Double Standards

When it comes to Harry Potter and Narnia, while it’s not hard to raise objections to the former (I myself fell into this in a way), but when it comes to the latter among Christians I feel it constitutes a socially acceptable way to read something taboo or off-limits in some way. But this involves realising something about themselves that feel drawn to things they shouldn’t even be into, I feel a children’s story featuring characters going through the trials and tribulations of their own wrongdoing and striving to be faithful to God would get off the ground, if it didn’t have any magic at all perhaps other than it being the byproduct of suspicious characters, would get off the ground the way Narnia did.

Even if it would’ve been more Biblically consistent, given the Bible’s stance on magic, but I guess something that’s taboo is more appealing than if it’s already good for other people. It kind of lines up with the verses about being tempted into doing something sinful/evil but also risking negative consequences as it’s been like this with me before, perhaps because a lot of Christians are rather worldly that even if they’re against the world on principle, they actually like it in practise for as long as it’s done in a socially acceptable form. Though sin is still sin, regardless of the form it takes on, it’s kind of unsaid in Christian communities that sin is kind of lovable if it takes on a socially acceptable form like Narnia for instance.

To put it this way it would be like the taboo surrounding male nudity, put them in tight clothing (for as long as you ignore the crotch area) then it’s kind of okay to look at. It’s already the case with superhero stories in a way, but at times it’s so close to actual nudity that inevitably many superhero cartoonists would’ve inevitably looked at naked fit men at some point. Maybe not really but it does feel like it whenever they make it so tight as to be bodypainted, maybe in ways not many would immediately realise what superhero cartoonists are actually up to. But it does make you wonder about how people enjoy consuming something taboo in a socially acceptable form, it may not be male nudity as it is with superhero comics. It could be something like magic in Narnia, but not many will admit it in some way.

I thought about this when it comes to Narnia’s own author CS Lewis, where I feel some of his popularity owes to how he can indulge in things taboo to a lot of Christians and still be beloved for it. He wouldn’t enjoy the same degree of cultish fame among Evangelicals if he was square through and through, something like CH Spurgeon and it’s kind of telling how CH Spurgeon never spawned a cult following among Evangelicals the way Lewis did. Even though he advocated and did more things in line with both Evangelical dogma and the Bible, there’s not a single CH Spurgeon society the way there is for CS Lewis. I still think Evangelicals actually enjoy taboo matters, for as long as it’s presented in a way that doesn’t offend them.

But it does make you wonder if their standards for what’s good and edifying are lower than they realise.

Stan

Celestial has said many times over that America is Mystery Babylon, and in here it’s Mystery Babylon for enabling the sin or vice of idolatry. As God is a jealous God, it would be hard to not make him jealous when we turn to something else. I personally think some charges about idolatry should be best applied to secular fandoms, which makes much more sense since I see fandom as concentrated idolatry. It’s not necessarily wrong to like something, for as long as it doesn’t overshadow your faith in and love for God. It’s not wrong to like cats, dogs, football, rugby, foreign countries and so on. Though the hardest part is not make them into idols.

I feel what America has done is to enable so much idolatry of almost everything and anything that it’s going to be punished by the Lord for doing this, despite proclaiming itself to be a Christian nation and it gets worse when you have otherwise self-proclaimed Christians like Brian Littrell enabling this in some way. It would be super horrifying if he and his bandmates have the audacity to dress up as demons in a concert in Mexico, one would only wonder who Brian Littrell is more loyal to. He may sing about praising God, but at times he doesn’t do as he should’ve been told to. Perhaps this is the natural outcome of him enabling idolatry of his band a lot.

There are other musicians who’ve done the same, but I think it would be more shameful if it was a Christian doing this. Gerard Way may not be a Christian, at least not yet, but for most of the part he doesn’t know any better. Brian Littrell should know better as he’s a Christian, he should know that idolatry is a sin and that pride is also a sin. But I don’t think it’s something he’ll be comfortable realising, if because he actually likes the attention his fans give to his band a lot.

Burk Parsons dodged a bullet by refusing to join the Backstreet Boys and became a pastor instead, he himself has his own demons from time to time. The only real difference is that he strives to do better by God, while he never became a famous musician he’s done better by actually introducing people to something spiritually substantial as a pastor. We may not be called to ministry but it’s best to introduce people to God, than to wallow in being worshipped as an idol ourselves no matter how tempting it is.

I admit being prone to time from time to time, though it’s something Littrell fell into and he got really deep into it. I said before that he never seems to make fans read the Bible and devotionals, never makes them listen to sermons in whatever medium they appear in and take them to church. He’d rather invite them over to Backstreet Boys sponsored cruises and concerts, than to actually take them to church to worship the Creator. Perhaps him turning to the Devil is an inevitable consequence of his own pride and enabling his fans’ idolatry of himself and the band, if because the Devil himself is very proud and resides in the world.

It’s easier to talk about Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and Beyonce enabling idolatry of themselves as they’re relevant to more people these days, but I think the Backstreet Boys deserve more mention if because what they’re doing is more shameful because they have a Christian member. That shows if you have somebody who should know better, but don’t do anything about it then it’s on them for turning themselves into a stumbling block for others. Christians shouldn’t cause others to sin, however hard it may be at times, it seems Brian Littrell took the path of least resistance. Perhaps the world is too strong for him to resist in any way, which proves my point about him.

It should also be noted that Disney and Warner Bros are pretty guilty of enabling idolatry in people, not just with the usual suspects but also something more unexpected like superheroes. Sort of like how Stan Lee co-opted the whole ‘true believers’ thing from Christians when he applied this label to diehard Marvel readers, though at some point he actually considered doing a line of Christian superhero comics and stories. That could work to some extent, especially with something like Power Mark. But I suspect a superhero who bothers to forgive their enemies, believes in God and is rarely ever violent in any way is a harder sell than a superhero who acts vindictively and gets into a fight because they can.

So it seems despite Lee’s good intentions, Marvel has more staying power than his proposed Christian superhero imprint. Easier to enable somebody’s idolatry and satiating it perpetually than to lead them to God, no matter how uncomfortable or preachy it would be and get. DC’s no different in some, though similar regards with one editor rejecting one writer’s proposal to turn one superheroine into a Christian, I personally feel Gail Simone is somebody who does respect and understand Christianity well despite being secular. She can be considered an ally, one who’s an ally to Christians which is increasingly rare in the realm of storytelling as time passes.

If Narnia is any indication, it’s possible to have a religious story and still have any renown outside of religious circles though Narnia’s biggest fans are always Christians. So DC and Marvel go for the easy way out by pandering to somebody’s idolatry, satiating them a lot and enabling them in ways where and when it shouldn’t be, than to make them actively seek out God in hard times like these and those. The path to least resistance is what they undertook, this is what they ended up with and why they do anything to reward people’s idolatry of their products. It’s not wrong to like DC and Marvel, or even Disney and Looney Tunes.

The real problem lies with turning them into idols, but this is something they ended up enabling a lot. Instead of stories where a character like Cassandra Cain does become a Christian and quit a life of violence for good, it’s easier to keep people hooked on their favourite characters a lot without making them read the Bible in some way or another. Perhaps telling them about sin is a particularly heavy pill to swallow, one that’s too bitter to be easily digested by many secular people.

While Christians shouldn’t preach to the choir that much, in fact they’re called to preach to many unbelievers and help them on their path to worshipping God. But then again they’re also pressured to not rock the boat, that’s to hammer the nail that stands out too much, to cut the tall poppy because it’s getting too preachy. Enabling somebody else’s idolatry is one example of the path of least resistance, spiritually speaking.

Disney pretty much developed a habit of enabling somebody’s idolatry for years, to the point of creating the Disney adult and from a business perspective, this is an excellent example of brand loyalty implanted since childhood. But from a spiritual perspective, with Walt Disney being bent on destroying anything Christian, that the well is poisoned even if it’s possible to love Disney products from afar. That’s by not turning Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Carl Barks into idols, but Disney would rather encourage people’s idolatry of its products and characters. It will do anything to enable it, no matter how spiritually unhealthy it is.

Disney is one of those companies that perfected the art of brand loyalty with a lot of people, that people will try out anything Disney-related because it encourages this a lot. Not just with Disney merchandise, divisions, brands and the like but also other things like Radio Disney, which is still a thing in many Latin American countries to this day oddly enough. Disney will find ways of keeping people interested in it in some fashion, which if done carelessly would enable somebody’s idolatry of Disney or a certain Disney product. Unfortunately, it would be that easy to swing into that direction, no wonder why it’s perilous for Christians.

It’s not necessarily wrong to like Disney products, the best a Christian can do is to love them from a distance. That’s by not making it into an idol, even if it’s not always easy sometimes. Anything else really, because God gets jealous real easily. But it’s much easier to lead somebody to sin, sometimes deliberately not just with porn and gluttony. But also idolatry especially when it comes to the very nature of every secular fandom around, it’s not wrong to like sports and it’s not necessarily wrong to love athletes for as long as you pray for their salvation then God will take care of the rest. It’s also not wrong to like comics, video games and film though not all of them edify somebody spiritually.

There are too many things that Americans make an idol out of, sometimes it’s the innocuous stuff like cats and dogs as well as sports and science. Sometimes it’s the more dubious stuff we should steer away from like certain celebrities and stories, especially if they don’t glorify God in any way. It’s not necessarily wrong to like cats and dogs, but the trick here is to not be too obsessive over them. So you have grounded dog owners who do see their dogs as mere animals, rather than substitute humans where they know this is where it gets worrying when they’re treated as proxies for people. The problem is Americans have glorified these things, worshipping the creature instead of the Creator.

No sooner or later we’ll get a series of Jezebel like situations where dogs turn against their owners by eating them, a comeuppance for what these people have done and arguably a case of God using the wicked to punish the wicked since dogs don’t seem to be esteemed that highly in the Bible. If he has done this to Jezebel before, then he will do it to women similar to her when he needs to. It’s not necessarily wrong to like dogs, the Bible does have some instances of dogs being used for good though depending on the Bible verse and also edition of the Bible. But this is tempered by a recurring suspicion, so the precipice of turning them into idols is something writers knew too well.

Known Babylon, as I’d like to call it, was a major hotbed of idolatry that would’ve easily tempted God’s people at any point. It made idols out of dogs, anything and everything which sounds like what a supposedly Christian country like America ended up doing, except that other people don’t recognise many secular fandoms for what they really are: concentrated idolatry where one would do anything to attend to fandom activities and meetings where one would do with churchgoing and worshipping God.

Things like comic books, fantasy novels and video games have been treated as a sort of religious text with fans co-opting religious terminology like canon. Canon as in it meant whatever that is officially part of the Bible, biblical canon would vary depending on the denomination where some editions of the Bible would officially include texts like the Book of Tobit and the Maccabees, others like the Book of Enoch and some just have them as apocrypha.

They have their place, but it’s not the main place. There are people who argue that Christianity is a fandom but whenever fandom tries to bring Christianity to its level, if God is like a king then fandom’s like a pretender to the throne. It claims pretensions to the king but has no official relation to him whatsoever, this is why God is referred to as a father, his church is like a bride and family, why nuns and monks are referred to as brothers and sisters. Fandom is really a commoner wanting to be recognised as part of a royal family, but it’s never noble and it’s never going to be royal if you get the pun. So it’s better to recognise fandom for what it is, that’s being concentrated idolatry.

It’s calling the spade for what it really is to the Lord, so we shouldn’t pussyfoot around its true nature. When you have people who spend a lot of their time not just watching Good Omens, but also making a lot of fanworks around it with virtually no time for the Lord then it is idolatrous. Many geek fandoms are practically idolatrous, though it takes a brave soul to call them out for what they actually are. It’s not necessarily wrong to love characters like Catwoman, Batman and Superman but one would have to draw the line at worshipping them like one would with the Lord, so this is something one would have to tread carefully as Christians.

God is jealous, so we shouldn’t make him jealous even though sometimes we do anyways. It’s not going to be easy, given human nature being sinful, but the best we can do is to ask for repentance from God and learn from our mistakes, however hard and shameful it may be.

Superhuman

Celestial was given a vision from the Lord where the transhuman movement will grow in the coming years, especially when it gets sanctioned by none other than Barack Obama, that we’ll see a growth in superhuman people. What seems like the plot of a science fiction movie or novel will actually come into fruition, the more people become more unscrupulous in biotechnology. She said that when Nebuchadnezzar tried to make Daniel and his friends suffer in the fires prepared for them, he had no idea he ended up harming the people who were sent to kill them. Likewise scientists will literally die trying to create a superhuman monster, most likely because they’ll be killed by those creations.

She had a prophecy of how there will be half-human, half-animal soldiers as well as the emergence of more sophisticated artificial humans. Also improvements in technology will open a big can of worms, especially when it comes to sexuality where people will have sex with more sophisticated robots, polyamory becomes more popular and so on. It looks like this prophecy has come true in some way, especially when it comes to the rise of polyamory in daily western life. But I feel the worst is yet to come if people will even incorporate more violence into their sex lives. Not just BDSM which would be pretty vanilla by then, but also murder and more gruesome violence to come.

Then comes the Nephilim, the horrible scions of human women and demons. They will return to the Earth in a way that’s never been seen before in centuries, it would be horrifying if people will do anything to advocate for their ‘rights’. She even had other prophecies where people will have sex with demons and this time demons will manifest themselves in the flesh, especially as aliens who seem to come from outer space. Not that there’s anything wrong with the thought of aliens among us, CS Lewis has contemplated this in the lesser known Space Trilogy books where the aliens come from a sinless world. But these aliens she’s referring to are actually demons.

I believe the worst is yet to come, yet her prophecies give a bitter foretaste of what’s to come.

False God

As I said before about CS Lewis, it’s one thing to defend what Christianity stands for. But it’s another to actually believe in God’s goodness, something people have struggled with before. In CS Lewis’s case, because he was so interested in paganism that his interest in pagan gods frequently got the better of him. No wonder why he struggled to believe in God for as long as he became a Christian, paganism got a stronghold on him.

Notice how other Christian writers like David Wilkerson and Mary K Baxter never seem to be interested in pagan mythology that much, to the point where you can get an idea of how CS Lewis constantly struggled to believe in God’s goodness and why he’s so prone to idolatry. Not that Wilkerson and Baxter never committed idolatry, though nowhere as frequently as he did. Same with unbelief and why Lewis could be so disloyal to God at times.

My point about being interested in pagan gods is that they are precipices, the fact that they’re intended to be idols is a dangerous road to get to. Lewis was especially interested in mythology, but sometimes too much for his own good that’s why he struggled to believe in God. If Lewis isn’t always such a great Christian writer, he can be taken as a warning to any Christian who gets interested in anything pagan.

It is perhaps telling that by the time his wife died, he stopped writing about pagan mythology in any way. This is God’s way of telling him that he had gone astray from him due to his interest in such topics, not to mention there was a time when I really got into Journey to the West (a story involving pagan gods) that happened when I was backsliding. Even as I got into mythology and Taoism again, it tends to be rather fleeing the more I devote myself to God.

When you’re dealing with characters intended to be worshipped as gods, any strong interest in them leads to the risk of idolatry in any way. It’s for the best that writers like Julian of Norwich, David Wilkerson and Mary K Baxter never show much interest in pagan mythology, otherwise they would’ve doubted God as much as CS Lewis had. Any interest in a pagan god will always be a precipice, no matter how hard you try to not make it be.

Fear of witchcraft

As I realised in life, admittedly this could be a false consensus bias going on in here, but when it comes to non-Christian mythology it’s easier for Christians (and Christianity) to co-opt, assimilate and cherry-pick certain aspects because they don’t compete for a love of God the way a strongly sincere interest in any pagan god would. Especially when it comes to lower mythological creatures and witchcraft in relation to what the Bible despises and fears, both fairies (for Europeans) and mermaids (for Africans) have been construed as demonic because they oppose God in everywhere.

Like say how some countries and cultures, be it present day Cameroon or early modern Scotland, viewed dogs as demonic but since the Bible doesn’t always have the highest opinion of dogs eithers so it’s a belief that can easily be meshed with Christianity in a way a sincerely strong interest in a pagan god wouldn’t. If because the latter would easily crossover to idolatry, which the Bible abhors and forbids. Perhaps this is why CS Lewis, with his strong interest in mythology, could have crossed the line easily and likely why some Christians distrust him.

When it comes to being strongly interested in any one of the pagan gods, it’s the big thing about polytheistic mythology that’ll never be smoothly assimilated into and widely accepted by Christians and Christianity. It could easily cross over to idolatry, perhaps sometimes mistakenly so. CS Lewis may’ve easily done this a couple of times over, so it’s not a stretch to think he committed idolatry before even as a Christian. This proves my point that a very strong interest in any pagan god could open up the potential for idolatry in a way a fear of witchcraft wouldn’t.

Though this involves realising how fallible Lewis actually was in person, given his penchant for mythology he would be really susceptible to it and may’ve struggled with it all throughout his life. This is likely why he doesn’t always have a strong relationship with God, especially with mythological gods on his mind that would’ve inevitably got the better of him from time to time. It’s still telling that throughout time and place, fears of witchcraft and evil beings are among the things that gets readily accepted by Christians.

It’s easy to incorporate into Christianity, if because Christianity already has these sentiments that it’s way easier to pull off than say being really interested in Zeus for instance. To paraphrase somebody else, he can only be called Thomas. No wonder CS Lewis sometimes doubted God and the Bible a lot, if it weren’t for his interest in mythological gods. There are things in mythology that Christianity readily accepts, and there are things in mythology that Christianity doesn’t.

It’s easier to integrate pre-existing witchcraft beliefs into Christianity than say a profound interest in Athena ever would, though it’s something that I realised ever since I came back to Christ that my interest in mythological gods is rather fleeting at this time. An epiphany like this is what led me to this conclusion and why some parts of mythology will never be seamlessly integrated into the faith the way a shared fear of witchcraft and evil would.