Fundamentalist Gandalfians...

...Literalist Megatronians and other related strangeness
An essay by dave_littler, re-posted with permission.

“Listen, I realize that Lord of the Rings is just a story written by one guy, okay? I’m not one of those fundamentalists who believes everything that Tolkien said just because it’s in some book. I don’t believe in Sauron or anything. That’s obviously bullshit. I do believe in Gandalf the Grey, though, don’t get me wrong. I believe that he was some kind of wizard, and that he had some part to play in leading the Fellowship of the Ring in destroying the One Ring, I just don’t believe in all that obviously made-up stuff in Lord of the Rings.”

Imagine if someone said this to you. Imagine how absolutely taken aback you would be by what they were saying. For someone to say that they acknowledge that a work of fiction is a work of fiction and yet that one of the main characters of that work of fiction, who was invented in order to fulfill a role within that narrative, was nevertheless a real entity. Would that be more ridiculous or less ridiculous than a person who believed the story itself to be a true story? At least someone who believed Lord of the Rings was a historical tale could be forgiven, on some level, for believing that the people described within it to have been real people; after all, the events could hardly have been real if the people who enacted these events did not actually exist.

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The rest of the essay can be found in this entry at the community atheist, and it's an intriguing read!

Since I am reposting essays today....

Even if I DID believe...
Essay ©Tim Maroney, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Originally posted here, Dec 30 1983. (Reposted, with permission from author pending.)

I am not a Christian. In my discussions of this fact with Christians, I have repeatedly run into one major misunderstanding. The Christians assume that if I believed the Bible were true, I would become a Christian; that is, they believe that my reason for not being a Christian is that I don’t believe in their god. This is not the case.

One disclaimer: The thesis of this essay is that even if a God as described in the Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship due to his low moral standards. Consequently, I speak sometimes as if I did believe the Bible, when in fact I do not.

If I had undeniable proof of the existence of Yahweh, aka Jehovah, aka Adonai, aka El Shaddai, aka Yahweh Elohim, the father of Jesus and the ancient leader of the Semitic peoples, I still would not worship the bastard. If an angel appeared to me and removed my appendectomy scar so I could never deny the reality of divine power, I still would not be a Christian. My primary reason for not being a Christian or Jew has nothing to do with my lack of belief in their god. My primary reason is that the Bible is a disgusting book describing the behavior of a god without the morality of an average high school student.

( The rest of the essay under the cut )

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This essay thanks to the ever-erudite doctoreon, who shared it in response to my last post. And I am sharing it because, alongside the applications of my logical and rational facilities which reject religious literalism of any stripe, lies a deep ethical abhorrence for so many aspects of the Judeo-Christian construct. This is one of those aspects, and the good Mr. Maroney has elucidated it better than I ever could.

And yes, it seems I am going public (in a limited fashion) again. I will be going back and re-opening a lot of my posts, though due to the recent blog-stalking unpleasantness, many will remain f-locked.