Book Smarts

Yeah I know what you’re saying, “Here he goes again complaining about politics”. Nope not today, well not entirely today I will touch on it only to complain about how it always gets muddied in with today’s subject. Religion, I am going to take the time right now to apologize to everyone who reads this who might take offense at what I say here. I know my father will probably be upset about what I have to say but since all I get from him are chain email jokes of the nonsensical variety I highly doubt he even reads my posts here. So if you don’t want to read my complaints about organized religion then please stop reading here and realize that I don’t want to hurt your feelings and am doing this not to insult anyone in particular but to share my feelings on this that I have kept bottled up for quite some time, and you know what they say about keeping your feelings bottled up inside; your eyeballs will explode in flames and watermelon seeds will blossom in your stomach. Okay I might have gotten some sayings mixed up there just now.

I was raised in a Roman Catholic denomination family, if you could call it that since my parents divorced when I was very young and had shared custody of my brother and I. We went to church every other Sunday when we were with my father and as we grew older we went through all the usual rituals of the catholic faith; baptism, first communion, and confirmation. Through the years that we went through the instructions for these milestones we went to CCD every Wednesday night, this could be considered “Sunday school” but it was on Wednesday instead for some reason. For the most part we paid attention to what we were being taught but of course we were all kids going to class in the late afternoon after we had already been in school all day, so of course we screwed around from time to time but remember we were kids. For me however there was always a twinge in the back of my brain that kept asking questions about what we were being taught. I’ve always liked to read and I still do, much to the annoyance of my family and some of the groups I join in my online games, so of course I read the Bible and enjoyed it quite a bit when compared to many of the books I read back then. It was an enjoyable read, and as fiction it had a lot in common with the other books I read; swords, war, heroes, villains, and lots of conflict and an underlying storyline to pass on a message of understanding and cooperation to further the cause of humanity in peace and harmony.

Oh I bet that pissed off some of you just now huh? I bet you’re saying “FICTION?!? He called the Bible FICTION?!? That’s blasphemy and he should be stoned with really big rocks”. I dare you to try and stone me, I have NERF guns by the bed and plenty of whistling darts for them, but first stop and think about what I said and then compare the Bible to other types of writing. Fiction is a “made up story” from the imagination of the author. The majority of the time there is a protagonist and an antagonist (hero and villain), minions for either side (hero helpers and villain helpers), a goal to be met by at least one of the sides (save the princess, free the land, stop the end of the world), and most of the time there is a moral within the storyline that relates to the real world at the time of when the story was written (Beowulf and the moral within that story, which I never understood, doesn’t relate very well to the 20th century for example).
Non-Fiction is an accurate and actual recording of what happened. Non-Fiction books sometimes also include the author’s personal thoughts or theories in regards to the subject of the book such as their interpretation as to why a particular event occurred or why an individual made a decision. The persons within a non-fiction book are actual people and not a product of the author’s imagination, these people actually existed; or still exist today; and in many cases their family tree can be mapped out and their descendants might be able to provide personal items handed down through the generations that actually belonged to those people such as George Washington’s false teeth or King George II’s chamber pot.

Now if we apply all those descriptions to the Bible you can see where doubt might form in a child’s mind. I had read history books and they happened to be my favorite subject, I had also read books from the science fiction/fantasy classification of writing. The Bible had several characters in the book that were actual people; King Solomon, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, and Pontius Pilate; and more information about them has been written in other historical texts. The Bible also had several characters which could be classified as fictional characters since they only show up in this one text; Adam and Eve, Noah, and yes even Jesus. For the most part the fictional characters take the role of protagonists (the good guys) in their struggle for acceptance and freedom from the antagonistic historical figures (the bad guys). In this sense the Bible would fall under a third classification of book, historical fiction.

Historical fiction is a genre that I have only recently begun enjoying in the last few years and I’m digging it. The combination of fictional character heroes fighting against historical figures is just intriguing to me. There are several types of historical fiction that I would recommend to you and if you’re reading this then you know me and those types will all be warfare related so you shouldn’t be surprised at this. The Sharpe series of books by Bernard Cornwell was my first taste of historical fiction, the story of an enlisted man in the British Army after the American War for Independence and continuing through conflicts in India and then the conflict against Napoleon’s armies in Spain and Portugal. Along the way Richard Sharpe goes from lowly uneducated ranker to Sergeant and finally receiving an officer’s commission for saving the life of Sir Arthur Wellesley (known now as the Duke of Wellington). In his adventures he and the small detachment of riflemen under his command participate in nearly every important engagement of the Napoleonic War from Trafalgar to Badajoz and the war’s climax at Waterloo, and of course saving the day at almost every turn for the British Army. Recently I have also begun reading the tales of Horatio Hornblower and also Jack Aubrey both storylines involving the Royal Navy in the same time period of conflict against Napoleon and his allies. Though the ship captains and crews are all fictional, many of their opponents and other vessels in the stories are true as are of course the cities and towns they visit. The most in depth and intriguing however was a single book called The Ten Thousand by Michael Curtis Ford and it tells the story of Xenophon and his leading of stranded Greek mercenaries and their comrades from Persia all the way back to Greece all the while fighting every combat force that stood in their way of getting home and also defeating the forces sent by the Persians to follow and harass them. It is intriguing because though the story is true and all of the names within the story are true and actual people, this book gives a fictional though completely plausible account of what might have been going on in the heads of these commanders and their soldiers during their gallant ordeal. Wow I got off subject there didn’t I?

Okay I’m just going to close out now by saying this, don’t worry I’ll try to be brief. It’s good to have a belief in something but you should still be able to keep your mind open to ideas and other people’s beliefs. I don’t believe in God anymore and I don’t think I ever really did, my mind has always had those questions and you can’t tell me that there is a God simply because you say it is since it says it in a book. I have books that tell me all sorts of things but I’m realistic enough to know that those books can’t prove that dragons fly and magical swords are hidden in lakes. I asked my father once when I was younger, why he never joined the military. He told me that he couldn’t take orders from someone and do what they told him to do simply because they said so; “Go dig a ditch there” “Why?” “Because I said so that’s why”. He couldn’t do that and the same reason applies to me when it comes to religion. “God says we should live our life this way” “Why?” “Because God told us in the Bible this is how it should be done”. Yeah okay I’ll be over here eating a bowl of chili.