Writing for Message, not to Entertain

I originally wrote and published this essay on this blog many, many moons ago, but I think it apropos to reprint it in light of recent discussions of Social Justice Warriors and their determination to place message above entertainment in storytelling. Read this and see if it sounds familiar.

Many Christian readers of sf, apparently feeling burned by the bad output for which explicitly Christian sf publishers have become famous, have drawn the conclusion that religious content in a work of fiction ought always to be slight, referenced only in delicate, tangential ways. Usually, in their support, they cite J.R.R. Tolkien's well-known dislike for religious allegory. I used to be in this crowd myself.

I have since moderated my views, mainly because of the many good books with explicit religious content. Anyone who lays a blanket condemnation on allegory or preaching will be at a loss to explain The Pilgrim's Progress, which is basically a collection of sermons and ham-fisted allegories as well as an acknowledged classic.

The problem with Christian sf is, I'm inclined to believe, more complex. First, it's possible that its badness has been exaggerated, as there are some decidedly talented authors writing in the field. Second, it's possible we have judged a fledgling sub-genre with the standards of a fully developed one: sf in its early days was largely literary tripe; standards of quality improved over time as the genre developed. Third, while religious content, in and of itself, will not ruin a story, the content of the religion in question might: I am inclined to believe that pop psychology-influenced Fundamentalism does not make a solid basis on which to build good fiction, yet it forms the basis of far too many Christian sf novels. Fourth, some authors may approach their fiction in the wrong way, forgetting that good fiction must begin with certain aims, the first of which is to tell an entertaining story. A Christian author who forgets that may fall prey to what I have decided to call Sheldonism, the belief that storytelling ought to serve no purpose other than to preach a Christian message.

Sheldonism, the bad new term I'm blatantly trying to coin, is the tendency to write like Charles Sheldon, or more accurately, write according to Sheldon's view on writing. Charles Sheldon, a Congregational pastor, advocate of the so-called Social Gospel, and novelist, was fond of telling extended parables, called sermon stories, to his congregation in place of a regular sermon (Smith 2007:201). Such stories would also be published. In His Steps, Sheldon's most famous novel, is a collection of such sermon-stories, preached in 1896 and subsequently published (Tanner 1999). In it, he presents the question that would later come to adorn key chains and tee-shirts, "What would Jesus do?" or WWJD for hip young people who, unlike me, are not acronym averse. Sheldon's gimmicky basis for Christian morality is well meaning but inadequate, mostly because it's vague and almost entirely subjective. Nonetheless,

The answers in the novel exude Social Gospel confidence, suggesting that any "genuine, honest, and enlightened Christian" could figure out what the Savior portrayed in the Gospels would do. Sheldon's characters come up with the answers with a good dose of sociological analysis and a minimum of biblical citation. [Lovin 2006:35]

Sheldon's novel was a bestseller even though it has no particular interest in entertainment per se and even though it keeps going for about a hundred pages after the story is over. Though Sheldon certainly lays it on thick, his prose and characters are interesting, and the plot, all things considered, isn't too bad. To the modern reader, the heavy focus on the Temperance Movement may seem quaint or naive, but the novel is of course a product of its time and doesn't deserve to be judged by Americans who live after the period of Prohibition, when alcohol is well regulated in both production and sale, when people no longer speak of a significant "whiskey lobby" in Congress, and when the western frontier and its associated alcohol abuse are in the distant past. Sheldon did not write of social evils from an arid academic post, either; he spent a good deal of time with people on the streets and became an early Civil Rights advocate after discovering that racism was causing the poverty of the Black population in Topeka, Kansas (Armstrong 2005:45).

In His Steps has something to say not only to Christians generally, but to a few specific occupations in particular: pastors who preach the word, newspapermen who can expose the roots of society's evils, and novelists who can potentially write inspiring stories are all featured in the book. It is not surprising that the novelist holds a special place, for, according to Smith, In His Steps is one of a number of Social Gospel novels that appeared during the Third Great Awakening, all of which were "self-consciously about print culture, making clear that founding the kingdom of God here on earth depends on making appropriate use of books and literacy" (2007:194). As Smith describes, some other books of the period such as Mary Augusta Ward's Robert Elsmere, which influenced Sheldon, or Wiston Churchill's Inside of the Cup, depict books, especially books of biblical criticism, as a means of salvation from orthodox Christianity, destroying the faith of the orthodox but rebuilding them as social reformers and truer followers of Jesus (2007:195-199). By contrast, though some describe Sheldon as a "liberal," and though he held, according to Smith, unorthodox views on certain matters such as the Virgin Birth (2007:199-200), his novel is shot through with supernaturalism. Nonetheless, it avoids getting mired in the theological debates between liberals and Fundamentalists. The wide popularity of the novel is probably due in part to this self-conscious ecumenicism; the denomination of the characters is ambiguous, and they spend no time discussing theological matters, which are clearly placed in a subordinate position to the matter of "what Jesus would do."

Rather than describing literature as a means of liberation from Christian doctrine as some of his contemporaries did, Sheldon prefers to limit its usefulness; the really important thing is whether any written work inspires people to be more Christlike. Anything else is a waste. In the same vein, Sheldon generally avoided serious theology because of "the irrelevance of doctrine to his practice-based religion" (Smith 2007:200), a way of thinking that still characterizes some strains of Evangelicalism. This dislike for doctrine may explain why Sheldon's famous ethic consists of four words that defy interpretation.

Admirable as Sheldon's philanthropy is--and the call to social action in In His Steps is still powerful and stinging--his novel breaks down precisely because of this lack of doctrine. What, exactly, would Jesus do? The question is always posed as an intensely personal one, one nobody can answer for anybody else, one that has no objective answer. The question becomes all but useless, "What do I think is the best thing to do?" with Jesus slapped onto it. When all is said and done and the novel is over, we find that every man did that which was right in his own eyes: it just happens that in Sheldon's world, every man is noble and self-sacrificing (except the novelist, but more on that in a moment). The book has good intentions, of course, but is as unrealistic as the more liberal Social Gospel novels to which it might be considered an antidote. In the real world, behavior stems from belief, and people work to shape the world to accord with their ideals. Noble ideals inspire noble behavior: a gracious god incarnate who offers stern threatenings and great comforts, who says, "Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me," is an ideal from which a Christian can readily work to improve social conditions or do anything else worth doing. But if the Christian believes nothing specific about Jesus, or if he believes Jesus is nobody particularly special, he has no basis for saying what Jesus would do or not do, and no reason for wanting to imitate Jesus anyway. In the world of Charles Sheldon, every man gets his own personal Jesus, and not only that, he gets to be his own personal historical Jesus scholar: you too can redesign Jesus according to your preferences, just like Marcus Borg or John Dominic Crossan, no arduous classroom study required. In our own age, we can see what this has devolved into: our liberals champion improving the lot of the poor even as they advocate murdering people by the millions. There is no telling what awful things Jesus might do if everyone gets to invent Jesus for himself.

Sheldon's view on fiction is similar to his view of doctrine: it is useful only insofar as it serves a practical purpose, which is "eliciting powerful emotions, changing people's hearts and minds" (Smith 2007:201) so that they may serve the cause of the Social Gospel. This is the goal of In His Steps, and in that sense may be seen as similar in aim to Dominique Lapierre's City of Joy, though it lacks Lapierre's finesse. It is in his view of fiction that Sheldon's ideas become visibly self-contradictory. Even though he strains against judgmentalism and tries to keep the question of what Jesus would do a personal one, he condemns novelists who do not serve the Social Gospel; apparently, Sheldon knows exactly what Jesus would do if Jesus were in their shoes. As Smith puts it, "Sheldon did not think most authors met their obligations to make the world a better place, one Christian heart at a time" (2007:201).

This is clear in Sheldon's treatment of his novelist character in In His Steps. To lay out the situation, we have a talented novelist, Jasper, who is in love with a talented singer, Rachel. Both of them, along with the other central characters in the book, have pledged, for an entire year, to do nothing before pondering that famous question, WWJD? In the relationship between these two, Sheldon presents the classic (or perhaps cliched) motif of the sensitive, idealistic artist in love with a cold woman who spurns him, thereby inspiring him to starve in a garret while creating his masterpiece.* This is the motif, oft repeated in both fiction and real life, of which Dante's love for Beatrice is the most commonly cited--and extreme--example, and which George Bernard Shaw parodies in Man and Superman. Sheldon gives this familiar story an interesting twist by adding a spiritual dimension--which doesn't bode well for poor Jasper.

Two passages in the novel are of particular importance to this discussion. The first is the one in which Jasper openly proclaims his love for Rachel. He chooses a bad time for this, at least according to Rachel's clock. In the scene previous, Rachel had sung at a tent revival meeting, the Holy Spirit had swept through the tent, and many of the city's most destitute and besotted citizens had given their life to Christ and a future of betterment away from the bottle. Shortly after that, moved both by Rachel's singing and his own passion, Jasper reveals his heart. The quote is long, but please bear with me:

"Rachel," Jasper had said, and it was the first time he had ever spoken her name, "I never knew till to-night how much I loved you. Why should I try to conceal any longer what you have seen me look? You know I love you as my life. I can no longer hide it from you if I would."

The first intimation he had of a repulse was the trembling of Rachel's arm in his. She had allowed him to speak and had neither turned her face toward him nor away from him. She had looked straight on and her voice was sad but firm and quiet when she spoke.

"Why do you speak to me now? I cannot bear it--after what we have seen to-night."

"Why--what--" he had stammered and then was silent.

Rachel withdrew her arm from his but still walked near him. Then he had cried out with the anguish of one who begins to see a great loss facing him where he expected a great joy.

"Rachel! Do you not love me? Is not my love for you as sacred as anything in all of life itself?"

She had walked silent for a few steps after that. They passed a street lamp. Her face was pale and beautiful. He had made a movement to clutch her arm and she had moved a little farther from him.

"No," she had replied. "There was a time--I cannot answer for that--you should not have spoken to me--now."

...

Rachel went up to her room and faced her evening's experience with conflicting emotions. Had she ever loved Jasper Chase? Yes. No. One moment she felt that her life's happiness was at stake over the result of her action. Another, she had a strange feeling of relief that she had spoken as she had. There was one great, over-mastering feeling in her. The response of the wretched creatures in the tent to her singing, the swift, powerful, awesome presence of the Holy Spirit had affected her as never in all her life before. The moment Jasper had spoken her name and she realized that he was telling of his love she had felt a sudden revulsion for him, as if he should have respected the supernatural events they had just witnessed. She felt as if it was not the time to be absorbed in anything less than the divine glory of those conversions. [pp. 81-82]

Ouch. Apparently, in Sheldon's (or Rachel's) world, God and love occupy separate spheres that are not to be intermingled; to profess love shortly after a detectable movement of the Holy Spirit is to do something profane in the presence of something holy.

Personally, I much prefer the depiction of the spurned lover in Caryll Houselander. Says Houselander, Jesus himself can be seen--

In the lover who, with his own hands, has laid his heart bare and shown all the subtlest tenderness of his sensitive mind and all the holy secret of himself, only to be scorned or met with indifference. Is not he Christ stripped of His garments? All that is holy looks absurd; all that is beautiful looks ugly: all that is secret is violated. He stands and bleeds. [The Reed of God, p. 117]

In Houselander's view, then, it would actually be Jasper who in this scene most resembles Christ, who is doing WJWD, revealing his love and in return receiving a scourging, which is given on a religious pretext, no less. Alas, Sheldon sides with Rachel in this matter, and from this point forward, the depiction of Jasper, when he is mentioned at all, is negative. So it always goes for the idealist romantic.

Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.

Rachel's "revulsion" for Jasper and her and the other characters' subsequent badmouthing of him behind his back (prefaced with "I don't like to judge him but") make a fine example of where Sheldon's vague ethic leads. Though supposedly free from judgmentalism, anyone who holds to this personalized moral code can immediately turn it around and use it to whip someone else. Because Jasper doesn't have the same personal spiritual or emotional experience at the tent meeting that Rachel has, she decides he is base and unspiritual. With no sound objective truths to which they can anchor themselves, the characters of the novel find anchor in their own sentiments and experiences, which can be cruel taskmasters, especially when they are used to rule someone else. Many, many Rachels can be found at emotion-driven Charismatic churches.

In the next passage to be cited, Sheldon dispenses with Jasper completely. I beg your pardon again for quoting at length:

Early one afternoon in August, after a day of refreshing coolness following a long period of heat, Jasper Chase walked to his window in the apartment house on the avenue and looked out.

On his desk lay a pile of manuscript. Since that evening when he had spoken to Rachel Winslow he had not met her. His singularly sensitive nature--sensitive to the point of extreme irritability when he was thwarted--served to thrust him into an isolation that was intensified by his habits as an author.

All through the heat of summer he had been writing. His book was nearly done now. He had thrown himself into its construction with a feverish strength that threatened at any moment to desert him and leave him helpless. He had not forgotten his pledge made with the other church members at First Church. It had forced itself upon his notice all through his writing, and ever since Rachel had said no to him, he had asked a thousand times, "Would Jesus do this? Would He write this story?" It was a social novel, written in a style that had proved popular. It had no purpose except to amuse. Its moral teaching was not bad, but neither was it Christian in any positive way. Jasper Chase knew that such a story would probably sell. He was conscious of powers in this way that the social world petted and admired. "What would Jesus do?" He felt that Jesus would never write such a book. The question obstruded on him at the most inopportune times. He became irascible over it. The standard of Jesus for an author was too ideal. Of course, Jesus would use His powers to produce something useful or helpful, or with a purpose. What was he, Jasper Chase, writing this novel for? Why, what nearly every writer wrote for--money, money, and fame as a writer. There was no secret with him that he was writng this new story with that object. He was not poor, and so had no great temptation to write for money. But he was urged on by his desire for fame as much as anything. He must write this kind of matter. But what would Jesus do? The question plagued him even more than Rachel's refusal. Was he going to break his promise? "Did the promise mean much after all?" he asked.

...

...he turned to his desk and began to write. When he had finished the last page of the last chapter of his book it was nearly dark. "What would Jesus do?" He had finally answered the queston by denying his Lord. It grew darker in his room. He had deliberately chosen hs course, urged on by disappointment and loss.

"But Jesus said unto him, no man having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God." [pp. 137-138]

Did you get that, novelists? What you care most about are money and fame. Even if your work is decent, if you don't write in any "positive" Christian way, then to hell with you. Literally. In Sheldon's "most famous work, the one unredeemed sin is not drinking, prostitution, or a life of crime, but instead the writing of conventional, popular society novels" (Smith 2007:206).

There's something faintly absurd in what Sheldon says about what Jesus would write. We know what Jesus would write: nothing, exactly what he did write. There is little purpose in asking what Jesus would have written had he been a novelist because Jesus was not a novelist. Jesus has left the novel-writing to us.

This is Sheldonism, a view of writing into which a Christian writer must not slip: fictional works should serve only the practical purpose of forwarding the Gospel, with no particular concern for entertainment or artistic quality. It is this kind of attitude that has probably done much to damage Christian fiction; a Christian writer who holds the presentation of his personal platform, or the theology of his church, as the goal of a novel, is almost certain to fall into the kind of poor, preachy writing for which Christian fiction has become infamous. The Christian writer who places sermonizing first and artistic concerns second or not at all, is in effect condemning art as a justifiable pursuit and beauty as a good. He is perverting beauty into a mere means of conveyance, one he can dispense with if he finds it inconvenient or too difficult to master.

Sheldon's viewpoint is somewhat understandable, though extreme; Smith hints that Sheldon was reacting to Aestheticism, which championed art for art's sake (2007:201), insisting that "all art is quite useless," as Oscar Wilde put it in The Picture of Dorian Gray. These two viewpoints, that art should be useless and that art should be useful but nothing else, can be considered two extremes that the Christian author would do well to avoid. Many of the poorer Christian works with their preachiness, flat characters, and unengaging plots, appear to fall into Sheldon's extreme, but now in reaction, many Christians are falling almost, but not quite, into the other extreme, insisting that good books will have at most only bare, nearly undetectable hints of religion. This is the other evil, the view that morals or religion are somehow ugly and that truly beautiful art has little or no concern for them. In reality, many books have proven that it is quite possible to create works of high artistic quality with religious meaning, even explicit and plain religious meaning.

However, though explicitly religious works of good quality are possible, this does not mean that every book must therefore be explicitly religious. We have no clear reason to think Jesus would condemn a novel in which the moral teaching is "not bad." If the moral teaching is not bad, then it is good and therefore does the very thing Sheldon thinks fiction should do, though such a book would not beat its readers about the head and shoulders with morality the way In His Steps does. Every book, whether the writer wills it or no, will teach something. Every novel has a moral element that may be good or bad, that may uplift the reader or drag him down. Oscar Wilde himself demonstrates this; in his relentless pursuit of art for art's sake, he somehow couldn't stop writing Christian morality tales. There is a use both for the good book without blatant Christian themes and the good book with blatant Christian themes. Each can do its readers some good, each can serve a noble purpose. The key to constructing each is careful craftsmanship that gives serious thought to the key elements of writing, like characters and conflicts. Outright preaching should be kept to a minimum for the same reason infodumps should be kept to a minimum, but if the author finds that either infodumps or sermons are absolutely necessary, they must be good infodumps or sermons, well constructed and provocative. The reason pop-psych Christian novels are bad is not because they're Christian, but because their sermons drone and have little real content. To be quite blunt, the explicit Christian novel needs more content than In His Steps if it is to be a work of art.

REFERENCES CITED

Armstrong, Chris
2005 "Holiness of Heart, Life, and Pen," Christian History and Biography 85:44-45.

Lovin, Robin.
2006 "Faith Matters." Christian Century 123.20:35.

Smith, Erin A.
2007 "'What Would Jesus Do?': The Social Gospel and the Literary Marketplace." Book History 10:193-221.

Tanner, Beccy
1999 "More than a century after he first asked his congregation 'What would Jesus do?' Charles Sheldon's book on the subject is one of the best-selling novels of all time." Wichita Eagle 16 June.

*Incidentally, I remember WWJD merchandise being popular when I was in high school. I used to interpret them as "We Want Jack Daniels" or "What Would Judas Do?" (My animosity toward acronyms has been life-long.) I also heard tell of a tee-shirt that read, "What Would Jesus Do for a Klondike Bar?" I stopped mocking WWJD when a young woman, on whom I had an overwhelming crush, rebuked me soundly. I subsequently retired to my garret, as was fitting, though I have yet to produce a masterpiece, probably because I haven't done too well on the starving part; after all, poets and horses should be fed, not overfed.

Addendum: Anatomy of the SJW

Yesterday, I posted on the essay by the perpetually outraged K. Tempest Bradford, who recommends that you de-Jew your library and read only approved Aryan authors.

A reader wonders if she made an honest mistake and simply doesn't realize that telling people to exclude authors from their reading list based on skin color or the ability to correctly identify one's own genitalia sounds a tad bigoted.

No, she did not make a mistake, and no, she does not realize how she sounds.  George Orwell says something apropos:

In the last twenty years western civilization has given the intellectual security without responsibility, and in England, in particular, it has educated him in scepticism while anchoring him almost immovably in the privileged class. He has been in the position of a young man living on an allowance from a father whom he hates. The result is a deep feeling of guilt and resentment, not combined with any genuine desire to escape. But some psychological escape, some form of self-justification there must be, and one of the most satisfactory is transferred nationalism. During the nineteen-thirties the normal transference was to soviet Russia, but there are other alternatives, and it is noticeable that pacifism and anarchism, rather than Stalinism, are now gaining ground among the young. These creeds have the advantage that they aim at the impossible and therefore in effect demand very little. If you throw in a touch of oriental mysticism and Buchmanite raptures over Gandhi, you have everything that a disaffected intellectual needs. The life of an English gentleman and the moral attitudes of a saint can be enjoyed simultaneously. By merely transferring your allegiance from England to India (it used to be Russia), you can indulge to the full in all the chauvinistic sentiments which would be totally impossible if you recognized them for what they were. [more...]

That was then. Orwell wrote these words in an analysis of a book denouncing British rule in India. The political landscape has changed, but the type of intellectual Orwell describes is still with us; he has merely changed his allegiances once again to fit the current fads.

This intellectual still hates his father, that is, Western Civilization, and so still seeks for something that opposes it to which he can give his his heart, even as he reaps all the benefits Western Civilization affords him.  Bradford, for example, frittered away her time in college studying interpretive dance or something similar.  Then she held a real job for a short space, and then she threw the job away to go to Clarion, after which she spent a few years touring around the country and living off the hospitality of others.

The cozy, comfy lifestyle she leads, and the small-minded things she is able to say without serious consequence, are luxuries won for her mostly by exactly the sorts of people she hates, white Christian men.  She does not know or care that most people in most times and places have not had these luxuries.  She does not know where the luxuries come from and does not care, and if anyone tried to mansplain to her where they came from, she would RAGEQUIT.

After Marxism failed, there were Gramsci and Cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School, which expanded Marx's vision of a war between oppressive Capitalist and oppressed worker beyond anything Marx ever dreamed of, because Marx, perhaps in a failure of imagination, never realized it was possible to distort every relationship in the same way he had distorted the relationship between laborers and their bosses.  Thus we have Second-Wave Feminism, which sees men as always oppressors and women as always oppressed, or race-baiters who see whites as always oppressors and everyone else as always oppressed, and so forth.  The Cultural Marxists believed that if they tore down Western Civilization, a sparkly unicorn kingdom would magically take its place.

At least they had a theory and a goal, even if the theory was wrong and the goal impossible.  But we are now in the "Third Wave," which is made up of the Second Wave's useful idiots, who've now taken over the nuthouse.  There is no apparent goal, no apparent endgame, just an endless witch-hunt, an increasingly shrill series of demands, and a shocking amount of backstabbing.  They hate the West and love everything that opposes it, and only that can explain their contradictory infatuations, such as their simultaneous love for sexual disorders and Muhammadanism.  They never realize that if the West goes, their luxuries and stupid ideas will go with it, because ideas like theirs cannot survive except in the lap of the luxury that the West has afforded them.  They are hothouse flowers, shielded from the harsh winds of reality by their smartphones and their air-conditioners and their rich buddies.

That's why these silly theories grow and metastasize on college campuses, where reality is carefully kept at bay.  What comes out of a department with "Studies" at the end of its name has nothing to do with real life, but that does not matter to the people who run such departments, because they are intellectuals who have security without responsibility.  It's only their students who have to crash into reality when they leave the hothouse behind.

That is, if they leave the hothouse.  Some never do.  Some tour the country and crash on friends' couches, or they find other ways to keep reality at a safe distance.

The Joyless and Ungrateful

Blogs I read are abuzz because of an incredibly stupid, shrill, scolding little article by somebody named K. Tempest Bradford, whom I vaguely think I've heard of, once.

Sweet mother of pearl, she's actually wagging her finger!

Anyway, this special snowflake is what they call a "Social Justice Warrior," that is, a priggish little hothouse flower who thinks it's her duty to tell everybody else what to do, and what she wants you to do is pledge, for a year, to stop reading, and I quote, "White, Straight, Cis Male Authors."

Huh.  Let's see . . . I think I can find a magical girl with an appropriate response to that.

Right back at you, Tempest.

And after pointing out that "cis" isn't a word, we move on to the next point:  Bradford is a raging bigot.  Literally raging, in fact, as she freely admits:

Back in 2012, I faced a conundrum. I write short fiction, and I wanted to get better at writing it. To do that I had to write, write, and write some more. But just as important was reading, reading, and reading a lot more. And I tried. But every time I thought about delving into one of the many science fiction and fantasy magazines at my disposal, or even reading compilations of the "best" stories that had been nominated for and/or won awards, my brain resisted.

Because every time I tried to get through a magazine, I would come across stories that I didn't enjoy or that I actively hated or that offended me so much I rage-quit the issue. Go through enough of that, and you start to resist the idea of reading at all.

Then I thought: What if I only read stories by a certain type of author? Instead of reading everything, I would only look at stories by women or people of color or LGBT writers. Essentially: no straight, cis, white males. [more...]

Got that?  She's chosen to avoid any books that might expand her mind or challenge her views . . . no, wait, not even that.  She's chosen to avoid any books by people who have the wrong skin color or who know how correctly to identify what's in their pants because they might expand her mind and challenger her views, because that might offend her and cause her to "rage-quit" (and I think that's the first time I've seen that word in what is supposed to be a serious context).

I highly recommend reading some certain responses to this.  Larry Correia dismantles it.  Right Fans gamely (and hilariously) offers a reading list of books that make the grade, and SuperversiveSF offers a list of authors.

But look closely at what Tempest Teapot is doing here:  she wants you to judge books not by their quality nor even by their content but by some arbitrary, superficial identity labels the author falls under.  She wants you to avoid books by Jew and Negro writers because they might infect you with their silly Jew and Negro ideas.

You'll notice that, in her finger-wagging photo, she's holding up a book by Neil Gaiman, and you'll also notice she's telling people to avoid that white guy Gaiman while at the same time wearing a T-shirt advertising Doctor Who, the television series about a white guy, written by Gaiman.  Now, Neil Gaiman, besides being an extremely successful writer, is a member of the Leftist Good ol' Boy Club, so he has offered support for Bradford's article and said that he doesn't "mind being the posterbook."

Of course he doesn't.  Neil Gaiman is already a success.  He sleeps on top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies.  He knows damn well his sales won't be harmed in the least if one of his SJW buddies tells everybody not to read his work, and he apparently doesn't give a flying feather for lesser writers who might, in fact, be harmed, assuming anyone takes Bradford seriously.

But I doubt anyone, or at least anyone important, will take Bradford seriously.  People who enjoy reading will read what they enjoy.  They don't go looking up every author to make sure he conforms to the latest Ahnenpass rules issued by our masters.

And the rules are frankly stupid.  I could have sworn everybody with any sense gave up years ago on trying to divide the human species into clear-cut racial categories, but these SJWs seem to think humans are color-coded for your convenience like D&D dragons.  How are you supposed to know the race of the author you're reading?  From his photo, assuming you can even find one?  I'm of the Scottish race, and Larry Correia, whom I mentioned above, is Portuguese, but he looks whiter than I do.  When I was in India, I saw people ranging from pitch black to lily white, yet all of them are of the same "race" according to SJW dumbassery.  My own brother has a skin tone different from mine.

The only way you can know all your authors' race is if is you only read authors who blather about their race, who define themselves by their race and think race is essential to identity, is identity.  No wonder Special Snowflake finds herself "rage-quitting" less when she only reads authors of the approved races:  the ones who define themselves by race are, of course, the ones who share her opinion that everything is about race.

But even so, the attempt to divide everyone up by race looks positively sane and wholesome next to this new attempt to divide everyone up according to the wholly imaginary categories of "orientation" and "gender."  The SJWs do not realize, at least not yet, that there can be no end to that absurdity:  since the variety of sexual disorders, dysfunctions, dysphasias, and diseases from which a man may suffer is potentially infinite, our self-appointed social betters can keep expanding their favorite acronym until it contains every letter of the alphabet and then some, until every individual is a member of an oppressed minority group with a population of one.  I mean, cheese and crackers, there are actually fifty genders listed on Facebook.  Surely it's obvious by now that this whole gender identity business is made up, the sort of thing rich and bored aristocrats, or rich and bored Post-Moderns, invent to amuse themselves.

My favorite part of Bradford's article, the real icing on the cake, is the end, in which she suggests ways you can mix and match your bigotry to suit your needs:

After a year of that, the next challenge would be to seek out books about or with characters that represent a marginalized identity or experience by any author. In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths, working class or poor, and asexual (as a start).

I am reasonably sure that "asexual" was not even a thing just a few years ago.  The word actually means "reproduces without sex," but in Cloudcuckooland, it is used to refer to an insensitivity to sex, which is now its own orientation.  Or maybe it's a gender.  I don't know.

So let's say I decide for a year to read books only by "asexual" authors, or even books with "asexual" characters.  How the hell am I even supposed to know?  I've read plenty of bios and blurbs on the backs of books, and I don't remember any of them ending with, "P.S., this author is, like, totally not interested in getting it on," or, "And by the way, the protagonist never does it, not even once, and even thinks it's kinda icky."

Is there some giant database of author sexual inclinations I don't know about?  And how are the author's inclinations any of my business?  I seem to recall that there was a time once in which people kept certain private things, you know, private.

It happens I'm writing a novel, and I now see that I need to spend some time thinking about my author biography in order to make sure the hypersensitive SJWs can decide whether or not to read my book based on my complexion and whatever else they come up with rather than on whether the book looks appealing.  Here is my first attempt.  Brace yourselves.

D. G. D. Davidson is an archaeologist who was frequently mistaken for a high school student well into his twenties.  His skin color is "blushing peach."  He prefers redheads, considers ponytails sexy, and thinks girls look cute with eyeglasses and buckteeth.  He is actually a Japanese magical girl trapped in a flabby, thirty-something bachelor's body, which is pretty gross if you think about it, and he has a man-crush on James Arness's depiction of Marshal Dillon from Gunsmoke.  He has been known to develop strong but short-lived infatuations with cartoon characters.  He finds the jam-eating scene in Eureka Seven to be strangely alluring.  He currently makes his home in Wisconsin with his five chihuahuas and a large block of cheese.

Jam-eating scene. Watch at your own risk.
I have no idea what all of that makes me, but I'm sure the SJWs have a stupid-sounding neologism already ready to go for it.  Surely I'm in some kind of underprivileged minority, right?  Of course, "underprivileged," in SJW-land, means you have several useless college degrees and have spent much of your life dinking around while mooching off rich buddies, just like K. Tempest Bradford, who has said about her life,

After Clarion West I wandered around the country for a few years visiting friends, writing, and discovering that all one needs to survive in life is confidence, charm, and many well-off friends.

Yep.  And remember, this is the kind of person who likes to go around calling others "privileged."

I got your "rage-quit" right here, Tempest.

. . . Hey, it occurs to me that I do just so happen to know of a couple of authors of whom I've read biographies, who might possibly qualify for this newfangled category of "asexual," though of course I can't be sure, since they were the sort of men who didn't announce it to all and sundry.  Still, I'll have to take that risk, even with the possibility that I might "rage-quit."

Okay, then, it's decided:  I'll spend the next year reading the respective corpora of H. P. Lovecraft and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Sounds like a good year.

#Ashtag Wednesday

Ash.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in the Western Church.  Today, through fasting and prayer, we begin the preparation for the feast of Easter.

I, of course, am giving up magical girls for Lent.  And don't forget that it's not too late to join the Sci Fi Catholic Lenten Read-a-Thon.  We begin with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and I'll be posting reflections as we go.

Anyway, they say Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday are the most heavily attended Masses every year, beating out even the classice combination of Christmas and Easter, apparently because at Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday, you get a souvenir to take with you (the flesh and blood of God not being enough for some people).

That gives me an idea:  we should totally give people a sticker book or stamp book they can take to Mass, so you can get a gold star or a little bunny stamp every time . . . or maybe one of those temporary tattoos.  I would totally be at Mass every day for a temporary tattoo.  Dibs on the glitter unicorn.

Wait, where was I?  Ah, yes.  Today is Ash Wednesday, and though I normally ignore the "press releases" I get in my inbox, one from some group called FOCUS, which I think is a Catholic campus group or something, sparked my interest.  They have a smartphone application (because I totally have time to say all the syllables) called "Lentsanity," which is kind of fun.  It has daily reflections and articles as well as some more amusing features, such as the "Meat Police" notifications that give you warnings before mealtimes on Fridays.  So check it out.


Okay, it's a little obnoxious, but it's cute.
So it seems also that a lot of people are doing something called #Ashtag, wherein you are supposed to take a picture of yourself after Ash Wednesday Mass to report which of the ten types of ash you got.  I kinda hate Twitter, but then again I have a blog. So, I thought, why not?

As always, I look like a curmudgeon.

According to the FOCUS blog, I got the classic "cross," but I think it kind of looks like a little guy running.

And there you go.

I was kind of hoping I might end up with the "unibrow" or the "loomster" to make this blog post more interesting, but that didn't happen.  I guess my priest knows how to make forehead ash crosses the right way.

Ah, that one never gets old.

So there you go.  Have a blessed Lent.

A Brief Note on the Nature of God

A reader brings up the subject of panentheism and identifies it as a Catholic doctrine.  That is an understandable mistake, but incorrect.

Panentheism, if you don't know what that is, is a sort of modified pantheism, the belief that the universe is part of God, but that God is greater than the universe.

My response to this concept is that it is incoherent:  universe is a universal term that includes everything.  All that is, together, we call the universe.  To define anything as the universe plus something else is simply gibberish.

The actual, correct doctrine, as clearly indicated by the above image, is that God is a magical girl.

Okay, no, I'm kidding.  And please don't ascribe that to me.

The actual, correct doctrine can be derived from natural theology, that is, a consideration of metaphysics apart from divine revelation.

We observe on a regular basis that all beings we encounter are contingent.  That is, they are finite and corruptible, and being finite and corruptible, they are dependent on other beings for their existence:  the keyboard on which I type was made in a factory, which had to have people to design and run it; the wine in the glass at my elbow had to be pressed from grapes; I was conceived by my parents, and am sustained by food and air and sleep.  All these beings are dependent on other beings.

Contingent beings imply the existence of a necessary being, that is, a being that is not dependent on other beings for its existence.  If there were no such being, the universe would be an endless chain of contingent beings with no first cause, which is as illogical as an infinite chain of moving railroad cars, each pulled by the car in front of it, with no engine to make them move.

So contingent beings require a necessary first cause of being, which all men call God.

Since finite and contingent beings can be brought into existence and potentially go out of existence, they can exist potentially or virtually without existing actually.  We demonstrate this whenever we imagine beings, such as magical girls, that do not actually exist.  We can sometimes even describe the attributes of such nonexistent beings in great detail and discuss them or argue about them in detail, even though they are not real.  They have a mental existence, but not an actual existence, unless some cause brings them into being.  So contingent beings have essence and existence as separate attributes.

So in order for a being to be necessary rather than contingent, its essence and its existence cannot be separate attributes.  Its essence is its existence.  If such a being were to describe itself in words, it might say, "I am that I am."  It is its own existence.

In other words, it is an order of being radically different from that of other beings in the universe.  Equal to its own existence, it is perfectly simple, with parts neither physical nor metaphysical.  Since this first cause of being is able to bring other beings into existence, not only all actual beings but also all possible beings, and since no effect can be greater than its cause, this first cause must contain all being virtually or potentially.  Thus it is the fulness of being, infinite being.

Now, the universe, as already described, is divisible, composed of parts, containing beings contingent and corruptible.  But the first cause is neither contingent nor corruptible.  So the first cause, which all men call God, cannot be identified with the universe, because God is a different order of being from all other beings in the universe.