The Unanswered Quandaries of “Lost”

Good day, friends! I trust you are all doing well this fine Monday.

Enough small talk, time to the topic at hand: Lost. That’s right, after a year-and-a-half, my wife and I have managed to watch the whole series straight through. For those of you who aren’t aware of the show or who don’t have television, Lost is a series by J.J. Abrams – a man famous for never answering the questions he raises – featuring a group of plane crash survivors who find themselves stranded on a bizarre island. The show touches on everything from polar bears to time travel, from psychic phenomena to the ultimate battle between good and evil, broken up in the middle with international government research and experimentation. Indeed, the series covers a lot of ground.

Now while watching the show, my wife and I recorded our questions after every episode. By the end of the series, we’d reached 246 questions, but only 172 of them were answered. So with that in mind, here are the 74 questions that are never answered in Lost! If you happen to know the answers to any of these, or if there are any unanswered questions left, please comment and let me know!

The Unanswered Questions (in the order they arose)

1. Did Jack sink the putt on Hurley’s golf course?
2. How/why are the numbers cursed?
3. How did Walt know about the Hatch?
4. Why didn’t Walt want Locke to open the Hatch?
5. Why did Walt change his mind about staying on the island?
6. Why did the Others want Walt?
7. Why did Shannon have visions of Walt?
8. Why did Walt keep appearing to people?
9. Why was there a glass eye, Bible and blanket in the shelter on the other side of the island?
10. What was Nathan (a survivor from the other half of the plane) doing for two hours that it made the other survivors suspicious of him?
11. Was it really Walt on the computer talking to Michael, and if so, how was he doing it?
12. What was the deal with the black horse Kate kept seeing?
13. Why didn’t Smokey (the smoke monster) attack Mr. Eko in their first encounter?
14. What did Charlie have to save Aaron from that he was trying to “baptize him”?
15. What were the strange hieroglyphs and symbols that appeared when Locke mistyped the numbers into the terminal? (special note: those symbols were at the Temple as well)
16. What was Libby’s backstory? (this was my most irksome question)
17. Why was the location of the Pearl indicated by a salted question mark?
18. Why did the Others draw Michael’s blood?
19. How could the island heal everyone?
20. Why was there a 4-toed statue, of which only the foot was left by the time the series began?
21. Why did Desmond go to prison?
22. Did Jae (Sun’s secret lover) kill himself or was he murdered after Jin left?
23. How did Locke, Desmond and Mr. Eko survive the Hatch imploding?
24. Why did Smokey kill Mr. Eko on their second encounter?
25. What happened to Kate’s husband after she left him for dead?
26. Why did the universe want Charlie to die?
27. What was the Magic Box?
28. How did Locke’s dad end up on the island? (refer to question #27)
29. Why wasn’t the island healing Ben?
30. Why did women who got pregnant on the island always die?
31. What was Daniel and Charlotte’s memory card trick?
32. What happened to Ben’s childhood sweetheart?
33. What was Sun’s scheme with Widmore?
34. Why did the Others not travel through time?
35. What was the deal with the Others? History, belief, politics, behaviors?
36. Whose canoe did Sawyer and co. claim from the beach while traveling through time?
37. What’s the history of the island and the ruins?
38. Why did Daniella’s people try to kill her after they came into contact with Smokey?
39. Why did (dead) Locke need Jack’s dad’s shoes?
40. Why did the Oceanic 6 vanish from the plane on their return flight to the island?
41. Why were Ben and Widmore separately helping Locke to try and gather the Oceanic 6?
42. What was up with Walt’s dream of John?
43. Why didn’t Walt and Aaron have to go back to the island with the rest?
44. What’s the story of the new plane survivors (Lapidus and co.)?
45. Why did the “Hostiles” break the truce with the Dharma Initiative?
46. How could Richard Alpert cross the pylons unharmed?
47. Why did Sun, Ben and Lapidus appear thirty years after the others when time traveling?
48. Why wasn’t Sayid going along with any of Sawyer’s schemes after being captured by the Dharma Initiative in the past?
49. Why did Widmore want Rousseau killed (in the past)?
50. What happened to young Ben after being taken in by the Others/Hostiles?
51. How did Daniel’s mom always know the future?
52. How would a Hydrogen Bomb detonation dissipate the island’s mysterious energy?
53. Why was Jacob randomly visiting everyone?
54. What “lies in the shadow of the statue”?
55. Where was Smokey’s new home? Did he have one?
56. Why was the island underwater in the new timeline?
57. Why was Sayid behaving so bizarrely at the Temple?
58. What is the black powder that Smokey can’t cross?
59. How does Smokey “claim people”?
60. How did the two timelines relate to each other? Was the new timeline just purgatory?
61. Why did Jack suddenly have a son in the new timeline? If it’s just purgatory, why would he have a son at all there?
62. What did Widmore want Desmond to do on the island?
63. Why did New Desmond want the passenger manifest?
64. Why was Daniel’s mom, Eloise, so cryptic and strange?
65. Why did Sayid kidnap Desmond?
66. Why did Desmond run over Locke in the new timeline?
67. Why did Smokey throw Desmond down a well?
68. Why did Michael’s ghost say not to blow up the plane?
69. Why were Widmore’s people betraying Sawyer and his people?
70. Why did Smokey want Desmond killed?
71. Why did Jack want to stay on the island?
72. Why did Smokey try to kill the candidates?
73. Why did Widmore rig the plane to explode?
74. What’s the Source?

It seems to me like most of these questions – or at least the most important ones – can be answered with a simple history of the island. I was particularly confused by the seemingly conflicting and shifting behaviors of Smokey and Jacob, so a better description of everything with them (their abilities, rules and limitations) would suffice.

So here is one closing question, to which you may choose to respond: what do you think is the proper interpretation of reality in Lost? Was the island real? Was the new timeline real? Was the Source God? Or was it simply strange energy? Share your thoughts, and thanks for reading!

Until next time, friends…

What Scholars Really Say: The Divine’s Opponent

 

Hello, and salutations! Yesterday, we celebrated Easter, and it was a great time to remember what remarkable event happened just under two millennia ago: the force of death, which has plagued mankind since time immemorial, the force to which even the smartest, greatest and most God-fearing of us succumb, was defeated by a man who was three days dead. On that day, Jesus walked from the tomb and demonstrated that not only could he raise new life, but he could even resurrect himself. What a remarkable thing that would have been to see!

In other news, my wife and I are currently sheltering a stray dog we found on our date night last Friday. My wife chose to call him “Scrap,” since we found him by the dumpster and, in her words, he’s “scrappy.” Here’s a picture of him in case anyone in the San Antonio area is looking for a 3.5-year-old dog of approximately 12 pounds ->

Now getting to the topic of today, I wanted to discuss something on the darker side of things, theologically speaking. I wanted to talk about the enemy of God. I’m not planning on repeating to you the same information so often quoted from Paradise Lost or the lone Lucifer Passage of Isaiah; instead, I’m going to share the personification of evil itself throughout history. This personification is something which has gone through radical transformations, and it was, in fact, a component in my Master’s thesis, so what I’m sharing today is essentially what I unearthed in my graduate school research. Let’s dive in.

I’ll begin during the age when Israel had finally settled the land of Canaan. They’d narrowly escaped from slavery in Egypt, then wandered in the Sinai Desert long enough for a whole generation to pass away and now, finally, God’s chosen people were granted the Promised Land. The great Jerusalem Temple was established and divine worship of God was carried out through the nation. And then, the Israelites found trouble. Trouble during this time (approximately 1000 – 586 BC, a time known as the First Temple Period) came in the form of ritual impurity and lack of devotion to God. Before this time, the concept of “evil” was nebulous and often misunderstood. After all, there are passages in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) which even mention God himself “repenting of the evil he sought to do.” This raises significant theological questions, but that exceeds my area of expertise, so I’ll not explore them. Nevertheless, Israelite mythology during the First Temple Period had no established entity which stood in direct opposition to God. Instead, the opponent of God, that force which ran counter to the divine will, was ritual impurity. Scripture from just before this era records how Moses’ nephews, Nadab and Abihu, were “consumed by fire” for messing up in the ritual worship of God. Idol worship, which God saw as spiritual infidelity, often carried disastrous results, causing God’s temper to flare and Israel to suffer international defeats and internal strife.

Then came the Babylonians. First engaging in skirmishes with the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah in 597 BC, Jerusalem itself fell to the Babylonian Empire in 586, eleven years later. The Babylonian rule was harsh and oppressive, with Jews (the descendants of Judah, almost the only Israelites left) taken in chains to Babylon, their Temple burned and their infants often murdered before them. The Babylonian pantheon was forced upon them, and their children were in many cases to be raised as Babylonians. Now in this time period, known as the Exilic Period, the Jews came to see the Babylonians as God’s enemy, and wherever mythology was concerned, they imagined God being opposed by a great, dragon-like beast. This beast was the symbolic representative of Babylonia, and the reason is that a physical dragon (were it real) would be as oppressive, dangerous, violent and terrifying as the Babylonians themselves were to the Jews.

But time passed, and after approximately forty-seven years, the Babylonian Empire fell to the Persian Empire. These Persians were actually pretty nice to the Jews. As long as the Jews admitted that Persia was in charge, and they paid their taxes, they were mostly allowed to do as they pleased, and Persian mythology was not forced upon them. As a matter of fact, the Persians even allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their Temple, establishing a period of history known alternatively as the Post-Exilic or the Second Temple Period. So with such a lenient and ideal nation ruling over them, naturally this was seen by the Jews as a time of peace (with a few minor hiccups), and any sort of enemy to God was scarcely mentioned. No dragon, no impurity, just peace among God’s people.

The Persians ruled for about two hundred years before a Greek force (actually Macedonian, but they were obsessed with Greek culture) gained control of the Jews. Intending to Hellenize (or Greek-ify) the Jews, they forced Greek culture on them, which caused a great deal of friction as Jewish morality and Greek culture were at odds in a great many places. So there began to be a resurgence in mythology about an enemy of God, and this enemy took not the form of an oppressive dragon, but rather as a sneaky character who would pollute the “pure” worship of God. There was a great deal of civil unrest among the Jews, who did not want their culture and religion polluted by this new enemy.

Another three hundred years went by and, in 63 BC, a Roman general conquered Israel and brought it into Roman control. The Romans were, like the Babylonians five hundred years earlier, highly oppressive, often carrying out gruesome mass executions against anyone even suspected of rebelling. And in this highly oppressive atmosphere there was a new explosion in mythology about the devil, who was usually seen as a great, dragon-like beast. The book of Revelation even refers to him as “The Dragon.” This symbolism had the same effect in the Roman era as it did back in the Babylonian era: the devil’s characteristics were symbolic of the oppressive characteristics of Rome itself. In an oppressive culture, God’s enemy was imagined as epitomizing that oppression.

But once Rome became Christianized a few centuries later, the beast/dragon imagery lost prominence as the early Church began to focus on rooting out heresies, returning to the symbolism of purity versus pollution. The heretics were viewed as the devil’s agents, polluting the “pure” worship of God. It’s interesting to note that an almost perfect parallel happened in America during the Witch Trials of Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th Century. Those accused of witchcraft were feared as the devil’s agents sent to pollute the religious purity of their Christian community.

So what do we see when we imagine the devil in our culture today? Do we see a great beast, a roaring dragon oppressing all who stand in its way? This is the imagery often clung to in oppressed nations, but it doesn’t really show up here in America. Instead, the Americanized devil is thought of as a clever salesman, trying to trick people into selling their souls and going down dark roads of perdition. We imagine him doing this by the clever mastery of speech, persuasively damning us with psychological wordplay and powerful temptations. Is this because of our heavily-commercialized society? Is this because of America’s charismatic nature, too often compelled to fall into a cult of personality, and thus suffer the resultant paranoia? I’ll leave that up to you to decide, but it certainly seems to be the case. I even did an experiment with my old Sunday school class back in Indiana a few years ago, and this theory held true in that scenario. In any case, I would encourage you to think on these things.

Now before I go, you may have noticed that I never used the term “devil” until the Roman times. If you didn’t notice that, go back and take a look. The reason for that is the mystery which we’ll explore next week.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which we’ll explore the evolution of belief about God’s greatest enemy: the devil!

What Scholars Really Say: Mysteries in the Book of Daniel

Hello, hello! It has been over three weeks since last you heard from me. In that time, my wife and I took our dog and traveled to Indiana to spend the holidays with our families. It was a very enjoyable time, but alas, vacations must inevitably come to an end, so it’s back to the grindstone for me.

Today, I would like to discuss the book of Daniel. A short book of only twelve chapters, it is most famous for its stories of the three boys thrown into the fiery furnace by the dreaded Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar and, later on, of the prophet Daniel being thrown into the lions’ den. Spoiler alert: they all survive. Well, at least they survived those ordeals; they’re long-dead now, possibly of old age or something. Who knows? But the book of Daniel is actually far more influential for Christians due to its enigmatic second half, with prophecies of crumbling kingdoms and dreaded beasts, of tyrannical rulers and a powerful being known as the Son of Man.

That last term is most important. You see, virtually every Christian today will tell you that the Son of Man is Jesus Christ. In the gospels, Jesus identifies himself in that regard, and other prophetic texts refer to him by that title (among others). But in the seventh chapter of Daniel, the prophet describes a vision of one coming down from Heaven who is “like a son of man” (emphasis mine). That certainly sounds odd. Why not the Son of Man? The reason for that is because the term actually evolved over time. In Judaism, the term “like a son of-” was a strange way of describing an entity’s species: a son of a pig is a pig, a son of a sparrow is a sparrow, a son of a man is a man. What Daniel may have been saying was that this being he saw coming down from Heaven was human-like in appearance. The term “son of man” occurs 107 times in the Old Testament, and 93 times in the book of Ezekiel. In almost all of those 93 instances, the term is used when God refers to Ezekiel as “Son of man.”

However, this term didn’t stay static with that meaning. Instead, it evolved, and eventually, the term “son of man” transformed from a weird way of calling someone a human into a proper title referring to a mysterious, messianic figure. After centuries of theological change in the Jewish faith, and the development and evolution of belief in a coming messiah, that term no longer meant just “human” in Jesus’ time. Instead, it referred to the coming Christ, and when Jesus stepped onto the scene, he claimed the title which was waiting for him.

That’s just one of the ways the book of Daniel has influenced Christianity. But before we delve in further, let me lay out a simple diagram for you.

Daniel 1-6: Narrative

Daniel 7-12: Prophecy

Admittedly, it is a very simple diagram. You essentially split the book right in the middle and that’s it. The first half tells the story of Daniel and three of his Jewish friends who are taken captive to Babylon, capital of the brutally oppressive Babylonian Empire. They experience persecution and blessing, they witness as Babylon falls to the more powerful Persian Empire and become servants to the new king, who becomes especially fond of Daniel. But political intrigue places Daniel in a lions’ den in which he miraculously survives. The second half, beginning with chapter seven, shifts into a series of visions Daniel has of the future. And that’s when things get hairy from a scholar’s point-of-view.

Traditionally, it’s accepted that the author of the book of Daniel is, naturally, the prophet himself. If that’s the case, then he chose to compose the first six chapters in the third-person in the guise of an unidentified narrator. That doesn’t seem too odd to me. It’s simply a stylistic choice. But then, after a brief introduction in chapter seven as that same narrator, the book shifts into the first-person, and it remains this way throughout the duration of Daniel’s visions. This in itself, while noticeably strange, can still be accepted as just an odd writing choice.

But then comes the content of chapters seven through twelve. These six chapters fit squarely into a category of writings called “apocalyptic eschatology.” That’s academic for “end-of-the-world stuff.” Daniel sees strange visions of Heaven, of monsters, of world-shaking things to come. He sees godless kings rise up and go to war, and he sees them defeated by an enigmatic, messianic figure described as “one like a son of man.” To top off this craziness, many of the visions are shared with him by an angel named Gabriel. This, honestly, is where much of Christian belief about the end of the world actually derives. The type of material in the second half of Daniel helped to set the tone for much of what we see in Revelation, in which we see visions of Heaven, monsters, godless kings who go to war only to be defeated by the Son of Man. And, in Revelation, John is shown these things by an angel. As a matter of fact, both Daniel and Revelation make mention of another angel named Michael, the only angel other than Gabriel to be identified by name in the entire Bible! Craziness!

But here’s the rub: apocalyptic eschatology didn’t develop until over two hundred years after Daniel’s death. I won’t go into the explicit details of how I know that, but let’s just say I wrote the thesis for my Master’s Degree on this very topic. So how is this possible? One could easily respond with the claim that Daniel was seeing the future, so of course his writings would be similar to future writings. Except that these six chapters would have been completely anachronistic for the style of writing and prophecy that existed in Daniel’s day. It’s like reading a letter written by George Washington, in which halfway through he suddenly mentions googling something or checking into Valley Forge on Facebook.

So does this mean that the entire book of Daniel is a lie? Of course not, stop being so melodramatic. What is more likely the case is that Daniel may have (but also may not have) written the first half of his book, chapters one through six. Then, over two centuries later, someone else chose to add in the second half, six chapters which accurately describe events leading up to about the year 164 B.C., the year of the death of Antiochus Epiphanes (a brutal Greek king who ruled Judea and tried to stamp out Judaism; most scholars believe he was the one to commit the “abomination of desolation” referred to in Daniel 9).

So, as most scholars believe (as well as myself), Daniel in all likelihood did not write chapters 7-12. But does this diminish the book’s value, or its truth, or its impact on Christian theology and belief? Absolutely not! In my opinion, mysteries like these only serve to make the Bible more fascinating and worth the effort of diving in and seeing what’s really there. I encourage you to do the same, and never hesitate to share with me any of the fascinating things you learn in doing so.

Until next time, friends…

The Interior Battle

Howdy, folks! Okay, that’s all the Texan you’re going to get out of me for right now, so let’s move on.

I’d like to share something that’s been on my mind since Saturday night. After my wife went to bed, I chose to watch a movie online, settling on a Halloween-themed horror film consisting of ten scary stories. Some of them were good, some unsettling, some bizarre and others left me wondering if I was actually saved for watching them. You see, I am quite a fan of the horror genre. I love scary stories and horror movies; not the gory or sexy ones, but instead the eerie, unsettling, creepy ones which get the audience’s own imaginations going into full-gear. I’ve liked horror movies since high school, and my love of scary stories goes back at least to Elementary school.

Yet for the last day-and-a-half, I’ve found myself wondering about the spiritual impact of these things, especially the films. I’ve wrestled with this concept before, as you can read in my Christian Defense of the Horror Genre, and I still stand by what I said in that article. So, then, what exactly is the problem? I watched a horror movie with the belief that a proper understanding of horror can be good, possibly even helpful, to one’s spirituality.

I think my issue arose from the question of what it is I truly like about the genre. When I watch a scary movie or read a scary story, am I appreciating its creativity? Am I focused on the ultimate triumph of light over darkness, or seeing it as a cautionary tale? Or am I instead reveling in the darkness and the fear, inadvertently losing my focus on the light? As you can guess, this is a deep spiritual struggle within myself. But I think that may be the point: as much as we hate to admit it, there is no one who is wholly good or wholly evil. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “there’s evil in the best of us, and good in the worst of us.” We are all a mix of the two, the intermingling of two opposites fighting for control over our souls. Each of us carries seeds of light as well as seeds of darkness, and that which germinates from each wars against the other in a struggle which continues until death (and possibly even beyond, who knows?). So when you enjoy a story, or you watch a movie, which side has your focus? Do you root for the slasher, or for the teens he’s stalking? Do you root for the misunderstood monster or the angry mob coming after him with torches and pitchforks? And do you enjoy the giant monsters for the sake of God’s creativity in creating such things (I fully understand that those things are Hollywood-produced, so stick with the analogy), or do you revel in their destructive power and the devastation they leave behind?

I’d like to say that I side with the teens, the misunderstood monster and appreciate the awesome creativity in giant monsters, but that’s not always the case. I am a human being, after all, a mix of darkness and light, and sometimes I dip into the dark and lose myself the way we all do when we fall to temptation. But I’ve not given up. The battle still rages, the light fighting against the darkness. Sure, the darkness may sometimes win the battle, and it may sometimes overwhelm the light, but in movies, that’s usually what happens just before the hero recovers and gains his ultimate victory. When you feel crushed by the darkness, take heart, for the dawn is coming. Even in the final book of the Bible, after all the devastation and turmoil we’re to expect at Christ’s return, we’re left with the light of God banishing the darkness forever. Whenever I doubt myself, I think I’ll pray and think about what that future world may be like.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll explore how the interior battle manifests in the exterior world!

The Depths of God’s Creation

Hello! I know I promised a new theory that I’m working on, but personally, I don’t entirely think it’s ready yet. I need to do a lot more thinking to be sure the world is even ready for it, or ready enough to not get the wrong impression about me. So for now, I’ll choose to present to you an article that I wrote a few months ago for Biologos, a Christian website interested in bridging the supposed divide between faith and science. Unfortunately, my article was rejected upon submission, and since then it has sat on my computer, unwanted and unread by anyone but myself. Now, with nothing else to do with this article that I poured myself into, I would like to share it with you.

Introduction

The stories of ancient sailors often tell of dreaded sea beasts that threatened or, in the very least, vexed their vessels. Many historians and writers ignored these tales as mere imaginative works told to entertain aimless souls or give a heroic quality to actually unremarkable journeys at sea. However, one would be intrigued to learn that the Bible does not contradict such tales of watery monsters; rather, in a few, lesser-known corners of scripture, it affirms them. The Eighty-Ninth Psalm, for instance, mentions God having “crushed Rahab like a carcass,” leaving no explanation for the enigmatic Rahab other than the fact that its mention is preceded by praise for the God who “rule[s] the raging of the sea.” The more well-known mention of a strange sea creature, however, is in the forty-first chapter of Job, in which God describes his ability to “draw out Leviathan with a fishhook.” Job later moves to a direct description of the creature Leviathan which, “when it raises itself up, the gods are afraid; at the crashing they are beside themselves.” So if the existence of sea monsters is not denied but, rather, affirmed by scripture, what can that tell us about the mysteries of the sea?

 Ancient Tales

 Most historians today are familiar with the old tradition of ancient cartographers marking the edges of their maps with depictions of dreaded sea monsters. Sometimes, these took the form of enormous serpents; other times, they looked more squid- or octopus-like, and sometimes there was no picture but, instead, a simple bearing some variation of the phrase, “here there be monsters.” Certainly, many of these were simply ways of designating the unexplored nature of these waters that existed at the edge of the mapmakers’ known worlds, but that does not discount the strange tales that sailors would often tell in pubs and less-reputable places once they came ashore. These sea-farers would tell tales of great serpents rolling in the waves, of strange beings never before seen by human eyes. In the more dramatic of these tales, the sailors claimed to be survivors of skirmishes and watery battles with enormous, unknown beasts the size – or exceeding the size – of their ships.

The locals would take in these stories with voracious appetites, transfixed by the tales of man clashing with beast out on the open waters. One of the most memorable portions of Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, features the twin watery terrors of Scylla and Charybdis, a clash from which only King Odysseus, himself, survives. Or one can think of Herman Melville’s work, Moby Dick, which certainly owes no little credit to the titular phantasm that haunted the crazed Captain Ahab. And in the early Twentieth Century, the strange primordial monsters of H.P. Lovecraft occupied not only their submerged city of R’lyeh, but the minds of science fiction and horror readers as well, leaving an indelible mark on both genres.

Even today, sea monsters are moderately popular in films – appearing in at least three of the Pirates of the Caribbean films – and obsessions with cryptozoological possibilities like the Loch Ness and Canvey Island Monsters are as strong as they have ever been. It almost seems as if the human mind is inordinately transfixed with the exotic, the unexplainable, and so these stories of clashes with beasts of the sea are often given a spiritual dimension in which the hearers (or viewers, where films are concerned) are placed in a sense of awe. We so often find ourselves entranced by such situations in which the horrible meets the sublime.

 Scriptural Tales

 For this reason, it comes as no surprise that sea monsters make rare but notable appearances in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Eighty-Ninth Psalm and the forty-first chapter of Job both describe enigmatic and titanic sea beasts (Rahab in the psalm, Leviathan in Job). Similar imagery is frequent in the book of Revelation, in which the beast that modern Christianity refers to as the “Antichrist” is only ever referred to as the “beast from the sea,” and the beast’s master – the dragon – is described in similar form to the sea serpents of sailor lore.

But in my studies in college and seminary, I found an even more unsettling connection only three verses into the Bible. In the beginning of Genesis, God is described as creating both the Heavens and the Earth, with his spirit floating over the unformed depths. The actual word used for what God hovers over is the Hebrew word “tehom,” meaning “deep,” “abyss” or “void.” This word, tehom, is linguistically related to a name in ancient Akkadian: Tiamat. Tiamat is a monstrous sea-goddess often described as a dragon, appearing most notably in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, though the legend itself also appears in earlier accounts across many Mesopotamian cultures. According to the Enuma Elish, Tiamat threatens the gods, but is ultimately destroyed by the young god, Marduk, and he uses half of her dead body to create the Heavens (as the abode of the gods) and the other half to construct the Earth. It would be worth noting the similarities in descriptions of Yahweh and Marduk, but that would be too tangential to our current study (though Psalm 104 would be chief to such a study).

So does that mean that the Heavens and Earth are actually made from the body of an ancient, primordial sea monster that was killed by God? That would certainly present some difficulty and possibly even derision if you tried using it as a conversation piece with a geologist or astronomer, though if you were to take a literal approach to this exegesis, the enigmatic bloop would certainly be an interesting bullet-point in the debate. However, the legend itself seems subtly connected to the Judeo-Christian creation story, so the ancient writer of Genesis must have found something spiritually nurturing or awe-inspiring in his particular choice of words, even if his only goal was to show how mighty God was in comparison to the Babylonian pantheon. After all, it is no coincidence that such imagery is echoed in Revelation, wherein one of the notable components of God’s throne room is a sea “like glass,” reiterating God’s power to conquer even the titanic unknown hiding in the depths.

 Modern Tales

The Nineteenth Century saw a radical transformation in the notions of sea monsters. While many scientists and natural philosophers had long theorized the existence of such beings, no viable evidence existed until 1861, when French sailors managed to capture a portion of one and transport it successfully to land. The creature they encountered was the Giant Squid, officially dubbed Arciteuthis by zoologist Johannes Steenstrup. Steenstrup, following in the tradition going all the way back to Aristotle, had long suspected the existence of a squid species of unprecedented size. Only a decade after the French sailors brought back their specimen, Newfoundland became the main focus of Giant Squid research when it witnessed a mass stranding of the creatures on its shores, forever banishing the idea that such creatures existed purely in myth.

In recent years, scientists have made great strides in studying Giant Squids, beginning first with pictures of lives specimens taken by underwater cameras, then advancing to footage of live juveniles taken by Japanese sailors. And recently, an international research team led a successful submarine expedition in which they saw a live adult feeding in its natural environment. Now that the question of this species’ existence has finally been laid to rest, speculation on other legendary marine life is appearing more and more plausible to marine researchers and cryptozoologists alike.

Conclusion

While many of the creatures reported in early mariner tales can likely be attributed to Giant Squids or whales, there are still many more which can’t be explained. There has been no creature of Leviathan or Rahab’s sizes to suggest their current existence, yet bones and fossils suggest that creatures of their kind may have once soared through the seas. The oceans harbor such mysteries that continue to call both sailors and researchers out into its expanse, as if some spiritual force is pulling them out into the vast deep in order to plumb the mysteries of God’s creation. Legends of such beings continue to entrance the landlubbers who stay behind, both religious and non-religious alike. But I suggest that these legends are not mere fanciful escapism; rather, these tales encourage us to search out the answers, to seek God’s creativity in the depths of the sea the way many astronomers seek it out in the highest of heights. These explorations ultimately lead to a magnanimous growth in human knowledge of what God made. What we know of these legendary creatures in stories and scripture may be modified along the way, but we must not be held back from exploring the components of their reality, for by doing this, we will touch upon the creative powers of God and, in the process, grow closer to the divine being who created us.

Until next time, friends…

A History of Zombiism, Part Two

Good day, good year and welcome to the year 2015! Can you believe it’s been over two years since everyone thought the world was going to end? I have to say, I’m glad those people were wrong, although I did enjoy the 2009 film it inspired. Now about a month ago, I began a series exploring the origins of the zombie myth. In part one, I laid out the Haitian Voodoo origins of the “zombie” term. Essentially, a zombie is a person who is poisoned into a near-death state by a bokor (Voodoo witch doctor) and then revived, then kept under the influence of cognitive-inhibiting drugs in order to be retained as a slave. Now the question becomes: how did we go from a poisoned-revived-drugged slave of a Voodoo bokor to the flesh- or brain-eating reanimated dead that fill our silver screens today (sometimes done well, sometimes done very poorly)?

On the surface, the “reanimating of the dead” is a clue as to the connection. After all, a bokor who is reviving a person would appear to be “raising the dead.” And furthermore, a victim kept drugged and enslaved certainly tends to possess the diminished mental prowess that we see in the zombies in film. But then there’s the big kicker: the cannibalism. Where did that part of the myth come from?

One of the earliest original precursors to today’s zombies appears in Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend. Although the creatures in his novel are referred to as vampires and bear many similar characteristics to vampires (aversion to light and holy objects, as well as the protagonist’s choice to kill them with stakes through the heart), the behavior of Matheson’s vampires are closer to the rabid zombies that showed up in fiction later on. But the more far-reaching effect of I Am Legend was its influence upon the father of the zombie genre: George A. Romero.

Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, can truly be considered the film that transformed the zombie myth into what it is today. In this movie, the dead are brought back to life presumably as a result of a space probe exploding in the atmosphere, dispersing a strange type of radiation that it picked up from Venus (that came from the movie, so don’t get mad at me for the scientific issues there). These reanimated dead – referred to in the movie simply as ghouls – are cannibalistic in nature, appear in swarms and spread their infection through biting.

It took another 17 years before Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 film, Return of the Dead, switched up the mythos, with the zombies specifically interested in brains, as opposed to simply flesh. While the brain-eating function of zombies (as well as government experimentation being the origin of the zombiism) are staples of the zombie genre, those two points appear to be dying out in recent years, with many good and terrible zombie films following more in line with the Romero conception.

So George A. Romero – under the influence of Richard Matheson’s novel – seems to have bridged the gap between the Voodoo bokor zombies and the flesh-eating living dead in film and television today. But interestingly enough, in his original 1968 film, Romero never actually used the word “zombie”; that name was applied by the fans afterward, and it stuck. Romero has since come to be identified as the “Godfather of the Zombie Genre,” though the contributions of Matheson and O’Bannon should not be overlooked.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll explore some of the deeper, cultural impacts of zombie films!

A Christian Defense of the Horror Genre

Good day! With Halloween this coming Friday, I thought it might be good to recycle an old post of mind, A Defense of the Horror Genre, initially published on November 4th, 2013. It may be an oldie, but it’s a goodie, so with moderate changes, I hope you enjoy it.

There’s a moderate controversy in the Christian community over whether or not to celebrate Halloween, with many citing its pagan origins and “dark” preoccupation as things to be avoided. Personally, I see Halloween as a celebration of the horror genre, a particularly popular area of fiction, both in film and literature. But should Christians avoid the genre for its dark focus? Can nothing good be gleaned from it?

While it is certainly dangerous to dabble out of the light and stumble in the darkness, there are actually some benefits that can be garnered from horror. Primarily, works of horror often fall into a paradigm of good versus evil. The main character is often toted as innocent, or, at least, capable of good, whereas the villain is typically too far down the road to hell to be saved. As such, the villain must be destroyed. On the surface level, the triumph over a monster with a violent persuasion sets a positive example of the Christian fighting against evil on behalf of all that is good. He is removing danger and destruction in order to bring forth peace and light. But on a deeper level, it sets a dangerous dualism, an us-versus-them scenario in which the enemy is unlovable and irredeemable. As Christians, I would press forward the possibility of, rather than destroying the enemy, trying to save him from himself. He may be violent and dangerous, with bitterness and rage in his heart, but if you can win that heart back into the light, then you have truly vanquished the monster and saved a soul in the process.

Now this leads me to my second point: sometimes – though much less often – a particular piece of horror will focus on what appears to be a monster, but turns out not to be so. Frankenstein’s Monster, for instance, was abandoned and persecuted, and as a result he fell into destructive tendencies. The less frightening Monsters, Inc. pushes this point in reverse, where humans are greatly feared, but later learned to be safe. This type of writing, the understanding of apparently evil to be actually good is a valuable lesson for Christians to learn. In an episode of the horror series, Supernatural, the main characters stumble upon a “nest” of vampires which they immediately seek to exterminate. However, by the end of the episode, they learn that the vampires have resorted to drinking animal blood out of a refusal to harm human beings, and the heroes of the show allow them to go free, realizing that these vampires who were immediately regarded as evil were actually good at heart.

And so we can take some of these lessons as a guide for how we should live, not judging by appearance but by truth. There are also what I call “negative models” in horror as well. I wrote a story awhile back about a girl who discovered a demon-possessed book and fell into witchcraft, not all at once but step by imperceptible step. Another, more recent story, chronicles a dangerous man as he searches the world for monsters, only realizing in the end that the greatest monster is the one inside himself. These stories tell the reader distinctly what not to do; they are negative models for how to live our lives, their ultimate end serving to frighten us away from the temptations of the darkness.

Lastly, and more secularly, the horror genre offers an almost unparalleled level of psychological insight into the characters. The first two films of the horror franchise, Saw, focus very much on the psychological development of characters placed in extreme circumstances. When a person is backed into a corner and fear creeps into their mind, you can be surprised what else waits inside their noggin, what reactions and mental notions manifest and allow the audience to dive ever-so-much-more deeply into their unconscious mental faculties. And sometimes, the audience is left with a reflective opportunity to look deeper into their own minds as well.

These all sound well and nice, you say, but are there pitfalls to avoid in the horror genre? Most assuredly, be not confused. Gore has, in recent decades, become an unmistakable staple of the genre, to my bitter dismay. Some films and books feel that a piece of horror is not complete unless it can double as a lesson in anatomy. I find this to be bad writing, a pitiful attempt to replace genuine thought and circumstantial development with a surface-level “gross factor.” Sex, in addition, muddies the waters of good and bad fiction. Sex, in my mind, merely plays on the libido of the audience as a way to entice them, rather than letting the actual story speak for itself. Slasher movies* often capitalize on these two factors.

So can the horror genre be trusted to teach us valuable lessons? Most assuredly, as long as good discernment is used. As with any genre, horror is flooded with cheap works using bad tools and teaching irresponsible lessons. But don’t let these things deter you from the good works, for they are capable of teaching us a great deal, both about ourselves and about what it truly means to “walk in the light.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I discuss the concept of outsiders allying together!

* A “Slasher Movie” is typically a film with a popular villain bent on nothing more than a killing spree, with such villains as Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, etc. Personally, I am a fan of the Freddy Krueger franchise for its creativity in plot and story, and the fact that sex and gore are utilized to a much lesser extent than in other Slasher franchises.

Attack of the Foibles!

Okay, I mean logic flaws. Four of them, to be precise. Also, hello!

These next four logic flaws – the last in our series for the present time – will revolve around the notion of attacks. These essentially concern an opponent’s choice to try and turn the argument around on you or diminish your own credibility. These attempts, fortunately, bear no real strength in a logical discussion.

Tu Quoque (or “You, too”)

“How can you say this is right when you don’t do it yourself?!”

The Tu Quoque argument is the claim that another person’s argument is wrong simply because they don’t act in accordance with it. You get this all over the place in both politics and religion. In politics, you get the claim that “Republicanism is wrong because Republicans don’t hold the very values which they preach.” In religion, you get the claim that “Christians don’t love people the way Christ does, so Christianity must be wrong.” But at the core, both of these arguments are wrong. Regardless of whether Republicans do or do not act in accordance with the morals they tout, or whether or not Christians succeed in loving people as Christ does, neither of these facts hold any influence on whether or not the views themselves are correct. For instance, I can say to you, “you should never, ever, ever commit murder.” But if I go out the next day and kill someone, does that mean I was wrong in saying you should never kill someone? Of course not. Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn’t mean that their claim is wrong. It simply means that they won’t hold up to it. Now this is not to be confused with

The Straw Man

“My opponent is clearly a bogeyman who eats babies for breakfast.”

This can very easily be described as misrepresenting your opponent. This is extremely common in politics. Let me give you two examples. First, I have heard people describe President Obama as on par with the Antichrist, saying that he’s an evil, corrupt monster. Harsh, I know. But if you really look at the man, representing him as an evil monster makes no mention of how hard he tries to be a good dad, or any of the good things he does in life. He has been misrepresented by an overtly negative description. Now my second example is in regards to the pro-life/pro-choice debate. One argument you often hear pro-choice activists claim is that “Conservatives are just trying to control women’s bodies!” Well, that’s just absurd. Conservatives almost universally oppose abortion because they see it as ending the life of a living being, and they therefore see that as murder. But by misrepresenting pro-life advocates as trying to control women through anti-abortion laws, pro-choice advocates are casting an image of chauvinistic woman-haters on their opponents. However, that image is only an illusion, and it does nothing for the argument of either side. Now both the Tu Quoque and Straw Man are different examples of

Argumentum ad Hominem (Personal Attack)

“You shouldn’t listen to him, he’s an adulterous thief!”

This is one of the easiest arguments to spot, and yet, sadly, one of the most utilized arguments around. It involves attacking your opponent’s character rather than their argument. Suppose John and Gary are debating whether there are sea monsters in the Marianas Trench. John says there are and he references the 1997 bloop as evidence. Gary says that that can’t be true. After all, John cheated on his wife ten years ago and stole gum from a convenience store when he was five. You would initially think, “well, there goes John’s credibility.” But let’s halt there and take this argument from two angles. Suppose John did, in fact, cheat on his wife a decade ago and steal gum when he was five. That makes him a past adulterer and thief. But what does that have to do with his argument about sea monsters? Absolutely nothing. Now the other side: suppose Gary just made all that up. John was never married at all, and he’s been allergic to gum his whole life, so why would he steal any? Does Gary’s lie make John’s argument stronger or weaker? Neither. It adds nothing to the argument. Does it do anything to Gary’s argument? Does it take credibility away from him? Again, no. Gary’s statement was, in fact, completely irrelevant and offered nothing to the debate. It should be stricken from the record. Now this personal attack reaches its absolute peak in the

Reductio ad Hitlerum (Comparison to Hitler)

“My opponent’s wife is blonde. You know who else liked blondes? Hitler. My opponent is Hitler. I rest my case.”

You know a guy was bad when a comparison to him warrants its own, independent logic flaw. This is basically the personal attack, only raised to a whole new level. It can, in addition, be expanded to all Nazis, and all you have to do to wield this power is find a common trait between your opponent and the Nazis, emphasize it, and then boom! Your opponent is, in the eyes of your audience, nothing more than a Neo-Nazi. However, this is a form of misrepresenting your opponent, because a similarity to Hitler or Nazism doesn’t mean that that person’s argument is wrong. For instance, I have blue eyes. Hitler and the Nazis wanted to make an Aryan race of blonde-haired, blue-eyed people. Does having blue eyes, therefore, make me Hitler? Does the fact that I have brown hair like Hitler did (as does, in fact, the majority of human beings) make me wrong in saying that Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch? Absolutely not. Comparing your opponent to Hitler is just a personal attack meant to discredit them or, in the very least, raise the question of their credibility. But it does nothing for the logic of an argument.

So you can see that these four are greatly inter-related. Yelling “Tu Quoque,” or misrepresenting, attacking or comparing your opponent to Hitler does nothing in the world of logical discussion and debate. In fact, anything to do with your opponent does nothing to help or hurt any argument. In a debate, all that matters is the facts, and how they relate to each other. Now, here is my last statement, see how many logic flaws you can find in it.

“How can you listen to my opponent when he says that you should love your neighbor? I mean, he hates his own neighbor, and he’s probably plotting that neighbor’s death like some sort of secretive sociopath. And to make matters worse, his neighbor is Jewish, and you know who hates Jews? Nazis. Therefore, you shouldn’t listen to my opponent because he’s a Nazi sociopath. I rest my case.”

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I share a few spiritual matters going on in my own life.

God and the Deep

Hello, readers! Only a few hours ago, I saw the new film, Godzilla, so the concept of giant monsters from primordial prehistory is still on my mind, to be sure. However, what I have to tell you has by far predated my seeing of the movie, so this is not a result of that movie, but, rather, an interesting parallel to it.

Background in Babylonia

First, a bit of background. One of the most powerful of empires in the ancient world was known as Babylonia, famous for its capital city, Babylon. A rich and expansive empire, Babylonia was larger in its time than any other political body that had ever come before it. And in 586BC, it conquered a small nation known as Israel (it was actually a bit more complicated than that, but I’ll spare you the details). Babylonia had – as was the norm before the spread of monotheism – its own pantheon of deities, as well as a complex mythology revolving around the birth of the world. For our study today, there is one, particular myth that is of the utmost importance: a great battle between the Babylonian god, Marduk, and the great sea monster known as Tiamat. Marduk, a young god, was one of the most popular in the Babylonian pantheon, descended – as all the gods were – from the primordial female sea monster, Tiamat. Some descriptions of her sound somewhat reminiscent of a watery dragon of gargantuan size, large enough to dwarf Godzilla, at least in his most recent incarnation.

Our story begins when Tiamat becomes angered at her descendants, the gods, and declares war on them. Confidently, Marduk strides forward while riding on the clouds (since he’s a storm god) and defeats the great sea dragon. After declaring himself king of the gods, he splits Tiamat’s body in half, forming the heavens from one part and the earth from the other. Thus the earth is made.

Now Israel, as I mentioned earlier, was conquered by Babylonia roughly 2,600 years ago, and its rulers were brought to Babylon itself in chains. Some scholars suggest that it was there that the first completed forms of the Torah – the first five books of the Old Testament, known also as the Pentateuch – took shape.

More to the Puzzle

That’s the background, so keep that in mind. Now in reading the first creation story in the book of Genesis, other scholars and I have found some quite intriguing information. The very first line reads “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was void and empty, and the spirit of God floated upon the face of the waters.” If you read the original Hebrew, what you get for “the waters” is also synonymous with “void” or “deep,” the Hebrew word tehom. Tehom just so happens to be closely related to an Akkadian (the language of the Babylonians) word for the same thing: waters, void, deep. That word is Tiamat.

Effectively, then, you could read in the very opening line in Genesis that the spirit of God floated over…Tiamat. To further complicate matters, the name that gets translated as “God” in the Torah/Pentateuch is El. That’s why many of the holiest names include “el,” with meanings that include God (Ezekiel, Michael, Gabriel, Elijah meaning “Yahweh is my God” and Immanuel meaning “God with us,” etc.). However, El was originally the name of another Near Eastern creator-god; the Israelites simply applied his name to their own God long ago. Furthermore, the Canaanites (from whom we get El) actually had their own version of the Marduk-Tiamat story, this time with their god, Baal, fighting a similar sea monster.

Speculation

“In the beginning, El created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was void and empty, and the spirit of El floated upon the face of tehom.” Were the early Israelite writers so heavily influenced by outside religions that they wrote foreign materials into their own mythology? Or was there a true sea creature of unimaginable size, a leviathan defeated by God, a being whose sheer size could be utilized as raw material for the construction of landmasses? With such puzzling implications, it makes me wonder not exactly what lays at the bottom of our seas, but what, indeed, does that sea bed consist of?

The mind can boggle at potential implications, pending it is left open to such possibilities. Indeed, I find closed minds to be quite boring. It’s from the open minds that you get speculation and Lovecraftian possibilities like a sea floor constructed from the carcass of an ancient dragon. But the truth…who knows? Perhaps knowing all the truth would stifle our creative speculation. But for now, I simply like to ponder what could be…and what could have once been.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my upcoming blog posts as I begin a new series comparing various political systems (capitalism, socialism, anarchy, monarchy, theocracy) to the scriptures. I have no opinion on which system is best, so I’m looking forward to learning right along with you!

In Defense of the Horror Genre

With Halloween just behind us, many people have just borne through the quetions over whether or not to celebrate the holiday. This is a strong controversy in the Christian community, with many citing Halloween’s pagan origins and “dark” preoccupation as things to be avoided. Personally, I see Halloween as a celebration of the horror genre, a particularly popular area of fiction, both in film and literature. But should Christians avoid the genre for its dark focus? Can nothing good be gleaned from it?

While it is certainly dangerous to dabble out of the light and stumble in the darkness, there are actually some benefits that can be garnered from horror. Primarily, works of horror often fall into a paradigm of good versus evil. The main character is often toted as innocent, or, at least, capable of good, whereas the villain is typically too far down the road to hell to be saved. As such, the villain must be destroyed. On the surface level, the triumph over a monster with a violent persuasion sets a positive example of the Christian fighting against evil on behalf of all that is good. He is removing danger and destruction in order to bring forth peace and light. But on a deeper level, it sets a dangerous dualism, an us-versus-them scenario in which the enemy is unlovable and irredeemable. As Christians, I would press forward the possibility of, rather than destroying the enemy, trying to save him from himself. He may be violent and dangerous, with bitterness and rage in his heart, but if you can win that heart back into the light, then you have truly vanquished the monster and saved a soul in the process.

Now this leads me to my second point: sometimes – though much less often – a particular piece of horror will focus on what appears to be a monster, but turns out not to be so. Frankenstein’s Monster, for instance, was abandoned and persecuted, and as a result he fell into destructive tendencies. The less frightening Monsters, Inc. pushes this point in reverse, where humans are greatly feared, but later learned to be safe. This type of writing, the understanding of apparently evil to be actually good is a valuable lesson for Christians to learn. In an episode of the horror series, Supernatural, the main characters stumble upon a “nest” of vampires which they immediately seek to exterminate. However, by the end of the episode, they learn that the vampires have resorted to drinking animal blood out of a refusal to harm human beings, and the heroes of the show allow them to go free, realizing that these vampires who were immediately regarded as evil were actually good at heart.

And so we can take some of these lessons as a guide for how we should live, not judging by appearance but by truth. There are also what I call “negative models” in horror as well. I wrote a story a while back about a girl who discovered a demon-possessed book and fell into witchcraft, not all at once but step by imperceptible step. Another, more recent story, chronicles a dangerous man as he searches the world for monsters, only realizing in the end that the greatest monster is the one inside himself. These stories tell the reader distinctly what not to do; they are negative models for how to live our lives, their ultimate end serving to frighten us away from the temptations of the darkness.

Lastly, and more secularly, the horror genre offers an almost unparalleled level of psychological insight into the characters. The first two films of the horror franchise, Saw, focus very much on the psychological development of characters placed in extreme circumstances. When a person is backed into a corner and fear creeps into their mind, you can be surprised what else waits inside their noggin, what reactions and mental notions manifest and allow the audience to dive ever-so-much-more deeply into their unconscious mental faculties. And sometimes, the audience is left with a reflective opportunity to look deeper into their own minds as well.

These all sound well and nice, you say, but are there pitfalls to avoid in the horror genre? Most assuredly, be not confused. Gore has, in recent decades, become an unmistakable staple of the genre, to my bitter dismay. Some films and books feel that a piece of horror is not complete unless it can double as a lesson in anatomy. I find this to be bad writing, a pitiful attempt to replace genuine thought and circumstantial development with a surface-level “gross factor.” Sex, in addition, muddies the waters of good and bad fiction. Sex, in my mind, merely plays on the libido of the audience as a way to entice them, rather than letting the actual story speak for itself. Slasher movies* often capitalize on these two factors.

So can the horror genre be trusted to teach us valuable lessons? Most assuredly, as long as good discernment is used. As with any genre, horror is flooded with cheap works using bad tools and teaching irresponsible lessons. But don’t let these things deter you from the good works, for they are capable of teaching us a great deal, both about ourselves and about what it truly means to “walk in the light.”

Until next time, friends…

* A “Slasher Movie” is typically a film with a popular villain bent on nothing more than a killing spree, with such villains as Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, etc. Personally, I am a fan of the Freddy Krueger franchise for its creativity in plot and story, and the fact that sex and gore are utilized to a much lesser extent than in other Slasher franchises.