It wasn't that the pain of being dumped had somehow inhibited my ability to write after all these years, it was more the fact that it was just so depressing of a story development that there was no amount of cool stuff that could overcome this momentum killer.

I pretty much gave up on the idea as a lost cause. But three weeks ago, in a moment of pure, brilliant insight, I suddenly realized that by moving some of the events around, by changing the actual event's orders, I could alter the momentum just enough to launch the story properly. Being certain that it had to be a mirage and that once I started writing I would realize that it couldn't possibly be that simple, I sat down on August 25th and started writing.

Last night, I finished the movie script. It took me three weeks to accomplish what it took me fifteen years to think about. The script isn't perfect, yet, but its a lot better than it has any right to be. I have finally succeeded in writing a romantic comedy about the end of my long standing relationship.

And I even managed to keep some of it still based in reality.

Oh... and best of all... No Star Wars references, whatsoever.

Free Speech? Really?!

I know this might seem reactionary, but I've been letting this storm brew in my head ever since I heard about this a couple of weeks ago. It was stupid then. It's even more moronic now that plenty of peers have weighed in on the idea and they all think its a bad idea, and the guy is going ahead with it anyway.

I'm talking, of course, about burning the Quran. Look, here's my point, plain and simple. If you're a Christian Pastor and you have to defend your action by saying that Constitution supports your right to do something, then you're probably NOT doing what God wants.

There is free speech and there is Christian speech and the two aren't always the same thing. If you want to come out and say that Abortion is bad - I may disagree with you, but I respect your right to say it. And I imagine, God respects you for saying it as well. But if you want to ATTACK someone with your "free speech" then you are NOT being Christian whether the Constitution supports your right to do so or not.

What part of Love your Neighbor is not clear? What part of Do Unto Others As You'd Want Them To Do Unto You is murky?

You are a Christian Pastor. You are called to a higher standard than the U.S. Constitution. You have the right to burn a Quran as an American, but you don't have the right to do it as a Christian. In fact, you have no right to do this and call yourself a Christian. This is Hate Speech and a Hateful Act. And to say that God wants you to do this, well, you need to go back and take a few theology courses, buddy. You are like a little kid hitting your sister and then saying, "Dad told me I could."

Sorry, but there are not many things that I see as absolutely wrong. This is one of them. There is nothing you can say or do that justifies your actions.

Sorry, Stephen Hawking, but you're wrong...

It's funny about the timing of some things. I just had this revelation two days ago and I've been mulling it in my head, trying to figure out how to phrase it. Then the news breaks today that noted physicist Stephen Hawking has decided that physics alone can explain the universe and that God is not needed. Well, quite frankly, he's wrong, and I can actually prove it using scientific theory.

This is a bit convoluted - which is why I was trying to figure out a correct way of phrasing it - but I'll give it a shot.

The Big Bang theory suggests that at some point roughly 40 billion years ago (give or take) the Universe existed as a single point without space or time. For whatever reason, this point then exploded with enough force to create the entire universe out of hot gasses and matter. My knowledge of physics here is a bit shaky, but I will concede the fact that the Big Bang did occur. The issue is whether the Big Bang occurred randomly as Stephen Hawking contends or whether God was its instigator.

Here is the gist of the problem with Stephen Hawking's idea. His theory is that the universe was created randomly - that the laws of physics clearly show that such a thing is possible and that, therefore, it must have happened that way. However, if the Universe was created randomly, it could have also NOT been created randomly. Random events are, well, random. They happen, or they don't. But in the only example that we have (our universe), the event DID happen. The Universe was created. And as a result we are here to speculate about whether the universe could be created. If the universe wasn't created, we wouldn't be here to speculate about whether it could happen. Therefore, we have a determinate outcome - the Universe WAS created. It does have a reason for existing. If it has a reason for existing (even if that reason is only so that we can say that the Universe does exist) its creation could not be random.

Think of this theory as a giant cosmic version of I Think, Therefore I Am.

By Stephen Hawking's rationale, there were two possible outcomes to the Big Bang - that it occurred randomly, or it didn't occur randomly. But obviously it did occur - the mechanics of which are not important to the discussion. Science clearly dictates that any fact must be repeatable scientifically. The Big Bang has not been repeated. Anywhere. So, the big idea that a universe could just form randomly has yet to be shown and can't be repeated. Also, the idea that the universe could NOT just form randomly has also yet to be shown and can't be repeated.

The problem with science is that it must, by its very nature, explain everything. Some things don't have explanations - no matter how much science wants to come up with one. If the universe could just randomly appear, it could also just randomly not appear - in which case this blog would have a seriously small audience. Since the universe is here, especially in light of the fact that the science shows that the universe is not a foregone conclusion, doesn't that argue for the fact that there is a reason the universe exists? If there is a reason for its existence, someone must have determined what that reason is. The idea that all of this is just here, with no grand scheme or design, is much the same argument you might have with yourself when you say, "What if I don't really exist?" What if you don't? Then your argument doesn't matter. If the universe was created for no purpose, completely randomly, then anything we discover about it, or about ourselves, also has no purpose. We exist randomly. We have no meaning, no purpose. We might as well not exist - because in the end, its just a different toss of the dice.