Up on the mountain it's easy
Everything is clear and bright
All the food is bread
And all the water is wine
Up on the mountain they all dance
Ask anyone and they will give the Good News
Kneel to pray and the words will come at once
Lift up a song and it will be beautiful
And it will be genuine
The distractions are small
And the glory is great
Up on the mountain our sins seem silly
Saul's hasty sacrifice seems absurdly stupid
Our old hatreds are easily set aside
And the stumbling blocks look so small
Up on the mountain joy abounds
We could sing again and again
With the thriving monotony of children
We could dance until our legs gave way
Because our Beloved is here
But we have to leave
Will it be different?
We've all done this before
We've all wiped away our tears
And returned to our old sins
We've all lost our joy
To the drudgery down below
Down below the traps are laid
The nets are ready and the knives are sharp
The bitter pleasures and the dull addictions wait
Down below are a thousand sacraments of Hell
And before an hour back below is passed
They will have ensnared us once more
But if we are disciples
We must go down
Because we did not go up to find our Beloved
It was He who came down to meet us
So we must also go down
Because that's where the glory is
There amidst the traps and poisons
There in the midst of resentment and addiction
There in the battlefield of common humanity
That's where the inheritances lies
That was written of in our hearts
The Lord is not a fool
This is not for nothing
The joy will be stripped away
The experience will fade
But the abundance of the mountain
Conceals some small treasure
Some little pearl that remains
Because some much else is stolen away
This small blessing shall remain
This brief song is not forgotten
And against our King's humble gift
The powers of the Enemy
Shall be exhausted and dismayed
Monday, June 17, 2013
Yahweh and Cthulhu
The world is dying
The sun burns away its youth
The very galaxies drift apart
On the stage of human politics
The old tyranny is put to the sword
And former revolutionaries continue where it left off
The old schools are rife with stale legalism
So they are overcome by vibrant freethinkers
Who are to sire yet more stale legalists
An empire becomes decadent and rotten
So it is overcome by a rising, savagely heroic power
Which shall grow fat and impotent on the same fruits
The world is dying
Now behold its doom
The ancient emptiness
The great, mad noise
The monstrous hellmouth
Lusting and hungering
After all that is bright and beautiful
It extends its tentacles outward
And up rise the sophists of Ancient Greece
And their kinsfolk through all the ages
Up until the postmodernists of today
Those skeptics who use logic to slander logic
Declaring the one truth that there is no ultimate truth
Who take away the solidity of things
Which is the one thing we all are really joyful about
And who then shame us for infringing on each others' joyfulness
It raises up Nietzsche and his kinsfolk
Wrapping it extremities in half-truths and singularities of thought
It reduces a vibrant world of a thousand shades to one dull hue
Everything is economics
Everything is power
Everything is sex
Everything is physics
It wraps its fingers in brightly colored paper
It tells us to explore our potential
It tells us to live our best life now
It tell us fleeting things are more valuable
It tells us to go out and have fun
It tells us that beauty is meaningless and artificial
And then asks us to consider the beauty around us
It tells us that people are nothing
But what thoughtless, loveless atoms do when arranged properly
And then it says religion is to be reviled and destroyed
Because religion oppresses those meaningless arrangements
It wears all these masks
To usher us into the yawning mouth
of Nihilism
But if Cthulhu can only destroy
There must be One that creates
If the whole world is dying
Then it must once have been born
Plato dreamed of the Forms
And glimpsed the Form of the Good
Aristotle saw the movement of the stars
And concluded the presence of an Unmoved Mover
They both ended with an ultimate explainer
That did not itself require an explanation
And it makes me want to jump into the pages
To rush at them and shout and point to the southeast lands
Where Goodness Himself had revealed Himself
The I Am had spoken a world into being
He had made cosmos to dance out of love
And when that world had began to die
He went down to the mountain
And poured love over us
We who had killed Creation
We who had fled Him in shame and pride
Elohim went down to bless us
And again we chose death
And again Adonai chose love
Again and again He romanced us
And rescued us
And warred against us
We chose dust and dignity
And He chose love once more
A lowly love that endures all torments
Emmanuel stood before the Hellmouth
The Emptiness that was His own shadow
The abomination that was born when He said "I am good"
And implied "I am not evil"
When He said "I am loving"
And implied "I am not proud"
When He said "I am wise"
And implied "foolishness is not in Me"
Before that thing of evil and pride and nonsense
Emmanuel was hung upon a torture device
To be devoured by it
But the fullness of the Man of Galilee
Was greater than the emptiness of His devourer
So against all the Nihilist rot
There stand the living sentinels of truth
Whose roots were set at the beginning of things
And who are sustained by the lifeblood of their Creator
That blood which spilled out like an ocean
And rose into the skies like all earthly waters
To spread from there across all the pages of history
And then to fall to earth as all waters do
There is death creeping over all the world
There is no medicine that can cure the stars
There is no therapy that can keep an empire at its prime
There is only the oncoming storm
The waters of Heaven that will smash the rot to dust
And bring vivid wholeness to all those things
Which rested upon the Holy One of Israel
The I Am
The sun burns away its youth
The very galaxies drift apart
On the stage of human politics
The old tyranny is put to the sword
And former revolutionaries continue where it left off
The old schools are rife with stale legalism
So they are overcome by vibrant freethinkers
Who are to sire yet more stale legalists
An empire becomes decadent and rotten
So it is overcome by a rising, savagely heroic power
Which shall grow fat and impotent on the same fruits
The world is dying
Now behold its doom
The ancient emptiness
The great, mad noise
The monstrous hellmouth
Lusting and hungering
After all that is bright and beautiful
It extends its tentacles outward
And up rise the sophists of Ancient Greece
And their kinsfolk through all the ages
Up until the postmodernists of today
Those skeptics who use logic to slander logic
Declaring the one truth that there is no ultimate truth
Who take away the solidity of things
Which is the one thing we all are really joyful about
And who then shame us for infringing on each others' joyfulness
It raises up Nietzsche and his kinsfolk
Wrapping it extremities in half-truths and singularities of thought
It reduces a vibrant world of a thousand shades to one dull hue
Everything is economics
Everything is power
Everything is sex
Everything is physics
It wraps its fingers in brightly colored paper
It tells us to explore our potential
It tells us to live our best life now
It tell us fleeting things are more valuable
It tells us to go out and have fun
It tells us that beauty is meaningless and artificial
And then asks us to consider the beauty around us
It tells us that people are nothing
But what thoughtless, loveless atoms do when arranged properly
And then it says religion is to be reviled and destroyed
Because religion oppresses those meaningless arrangements
It wears all these masks
To usher us into the yawning mouth
of Nihilism
But if Cthulhu can only destroy
There must be One that creates
If the whole world is dying
Then it must once have been born
Plato dreamed of the Forms
And glimpsed the Form of the Good
Aristotle saw the movement of the stars
And concluded the presence of an Unmoved Mover
They both ended with an ultimate explainer
That did not itself require an explanation
And it makes me want to jump into the pages
To rush at them and shout and point to the southeast lands
Where Goodness Himself had revealed Himself
The I Am had spoken a world into being
He had made cosmos to dance out of love
And when that world had began to die
He went down to the mountain
And poured love over us
We who had killed Creation
We who had fled Him in shame and pride
Elohim went down to bless us
And again we chose death
And again Adonai chose love
Again and again He romanced us
And rescued us
And warred against us
We chose dust and dignity
And He chose love once more
A lowly love that endures all torments
Emmanuel stood before the Hellmouth
The Emptiness that was His own shadow
The abomination that was born when He said "I am good"
And implied "I am not evil"
When He said "I am loving"
And implied "I am not proud"
When He said "I am wise"
And implied "foolishness is not in Me"
Before that thing of evil and pride and nonsense
Emmanuel was hung upon a torture device
To be devoured by it
But the fullness of the Man of Galilee
Was greater than the emptiness of His devourer
So against all the Nihilist rot
There stand the living sentinels of truth
Whose roots were set at the beginning of things
And who are sustained by the lifeblood of their Creator
That blood which spilled out like an ocean
And rose into the skies like all earthly waters
To spread from there across all the pages of history
And then to fall to earth as all waters do
There is death creeping over all the world
There is no medicine that can cure the stars
There is no therapy that can keep an empire at its prime
There is only the oncoming storm
The waters of Heaven that will smash the rot to dust
And bring vivid wholeness to all those things
Which rested upon the Holy One of Israel
The I Am
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Three Coping Mechanisms for Problems in Imaginative Fiction
Self-Caused Time Travel Event
So there are two basic models of time travel; one model says that when you go back in time everything that happens after the point you traveled to gets reset, and the other says that time is fixed and while it is possible for a time traveler to affect the future/present that effect has already been determined and if they try to change something that they know for certain happened they will fail.
Now, there is a particular problem with the fixed-time model which many writers of imaginative fiction simply love to exploit, which is that in this model two events can simultaneously cause each other. For example, in the television show Gargoyles there was an evil wizard who was falling to his death when he was rescued by... himself. From the future. Who was saved in exactly the same manner. In fact, they actually showed the whole process of the older self instructing the younger self and eventually sending him back in time to become the older self saving and instructing the younger self. So why did this happen? When the wizard was falling to his death, was there any good reason to assume he would be rescued? Of course not! He was only saved because his future, time-traveling self had been saved by his own future, time-traveling self who had also been saved by his future, time-traveling self... You get the picture? These two events are causally cut off from everything else in the universe aside from those relating to the original birth of the wizard! It's completely illogical and it really gets on my nerves...
Which is why I've developed my own theory to cope with the bad logic of this paradox. You see, my theory is that what we see in such stories is the third or fourth incarnation of a cycle. In the first cycle, a time-traveler goes back in time to make some change. Then they get zapped back to their own time and they realize that with the original problem fixed they have no reason to go back in time and fix it. I'm not quite sure what this problem looks like when it's played out, but however it looks the basic idea is that the universe swallowed a paradox and it is finding that paradox very hard to digest. Maybe the time-traveler has/is a copy of himself, maybe there's a hole in space and time, or maybe there's something else I can't even imagine. Whatever the case, the time-traveler realizes that they have to go back again in order to fix the paradox. Then, after at least one more cycle of time trying swinging in and out of balance, we finally get the cycle that you and I see in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Gargoyles, and occasionally on Doctor Who. The final cycle is one in which time is satisfied because both events are caused by each other (in other words, the future event isn't disrupted by the time travel because it is caused by it) and logic is satisfied because the ultimate cause for both events lies in another timeline which logic can recognize even if time can't.
Creatures that Grow Huge in Mere Minutes
You know what's a really, really basic rule of science? The Law of Preservation of Matter. You know what the Incredible Hulk, the Xenomorph from the Alien movies, and the incredibly quickly aging child from a particular episode of Fringe all have in common? They all break the Law of Preservation of Matter. Basically, any time something grows to three times its original size or more without eating as much mass as it's gaining, that law is being broken.
Now this kind of thing is entirely acceptable in fantasy. Magic can do things like that. It is not, however, okay in science fiction, particularly a science fiction show like Fringe that makes a point of explaining how all its phenomenon are supposedly plausible in some vague way. You are allowed to bend the rules or invent new ones in science fiction, but this is the kind of thing that is just so incredibly basic that it's almost sacrilege to ignore it. And in most cases no one seems to even realize there's a problem!
In this particular case, I have a multiple theories to make my head stop hurting and to reverse my transformation into a giant squid of anger. One theory is basically all about wormholes. In this scenario, the subject in question is actually some kind of special quantum creature (I mean, there really isn't any way to explain superheroes like Thor without claiming they tap directly into the fabric of the universe) which uses tiny, cellular wormholes to draw in the necessary chemicals from all across the universe. This theory works, but it's not really one that I'm happy with simply because I find the idea of a Xenomorph incorporating this into its biology to be so absurd. The kinds of creatures that appear to gain matter out of nowhere often simply don't fit the type of something that warps the very fabric of the universe.
The two other theories I have to explain this can basically both be labeled as alchemy. The first is that the creature in question is able to draw in and incorporate any matter readily available, even if that's only the air that it breathes. Somehow, the creature is able to make those chemicals act as if they were other ones (specifically, the nutrients that a living thing needs in order to grow) or else it is able to rearrange the particles and turn the chemicals it has into the chemicals it wants (don't ask me what happens to the leftover particles).
Finally, the second alchemical theory is that the creature has that matter all along, it was just... hidden. Essentially, the idea is that in this imagined universe there is some way to trick an atom into compressing or expanding beyond its normal size. In fact, it's even possible to trick the compressed or expanded atom into behaving as if it weren't even there. That's why Bruce Banner can step on a scale and see that he's 174 pounds, but when the Hulk steps on the same scale it just gets smashed to pieces. They both have exactly the same amount of matter, but when Bruce is himself much of that matter just hides in a little corner and does nothing. It doesn't weigh anything, it doesn't react to anything, it doesn't do anything that suggests that it even exists. Until he gets angry.
Obviously, all three of these phenomenon would be unlikely to occur naturally even if they were possible, but they are still more likely than a monster growing from two feet to fifteen feet tall without having eaten anything. And so the headache is relieved.
Aliens that Could Never Have Invented Spaceships
Finally, the last problem that I can currently recall is that of monstrous, animalistic aliens that fly through lightyears of space to... eat us. Two examples of this problem are the new movie After Earth in which a race of aliens called the Ursa (which sense their prey by through the hormones released by fear and are otherwise blind even though they can apparently sense the landscape fairly well) relentlessly hunt humans and in Storage 24 in which an alien creature (which is baffled and even frightened by a robotic puppy) stalks a handful of friends through a storage facility. In both cases the aliens in question are highly animalistic (they literally fight with only tooth and nail, they are very predatory, and they are completely naked) and also have spaceships.
The problem here is that the monsters are heroes fight couldn't possibly have built the ships they fly. Even if we accept that these are extremely intelligent creatures (which is a role they certainly don't fit very well) we have to realize that it takes more than intelligence to build a spaceship. It takes an almost playful delight in solving puzzles that is so great you actually go out looking for puzzles such as the formula for converting energy into matter, it takes a collection of beings that are peaceable enough and interested enough in knowledge to preserve and build upon the discoveries of its members, and lastly it takes a complete civilization that can both provide everything needed to build a spaceship and can also support people whose role in life is to simply solve puzzles and build inventions. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see the shrieking, naked, homicidal monsters present in so many alien movies as being able to fit into the society I just described. So how did they build those spaceships?
They didn't.
I have two simple theories on this matter; one being that they stole the ships and the other being that they themselves are just as much tools as those crafts they are carried by. In the first scenario these are savage but intelligent cave aliens who came into contact with another much more developed race at some point in the past. These other aliens showed them their fabulous technology, tried to interact with them, and finally got killed for it. The monsters that we see then took the vessels of their vanquished prey and familiarized themselves with them. In other words, they are technologically parasitic savages. This also explains why these aliens invade Earth instead of terraforming new planets (if they want the land) or mining other celestial bodies (if they want resources) since they don't actually know enough about their own technology to use any planet they can't survive on.
The other theory is that they were either enslaved or bioengineered by another alien race that is actually drawing the strings. This makes sense since any seriously developed civilization would probably send probes on ahead instead of risking their own kind in any exploration of space. Perhaps their medicinal skills are advanced enough that the advantage of a probe that can heal outweighs the risk of disease. Of course, this theory also makes things very interesting for any story in which the heroes valiantly defeated some army of feral extraterrestrials. In this scenario, the invasion humanity is so happy to have survived is only a fraction of the onslaught our distant enemies are capable of unleashing.
So there are two basic models of time travel; one model says that when you go back in time everything that happens after the point you traveled to gets reset, and the other says that time is fixed and while it is possible for a time traveler to affect the future/present that effect has already been determined and if they try to change something that they know for certain happened they will fail.
Now, there is a particular problem with the fixed-time model which many writers of imaginative fiction simply love to exploit, which is that in this model two events can simultaneously cause each other. For example, in the television show Gargoyles there was an evil wizard who was falling to his death when he was rescued by... himself. From the future. Who was saved in exactly the same manner. In fact, they actually showed the whole process of the older self instructing the younger self and eventually sending him back in time to become the older self saving and instructing the younger self. So why did this happen? When the wizard was falling to his death, was there any good reason to assume he would be rescued? Of course not! He was only saved because his future, time-traveling self had been saved by his own future, time-traveling self who had also been saved by his future, time-traveling self... You get the picture? These two events are causally cut off from everything else in the universe aside from those relating to the original birth of the wizard! It's completely illogical and it really gets on my nerves...
Which is why I've developed my own theory to cope with the bad logic of this paradox. You see, my theory is that what we see in such stories is the third or fourth incarnation of a cycle. In the first cycle, a time-traveler goes back in time to make some change. Then they get zapped back to their own time and they realize that with the original problem fixed they have no reason to go back in time and fix it. I'm not quite sure what this problem looks like when it's played out, but however it looks the basic idea is that the universe swallowed a paradox and it is finding that paradox very hard to digest. Maybe the time-traveler has/is a copy of himself, maybe there's a hole in space and time, or maybe there's something else I can't even imagine. Whatever the case, the time-traveler realizes that they have to go back again in order to fix the paradox. Then, after at least one more cycle of time trying swinging in and out of balance, we finally get the cycle that you and I see in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Gargoyles, and occasionally on Doctor Who. The final cycle is one in which time is satisfied because both events are caused by each other (in other words, the future event isn't disrupted by the time travel because it is caused by it) and logic is satisfied because the ultimate cause for both events lies in another timeline which logic can recognize even if time can't.
Creatures that Grow Huge in Mere Minutes
You know what's a really, really basic rule of science? The Law of Preservation of Matter. You know what the Incredible Hulk, the Xenomorph from the Alien movies, and the incredibly quickly aging child from a particular episode of Fringe all have in common? They all break the Law of Preservation of Matter. Basically, any time something grows to three times its original size or more without eating as much mass as it's gaining, that law is being broken.
Now this kind of thing is entirely acceptable in fantasy. Magic can do things like that. It is not, however, okay in science fiction, particularly a science fiction show like Fringe that makes a point of explaining how all its phenomenon are supposedly plausible in some vague way. You are allowed to bend the rules or invent new ones in science fiction, but this is the kind of thing that is just so incredibly basic that it's almost sacrilege to ignore it. And in most cases no one seems to even realize there's a problem!
In this particular case, I have a multiple theories to make my head stop hurting and to reverse my transformation into a giant squid of anger. One theory is basically all about wormholes. In this scenario, the subject in question is actually some kind of special quantum creature (I mean, there really isn't any way to explain superheroes like Thor without claiming they tap directly into the fabric of the universe) which uses tiny, cellular wormholes to draw in the necessary chemicals from all across the universe. This theory works, but it's not really one that I'm happy with simply because I find the idea of a Xenomorph incorporating this into its biology to be so absurd. The kinds of creatures that appear to gain matter out of nowhere often simply don't fit the type of something that warps the very fabric of the universe.
The two other theories I have to explain this can basically both be labeled as alchemy. The first is that the creature in question is able to draw in and incorporate any matter readily available, even if that's only the air that it breathes. Somehow, the creature is able to make those chemicals act as if they were other ones (specifically, the nutrients that a living thing needs in order to grow) or else it is able to rearrange the particles and turn the chemicals it has into the chemicals it wants (don't ask me what happens to the leftover particles).
Finally, the second alchemical theory is that the creature has that matter all along, it was just... hidden. Essentially, the idea is that in this imagined universe there is some way to trick an atom into compressing or expanding beyond its normal size. In fact, it's even possible to trick the compressed or expanded atom into behaving as if it weren't even there. That's why Bruce Banner can step on a scale and see that he's 174 pounds, but when the Hulk steps on the same scale it just gets smashed to pieces. They both have exactly the same amount of matter, but when Bruce is himself much of that matter just hides in a little corner and does nothing. It doesn't weigh anything, it doesn't react to anything, it doesn't do anything that suggests that it even exists. Until he gets angry.
Obviously, all three of these phenomenon would be unlikely to occur naturally even if they were possible, but they are still more likely than a monster growing from two feet to fifteen feet tall without having eaten anything. And so the headache is relieved.
Aliens that Could Never Have Invented Spaceships
Finally, the last problem that I can currently recall is that of monstrous, animalistic aliens that fly through lightyears of space to... eat us. Two examples of this problem are the new movie After Earth in which a race of aliens called the Ursa (which sense their prey by through the hormones released by fear and are otherwise blind even though they can apparently sense the landscape fairly well) relentlessly hunt humans and in Storage 24 in which an alien creature (which is baffled and even frightened by a robotic puppy) stalks a handful of friends through a storage facility. In both cases the aliens in question are highly animalistic (they literally fight with only tooth and nail, they are very predatory, and they are completely naked) and also have spaceships.
The problem here is that the monsters are heroes fight couldn't possibly have built the ships they fly. Even if we accept that these are extremely intelligent creatures (which is a role they certainly don't fit very well) we have to realize that it takes more than intelligence to build a spaceship. It takes an almost playful delight in solving puzzles that is so great you actually go out looking for puzzles such as the formula for converting energy into matter, it takes a collection of beings that are peaceable enough and interested enough in knowledge to preserve and build upon the discoveries of its members, and lastly it takes a complete civilization that can both provide everything needed to build a spaceship and can also support people whose role in life is to simply solve puzzles and build inventions. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see the shrieking, naked, homicidal monsters present in so many alien movies as being able to fit into the society I just described. So how did they build those spaceships?
They didn't.
I have two simple theories on this matter; one being that they stole the ships and the other being that they themselves are just as much tools as those crafts they are carried by. In the first scenario these are savage but intelligent cave aliens who came into contact with another much more developed race at some point in the past. These other aliens showed them their fabulous technology, tried to interact with them, and finally got killed for it. The monsters that we see then took the vessels of their vanquished prey and familiarized themselves with them. In other words, they are technologically parasitic savages. This also explains why these aliens invade Earth instead of terraforming new planets (if they want the land) or mining other celestial bodies (if they want resources) since they don't actually know enough about their own technology to use any planet they can't survive on.
The other theory is that they were either enslaved or bioengineered by another alien race that is actually drawing the strings. This makes sense since any seriously developed civilization would probably send probes on ahead instead of risking their own kind in any exploration of space. Perhaps their medicinal skills are advanced enough that the advantage of a probe that can heal outweighs the risk of disease. Of course, this theory also makes things very interesting for any story in which the heroes valiantly defeated some army of feral extraterrestrials. In this scenario, the invasion humanity is so happy to have survived is only a fraction of the onslaught our distant enemies are capable of unleashing.
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