R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 103

The Legend

Luther wrote once that he threw ink at the Devil. When he wrote those words, he was thinking metaphorically about his translation of the New Testament into German that allowed ordinary people to read God’s word for themselves. Over time, many have imagined Luther was speaking literally. The story is now often told that on one dark night, while Luther suffered doubts about his mission, the Devil himself appeared in his study to taunt him— prompting the Reformer to toss an inkwell at the Devil in order to chase him away.

Similar myths and stories about Satan have multiplied over the years. Much of what people imagine they know about the Devil derives more from Hollywood portrayals than it does from the biblical descriptions.

The Zoroastrian belief that there were two gods, one good and one evil with the world as their battleground and humans as their soldiers, has been taken up into much popular thought. Added to that, are Milton’s words from his poem, Paradise Lost, placed in Satan’s mouth that he would “rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Together, these portrayals create an image of Satan sitting on a throne surrounded by flames and dancing demons, sending armies of his minions out to wreak havoc on the Earth and recruit converts to his cause. Together with Dante’s Inferno, and pre-existing Roman and Greek myths, people imagine a dark and fiery underworld where demons torment the wicked dead in gruesome ways while cackling maniacally.

Meanwhile, other demons sneak about as invisible imps whose joy is fulfilled by creating havoc: giving flat tires and making computers crash at the worst possible moment. The Zoroastrian belief in good and evil angels who pulled on people like children playing tug of war, one on one shoulder whispering encouragement to good behavior, while the other suggests a vile choice, has made its way into television and the daily newspaper comics.

The Bible paints a radically different picture of Satan than what appears in the popular media. In the Bible, Satan remains a relatively minor character, with few lines of dialogue. He is portrayed as a limited being, constrained in his behavior by God. Satan can be in but one place at a time, and his power is dependent more on perception than actual force. Although immortal, intelligent and dangerous, he is to God as a burning match is to a supernova. He roams the Earth and has access to God’s throne. The flames of Hell are his future punishment, not his current address. He is, as it were, out on his own recognizance, but God will someday send the marshals out to lock him away for good (Revelation 20:1, 10).

Satan is portrayed as a real being who talks and struts about (Job 1:7). As a real being, he has real thoughts, real attitudes, and real beliefs. He has a recognizable personality, with goals and desires.

So who is Satan? What does he want? What does he think about life, the universe and everything? What is his philosophy? His world view? His theology?

Everyone has a philosophy, an outlook on life, a theology. It comes with being a thinking being. Some people think about it more than others; some have a clear sense of what they believe and why. For others, it is a bit more nebulous. How clearly has Satan thought about what he believes and why he believes it? I think if nothing else, it would be accurate to say that his view of God is somewhat skewed, though probably broadly orthodox. For instance, he believes in God, he believes in Jesus. He’s met them and talked to them; the existence of God is not something he questions. He knows about angels–after all, he disputed with Michael. He apparently believes the Bible, since he backed down every time Jesus quoted it at him. He knows about sin, Heaven, and Hell. But I doubt Satan has a clear handle on such things as grace, love, and mercy.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty

The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle states that for a given subatomic particle, one may know its location or one may know its velocity, but one cannot know both at the same time. While this may seem ridiculous on a macroscopic level (certainly we know both where our car is and how fast it is going at the same time), on the subatomic level, it quite clearly doesn’t obtain. It is a mathematical certainty, as clear and unabiguous as 2 plus 2 equals 4. Even God can’t make it equal 5, and likewise, even God can’t know the location and velocity of subatomic particles. It would be as absurd and contradictory as asking him to make a square circle.

We can know that given a block of uranium 238,in 4.5 billion years (4,500,000,000) half of it will decay to thorium 234 and finally to lead 206. However, we cannot ever say if a given, individual atom will decay in that time.

Encyclopedia Britannica (vol. 5, p. 502, 1984):

It is impossible to predict the instant when any given radioactive atom will disintegrate. But, when enough radioactive atoms are placed together, observation shows that the number of disintegrations per unit time is proportional to the number of radioactive atoms present. The situation is analogous to the death rate among the human population insured by an insurance company. Although it is impossible to predict when a given policy holder will die, the company can count on paying off a certain fraction of beneficiaries every month.

One can know with certainty that in a million flips of a coin, fifty percent of the time, it will come up heads, and fifty percent of the time it will come up tails. But one can never know with any degree of certainty, whether a particular flip will be one or the other. Evil may simply be an inevitable characteristic of any universe, a sort of quantum indeterminancy that cannot be eliminated by any normal means.

Modern physics has been described as “stranger than science fiction”, as the following quotation from Gary Zukov’s now somewhat dated book, The Dancing Wu-Li Masters:

According to the Many World’s theory, whenever a choice is made in the universe between one possible event and another, the universe splits into different branches.

In our hypothetical experiment we decided to throw the switch into the “up” position. When the experiment was performed with the switch in the “up” position it gave us a definite result (a certain number of clicks in each area). However, according to the Many Worlds theory, at the moment that we threw the switch up, the universe split into two branches. In one branch, the experiment was performed with the switch in the “up” position. In the other branch, the experiment was performed with the switch in the “down” position. Who performed the experiment in the second branch? There is a different edition of us in each of the different branches of the universe! Each edition of us is convinced that OUR branch of the universe is the entirety of reality….

…we are led to the Many Worlds theory in which the world continuously is splitting into separate and mutually inaccessible branches, each of which contains different editions of the same actors performing different acts at the same time on different stages which somehow are located in the same place. (The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. New York: William Morrow and Co, Inc. 1979, pp. 319 and 321)

Not only is this very weird to think about, it could allow for a very peculiar explanation for who the angels and the demons are.

Nix, Hydra and Wikipedia

Back on June 21, 2006 the International Astronomical Union announced that the two recently discovered moons swinging around Pluto have now been officially named. One is to be called Nix, and the other is to be called Hydra. They join Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, discovered back in 1978. They were discovered by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope.

In addition to having some mythological relation to Pluto, the names Nix and Hydra were chosen because their first initials, “N” and “H,” are also the first letters of New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft launched in January 2006 towards the Pluto system. Currently past Neptune and on its way for a rendezvous with Pluto in 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft will make a point of visiting them. The “P” and the “L” in Pluto are similarly significant. The name Pluto was chosen for the ninth planet because it honored the astronomer Percival Lowell, who instigated the search that ultimately resulted in the discovery of Pluto.

Pluto is the Greek God of the underworld, and the new names for these moons are in keeping with who he is. In Greek mythology, Nyx was the goddess of the night and the mother of Charon, the boatsman who ferried souls across the River Styx into the underworld ruled by Pluto. Hydra was a giant, nine-headed monster, the second of the Twelve Labors of Hercules. Slaying Hydra was not easy for Hercules. Every time he chopped off one of the creature’s heads, two quickly sprouted in its place. He finally managed to finish the beast off by calling on his nephew Iolaus for help. Iolaus came up with the idea of using a burning firebrand to cauterize the neck stumps after decapitation. So, as Heracles cut off each head, Iolaus burned the open stump. After much cutting and burning, the hydra was finally terminated.

When I went to Encyclopedia Britannica online to do research on the names—I was not certain about Nix—all I found was an article about the Germanic sprite called Nix. In Germanic mythology, Nix is a water being that is half human, half fish. It lives in a beautiful underwater palace and mingles with humans by assuming a variety of physical forms, usually female. When I read all that, I was puzzled why that would have been chosen for the moon’s name.

But then I went to Wikipedia, which has been criticized by some as inaccurate given its open source nature. Open source means that the articles can be rewritten by anyone who visits the website. But it was at Wikipedia that I found not only information about the mythology, but within hours of the announcement that the moons had names, there was already a nice article about the moon.

Wikipedia made it easier for a casual searcher to learn the fact that Nyx was the Greek goddess of night and thus more likely the source of the name for the moon than the Germanic sprite, given that Hydra and Charon, are associated with Greek myth, not Germanic, and the naming convention for the planets and moons of our solar system requires Greek or Roman names.

The spelling of the German water sprite is with an “i” and of the Greek goddess with a “y.” The International Astronomical Union changed the spelling of the moon to “Nix,” following the Egyptian spelling of the goddess. They did this to avoid confusion with two asteroids that had already been named “Nyx.”

I later discovered that the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica does have an article on the Greek goddess. But one can find it only if one spells the name “Nyx” rather than “Nix.” Wikipedia, by contrast, gives the searcher both articles, regardless of how one has spelled the name in his or her search. It also gives a hyperlink from one to the other.

Frankly, I find Wikipedia very handy most of the time. On controversial topics, especially anything having to do with modern politicians, there is a tendency for their articles to be very biased, inaccurate, and often defaced by those who dislike the given politician. But articles on general topics I’ve found tend to be quite well done. And the editors of Wikipedia work tirelessly to try to correct and fix any errors that do show up. Additionally, I’ve found that Wikipedia is very quick about keeping articles up to date—somewhat faster than Britannica.

But I still like Britannica, and in general, its articles are more detailed and more thorough. I purchased the book form of the Encyclopedia Britannica shortly after I got married back in the early 1980s. It’s now obviously become a bit out of date, but I’m not planning on replacing it. Instead, I pay for Britannica’s online version, which has all the text of the printed encyclopedia, but is much quicker and easier to use, and is kept constantly up to date. I recommend to my students that they simply subscribe to the online version, rather than purchasing the dead tree version. I also have a version of Britannica that I keep on my , for those times when I need to research something but don’t have access to the web. Wikipedia, of course, has the advantage of being absolutely free. Using multiple sources when doing even initial research is usually a good idea, and encyclopedias are always a good place to start.

Bigotry’s Nature

Did you read about the girl, a year or two after the Columbine tragedy, who overheard a boy at lunch talking about his plans to shoot certain teachers and students? She reported what she had heard to the principal. After an investigation, the principal suspended the boy who had made the terrorist threats.

The boy then hired a lawyer who sued the girl for defamation of character. The case was subsequently thrown out, but not before her family had to spend thousands defending themselves against a stupid and frivolous lawsuit. We read such things and perhaps our first reaction is to mutter darkly, “typical lawyer” or to tell the joke, “What are three thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.”

It has been said that stress is the confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s desire to choke the living daylights out of some jerk who richly deserves it. Unfortunately, the all more likely consequence of facing jerks is for us to take the experience and make some wrongheaded and overly generalized conclusions out of it.

If a person of an ethnicity, profession, political party, or religion we have learned to despise does something jerklike we gleefully notice and record it as one more example, and additional, incontrovertible proof, of how bad that ethnicity, profession, party, or religion is. But what if a person who does not belong to the group we hate does the same sort of jerklike thing? What if the person who did it is part of our group? We hardly notice it, then. It makes no lasting impression. That person was just a jerk, we comment. We won’t generalize it to cover all members of the species. We have explanations.

And what if a member of the hated group does something remarkably unjerklike? What if, in fact, they do something that’s actually noble? We shrug. We explain it away. We ignore it. More than likely, we won’t even notice it at all.

The only thing that we’ll notice is evidence that confirms our hatred. We will see what fits our mindset and miss what doesn’t. Every wrong done by the group we despise will enter our brains and take up permanent residence. (This is the same sort of thinking that leads to superstition. You tell me you know someone who broke a chain letter and they keeled over the next day Interesting, perhaps, but that someone died after breaking a chain letter does not prove any cause and effect relationship. It’s like the old joke about the guy wearing garlic to keep the vampires away. “How silly”, we say, but he points out that he hasn’t been bothered by vampires in years.)

If asked to justify our dislike of the group we despise (Republicans, Democrats, lawyers, Muslims, Christians) we’ll easily and cheerfully list all their sins, never considering the obvious fact that given human nature, we could find bad things perpetrated by any group’s collection of jerks that we’d care to name. Even ours. Likewise, we’ll choose not to consider all the good things we could list about a group we dislike. We’ll in fact strenuously argue that we’re right to despise [insert name here] and that there there are hardly any righteous or decent or intelligent ones out there and so we’re justified in our prejudice just because.

This is simple human nature. We tend to only notice information that meshes with what we already believe to be so. We are quick to believe bad things about our opponents, and slow to believe it about those we love. We are good at rationalization and justification and how it’s different about [insert name here]. We are skeptical of those we hate, credulous of those with whom we agree. We can call this the bigoted mindset.

The Needs of the Many

In Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan asks a question of his brother Alyosha:

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on these conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth!”

(Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.)

In the Gospel of John (11:45-53), we’re told the following:

Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

Some people are willing to say “Yes” to the question Ivan asks of his brother; they will happily sacrifice one for the sake of the many. It is better to force the death of a single innocent, than to risk the prosperity of everyone.

How is that different from what God chooses to do?

God chooses to sacrifice not someone else, but himself for the sake of the many.

John 10:14-18:

“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

A Man of War

The KJV renders Exodus 15:3 in this way:

“The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.”

Most modern translations simply render it “The LORD is a warrior.” The passage in Exodus is neither a pre-Christian allusion to the incarnation, nor does it suggest that God is human. Instead, it is simply that in Hebrew, there is no other way to refer to a soldier, a warrior, than with the phrase “man of war.” The Old KJV tended toward the literalistic in translation, creating some oddities such as the rendering of this verse, or in phrases like “holy of holies,” which is rendered more accurately in modern translations as “Most Holy” Thus, the modern translations which read “the Lord is a warrior” are actually better and eliminate any possible confusion or misperception.

This is not the only place that the Bible creates discomfort for those concerned with opposing militarism and war. In the 1970s when the NIV was first being translated, another common Hebrew phrase also became problematic for the translators. The Vietnam war was winding down for the U.S. and there was wide-spread anti-war sentiment, especially among the younger people who might be the primary audience for a new translation. The war was also not popular outside the U.S. and the NIV translation was not U.S.-centric–it was, after all the New International Version and scholars from around the world were involved in the work. The NIV translators therefore also struggled with the phrase Yahweh Sabaoth, which the KJV had rendered “LORD of Hosts.” The word “hosts” is rarely used anymore in the sense that the KJV meant it. In the 1970s, as well as today, when we hear the word “hosts,” we might think of the host of a party or a television show. We might have thoughts of hospitality. But the Hebrew word Sabaoth did not mean that God was the patron of variety show hosts or especially concerned with women running Tupperware parties. Instead, the word Sabaoth–the KJV “hosts”–was best rendered into contemporary English with the word “armies.”

The Bible in the Old Testament regularly and repeatedly refers to God as “Yahweh of Armies.” Likewise, the “hosts of heaven” could better be rendered in contemporary English as the “armies of heaven.” Since such a translation did not fit with the prevailing cultural notions of peaceful, flower-toting tolerance, the translators chose to retain the impenetrability of the KJV translation for moderns, but in a modern way. Thus, the choice was made to render the phrase as “Lord Almighty” throughout the Old Testament of the NIV. Really, not what the underlying Hebrew meant, precisely, but it didn’t offend modern sensibilities, either.

Many people remain uncomfortable with the notion of war and find it hard to wrap their minds around the idea that God could ever have sanctioned such a thing. For convinced pacifists who are of a mind to put bumper stickers on their cars announcing that “War never solved anything” they either happily ignore the uncomfortable verses, or reject any belief in the God that shows up in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. Others will dismiss the militarism simply because it is in the Old Testament, arguing that the Old Testament has been superseded by the New Testament picture of love and tolerance shown in Jesus. Of course, this is the same Jesus who called the religious leaders “vipers” and “white-washed tombs”—and showed his love to the money changers by making a whip and chasing them from the Temple.

When people ask the question, “What would Jesus do?” it is rare for them to think in terms of making whips and beating folk. But there it is, and given that the God of the Old Testament is actually the Son of God, rather than the Father, the problem for the more pacifistic seems difficult to me.

I think that the Augustinian view of “just war” is probably closer to the biblical picture of things than the modern ideas of pacifism.

I would rather that pacifism was all we saw in the Bible. And I believe that pacifists are not wrong, at least in an ideal sense. Sadly, the world does not always conform to idealism. And the Bible’s words and message are not given to angels or to the ideal: they are for flawed people who live in a real world, a world that is fallen and imperfect. Jesus told the religious leaders who asked him about divorce that divorce is established in the Law of Moses, not because God favors divorce or thinks that divorce is a good idea. Instead, divorce exists in the Mosaic legislation, Jesus said, because of “the hardness of your hearts.” Ideally, there should never be divorce, nor should there ever be the need for it. But in the real world, it’s going to happen. God knows what people are like. So what did God do? He made allowance for our hard hearts. For the fact that we can make mistakes. He regulated and mitigated the evil as much as possible for fallen creatures.

War is not the ideal. But sometimes it is necessary. Gandhi thought that the Jews should quietly accept their fate during the Holocaust and not fight back. I disagree with Gandhi–in fact I am horrified by his attitude. I really don’t think there was any other way to stop the Nazis other than bombing them. For those who wonder where God was during the Holocaust, I would argue that he was using the allied aircraft to bomb the crap out of the Nazis–and he was the Lord of the armies who fought their way to Berlin.

The LORD is a warrior;

the LORD is his name. (Exodus 15:3)

The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” (Exodus 14:14)

Who is this King of glory?

The LORD strong and mighty,

the LORD mighty in battle. (Psalm 24:8)

…a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:8)

Smog Check

I had delayed getting my Saturn Vue smog checked for a very long time; I paid the registration fee, but the vehicle needed to have the brakes replaced and getting a smog check costs money too, and so I put it off until we could afford it.

So, today I took it in to be checked (yes, I got a pass from the DMV so I could drive it); although it passed on both emissions and visual inspection, because the OBD System was “not ready to test” it failed. Emissions were as follows:

CO (carbon monoxide) at 728 RPM (idle) could be a maximum of 1 per cent. My car put out 0.02 per cent.

CO at 2500 RPM could be a maximum of 1 per cent. My car put out 0.01 per cent.

Hydrocarbons could be a maximum of 100 parts per million. My car puts out 0, both at idle and at 2500 RPM.

But because the OBD (on board diagnostic) system wasn’t up and running like it should, I failed. And what does it mean that my OBD system wasn’t “ready to test”—it means that I need to drive the car so it fills up with data; the reason it was not ready to test is because we had let it sit for a long time, then replaced the battery, so it was, essentially, cleared. At least the fix is easy. But I must admit to being puzzled by the State of California. If the purpose of the smog check is to see to it that emissions are kept to a minimum, then why does anything else matter? I have hardly any emissions. About the only way it would be better is if my car is electric. But because the OBD wasn’t working? I don’t understand. I suppose there’s a reason besides just the bureaucratic.

This is the same smog place I’ve been going to since I’ve lived here in Lancaster and I’m happy with them. The nice man who did the smog test today was very friendly and gregarious. He asked me what I did and I told him I was an author, which he found interesting. He told me he had been a university professor before he came to the US six years ago, and that he also was a computer programmer—he taught computer science and he’s hoping to move to Seattle soon for a job up there—he’s got family there who work for Microsoft.

So he had some questions about writing, and how to keep the text from drifting off into other subjects; he told me, in essence, that he easily gets off on bunny trails—he finds something fascinating, it triggers ideas, and off he goes. He told me his students would complain about that tendency. He also kept telling me he likes to talk a lot, which was certainly true.

I enjoyed listening to him, and tossing in ideas about how to write; I explained how I fix that sort of problem in rewrites—that you just get the book done first, and then you go back and excise the extraneous material and rearrange things to fit the outline you created ahead of time. He likes to outline and organize before he gets started—though, as he said, he has a problem ignoring the outline once he starts writing.

Later he asked me what sorts of books I write and I told him science fiction and religious books. He then asked me if I’d written anything about Islam. I told him I hadn’t, though I had read the Quran in translation a couple of times.

He asked me if he could tell me about Islam briefly (which turned into much longer than anyone’s definition of brief, but he really did enjoy talking to me a lot).

So he talked to me about the differences between Islam and Christianity and explained that while Islam is logical, Christianity is not. And he spent some time discussing issues he had with the trinity and the various attempts to give analogies, such as the egg (yolk, white, shell). He also didn’t like the concept of God “resting” after creating the universe—how could God be tired? And he didn’t think it was reasonable that God would wrestle with Jacob—how could God come down and be a man and allow a man to challenge him. In Islam, God is entirely transcendent.

He also couldn’t understand how or why God would have a son—how could he need a companion or someone to rely on? And he explained that it made no sense for God to exist and then at some point form the Son and then the Holy Spirit.

He thought it strange that most Christians, in his estimation don’t think, and they don’t read the Bible—unlike Moslems who have to read the Quran every day. He also found it peculiar that the names of God and Jesus change from place to place in the world—that in Spanish the name of Jesus is pronounced entirely differently than it is in English. He also talked about the variation from place to place with the word God, or Jehovah, or Yahweh.

Unlike Christianity, in Islam, you pray to God only in Arabic, and you carefully learn how to pronounce it, and so no matter where you go, US, Saudi Arabia, Germany, China—it is always Alahu Akhbar. And the Quran is studied only in Arabic, and read only in Arabic.

He explained that Shiites are not Muslim at all, because they venerate a man, and that only the Suni are truly Muslim.

He explained how in Islam the men who go to war, to fight jihad, expect to either be victorious or to die trying—and that either one is a win for them. Unlike Americans who want to come home to their families and houses and cars. A Muslim leaves his family, leaves everything, and will either win or die.

Under Islam, there is only the rule of Islam, no democracy; if you fight against Islam, then you will die. If you don’t fight, then you are free to believe what you will. But if you don’t accept Islam, then you must preach only in your churches—and you cannot build new ones—and you can worship only at home. And you must pay a tax for the privilege. He extolled the advantages of punishing wrongdoers publically and extremely: if you steal, we cut off your left hand. Do it again, your right. And how many people will steal when they see that sort of swift justice; having a lengthy trial, putting them in prison, how does that keep someone from misbehaving. You hang adulterers in the public square, let everyone see—and the men and women will be constrained from that sort of thing. Same with homosexuality.

He sees the conflicts, the wars in the Middle East and the beginning of the end times—the great battle when Islam will become dominate.

He only briefly mentioned Israel as a place that he expected Islam to soon rule over.

After I had paid for the smog check—he told me to pick out a drink from the cooler—he liked to do that for good friends and customers. And he told me if I had any questions, or wanted to talk more, he was always open to it. We shook hands repeatedly and he kept wanting to chatter on, but said he really should stop and let me go. Which he finally did.

It was an interesting discussion. He was very nice, very friendly, and I enjoyed talking with him. But I must admit to wondering how common his attitude regarding what Islam means might be, given his otherwise generally western orientation and outlook.

History

In answer to the question, why study history:

“The world seemed an odd place, and I wondered how it got that way.”

– Attributed to R.H. Tawney, historian

If you’ve ever wondered about the value of history, you’ve doubtless heard what has become almost a cliché: “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Which makes history sound as if it is cyclical or something. In fact, you can either make your own mistakes and learn from them, or find out the mistakes others have made and learn from them. Of course, the reality is something of a mixture of the two: we learn from the mistakes of others, and still make some new, fresh ones ourselves so we can teach ourselves something.

A better way of thinking of history follows more the words quoted above from R.H. Tawney: all of us have been thrust into a theater two hours into a play, in the middle of the third act. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do if we want to make sense of where we are and what’s going on.

Of course, it’s worse than that. Not only have we been dropped into the play after it’s been going for two hours, we’re expected to hop up on the stage and join in on all the fun.

That’s why a knowledge of history is useful: you know what’s going on, at least a little. You know why those two characters don’t like each other, and why that little fellow is punching that old woman—and so on. You understand why mostly there are no easy or quick solutions to most of the problems, because the quick and easy problems have already been solved—but new ones keep cropping up all the time. And you learn who the good guys and who the bad guys are—and realize that sometimes hero and villain are slippery ideas, one of degrees, and sometimes shifty. And worst of all, that sometimes everyone is a villain and there aren’t any good guys at all. Sometimes you’ll just want to find a place on stage to hide until the next act comes along.

Don’t Give Up

Some of the stories you write you just know are good. Not only do all your friends praise it, but when Ray Bradbury read it he praised it, too.

So how come a story like that gets rejected over and over again? And not just form letter rejections, but personal rejections. Always personal rejections. And more than one of them tells you, “we can’t use it just now, but I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding someone to take it. And please send us something else.”

So if you’re that good, if they like the story, if they want to see more of your work, then why did they reject this story? It’s hard to say. Sometimes rejection happens because the editor just bought a couple of stories that are similar to yours. Perhaps you wrote a time travel story, but he just bought two of them and he had four appear in the magazine so far this year. He just can’t take another, no matter how good or how unique yours is.

Getting published is not just about your talent. It is not just about knowing your craft and being good at it. Being good at writing is simply a given in the world of publication. A lot of good writers get rejected every day. Rejection is not necessarily because you’re incompetent; often, it has nothing at all to do with your competence. It’s just a business decision. What you wrote doesn’t fit the need of the publication right now. Sometimes that’s all it is.

So what do you do? One of the most important traits for any prospective author, for any author at all, even if he has been frequently published, is perseverance. You have to keep on trying. You have to refuse to stop trying. Giving up is the one sure fire way to avoid getting published. Never giving up, taking a beating, and sticking to it is the way you will succeed.

In baseball, a good hitter is one that makes it to first base only once out of every three tries. If you fail two out of three times—if you fail 66 percent of the time—then you are a very good hitter. And every time you get up to bat, you may see several balls go past you before you get that hit. You might get two strikes, maybe two or three foul balls, and two or three balls before you swing and connect and hit it just right so that the ball falls between the opposing players and you scramble fast enough to get on base. Or maybe, you get on base only because one or more of the players on the other side does something wrong—they make a mistake and you’re safely on base only because of their screw up. It counts for you, but you know that all things being equal, you’d have been out.

Writing is often times the same way. There is a whole lot of failing and a whole lot of luck involved, even if you are at the pro level.

So don’t give up. Don’t get discouraged. Keep at it. That’s the only way you’ll ever get anywhere.

This segment of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, If describes how a writer must be:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

Kipling ends his poem by stating, that if you can do all this, then “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,/And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son.” I would tweak Kipling’s words and change the last line to, “You’ll be a writer.”

Humility

.After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.”

Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself. (John 6:14-15)

“Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me.” (Matthew 21:2)

Jesus made water into wine, multiplied the loaves and fishes, healed the sick, cast out demons, and raised the dead. Massive crowds hung on his every word. He was God in the flesh, the Creator of the universe. When he made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem a week before he was crucified, he came riding on a donkey.

There were many prophesies in the Old Testament about when the Messiah would come, what he would accomplish, and what he would be like. The prophet Zechariah predicted that the Messiah would arrive humbly, upon a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). Donkeys were beasts of burden, used for carrying food and supplies. They were not the sort of animal anyone expected to carry a conquering king. When heading off to war, kings sat on mighty steeds or in chariots behind a team of horses. The President of the United States does not peddle a bicycle to across town to address Congress. But that’s just how Jesus rode into Jerusalem, upon the lowliest of animals used for human transportation.

By arriving in Jerusalem in such a manner, Jesus announced to the crowds that though he was the Messiah, he was not going to conquer the world in quite the manner they might have anticipated. Most of the disciples missed that Jesus was God’s servant, conquering the world by dying for its sins.

This same Jesus has come into your life. Have you accepted what that really means? Or have you allowed your expectations to get in the way of glorious reality?