On My Belief

As a child I believed in God.

I believed in God with a child's faith--I never doubted it or questioned it. I also believed in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, alien abduction, ghosts, demons, psychic powers, astrology, and spontaneous human combustion. I believed in magic and thought the world was a magical one, that there were dark secrets and incredible powers that people could and did unlock. I looked forward to the day when I would encounter these strange and supernatural things.

Because of my fierce interest in all of these things I sought them out. This was before the Internet was a thing that could be used by a kid at home, so I was limited in my ability to learn about the monsters and magic I was sure populated the world. I would find books about werewolves and ghosts in the library and beg my mother to buy me magazines about monster sightings or dragons. Every weekend I would go to Bible school and hear about all the miracles and goodness of God and all that stuff.

My Bible study group was called Sparks or something like that. All I can remember about it is there was a weird little white puppet the teachers would use to talk to us about God and we had plastic crown pins that we got to put fake gems in for memorizing Bible verses or something. In these classes we would pray, of course, and the teachers told me that by praying I would feel God's presence and would know how to deal with problems. I prayed when they told us too, as earnestly as I've done anything in my life. I would call out to God and thank Him for everything I had and ask Him what to do about problems in my life or how I could help my mother and father love each other more when they were separated.

Never did I ever feel the presence of God, despite my wanting it more than almost anything. I felt like there was something wrong with me. I lied to my teachers in my Sparks class and told them that I could feel God's presence, that when I asked Him for advice I would hear Him telling me what to do. I decided perhaps I wasn't faithful enough or that perhaps God thought I was doing well enough and didn't need his help.

In the meantime I continued to peruse all the written things I could about the supernatural. The X-Files was probably the biggest show on television when I was a kid and it reinforced my belief in the fact that there was more to the world than met the eye. We moved into a house without my dad and got cable television and I added shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, and In Search Of... to that list. Everything I consumed told me I was on the right track, that supernatural things were just around the corner and I would encounter them soon--I already had friends in school who claimed to have seen ghosts and aliens and whatnot, I was sure I'd find the same things soon enough.

But I didn't. I never found a dragon egg or a ghost's ectoplasm, or felt the presence of God when I prayed. My father began to teach me about scientific forces like surface tension, centripetal force, and gravity. These things fascinated me as much as the supernatural things of my much younger days and I was ecstatic to apply them to my beliefs. I had grown frustrated with the lack of evidence of the magic I knew existed. Eyewitness accounts were great, and there was some physical evidence of course, but never enough. I'd grown old enough to understand the concept of a hoax and nothing made me more angry than reading about proof I'd thought was real turning out to be hoaxes. I became skeptical of the accounts I read not because I didn't think the things the people claimed to experience didn't exist, but because I was afraid to believe another hoax.

I began to apply my rough understanding of science to these things and they always came up lacking. Logical thoughts seemed to always hedge the monsters back further and further from what seemed possible. The Loch Ness monster, I thought, was a plesiosaur or a colony of them. But what were they eating? A predator that large needed more food than a lake in Scotland could provide. Where were the corpses, if it was a breeding population then how could there be no dead animals washing ashore? No droppings or anything other than a few fuzzy photographs and iffy eyewitness descriptions.

Reluctantly I began to think perhaps there was no Loch Ness monster, or Bigfoot. I consigned these and other monsters to a category of disbelief with the possibility that I might change my mind sometime in the future. I became, I suppose, a kind of agnostic in regards to giant monsters.

I still remember the first time someone suggested to me that God might not be real. My cousin was watching me and I said something about God, he said, "Maybe there's no God at all," to me. I was absolutely blown away. I very concept of God not being real had never entered my mind. At the time I was only vaguely aware that there were even other Christian religions besides Baptists. The idea was too big for me to wrap my young mind around and I pushed it to the back of my mind and rarely thought about it.

As years went by and I continued to see no ghosts, no aliens, and no angels I began to move more and more ideas into the "probably not" column of my mind. I would return more and more often to the words of my cousin and would consider the idea that God did not exist. I couldn't stand it--because if there was no God, then what would happen when I died? Even as a very young child I was terrified of death. More than once my mother would find me crying in my bed or the tub because I was thinking about her or my father or sister or myself dying.

If God was not real, then what happened when you died? If God didn't exist then how could Heaven? When you died was it like sleep, but much deeper? The thought made me terrified. I would think back to my earliest memories--confused, blurry recollections of a trailer and wooden toys and my father hugging my pregnant mother. And beyond those memories? Nothing. Was that what death was? Oblivion? No thoughts, no feelings, no anything?

It was too much, I couldn't accept it. I was too young to realize that now it was fear that fueled my belief in God and not faith.

One day, I remember it vividly, I was swinging on my neighbor's swing set and mulling these thoughts over in my mind. I had worked myself up into a scared frenzy, thinking about God and whether or not He was real or made up like Santa Claus. I leaped out of the swing at the same time that I made a decision. God might not be real.

I went up a believer and came down an agnostic.

As I grew older and information became more easily accessed and I learned more about life and myself, I dropped the rest of my beliefs about aliens and ghosts and psychic powers one by one--always sad that the world was becoming less magical and more material, but unable to lie to myself about what I saw. It wasn't until my mid teens that I became a true atheist and committed to the idea of a fully material universe, and my youth made me more than a little bit of a prick in regards to my new "beliefs". I think back to my highschool/late teen self and shudder.

Now I still devour stories of monsters and aliens and possessions. I still want there to be ghosts, I still want there to be a kind and loving God--but I know there isn't. My youth of belief has led to a lifetime of skepticism.

And I'm a better person for it.

Celluloid and Pages

Recently The Hobbit came out in movie theaters which made me think of The Hobbit the came out a few years ago which in turn made me decide to read The Hobbit again. That last link was really hard to find, by the way, buried under tons of shit about the most recent movie.

I might not have mentioned this before, but The Hobbit, as in the book by J.R.R. Tolkien, is one of my favorite books ever written and might be my favorite fantasy novel ever. I certainly think it's the best thing that Tolkien ever wrote, before he started becoming obsessed with his own mythology and forgot he was writing books to entertain people and started using them as an excuse to make up fake languages. The Hobbit, to me, has everything needed in a fantasy novel--adventure, friendship, horror, action, and a pretty decent message about greed and people's priorities.

It has no women, of course, which I suppose will bother some people. I can't defend the fact that there are no women except to weakly offer that none of the character's masculinity is really important to the story. If Bilbo and all the dwarves had been female the story would've been the same. Yeah, I know, it's a shitty excuse. The dude wrote it in the 1930s okay? Give him a break.

There's also no romance in it. Which is spectacularly awesome, a fact that the movie people seemed to have missed.

Alright so let's talk about the movie version of The Hobbit, huh? The second part I mean, the second of three parts. We can take a moment to appreciate the irony of slicing a book that is shorter than any one of the Lord of the Rings books into three movies to increase profits when the book itself could be seen as one very long argument against greed.

And yes, the book was made into three movies for profit. Don't try to tell me the creators wanted to capture every nuance of the book and needed three movies to do it because that is obviously false. Not only do they add a ton of extra stuff, only a fraction of which is even hinted at in the book, but they still cut out shit from the book and change it to go faster. It is absolutely mind boggling that with nine hours of screen time--half of the time it takes a narrator to read the entire fucking book, they still cut out stuff from the book.

But I'm not here to pick apart every difference between the movie and the book. Plenty of people can already do that, and just because something is different than the book it is based on does not automatically mean the thing will be bad.

I want to talk about one specific part of The Hobbit, which is Flies & Spiders, the eighth chapter in the book and my favorite part of the whole thing. It is a incredibly important chapter in the book because it is the turning point for Bilbo as a character, he goes from a reluctant passenger with the dwarves to a active force in the story--he rescues the dwarves, he fights and kills the spiders, and he keeps the dwarves going long enough for them to stumble into the elves and be captured which is pretty much the best thing that could happen to them since they were poisoned and starving to death.

What I'm saying is that the real story of The Hobbit is, shockingly, about the hobbit himself. His journey isn't just across Middle-Earth to the Lonely Mountain, but through himself, across the Baggins side over to the Took side. From the contented, lazy rich man to a genuinely brave hero. Flies & Spiders is where that turn becomes most apparent. It isn't sudden, because Bilbo has already shown his willingness to act when he has too, especially under the Misty Mountains when he was going to go back in to find the dwarves and Gandalf, but also during their encounter with the trolls. But in Mirkwood he finally has the opportunity to act since all the dwarves are captured and Gandalf is gone. His killing of the first spider that tried to take him away galvanizes him and he expresses this change by naming Sting.

When he rescues the dwarves, Bilbo doesn't just cut them down and run. He sees the spiders and formulates a plan, shaky as it is, he bravely taunts the spiders and doubles back to free the dwarves, then leads them in a running battle against the spiders--fighting and killing many of them and distracting them long enough for the exhausted, poisoned dwarves to escape with their lives. Without Bilbo the dwarves would have been eaten, no doubt.

So now let's compare this excellent chapter with how it is portrayed in the movie. If you haven't seen the movie and care about spoilers you might want to stop reading because I'm going to discuss the finer points of these scenes here so, you know, look away?

So in the movie the dwarves are in Mirkwood for like three hours before they wander off the path and get confused. Bilbo climbs and tree to look around. The spiders ambush the dwarves and Bilbo goes after them. He sees them tying up the dwarves and puts on his devil ring, which allows him to understand the spiders. He frees a few of the dwarves and they take over the battle, fighting the spiders while Bilbo cries about the ring which fell off of his finger and landed on the ground. He chases after it and then KILLS A BABY to keep it.

Yes, it is a baby spider, but still. BILBO BAGGINS HACKS A BABY FROM A SENTIENT RACE TO DEATH TO KEEP HIS RING. So instead of a transformation from a passive character to a truly active and dynamic character, Bilbo is reduced to a plot device to show how bad and evil and corrupting the Ring is in the most hamfisted and obvious and bullshit way possible.

But okay, sure, they need to establish the Ring is bad because they're trying to make the movie more like a prequel to the Lord of the Rings instead of a story all its own, right? So after Bilbo finishes killing his baby then he probably snaps out of it and leads the weary dwarves to safety, right?

Well, no, in fact the dwarves are pretty much fine and kill a lot of the spiders (including all of of them grabbing one by the legs and pulling it apart which struck me as needlessly gory) but then even more spiders come and then... well then the elves show up led by Legolas and some girl elf who's there to be a love interest for the...pretty dwarf? (By the way, he dies at the end. Almost like they want you to like the dwarves who don't make it)

So what we have is a scene where Bilbo does not really demonstrate a lot of nerve. Yes, he does chase down the spiders and free the dwarves, but he doesn't really have time to consider what he's doing. In the book he has to wander around and watch the spiders from afar, in the movie he listens to the dwarves screaming all the way to the spider lair. Bilbo only has to free one or two of his companions before they take over for him, they never begin to look to him for leadership, and his brave rearguard fight against the spiders is transformed into an incredibly cheap shot to make the Ring seem sinister and foul.

Obviously, I did not like the movie much at all, and there are more reasons than this one for that, but I think  this scene in particular really was a turning point for me and the real reason I dislike the movie. Taking the focus away from Bilbo's self growth so that we can watch an Orlando Bloom who seems to be straining the edges of his CG/makeup youthificiation shoot a bunch of CG spiders while he surfs really does not sit well with me. I hope you enjoy the movie more, of course, more enjoyment is always better than less enjoyment.

But maybe instead you should just read the book again?