Actually, the opposite happens: I have read people who think my journal is angry, but when I say the same thing in real life as I say here in my lingering Virginian drawl and a chuckle in my voice, they are surprised at the lack of heat. This is a testament to their innate courtesy: they would not say such things unless they were angry, so they assume I must be provoked by anger before offering an opinion. I would never cane someone in real life, unless he were a New Yorker. In the commonwealth of Virginia, we have concealed carry, so you never know who is packing. Mind your manners, Yankee.

But now we are far from the topic: Con organizers. Great guys! Go hug one today!

I am sure the officers and crew of the real USS Enterprise are used to the kidding that must accompany sharing names with a fictional (but, in this day, more famous) ship of the same name. You can see a little homage to Capn Jean-Luc in the middle of this odd, odd video made by the sailors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTEKqUQCqHU

Go Navy!

Perhaps the moral here is that to the degree that comments on the issues of the day can be made to be comments on the universal issues of every day, they will not soon grow trite and dated.

One Will Stape, a writer at The American Chronicle comments here that Gene Roddenberry was a big hippie, but that the show was all the better for it, hippies being intellectual and concerned with real issues like racism and the Viet Nam war. In other words, this is the opposite of what Tim Powers says. With all due respect to Mr. Stape, this kind of talk makes me want to get in touch with my Inner Hardhat, and go out and break a two-by-four over the unwashed and unshaven hair of a jobless flower child. Give me a break.

There were a lot of things that made that show a cherished favorite for three generations of viewers, especially for those of us who grew up to be Vulcans. But the intrusive political comments were the weakest aspect of the show. The show where The Riddler is black on one side and white on the other is a perfectly enjoyable episode, because it shows the futility and self-destructive nature of hate; nor, let it be said, is his enemy Loki portrayed in the light most favorable to reformers and rebels. As drama, the scene where the two Cheronians reveal the reason for their race hatred, (“Are you blind? He is Black on the Right Side. All his people are Black on the Right Side”) as drama, I say, the scene is brilliant. As commentary on what fuels race-hatred, it is trite and shallow. The conflicts of cultures and peoples have deep roots in history and prehistory, and have to be overcome with a Martin Luther Kingian level of moral strength. If race hatred were caused by triviality, curing it would be trivial. This episode is (in my opinion) one of the better ones precisely because it reaches a more universal theme than the faddish political concerns of the hippies.

I also seem to recall an episode where the space-hippies (including Chekoff’s cutie-pie girlfriend) discover their attempt to go back to Eden is futile: for the way is barred by an angel with a sword of flame, or, at least, by poisonous fruit. I also seem to recall an episode where Klingons and Federalists (who DO we call members of the Federation? Feds? Federales?) are supplying arms to either side of a local conflict, and the solution is not to pull out and permit a Vietnam-style bloodbath, but to continue the grinding, horrific business of war: this is hardly the standard hippie position on the issue of Peace and Love.

I have heard the abortive theory that WIZARD OF OZ was a commentary by L Frank Baum on William Jennings Bryan and the Gold Standard — rubbish, of course. Baum explicitly said his purpose in writing was to craft an American fairy tale without the grimness and morbidity of European fairytales, a goal he achieved admirably — but let us suppose that this theory were true, and Baum had been writing about the issues of his day, now forgotten. The surrounding story touches an eternal theme: the Great and Powerful Oz is sometimes a mere carnival huckster, and the splendid Emerald City only looks green because you are wearing green-colored glasses.

(For those of you who read the book, the Emerald City is not, in the first book, really made of Emerald; and, unlike in the movie, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion continue to be fooled by the Wizard even after they discover his fakery– he stuffs the Scarecrow’s head with bran, pins and needles, and tells him he now has brains; he puts a tin heart in the tin man; and feeds the Lion a bowl of broth he tells the beast contains courage.)

But not to wander from the theme: even a book that makes a comment on some now-forgotten issue of its day will still be read and loved if it makes a comment on some issue not so strictly bound by time.

Oddly enough, tragedy seems to age less badly than comedy: ANTIGONE by Sophicles still has power to awe and horrify, whereas Aristophanes’ THE CLOUDS did not have (for me, at least) a single chuckle in it, and I simply detested Rabelais GARGANTUA & PANTEGRUEL. Dante I am rereading, so, as recently as this morning, I notice the great Italian poet has something to say about the issues of my day, something sublime.

I wonder how well science fiction tragedies versus science fiction comedies will hold up a hundred years from now, or a thousand.

(Indeed, I find it telling that each time I write an article against hedonism, some reader of mine feels it is pertinent to defend homosexuality. The two concepts are evidently linked, even in the minds of those who claim they are not linked.)

To secure to oneself the faithfulness of one’s sodomy partner I will admit is a fine thing: certainly it is nobler to be consistent with one’s catamite than to break his heart by dallying hither and yon. Likewise, I think pirates should keep their oaths they take to their vile articles of compact before they go buccaneering, and divide the spoils fairly. I have doubts about the wisdom of the long-term enterprise, but simple justice should require that men not lie to each other, and not betray each other, as this is as true for perverts as for pirates. A trusty pirate, I suppose, is better than a treacherous pirate: but it is better still not to be a pirate at all. 

So granted that a trustworthy partner is better than an untrustworthy, let us look next to see whether we are talking about partners in an wholesome undertaking, or partners in unreason.

Logic tells me that a desire unrelated to the object of desire is illogical, such as when erotic love, which is the mating emotion, takes as its object a member of the sex with which one cannot mate. And likewise, when the object of erotic desire is immature, or dead, or of the wrong species, or related by blood, or any erotic affection attached not to symbols to the exclusion of attachment to persons: pederasty, necrophilia, bestiality, incest, fetishism.

Moral reasoning tells me that reason must govern passion, as the only other option is hedonism. Rejecting the hedonist philosophy leaves one with no justification to respect homosexuality, or any other sexual abnormality.

Accepting hedonism leaves one with no justification to disrespect incest or polygamy. Indeed, from a biological point of view, incest is more respectable than homosexuality: Oedipus can father Antigone on Jocasta, but Alcibiades cannot mate with Socrates, thrust however energetically he might in any orifice the great philosopher might present to him.  

Again, I do not doubt that homosexuals can find a deep, true, and abiding unselfish love for each other. I merely regard this as tragic rather than as a cause for celebration. Their so-called marriage can never be consummated. They throw away the substance of love and feast on shadows.

This reader, and others, assure me that I am ignorant, homophobic, and prejudiced, because my conclusions do not match theirs. I can only speculate that they look into their own hearts and assess what it would take to get them to speak conclusions like mine: since nothing but hate would prompt them to condemn the law-abiding gay man, they assume my condemnation of the man’s unfortunate self-indulgence is the condemnation of the man. Their hearts are not as my heart: what they would only say in the heat of hate, I say reluctantly in the cool of reason. If I have made an error in my reasoning, I will change my conclusion without delay once those errors are convincingly pointed out to me. In the meanwhile, it has no persuasive value to accuse me of motivations I do not have.

I assure you, dear reader, it is not ignorance which informs my conclusions. I have homosexuals both among family and coworkers, and families of my friends: and I have seen them ruin their lives, in two cases attempt suicide, in one case successfully. The one homosexual I know who seems to be happy and well-adjusted, ironically, is a celibate young man who converted to Catholicism.

I assure you it is not hatred, fear or “homophobia” or ignorance which informs my conclusions: and that for the simple reason that I regard my own sins, including my own sexual immorality, as far worse than a little bit of harmless buggery. Sins of pride are the worse of sins; sins of lust are the least. Erotic love, even between man and man, can bring out tenderness, unselfishness, and other noble passions which might otherwise might not develop. Honestly, it is worst to be a drunkard, or a man who gambles away the rent money, or a liar.

For that matter, I regard no-fault divorce as a bigger threat to the institution of marriage, and as a deeper and uglier wound in the body politic, than homosexual marriage. No one seems to be writing in to denounce me as an ignorant & bigoted “Divorcophobe”, despite that my condemnation of this practice is much more severe and personal.

(For my fellow Christians, I note that while Moses condemned homosexuality and permitted divorce, Christ said nothing particular about homosexuality, and condemned divorce unambiguously. You generation of vipers! Let us remove the beam from our own marital malfeasance before trifling with the mote in our brother’s.)    

I assure you it is not prejudice which informs my conclusions. My migration to the camp of the anti-hedonists is recent. A few years ago, I was a supporter of the Bob Heinlein and Hugh Hefner view of sexual libertarianism. My anti-hedonist conclusions can be dismissed as wrongheaded, unreasonable, or even malicious, but they cannot justly be called a prejudice, because that word means a judgment before the facts are contemplated.

Ironically, it was Joss Whedon, famed glorifier of homosexuality, an advocate of its wholesomeness, who convinced me homosexuality was a perversion: had he and the other perversion advocates merely shut up, I would to this day have continued in my relaxed Heinleinianism. It was the mere absurdity of his advocacy that first drew my attention to the logical absurdity of the position he was propagating. My prejudice (and here I use the word correctly), my conclusion before I judged the facts, was that homosexuality was a harmless kink, and nobody’s business but his own, if a man took pleasure in its pursuit.

Alas, there is no point in my repeating my logic; if it was not found convincing to the honorable opposition before, it will not be found convincing now. Instead I will tell a story.

On the planet Eddore is an asexual race: the Eddoreans reproduce by fission like amoeba. Prudence requires an Eddorean about to divide to make provision for his two new younger selves: the Eddorean custom is to make and provision and nest when he feels his asexual reproduction about to begin. The act of dividing produces exquisite pleasure in the Eddorians—without this evolutionary pleasure-mechanism, the Eddorians would fear the division of personality and memory that accompanies the physical fission when they reproduce. Because of the ferocious competition involved in nesting behavior, laws and customs have been devised by wise Eddoreans to protect the sanctity of the nest. There is a nesting ritual that an Eddorian undergoes when he is nearing his time of fission.

Because the fission process is difficult, those who undergo it according to certain times and conditions have their children awarded honors and dignities closed to those who refuse to divide.

It just so happens that the Eddorians can stimulate the same exquisite pleasure caused by asexual reproduction by chemically treating part of their amoeba bodies and having the treated part drop off. The discarded part is not a new individual, it is mere blob of dead flesh. This process sometimes causes a loathsome disease that maims or kills its host.

It also happens that certain of the Eddorians not only prefer this chemical dismemberment, but cannot achieve any pleasure from that asexual fission natural to their race. Throughout history they have been reviled by normal Eddorians, and given the name “Chemosexuals.”

A revolution in manners and customs has recently overtaken the Eddorian society. Many of the old customs and laws surrounding nesting behaviors have been relaxed or abolished, with the result that insufficient care is taken of the young. Teen fission and orphaned split-offs are now commonplace, and the population is not reproducing at replacement rates. The diseases related to unsafe nesting practices are epidemic.

The Chemosexuals are now petitioning the All-Highest Ruler of Eddore to further modify the nesting customs so that they, and the blobs of dead flesh they shed, are treated with the same respect and circumspection as normal asexually-produced young. They are completely sincere and honest in saying the love-emotions and sexual-experiences they have toward their divisions are one and the same as those suffered by mainstream asexually-dividing Eddorians. They want to have the places where they perform their chemical amputations called “nests” and be given the same respect and sanctity Eddorians give other nests.

However the Chemosexuals are eager not to be likened to those Eddoreans who divide before their reproductive cycle is ready: premature division is regarded as grotesque and abnormal by all mainstream Eddorians.  The Chemosexuals are also eager not to be likened to the barbarian tribesmen from their planet’s equatorial regions who divide into three or four parts, instead of just the traditional two. These practices are called Pedofission fission and Polyfission. Unlike Chemofission, however, Polyfission always produces healthy (if undersized) offspring, and Pedofission sometimes, albeit rarely, produces healthy offspring.

Unfortunately, the Eddorians recently lost a war with Earth, and the All-Highest is slain, so the military regional governor from Earth has to make the decision.

His two choices are to categorize chemical fission with normal asexual reproduction, and award its practitioners nesting rights, or to categorize chemical fission with Pedofission fission and Polyfission, and deny those rights.

Earthmen are not asexual and have no sympathy or common experience with the reproductive practices of the Eddorians. The regional governor has to decide based on something other than his emotions, because his emotions are not fitted to the situation. He can only draw crude analogy to any Earthly practice.

The regional governor can only rest his decision on facts and logic. How should he decide? What should be the grounds of his decision?

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=3895&sec_id=3895

Evgenia Ginzburg, author of the brilliant and terrible memoir, Into the Whirlwind, leaves her apartment to go to the local headquarters of the NKVD, having been called there for a supposedly friendly chat about someone she knows, her husband says to her, ‘Well, Genia, we’ll expect you back for lunch,’ and she replies, ‘Goodbye, Paul dear. We’ve had a good life together.’ She knows, as he does, that she is never going to see him again this side of the afterlife: which is to say never. Thus a fathomless world of pain and sorrow is expressed in those few simple words that shames our vociferous complaints about nothing very much.

… The pain and sorrow as Evgenia Ginzburg expressed was a mass, everyday phenomenon. I remember what a professor told me when I visited the Baltic States just before the Soviet Union collapsed about his childhood in the late 40s: that he never went to bed other than fully-dressed, so that he would have clothes to travel in if the secret police came to the door in the early hours of the morning (they always came in the early hours of the morning). And another professor told me he remembered the trucks that would draw up at his school, whereupon names would be called out of those children who were to get in them and never be heard of again. A tenth of the population of the Baltic States was deported in those years.

Murders and deportations on the scale practised in the communist countries could not have taken place without the co-operation and even the enthusiasm of large numbers of people.

[…]

According to Solzhentitsyn, the sine qua non of mass murder as a way of life, or as an industry, is ideology.

[…]

It is curious how even now, after all the calamities of the twentieth century, the lengths to which people are prepared to go to pursue an end is taken by others as a sign of the worthiness if not of the end itself, at least of the motives of the extremists. The fact that people are prepared to blow themselves up in an attempt to murder as many complete strangers as possible is taken as proof of the strength of their humanitarian feelings and outrage at a state of injustice.

The greatness of a crime is thus a guarantee of the greatness of its motive

The second article is about the lassitude of modern liberal democracy:

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=4438&sec_id=4438

While I was in New Zealand, I learned of two cases that seemed emblematic of the Mailerian developments in the New Zealand criminal justice system. The first concerned a man with 102 convictions, many for violence including rape.

This man nevertheless became eligible for parole. As conditions of parole, the board told him he must not drink, smoke cannabis or frequent certain places. The man told the board that he would abide by none of these conditions, but he was released on parole anyway. Within a short time, he had killed three people and so maimed a fourth that she will never recover.

The second case was of a man with many previous convictions, some for violence, who abducted and murdered a young woman aged 24. He was imprisoned and applied for bail. Three times he was turned down, but a fourth judge granted him bail. He was sent to live at a certain address, where he befriended his neighbours, who did not know that he was accused of murder. Eight months later, while babysitting their children, he killed one of them.

Perhaps the most extraordinary twist of this terrible tale is that the parents of the murdered child then had another baby, which the social services then removed from them on the grounds that they had previously entrusted a child to the care of a murderer and were therefore irresponsible parents. The state blames its citizens for the mistakes – if that is what they are – that it makes.

What lies behind this terrible, wilful incompetence?

[…]

I think in large part it comes from the intellectual and moral zeitgeist that intellectuals have created … those who make the mistakes do not pay the price for them. They feel the warmth of generosity without feeling the cool current of responsibility.

My comment: one reason why I am conservative is that I find the alternatives are intellectually unsatisfactory. The secular humanist makes a great claim to being reasonable, and of overthrowing old traditional systems of law and morality as mere arbitrary superstition: but once one abandons tradition, customs, laws or religion, the only logical alternatives for a philosophy of life are either a newly-minted secular ideology, which takes upon itself many of the aspects of a religious cult, or a life without ideology, which is another word for hedonism or utilitarianism or even nihilism. Both are unreasonable.

The reality of life is that men are not Houyhnhnms: the attempt of Fallen Man to live life according to Reason, if it does not carefully take into account the weakness and folly of Man, will end merely by unleashing the passions Reason is meant to keep in check: ideologues as devoted to idealism as idolaters to Moloch become devoted to untruth: Orwellian political correctness is one result.

(I consider the US Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the English Common Law and the Enlightenment writers on which the American system is based, to have taken into account the weakness and folly of man, which accounts for the success of the American experiment in living according to Reason. The French and Russian revolutions were not so cynical, and not so salutary.)

The experience of the Twentieth Century is summed up in the two articles I quote above. Ideologies without religion are simply deadly to body and soul. The promised utopias never come to pass, but instead nightmarish regimes infinitely worse than whatever Batista, Czar or Weimar the reformers vowed to replace.

On the other hand Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, leads to displeasing results, and Utilitarianism turns out to be inutile, and Nihilism is nothing at all. Hedonist philosophies lead to lawlessness and moral frivolity.

It may be a law of psychology that no man devoted to self-indulgence can devote himself justice; for justice would condemn him. Hedonism shelters him from life and its consequences, and so the Hedonist is philosophically incapable of taking the consequences of his actions seriously. The disintegration of the normal legal features of the state, the duty to secure the physical safety of its citizens, is a by-product of modern notions of rights-based hedonism: I indulge only in mild hyperbole to call it anarchy. Certainly in the realm of public decency and private conduct, they are anarchists.

Why do the tyrants and bloody mass-murderers of the modern totalitarian ideologues get along so well with the dimwitted intellectuals of the modern anarchists? They should be opposites.

There should be no reason whatsoever for the Eloi of the West to fawn and flatter and applaud the Morlocks of the East, who consume the lives and souls of men. But hedonism, which is irresponsibility of the passions, and ideology, which is irresponsibility of the intellect, both see a natural ally in each other, much the same way the devils of Hell, however they might hate each other, all know against which King they separately rebel.

*******************************

Let me close with another quote from Dalrymple. He is complaining about the modern idea, not that man has a right to pursue happiness, but that man has a right to be provided happiness, in this particular case, the right to medicine and medical care disbursed from the coffers of Our Stepfather, the State. He details the folly of distributing free recreational drugs to drugs addicts.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=3671&sec_id=3671

I am astonished at how quickly the doctrine of rights has colonised minds, like bacteria on a Petri dish. Not long ago, I asked a young patient what she was going to do with her life (I am sufficiently interested in my patients to ask such things). She said she wanted to study law. Any particular branch, I asked, thinking she might want to do criminal law, which is the most interesting, if least lucrative, branch?

“I want to go into human rights,” she said, with that semi-beatified smile with which a girl of her age might once have claimed to have a vocation.

“Oh yes,” I said, “and where do human rights come from?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, are they just there, like America, waiting to be discovered by someone going out and looking for them, or are they conferred by mere human agency, in which case they can be repealed at the drop of a law?”

She looked appalled, as if I were a deeply wicked man who had suggested that, for example, racial discrimination was just the thing.

“You can’t ask that,” she said.

My comment: what is interesting to me is the tone of moral self-righteousness that accompanies, not just this poor young girl, but both wings of the modernist project.

Theodore Dalrymple does not pause to explain why the puritan-totalitarians and the hedonist-anarchists both assume the prerogative of being moralists, despite that they serve as close to the perfect opposite of morality as can be envisioned. In both cases, I suspect the reason is the cost-effect ratio of claiming the moral high ground, once morality is unhinged from traditional notions of law, fair play, philosophy or religion.

In the first case, the totalitarians are zealous for their cause because human psychology in inclined to zeal. If there is no God, man will worship Material Dialectic. If there is no Heaven, man will yearn for the People’s Soviet Utopia of Tomorrow. If there are no saints, there is Che. If you do not adore the martyrs, you end up adoring the beasts that consume them. The totalitarians assume the moral high ground because it is the most satisfying prospect from which to view the pile of skulls totalitarians pile up, the loot of ruined lives, the best place to hear both the moans of prison camps and the silence of the mass-graves. If you can loot and lie, prey on the weak, commit acts of piracy, organize gulags and show-trials, and lie and lie and lie, and the useful idiots will continue to applaud you as long as you claim to be helping the poor and heralding the future, the claim costs you nothing to make, and gains you the admiration of the principalities and powers of this world and the flattery of their servants.

In the second case, the greatest pleasure of the Hedonist is to playact at being a moralist. The pleasure of wine and women and song are as nothing compared to he pleasure of bathing in the glow of self-righteousness; and this hunger for praise is directly proportional to the absence of praiseworthy behavior. Hence, the Hedonist eventually becomes the Pharisee.

The formula for Modern Phariseeism is simple, as first discovered by Marx: take some inescapable aspect of reality, such as the scarcity of resources, and pretend that you have the right to unreality. You have the right, not merely to have other people provide you with food and shelter, but to have other people abolish the laws of supply and demand.

Or you take some inescapable aspect of human existence, like marriage, which logically requires chastity and decency for the institution to operate, and pretend you have a right to have other people applaud you for your sexual perversions and gross indecencies. The people cannot merely serve you, they must also praise you, and not by word or look cause your delicate nerves any disquiet at all.

Or take some universal institution, like politeness, condemn it as dishonest to excuse yourself from its rigor, and then accuse any who disagree with you of being insensitive and highly insulting.

No matter what they give you, demand more. And when they do not provide (for they cannot) accuse them of oppression.

It is a cheap and easy trick. The prerequisite for this formula is that you be utterly, entirely shameless.

It works as well for frivolous matters as for serious: you can accuse others of oppressing women when they insists on agreement of number in sentences containing a pronoun. Got that? Proper grammar is Hitlerism. The absurdity of this example merely shows that he formula for moral preening can be applied usefully to any question, any topic.

You too can be a crusader without ever having to go fight the Paynim. You can enjoy the palm of martyrdom without suffering the discomfort of being a martyr. With this formula, one enjoys the pleasure of the moral high ground without actually taking the tedious effort to climb it.

There are only two possibilities here: (1) something came before the Big Bang or (2) nothing came before the Big Bang.

The pre-cosmic “something” cannot have been another material universe like this one, unless we are willing to abandon the idea of entropy, as well as the idea of conservation of matter and energy. This is tantamount to abandoning science. While it makes a good science fiction story, it makes as little sense, on close examination, as the idea that time can run backward.

If nothing came before the Big Bang, then the cosmos does not now exist, because nothing can come from nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit. If something can come from nothing, not just science, but all human reasoning is futile (including this argument). A self-creating object is a flat contradiction in terms, it is analytically impossible, like a three-sided square or a married bachelor.

Esteemed scientists like Stephen Hawkings talk about the Big Bang as an “event” that creates time. In other words, at one time, time did not exist, then an event happens, and after this event happens, time, which is our name for the continuum of events happening, happened: and now time is time. In a previous time, before time was time, time was not time. It is merely meaningless rubbish. It is proof scientists should talk to philosophers before they dabble in metaphysics.

If the universe is not infinitely old, and not self-created, than it was created by something or someone which is not the universe: an uncaused First Cause.

Unlike the material universe, the concept of God does not involve entropy and decay. Unlike the material universe, a concept is not something that exists in time and space. We cannot point to God any more than we can point to the number four or to the ideal of Justice or to the Law of Non-contradiction or to any other formal idea.

The elegance of this solution is that is also gives warrant for belief in objective morality. It explains the beauty and goodness and rationality of creation, which, in the atheist universe, it either arbitrary or an accident. In a created universe, scientific reasoning is theoretically possible. In an atheist universe, scientific reasoning rests on assumptions about the rationality of the universe that cannot be justified.

You live in a universe, in an emotional life, where you are grateful for a gift with no giver. A giverless gift is analytically impossible, like a married bachelor. Your emotion of gratitude, which is the best part of you, has no intellectual justification.

I can only report that I used to talk like you, when I talked about the ability of the unaided human mind to make itself happy in any circumstance. I no longer wrestle with those fears, because I am no longer unaided. There is a spirit that is helping me to improve my life: back when I was a stoic, I was unable to endure pain. Now that I am a Christian, I have been able. Make of that what you will.

As for proof, what proof would satisfy you? All you see is a physical construct. Of course. The purpose of the eye is to show you material things around you. You cannot use your eyes to see true and false, logical and illogical, beautiful and ugly, moral and immoral, being and nothingness. You cannot use your eye to hear music either– because music does not reach the soul through the organ of the eye. You are looking for something no one has ever seen with his eye.

The organ is not meant to show you these things. Why do you assume your eye is accurate and your conscience is not? When your conscience tells you right from wrong, why do you assume this is an illusion? When the best part of you tells you, without any intellectual justification, to be grateful for the gift of life, why do you assume the best part of you is lying? 

You and me both, brother. Nothing can snap a recent convert out of his faith quicker than reading the bloodbath in the book of Joshua, for example.

There are five possible general responses to a Christian reading about the blood-thirstiness of the God in the Old Testament. The first is to reject the whole thing as a human invention, as the honest atheist must do. The second is to reject part of what the Bible says as human invention, and accept part as divinely inspired. The third is to excuse the shocking behavior of God by finding some reasonable justification. The fourth is to bow to the apparent injustice with piety, and say we do not understand God’s ways. The fifth is to say the Old Covenant with the Jews necessitated cruel laws and cruel enforcement, and that the New Covenant with Christ is more merciful.

There are problems with each of these approaches.

The fifth supposes a changing or evolving God or an evolving conception of God: the problem with an evolving God is that an evolving object is not perfect, cannot be used as a standard, and is whimsical. How can it be lawful for St. Paul to eat pork and unlawful for Moses?

(Please note this problem applies to any concept of an evolving standard, not just a Christian concept. The honest Marxist thrown back in time to the Dark Ages would be required to be a pro-Capitalist, because the ‘evolving standards’ of Marxism list Capitalism as a necessary historical stage to follow Feudalism. A standard that evolves is not a standard; a God that evolves is not a God.)

The fourth is unsatisfying to any thoughtful man, perhaps even an offense again reason: it is, in effect, asking men to trust rather than ponder.

The third would depend on a case by case examination of each enormity: but the problem is that it would be special pleading—why is it just for God to smite Sodom but unjust for the Romans to do the same thing to Carthage?

The third approach also raises Euthyphro’s paradox: Is righteousness loved by the gods because it is right? Or is it righteous because it is loved by the gods?

The second opens a Pandora’s Box of conflicting interpretations. In effect, accepting parts of the Bible as authentic and inspired and rejecting other parts as text corrupted by humans runs the serious risk of having each believer merely write his own version of the Bible in his imagination, tempting him to quote only those passages out of context that support his own particular opinions.

The first is satisfying to the intellect, but does not satisfy the spiritual hunger or supernatural insight, whatever it may be, that led the believer toward Christianity in the first place. One is left wondering how and why intelligent people like CS Lewis could lend this efforts to supporting a creature as monstrous as the slayer of all the first born children of Egypt, or the whole world of Noah (and Lewis was a intelligent—even his enemies must admit that a professor at Oxford and Cambridge was literate).

But if one rejects God utterly, what is one left with? The honest atheist is left staring into the grave that has been dug to receive him without hope: the blind idiot universe, dying of entropy, is certainly not any more just than the cruel God of the Old Testament. One can drink with Omar Kayyam, lolling with one’s head in the lap of a toothsome damsel, and toasting with strong wine the fate that comes to consume and destroy you; or one can commit suicide with Cato of Utica, living by stern and unflinching precepts while life lasts, and accepting inevitable death with the fortitude of a philosopher.

If the doctrine of Hell offends you, if the injustice of God offends you, it would be better for you to read Tom Paine’s AGE OF REASON and be a Deist, rather than to fall back into the cold, cheerless, hopeless world of the atheist.

I am not a theologian, and am not studied in the particular questions that vex Christian thinkers. I am a philosopher, and so can only speak in general terms about the basic questions. If God is unjust, our only honorable course is to defy Him and be destroyed; an act that would require the fortitude of Lucifer. Drawing back from that appalling possibility, let us assume as an axiom that God is just. If we take it as an axiom that God is just, it follows that any reports of acts of injustice are either not unjust or are not acts of God.

The first thing to recall is that human conceptions of justice change in some respects from time to time and nation to nation, but in other respect remain the same. The general consensus of justice that springs from the Christian world-view, which is not present in the Old Testament (at least, until Isaiah) is that justice is individual. Modern Christians hold it as wrong to punish the sons for the behavior of the fathers, or to punish the nation for the misbehavior of the rulers: the idea of collective or vicarious guilt runs counter to the basic precept of justice common to all men—one ought not to punish the innocent.

Unfortunately, in life, it is not even theoretically possible to punish the guilty without punishing the innocent. The Nazis had young children: if you shoot a Nazi to save a Jew, you make a German child, who has done no wrong at all, into an orphan. If you don’t shoot the Nazi, then the Jew dies a horrible death. If you throw a man in jail for the most just of reasons, you leave his family to earn a living without him.

Christians believe in the paradox of vicarious punishment. We believe Christ stood in our place and took the penalty our sins earned, and paid in blood for our wrongs. In a universe where vicarious mercy is possible, vicarious justice must also logically be possible: each sin consents to and participates in the original sin of Adam.

A man who as an iron-hard notion of justice must reject with disgust the idea of vicarious crimes of Adam and vicarious salvation by Christ: but, on the other hand, no mother with the heart of a mother can help but wish that she could do herself what Christ did, and stand in the place of her suffering child, and take his pain in his stead and spare him. Logically, if the wish that nature plants in the heart of every mother with a suffering child could be satisfied, then the paradox of vicarious punishment must be accepted. If you believe men are as corrupt and wicked as Christian pessimism paints us, or if you have read any history books and have seen the corruption and wickedness of men, you must abandon and iron-hard notion of justice, lest you and your loved ones be condemned by it. Even the most beautiful things of this Earth, the greatest nations, the most just of men, participate in, or benefit from, wicked crimes: David was an adulterer, Solomon an idolater, Socrates a sodomite, Lancelot a traitor, Cato a suicide. Washington a slave-owner and so was Trajan. These are noble men, lawgivers, kings, philosophers, and they include the best and greatest our race has produced.

My child is an innocent as spring rain; but if my fathers committed any act of crime, let us say, to rob Indians of their land, or to drive slaves to work it, the wealth my sons will inherit is tainted with blood. Where is iron-hard justice now? Must the innocent be dispossessed?

Young men of high hearts and high ideals love iron-hard justice, for young men of high ideals love all things clean and pure. Old men love mercy, for it rare and precious, and they see their own sins, and the sins of their loved ones, and they quail to think what iron-hard justice would owe them.

The horrid paradox, then, is that the wrathful God of the Old Testament shows us the face of divine justice: and it smites the whole people, not each individual separately, because we are not as isolated and separate as we think we are. Love binds together families and nations, or ought to; patriotism binds kings and peoples, or ought to. No king is king without the consent of the governed; they pay his taxes and carry out his orders; if we live in a universe where the blessings of good government can be shared with the people, then we live in a universe where the cursed earned by the iniquity of bad government likewise fall upon the people. Speaking as a man who has received untold and unspeakable blessing from the Founding Fathers of an especially well-governed nation, the best institutions of government in history, I cannot in justice excuse myself from any general punishment that befalls this nation for our sins, which, unfortunately, are many and very egregious.

But I see I have wandered far from your questions. Let me in all fairness try to answer them more particularly. You mention several specifics that shock the conscience:

“Yahweh’s attempted murder of Moses”

 Circumcision is symbolic of the acceptance of God’s law, and is for the Jews what baptism is for Christians, a sign of the covenant. God was coming to kill Moses precisely because we are talking about real life, not some fairy-tale. In real life, all men, sons of Adam, are mortal. God is coming to kill all of us. It is not until and unless we accept His covenant, and keep His laws, that there is even the possibility of an escape for us. The point of the passage here is to show that even the noblest and best of men, a prophet like Moses, cannot of his own merit escape death without God’s covenant.

I am not a theologian, but my answer here is that I would not read that passage literally.  It was a story meant to impress the arrogant that they are not immune from God’s law any more than Moses was.

“Thou Shalt Not Murder; Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live”

Sorry, I am a lawyer. I do not see any contradiction in outlawing murder and proscribing a death penalty for poisoners. We are not talking about friendly new-age Wicca here. If you object to this, you have to object to all laws whatsoever: the act of law-making assumes that the sovereign may punish scofflaws.

“Yahweh’s tizzy over a census being taken while David was king.. Or is there something evil about taking a census i’m not aware of? does going around the neighborhood asking people their age, sex, occupation and counting heads call forth the legions of Hell? Does it start to crack the ice encasing Satan? What? What’s so horrible about a census?”

The passage in question reads:

“ And David said to Joab and to the rulers of the people, Go, number Israel from Beersheba even to Dan; and bring the number of them to me, that I may know it. And Joab answered, The LORD make his people an hundred times so many more as they be: but, my lord the king, are they not all my lord’s servants? why then doth my lord require this thing? why will he be a cause of trespass to Israel?” (1Ch 21:2-3)

Yahweh repeatedly granted victory in battle to the weaker side, if the weaker side put their trust in Him and not in their own numbers. Joshua at Jericho, Gideon being told to reduce the size of his army, Jehosephat in the wilderness of Tekoa, David against Goliath, all overcame their enemies not through strength of arms, but through straight of faith, which is stronger than arms. David’s numbering his armed men (which might seem a perfectly prudent think for any king with a commissary to plan to do) in this case, according to the Chronicler, was an act of arrogance: an unwillingness to rely entirely on God.

It was not a census such as our Constitution calls for, nor was the composition of his army a modern army. It was not “… does going around the neighborhood asking people their age, sex, occupation and counting heads …” It was, instead, gathering an enumeration of soldiers such as ancient kings in the middle east were wont to do before committing to invasion, or to boast on public monuments about their strength.

“How do you consider Hell to be Just?”

Unfortunately, I do.

Hell is exactly what human beings deserve because hell is what we create for ourselves in the absence of a redeeming goodness. The good things life on Earth, those things that are a source of abiding joy, are things like marriage, a sacrament, and childbirth, a miracle. Those things are from God. Let us suppose that God, in His terrible justice, granted to each of us exactly what we asked: those who reject God asked to be left alone. In His terrible justice, He leaves us alone. What would the place where there is no God be like? Look at Soviet Russia. Look at a Nazi concentration camp. Then remove from those places those spiritual things that make life bearable, those things creatures without souls do not understand: remove pity, compassion, marriage, friendship, family; remove honor and remove honesty. Humans, left to ourselves without God, would make of this world a concentration camp with even a Schindler.

I pray that all the Church Fathers are merely wrong, and that there is no Hell. I pray that the mercy of Christ can extend even to those who steadfastly reject and hate His mercy. It is merely that, logically, I do not see how this is possible. If there is a Hell, the decision whether to accept Christ’s mercy is a real decision with real consequences. If there is a God, and if there is such a thing as free will, what can God do to those who reject Him aside from depart from them?

Hell is not a place, because spirits are mental entities that do not occupy time and space. No more than you can point to a thought, or a concept, can you point to a spirit, or say it has size, shape, mass. Hell is the vacuum of goodness, of life, of godliness, into which the disbeliever plunges himself. Hell is the despair of eternity for those who reject eternity. When you depart from eternity, where else is there to go?

We don’t think of God as merely a person. He is goodness itself. He is light. If you reject goodness, you are left without the good. If you reject light, you are in darkness. Would that it could be some other way.

There are denominations, I should mention, that depart from tradition, and announce that there is no Hell. It would be more prudent for you to join one of those denominations, just in case Pascal’s God does exist, than to be caught up in ponderings of divine justice, and reject the grail of life eternal.

“How is it showing that God is Just?”

I suppose it depends on your definition of justice. The possibilities of life after death are only three: (1) that our spirits are mortal, we die at death and we dissolve into oblivion like the beasts; (2) that our spirits are eternal, and we are trapped in an eternal return, a cycle of reincarnation without end, life without end, suffering without end; (3) that our spirits are eternal, and suffering ends but life does not end.

The noble Buddhist conception allows for Possibility (3) extended over many myriads of lifetimes, until one finally achieves the bliss of Nirvana; the Christian conception allows for only one life, albeit the Catholics allow for a Purgatory to carry out unfulfilled penances or oaths.

(One reason why I am a Christian and not a Buddhist is that their nirvana sounds suspiciously like the oblivion of possibility (1), something that extinguishes the soul and the self. However, I have not looked in Buddhism as closely as I ought: I would be delighted to discover that Christ made some provision for their salvation as well. I am frankly unconcerned with the possibility that I lived many past lives: this one I must live as if it is my last, as if it were important, as if my determination to live as an obedient Christian were crucial, and not merely a drop in an ocean of endless lives and endless suffering.)

But not to meander from my point: I can see why some might object that a Final Judgment following possibility (3) is unjust. But I cannot see why the other two options are more just: indeed, they both posit either eternal nonbeing or eternal woe, no matter whether one is good or bad.

The Hindu allow that one may rise in the ranks of sufferers, so that one can be sad with the sorrows of a king, rather than sad with the sorrows of a peasant, but in the grand scheme of things, compared to perfection in bliss, Buddha was right to condemn the whole system of Karma as an endless wheel of pain.

Basically, Hell is just because no other possibility is logically possible granted a perfectly just creator and a perfectly unjust mankind.

“why does any mortal human being deserve eternal punishment?”

Do we deserve eternal bliss? That is the only other option.

“Saying that the soul is eternal doesn’t help because any soul has been tied to a mortal body, and that mortal body is only capable of temporal crimes, not eternal ones. We all die, and similarly all of the crimes that we’ve committed while living die with the passing of time. They fade out of memory. Who remembers anything about the crimes of the average ancient Roman or Greek? Some people might have an inkling if they’ve immersed themselves in the classics as you have; but even that is fragmentary at best. Who, ultimately, is there left to be offended except God?”

To the contrary. Saying the soul is eternal answers your question. A finite term of penalty, no matter how long, is one an infinite and eternal soul can hold in scorn. No matter how long, it is as nothing to him in the long run. One second of pain is as nothing to a creature who lives seventy years. A million seconds are likewise as nothing to a creature who lives seventy millions of years. Multiply that my any magnitude you like. If the punishment time is finite, proud Satan can serve his time in prison standing on his head, and emerge from the fire as unrepentant and scornful as ever, and then receive the same infinite bliss that the martyrs earned with all their heroic stoicism.  Where is the justice in that?

You are not mortal. I am not mortal. None of us are mortal. Those Greeks and those Romans, and their victims, are still around. They are simply not on Earth. We are immortal. If we do not forgive the crimes done to us, the wounds done to us, our hate will endure for ever. That is Hell. If we forgive, that is Heaven. There is, in the long run, no third option.

“How is it just to punish a person, any person, an infinite amount of time when they have only a finite existence during which they can earn this punishment?”

I don’t understand the question. We are not talking about a penance, where a person serves a certain amount of time in order that, at a later time, he might show improvement. We are talking about the condition that eternal souls will occupy for eternity.

Let us say Hitler only committed genocide on a finite number of Jews. His offense against them, if he were going to do penance for it, might be a large number of years, perhaps in proportion to some number of his victims and their widows and orphans, and the suffering he caused. This is what in law we call a tort: an offense against a private person. But Hitler also offended the sovereign by breaking the King’s peace. There is not just a lawsuit involved, but also a criminal offense. The law against murder is not a human invention: it is a matter of categorical logic. A categorical imperative, one might say. It is an eternal law. For how long should a man who breaks an eternal law, and who does not repent, but rejoices in his deed, be punished? The punishment should exist at least as long as the sin exists in the soul: indeed, divine judgment might be nothing more than the externalization of the internal pain of the sin itself. If you do not reject it, if you continue to love your sins more than you love your life, God, in His terrifying mercy, grants you your wish, and marries the unjust to their sins as He marries the saints to their salvation.

“If God is so angered and opposed to any particular damned soul, why couldn’t he just dissolve them into nothing? He brought the souls into existence out of nothing; why not also send them back to nothing if they are irredeemable, rather than tormenting them eternally?”

The unjust would rejoice at that, I must say. It is the suicide-bomber’s dream: to kill, and to put oneself instantly beyond all retribution! Anyone with the courage of a samurai, anyone willing to accept death as the price, could carry out whatever crimes of hate his maddened soul could prompt him to, and escape divine judgment.

But to answer you question: me, I do not think God can abolish souls into nonbeing any more than He can dissolve eternal justice into nothingness. God is what He is: He is being itself, He is existence, the necessary being. Everything else fades, is corrupted, is consumed by entropy: God is eternal.

We are His children, hence we cannot be anything but eternal as well. He could not make us His children and make us capable of dissolution into oblivion, because then He has not given us all the blessings we can receive. If He merely created mortal children that can die into nothingness, He has kept back some part of His love, and kept to Himself some of the storehouse of honors and treasures with which it is His pleasure to anoint us.

Allow me to speculate, but I must say again, that what I am expressing is my own opinion, my own musings, not received doctrine. I speak only for myself:

The reason why we sons of Adam live under such a dire penalty as the threat of hellfire is that we are great and splendid beings, creatures more noble than the entire sidereal universe. Look at the night sky: see the endless galaxies! They are rubbish: they will age and die and we will outlive them. Even the most wretched beggar in a ditch is worth more than all the gemmed wonders of earth and sky; we are more than the superclusters beyond Hercules, and more grand. We are the princes of eternity, you and I. With this awe-inspiring glory  comes awful responsibility. Logically, there is no third possibility: immortal bliss is not possible without immortal unbliss. God Himself cannot do what cannot logically be done: He cannot both make us immortal, and, in the same time and the same sense, make us able to dissolve into our elements.

“Does actually putting numbers to eternity give you pause, and realizing that the numbers never fully express just how much torment each damned soul will suffer?”

The numbers do not beguile as much as you might think, because there is no comparison possible between infinity and any finite value howsoever high.

Let me see if I can make this clear: the saints will enjoy eternal and infinite bliss. Hence, anyone excluded from that suffers an infinite amount of depravation, even if he were reincarnated forever into very comfortable circumstances. The only way to make the contrast tolerable, even for an instant, is to erect a material world and a material life where the bliss and blessings of heaven are hidden from our direct sight. One wonders why God is so obscure, so hard to understand, so hard to see: but I am a man who saw Him, if only in a vision. Words cannot express the transcendent ecstasy: this present life is already Hell, compared to that. Compared to infinite light, any finite light is indistinguishable from darkness.

Do you understand? It is God’s generosity, His blessedness, His love that makes this grim doctrine of damnation seem so real to me: if He is to reward the faithful with infinite, endless bliss, life everlasting, then whatever is reserved for the faithless is infinitely less than that.

“Does any human crime merit that?”

Mine do, I’m afraid.

Try to imagine what a glorious thing a human soul is, how bright, how perfect, how angelic. To mar such fair perfection is unforgivable.

The crime is not that I steal or rob or lie. The crime is that God gave me a soul and I corrupt and ruin it, I make it ugly. I do it every day, practically every hour. A soul is an immortal thing, an eternal thing. I am making an eternal thing corrupt and vile: that is an infinite crime.

Perhaps you cannot see the beauty in your own soul. Look into the face of a benevolent baby, and you can catch a glimpse of what innocence is, what heaven is.

It is not the divine justice of sending men to Hell I have trouble explaining. It is the divine mercy of uplifting men to Heaven I cannot explain. I can only wonder, and worship, speechlessly.

Discussing the content, Martin says “we’ve assembled an all-star lineup of contributors for the book, we think. Songs of the Dying Earth will feature original stories from Dan Simmons, Robert Silverberg, Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, Elizabeth Hand, John C. Wright, Glen Cook, Jeff Vandermeer, Neil Gaiman, Paula Volsky, Tad Williams, Howard Waldrop, Michael Shea, Mike Resnick, and a host of other terrific writers and hardcore Jack Vance junkies, some of whom offered us their firstborn children for the chance to be a part of this project. And yes, I plan on doing a story for the book myself.”

Asked about the line-up for the book, Dozois told SFScope: “It’s a bit premature to speak confidently about a ‘Table of Contents,’ since, as with all original anthologies, there may well not be a one-to-one equivilency between who we’ve invited and who actually submits a useable story on the day, when push finally comes to shove. However, I can tell you that we’ve invited: Glen Cook, Terry Dowling, Phyllis Eisenstein, Ray Feist, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Matt Hughes, Tanith Lee, George R.R. Martin, Michael Moorcock, Mike Resnick, Michael Shea, Robert Silverberg, Dan Simmons, Jeff Vandermeer, Paula Volsky, Howard Waldrop, Liz Williams, Tad Williams, Walter Jon Williams, and John C. Wright

Look Ma! That’s me!

to be in the anthology, and they have all at least provisionally accepted. How many of them will actually end up being in the book, is impossible to say, at this point.”

The anticipated publication date is sometime in 2009.

Needless to say, I am somewhat intimidated. Jack Vance is truly a master of his craft: even an ambitious author must quail for a moment at the task of entering his word to tell a tale like his.

Good thing the other authors are only

— OMIGAWD! Lookit those names! I’M DOOMED! AAAAiiiiEEEE!! (insert scream of bad guy from Johnny Quest being eaten by his own giant spider or something)! MOUNTAINS, FALL ON ME! —

      good thing I am not easily awed. I am in august company indeed. I am sure I can hold my own. (Sniffles in fear).

Now to come up with an idea. Quick, wife! Tell me what to write!

What’s that? Adam Reith crashlands on the Dying Earth and has to hunt down the killers of the family of Kirth Gerson, discover the truth behind the Emphyrio Myth, recover his lost spaceship, and lose the girl, the melancholy Suldrun? Lliane the Wayfarer is shipwrecked on Zothique, the world’s last continent, and is excruciated by Severian of the Torturers?

Good thing I have two years to work on this. I will start tomorrow.

My attention was attracted to the article’s closing paragraphs.

I once made the mistake of writing an article in as left-wing publication saying that, in my experience, the best people were usually religious and on the whole religious people behaved better in their day to day lives than non-religious once: and I wrote this, as I made clear, as a man without any religious belief.

As a frequent contributor to the public prints, I am accustomed to a certain amount of hate-mail, and can even recognise the envelopes that contain it with a fair, though not total, degree of accuracy. Of course, e-mail has made it far easier for those consumed with bile to communicate it, and on the whole it exceeds in vileness what most bilious people are prepared to commit to paper. I don’t think I have ever hated anyone as much as some of my correspondents have hated me.

Suffice it to say that I have never received such hate mail as when I suggested that religious people were better than non-religious in their conduct. It seemed that many of the people who responded to me were not content merely not to believe, but had to hate. Although I had not denied that religious motivation could motivate very bad behaviour, something which indeed can hardly be denied, I was treated to a summary of the historical crimes of religion such as many adolescents could provide who had recently discovered to their fury that they had been made to attend boring religious services when the arguments for the existence of God had never been irrefutable.

The article concludes:

Perhaps one of the reasons that contemporary secularists do not simply reject religion but hate it is that they know that, while they can easily rise to the levels of hatred that religion has sometimes encouraged, they will always find it difficult to rise to the levels of love that it has sometimes encouraged.   

A frequent reader of this livejournal (assuming so fabulous a beast exists) may or may not recognize the above-mentioned adolescent fury marring the otherwise intelligent comments of some of my esteemed guests. Such unbridled tongues make the tough-but-fair comments of reasonable and cool-headed atheists and skeptics (unfortunately, a decided minority) all the more admirable by contrast.

Again, speaking only of my own experience, and drawing no general conclusion based on my limited sample, I note that in my atheist life, the Christians were always polite to me, no matter how vehement and nasty my attacks; in my Christian life, a disproportionate number of atheists have been remarkably rude, to the point of self-parody, to the point of an Anselmian entity: that being of which none ruder can be conceived.

I am not sure what conclusion to draw from this. Correlation is not causation. I suspect it has to do with politics rather than religion. Rudeness is hailed as a virtue among the Left, and atheists are over-represented in their population. The Rightwing atheists I know happen to be polite and respectful in speech: they are able to give articulate reasons for their atheism, rather than simply venting outrage like a steam-whistle. (The Libertarians, who are neither of the Right or Left, seem both to have the articulate speech of the Rightwing Atheists and the shrill, silly anger of the Left.)

That said, not everyone’s experience matches my own. I notice that in John Derbyshire’s description of the reasons for his apostasy, one reason given was the effrontery of the Christians, who wrote poisoned pen letters to him.

Derb comments

I get lots of religious hate mail, some of it really vile. Often this is in response to something I have said, which I suppose is fair enough, even if not a particularly good advertisement for Christ’s injunctions about meekness and forbearance. Often, though, these e-mails come in from people who are not reacting to anything in particular, they just want to tell me that I am not religious enough to suit them, or to call myself a conservative, or to work at National Review, or to live in the USA, or (though this is very rare) to live at all. Half a dozen times I’ve had readers express these sentiments using four-letter words of the taboo variety.

My reaction:

I am not Christian of the type who dwells in his imagination on the perils of hellfire and brimstone. If I were to discover, against all tradition and scripture, that the Lord in His mercy will spare even the devils and evildoers condemned to the outer darkness, I would rejoice.

 Nonetheless, in this one instance, against my better judgment, I hope tradition is correct, and that there is a Hell, and my fellow Christians who wrote these letters are flung there by an angry God, and will find themselves trapped in ice up to the necks, chilled by the blasts from the batwings of weeping Satan, and gnawing on each other’s skulls. For they have tempted a man to lose his soul, for no sake other than to scratch the itch of their own self-righteousness and pride and a ghastly delight in their own voices. To the degree that mere words can do anything to another man, they have done the worst they can do. The sheep pushed one of their own out of the flock and fed him to the famished wolf. They killed him.

I can understand how an atheist can fear no god. Atheists dismiss God as merely the Wizard of Oz, merely an impressive puppet head manipulated by a charlatan behind the curtain. For an atheist to fear God would be impossible and ridiculous.

But how can a God-fearing man not fear God? That is damned nonsense, and I mean damned in the horrifically real sense of the word. Did they read a different Gospel from mine, maybe one where the chilling phrase about “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” was left out, and the Pharisees and hypocrites were all given the divine thumbs-up and attaboy? 

Your Score: House Targaryen

54% Dominant, 54% Extroverted, 81% Trustworthy

Ancient. Noble. Passionate to the point of insanity. Transcending lesser beings, you are of House Targaryen.

You are a dominant personality—in fact, you are the most dominant of all eight house types. You will not suffer yourself to be ignored. You will not suffer yourself to be ruled. The phrase “I will not suffer myself to _____!” was practically made for you. You are willful, arrogant, and exceedingly dangerous to screw with. With a temper like yours, anyone stupid enough to saunter into your line of fire won’t soon forget their mistake.

You are also extroverted, which means that everyone in the world knows exactly what your intentions are. Unlike your cohorts (who hide behind smiles and courtesies and court politics), you think of it as your birthright to come riding in on an enormous dragon, breathing fire and fucking your siblings. Hey, what you lack in subtlty, you make up in style!

Finally, you are trustworthy. Your absurd amounts of power and borderline psychosis are not used unjustly. Unlike many, your general aims are just and true. You we bred for rule, and the fact that you cannot rest until you are doing so is not your fault. If you make up your mind, it becomes reality. Never one for empty threats or vainglorious lies, you can only speak the truth. And the truth is “fire and blood.”

Representative characters include: Daenerys Stormborn, Rhaegar Targaryen, and Viserys Targaryen

Similar Houses: Baratheon, Lannister,and Tully

Opposite House: Frey

When playing the game of thrones, you play it to the death.

This is so totally bogus. I am such a Stark it is not funny. Winter is Coming. Winter is always coming. I am not dominant, not an extrovert, and I am 100% trustworthy, except when it comes to being places on time.

I demand a recount. And I want a magic wolf dog.