Stranger in a Strange Land (a book review post)

I feel like I'm a little late to the Heinlein game.
Which is silly.
But, for someone who grew up reading all the sci-fi/fantasy he could get his hands on, it makes me feel like I'm late.
What makes it silly, though, is that even if I'd read this when I was a teenager, I would have been reading it decades after it was originally published. Can you really be late to the game with fiction? Unless you're trying to be in on the cultural zeitgeist game, but that's a totally different thing.

At any rate, I'm not sure reading this when I was younger would have necessarily been a good idea. I was a pretty hard-line Fosterite all the way through my 20s. Oh, wait, I mean Southern Baptist. Not that Fosterite equals Southern Baptist specifically, but it certainly equates to any of the Evangelical denominations. Probably all the Protestant denominations. There's every chance I would have dismissed the book as blasphemous and been done with it.

Or, maybe, it would have helped to yank the stick out of my ass.
I guess we'll never know.
"Waiting is...," as Mike would say it, and I think I've read it at a fairly appropriate time in my life.

What I want to say about Stranger in a Strange Land is that it's barely science fiction, but that's not really true. To paraphrase Mary Doria Russell's response when her book, The Sparrow, was referred to as not really being sci-fi, "It has spaceships and aliens!" And so Stranger does have spaceships and aliens. But the sci-fi wrapper is to cover the philosophy underneath. Which is, actually, totally okay. Asimov said something about sci-fi being the perfect genre in which to write about anything.

Or, in this case, everything. Almost everything. It's a philosophy of... the world. A view of how things could be if we could just... get along? Love each other? His name is Valentine, after all. I don't want to be spoilery and say what kind of figure Michael Valentine Smith is, so I'll say, instead, that the first thing I thought of, the other first thing I thought of, was Billy Budd, Sailor. Billy Budd and Smith are very similar figures, at least in my vague memory of Billy Budd, which I haven't read in decades. Since most of you probably haven't even heard of Billy Budd, I'm not really spoiling anything, right?

But did I like it? I'm sure that's the question you're all dying to know the answer to, probably in some very human rushed sort of way, wanting me to get on with it. But that's not very Martian, you grok?

Yes, it's a very interesting and engrossing book.You can tell by how quickly this review is following after my last review. [And shut up to you people who are pointing out that it's been a full month since my last review! For me, especially recently, I flew through this book!] It's good. In fact, it's very good. I especially enjoyed the character of Jubal Harshaw; I suspect he's a personification of Heinlein himself, though I don't really know anything about Heinlein so that supposition could be completely baseless.

That said, the book does have a few issues, the first one being the way the lead female character is referred to by the male characters early in the book. They pretty regularly call her "little girl" or "baby girl," something which made me extremely uncomfortable. And, like I said, I'm completely unfamiliar with Heinlein, this being the first book I've read by him, so I don't know if this is a Heinlein issue or not. Or it could have been purposeful and for effect since the main male characters quit that behavior as they... well, as they become more evolved due to their experience with Smith. So is it an issue? I don't know, but I bet he wouldn't write it that way if he were writing it today.
Or would he..."

The real issue I have with the book, though minor, is a story issue. And this is what you could call mildly spoilery, so you've been warned.

Mike grew up on Mars. On Mars, dead Martians hang around after they're dead and, really, control everything. They're the Old Ones and are considered all-wise. But, when your soul gets to hang around for... forever... I guess it gives you a different view on things. If you got to hang around after you died, wouldn't you want tell people what to do?

At some point early in the book, we get a snippet from the perspective of the Old Ones. Which was fine. That's part of the sci-fi. Martians aren't the same as humans. The issue is that Mike spends a good portion of the book wondering about the human "Old Ones" and how to get to talk to them, which is also fine... right up until we hit a point where Heinlein gives us some point-of-view from a dead human. That part just didn't work for me.

Heinlein spends a fair amount of time discussing, through Jubal, how it is that we can't actually know the truth about religion, especially in a world where everyone insists that they know the one and only truth. That he later breaks that wall by giving us a view of what happens after death, at least from his perspective, undermines his point about that sort of truth being relative. Fortunately, there's not a lot of that in the book, because that would have had the potential of ruining the story.

All of that to say, if you're a sci-fi fan and pretty flexible minded, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're not a sci-fi fan but, still, pretty flexible minded, i.e., you enjoy hypothesizing about the state of the world, you'll probably enjoy this book. If you're ultra-religious or think you have everything figured out, unless you have happened to figure everything out in the same manner as Jubal, you're going to want to throw the book against the wall and burn it. Or, maybe, it will help you get the stick out of your ass.

Fallacies of the Church -- An Introduction (part one)

As I've talked about before, I grew up in "the church;" specifically, I grew up Southern Baptist. Beyond that, I've worked in "the church," across several different denominations. The difference between me and most people who grow up in "the church" is that, from a young age, I began exploring Christianity on my own. What I mean by that is that I did not rely on Sunday School or the pastor or the youth pastor or whomever to teach me what's what about what's in the Bible and anything and everything related to that. I studied on my own.

My tendency to do my own studying (I was the only one in my youth group when I was a teenager who had read the Bible (even worse, when I got to college, I knew ministerial students who had never read the Bible (that, actually, was more than 90% of them))) led to many disagreements between me and authority figures at my church when I was a teenager. They would say something like... Let's use a great Southern Baptist example! "The Bible says it's a sin to dance." And I would reply, "No, it doesn't." Then, there would be some complicated rationalization about how all these other things the Bible said arrived at the conclusion that "dancing is a sin." It's very clear that God thought it was excellent when David, so overcome by joy and praise for God, danced naked through the streets. I'm sorry, but it's hard to get past that.

The thing is, whenever I would get into one of these disagreements with an authority figure in my church (and remember, I was only 16-17 years old), they would always have to concede to me that I was right. Because I was. They had just accepted things because of the tradition that the church had that the Bible said these things (like "God helps those who help themselves," and "Cleanliness is next to Godliness"). The only one of these I didn't get a full turnaround from the other person had to do with the rapture and when that will happen (in relation to the other events of Revelation, not what year it will happen). He couldn't bring himself to tell me I was right, so he came back with, "I'm not saying you're right, but I will say that I was wrong."

Now, you might be thinking right about now, "Why does any of this matter? I don't care about the rapture or what Baptists think about dancing," and I get that. Totally. I don't care about what the Baptists think about dancing, either, even if I can't do it (and you can ask my wife, even after lessons and more lessons, I just can't dance). However, some of these things "the church" teaches are damaging to people, including what it teaches, mostly, about the rapture. I don't mean damaging in a little way, either. I mean damaging in a big way in that it becomes damaging to society in general.

Now, I am not setting out to be offensive, but I am sure that some, if not all, of what I say will be found to be offensive by at least some of the people who visit my blog. I'd like to care more about that, but I kind of don't. If I did, I wouldn't do this series to begin with. People in "the church" tend to believe too much and trust too much what pastors say just because it is a pastor who is saying it, pastors who have never read the Bible all the way through or ever bother to learn the historical context of what they were reading. I have had people tell me, "You don't need no schooling to be a preacher, all you need to do is have a Bible." And that attitude explains the abject ignorance of at least 80% of "the church." [Yes, I pulled that figure out of my butt, but I expect it's more like 95%, so I was being extremely generous. Remember, I spent decades around people in "the church" and found very few of them to be any kind of enlightened. About anything.]

Anyway... back at the beginning of the year, I promised to be more offensive, and this is just another of the ways I intend to do it. I don't have an issue with tackling difficult topics.

All of that being said, I am a Christian, but I am only a Christian in that I believe in the Kerygma (as I talked about here). I am certainly not the current iteration of cultural "Christian" who is so far removed from anything that Christ taught that if Jesus walked into their church, they would turn Him out. Or barely tolerate his presence in hopes that He would leave on His own. I'll put it like this: I find "the church" to be offensive. I find a significant number of right-wing nutjobs supporting their actions by waving the Bible around (like Kim Davis) to be offensive. I find the people who hold rallies for those people and wave the Bible around as an excuse (I'm looking at you Mike Huckabee) to be offensive. Well, it's time for you to own up to what's not actually in the Bible and to start treating people the way Jesus said to: with love.

The Religion of Writing: Part One -- Religion

Disclaimer: This post is not meant to be offensive in any way. It's about an actual experience which will serve as an example to my actual point in this series. Having said that, though, and knowing that religion is a touchy subject, as is writing, I know that this post is opening to door to people being offended. Just know that when I write this, I'm not really condemning anyone else's beliefs or belief system. I am condemning people that are condemning of others' beliefs, though, because that's just wrong. People ought to be allowed to believe whatever crazy thing they want to believe no matter how wrong it is without the fear of other people coming along and damning them for it. You know, as long as those beliefs aren't hurting someone else.

I started working at my church at a pretty young age. I don't mean just helping out in VBS and stuff like that, although I did do those things, too; I mean I was actually on staff and getting paid. I was 15 when I started being in charge of things like the gym and being left to supervise various recreation programs we ran. By the time I was in college, I was actually in charge of the youth and recreation programs.

One of the things we did was rent out our gym building (which had the chapel in it (as opposed to the sanctuary, which was the bigger building where we had "big" church)) to other church groups that didn't have a gym at their church. The most common reason other churches wanted to rent our facilities was to hold lock-ins. That meant I had to be there for the duration of any given lock-in. [Sometimes, during the summer, we would have a lock-in every weekend.]

There are a few things here you need to know:
1. My church was Southern Baptist. I have always liked to refer to the Baptists as the Pharisees of the Protestants. They are as tied to tradition and "how things are done" as the Catholics.
2. That being said, there are "worse" denominations (by worse, I mean even more strict and legalistic). One of those is the Pentecostals (and the Pentecostals really liked to rent out our gym).
3. Sometimes, to have something to do during a lock-in, I would invite some of my friends to hang out in the office with me. Seriously, it was important, because it was hard to stay awake otherwise. Just sitting and watching people skate and play basketball isn't all that entertaining.

4. You also need to know the basic fact of Pentecostalism: you only get to go to Heaven if you speak in tongues. [Yes, I'm boiling it down to its very core essence, but there's really not room, here, to elaborate.]

[The issue with the speaking in tongues thing is that it doesn't say that in the Bible. Not explicitly. There are some passages they base this belief on, but they create a logic trail you have to weave all through the Bible to come to that conclusion, and there are just as many passages that knock the foundation out from under that belief.
And, now, the plot is set for you.]

So... there was this lock-in, and I had invited a couple of my friends from college, both ministerial students, to come hang out for the night. I mean, it's free food which is pretty close to the Holy Grail for college students. All the pizza you can eat is a pretty big draw, and, in all actuality, getting invited to come to one of these things with me was pretty highly sought after. These were my two best friends, and it wasn't the first time they'd done this.

At one point, I was in the office working on something; I don't remember what but something to do with the lock-in. The guys had wandered off to the lounge where the TV was; one of them to work on a class assignment, which happened to be a sermon. He had his Bible out and open. The two of them were alone in the lounge. For a while.

But a group of the women (moms and such (chaperons)) who had been setting something up in the chapel for later in the evening came out into the lounge and found my friends there, one of them with his Bible out (maybe both of them, I'm not sure). One of the women asked them what they were doing, and the one working on the sermon responded that that's what he was doing...

And the group of women began telling my friends about how they were going to Hell.

It was the noise of the arguing that drew me down the hall. My two friends were surrounded by about half a dozen Pentecostal moms, one of the scariest things on the planet, I'm pretty sure. One of my friends was holding an open Bible with which he was refuting statements by the women. Now, here's the interesting part of that:

One of the women would say something like, "Well, the Bible says blah blah blah."
And my friend, with the Bible in his hand, would look up that passage of scripture and say, "That's not actually what it says. It says," and he would read it, "blah blippity blip blah."
To which the woman would reply, "Well, that's wrong, because my pastor says it says blah blah blah."
Did I say that my friend had his open Bible in his hand?
But the Bible was wrong because of what some woman thought her pastor had said about what was in the Bible. And none of the women had ever read the Bible. Many of them had never actually physically read any part of it because they had been indoctrinated to believe that they shouldn't read it because, you know, they couldn't figure it out for themselves, so it was better to just let the pastor tell them what was inside.
Even if it wasn't.
[I'm not making that part up. Several of them made statements to that effect.]
It didn't matter that my friends had the book in question in their hands, the proof, so to speak. The proof, the actual data, was "wrong."

That's what I walked in on. I was no less offended than my friends, but I was offended because they were in my church telling us we were going to Hell. My only question was why they wanted to rent our building if they believed we were a church on the way to Hell. With or without the hand-basket.

Since I was in charge, though, I had to break the whole thing up, so I sent my buddies down to the office to cool off for a while.

I'll be explicit here:
Many writers are just like those women in the way that they treat writing. In all sorts of ways. Things like traditional publishing being god. Agents being priests carrying the Holy word that can't be questioned. And all sorts of other things that I'm not ready to get into, yet, because we'll get to them in good time. Just be thinking about the ways you might be like that group of women. Believing without questioning what's being handed down to you.

Why the Right is Wrong

[Disclaimer: This is NOT a political post. This is not me declaring sides or advocating for one side or the other or anything like that. What this is is pointing out a mistake, kind of like pointing out a misplaced comma or a "your" instead of a "you're." However, in my mind, it's a pretty big mistake, and it's something that has made me sad. If you are at risk of becoming offended, don't read at all. If you do read, please read all the way to the end. Thank you.]

People like rules to tell them what to do. In America, we like to think that's not so true, but it's just as true here as it is anywhere. It's by following the rules that we know how good we are. It's by following the rules that we know who's winning. It's by following the rules that we know who's better. These rules, though... we just make them up. But, worse than that, we also impose them on other people. After all, you can't tell who's winning or anything else unless everyone is playing by the same rules.

I grew up a Southern Baptist, and I have to tell you the three greatest commandments had nothing to do with the Bible at all.

1. Don't drink.
2. Don't smoke.
3. And, whatever you do, don't dance.

I am in no way kidding. There was a fourth rule: don't have sex; however, if you didn't dance, you would probably be okay, because it's dancing that leads to sex, so just stay away from that whole dancing thing and nothing bad would happen. Made up rules.

The point is, we make up a lot of needless rules to try to keep everyone in line, and they actually have nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with religion. The worst part about all of this is that Christianity isn't even a faith anymore, not in the USA. It's a political stance, and it's so wrapped up in so many things that have nothing to do with actual Christianity that I can barely stand it.

So I want to go back to the beginning. It doesn't matter what you believe about the truth of these things; this is what Christianity IS as preached by the apostles, especially Peter, and this is what defines Christianity. It's called the Kerygma:

1. Jesus, the [one and] only begotten son of God, was born in fulfillment of prophecy.
2. He was crucified according to the plan of God and was raised from the dead in glory, witnessed by many.
3. He has given us the Holy Spirit as a sign of his present power and glory.
4. He will return again in judgment and restoration.
5. Those who hear this message should repent and accept salvation.

Holding to these things are all that's required to "be a Christian." Not believing in Creationism. Not opposing abortion. Not being clean, sober, and abstinent. Not believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. I'm going to say it again: the Kerygma defines Christianity.

Now, I believe in definitions. Not because they are rules but because they allow us to understand one another. If you say, "Watch out! There's a lion about to attack you!" It's important that the person being addressed understands that a lion is a lion and not, say, a gerbil. If I say to my kids, "take the trash out," I don't want them shoving the dog out the front door. Definitions are important, and so is this one about Christianity. For, oh, 2000 years it has been understood that to be Christian, you had to adhere to the Kerygma.

Along with this is where Christians gained their definition of what a cult is, because a cult was something claiming to be "Christian" while not adhering to the Kerygma. This goes all the way back to the Gnostics  and, while the word has changed through the ages (Gnostic, heretic, cultist), the meaning has remained the same. So, for decades, the Mormon faith has been considered a cult by Christians and, especially, by the Southern Baptists.

I'm not here to pass judgment one way or the other on that. I'm just saying it is. I grew up hearing about the evil Mormon cult at church while having Mormon friends that lived up the street. Just to clarify even more, I also grew up in a church (and an area) where an old lady, one Sunday, had a freak out because there was a [black man] in her church and someone needed to run him out of it. Yes, "black man" is my term, not hers. So I'm not saying whether it's okay or not, but, if I was a Mormon, I'd want to just be a Mormon and not get wrapped up in any of this "Christian" stuff. Just own what I am. Except that's not how it is.

And here's the thing that makes me sad:
This last week, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association removed Mormonism from its list of cults. This was not done because of any enlightenment or desire to bridge the gap between "Christians" and "Mormons" or "Christians" and any other cult group, because, let's face it, it's rather offensive to be called a cult, just like it was offensive of that woman in my church to call that man what she did. All the other groups labeled cults are still there; it's just that Mormonism has now been embraced into "Christianity" even though none of the definitions have changed.

Except that they have. Because "Christianity," as defined by the Right, has nothing to do with the Kerygma. It's a system of political stances that has risen above religious faith. It's rather like having decided that you don't like the thorns on a rose, but you still like the name rose, so, instead of a rose being a rose, you will now call a lily a rose. People still think when you say "rose" that you mean rose, but, really, you mean lily. It's kind of a clever trap, because you get people to elect a lily for president when they thought they were electing a rose. Or whatever.

Likewise, you don't just get to call yourself a rose if you're not. Daisies are daisies no matter how many times they try to claim to be roses. They're not gonna spontaneously grow thorns through word usage.

This whole thing bothers me, if you can't tell. There was no announcement. No change of stance. No "we've realized that this list is offensive." No nothing. They just quietly removed Mormons from the list to further their political agenda. And that's what Franklin Graham (Billy's son, and the person I think was most responsible for all of this, because he's more politically ambitious than his father ever was) said, "We don't want anything to stand in the way of getting Romney elected." That's a paraphrase. Basically, we're going to set aside what we believe in and what we've stood for for decades not because we've had a change of heart but because we don't find it politically convenient.

That way of being just... well, it just burns me up. If you believe in something, if you're going to say it and tell people about it, believe in it. Do it. Walk the talk. This amounts to me raising my kids telling them that they should treat other people the way they themselves want to be treated, which I do. Teach them that, that is, especially when it comes to how they treat each other. This is the basis for everything I teach my kids in many ways. However, if at some point I decided that I need to not follow that anymore, that I need to treat someone in a disrespectful way, because I have some justification that I feel goes beyond the "Golden Rule," so I tell them, "You know what? All that treat others the way you want to be treated stuff? Forget that; we're not going to encourage that anymore," because it's convenient for me to set those things aside to achieve my agenda, well, that would be the same sort of thing.

If you believe in something, it's not about convenience, it's about belief. If you lay it aside because it's  not convenient, you didn't believe it in the first place.

And this has nothing to do with the stance on Mormons specifically; it has to do with the stance on Christianity. If you believe the Kerygma, and, theoretically, if you say you're a Christian, you are saying that you believe the Kerygma, whether you know what that is or not, you don't get to just toss it aside because it's not politically convenient, and, if that's the way the Right and "Christians" are gonna be, well, maybe I don't want to be called a "Christian" anymore, because I certainly don't believe in a lot of what the Right says you need to believe to be a "Christian," none of which seems to have anything to do with the person of Jesus.

Maybe what I want to be is a Kerygmaist.

At any rate, Billy Graham is someone I've respected my whole life. I remember watching him on TV when I was, like, six. Billy Graham stood for something. He held to his beliefs, stood by them, but, because there is such opposition to a [black man] (who professes to be Christian) being in the White House, the organization is willing to toss aside their "beliefs" to elect a man that just a few years ago they would have dismissed as a "cultist." Which is what I'm sure they still believe, but it's better to have the white cultist than the black Christian. [Yes, I do believe it's a racist issue; after all, I've heard how my own family has talked about having Obama as president.]

I don't blame it all on Billy; he is almost 94 years old, after all; I think his son played a huge part in swaying his decision, but, still, it hurts me to see a man I have admired laying aside his beliefs because it's convenient to do so. Much better that he'd had an actual change of heart.

I'd much rather deal with a (wo)man I disagree with but who stands by his/her beliefs than someone who will lay them aside for the sake of the current convenience.