J.T. McDaniel's blog

Suspension of Disbelief, Where Fiction Meets Religion

When writing fiction I rely on what we call "a willing suspension of disbelief." It's a very simple concept. The reader knows that what he's reading isn't real, but in order to enjoy the story he convinces his brain that, for the moment, it should accept that this is real. Fiction isn't really enjoyable without being able to do this. Most of us have read books, or seen movies, where the plot was so obviously silly and unrealistic that it was impossible to enjoy them. If you can't believe it at least a little it's not fun.

I like to believe there are thousands of people in the United States who can do this when they read the Genesis creation stories, suspending their disbelief and thinking these things really happened. I like to believe there are thousands mostly because I know there are actually millions, and it's just too fucking depressing to think there are that many Americans who actually want to ignore reality.

Why is there this widespread suspension of disbelief about this particular myth? Anyone looking at the Genesis creation myths can see they don't fit in with accepted reality. Just the idea that the earth is older than the sun, and that the earth somehow was having normal night and day cycles before there was a light source, is clearly ridiculous. So is the idea of creating the human species by making a clay statue and bringing it to life. If nothing else throws that one out, we're a carbon based life form, and an animated statue would necessarily be silicon based.

Christians are particularly tenacious in their devotion to the literal truth of this myth. Jews seem to have less of a problem interpreting it as an allegory intended mostly to emphasize the interrelatedness of humanity. When you look at it that way, it doesn't matter that much if it really happened, because the point is still made. All people are related. It's even true, though that connection doesn't really trace back to a particular pair of "first humans," if only because there was no first human. Homo sapiens evolved from earlier human types through a slow process of evolution, and it would be close to impossible to state with certainty at what point the "modern" actually supplanted the "early" in the human line.

Creationists are quite right when they argue that one species doesn't suddenly turn into another, but if you look at enough generations you do find one species at the starting point and another species at the end, with probably thousands of intermediate forms that vary so slightly from one generation to the next that no one really notices one species turning into another over the course of perhaps several thousand years.

The thing is, Christians, unlike Jews, are vitally dependent upon the Genesis creation myths being literally true. For Christians, the important thing about these myths isn't that everyone is related to everyone else. That's just a bonus, and maybe useful for a sermon sidebar. What's important is that the serpent talked Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, and that Eve then talked Adam into trying it as well. This "fall of man" myth is as central to Christian theology as the myth of Jesus' resurrection. It was the "fall" that created original sin. This spiritual taint would be forever inborn, and inherited by all subsequent human beings. This would alienate humanity from god, and could only be removed through an atoning human sacrifice in the form of Jesus dying on the cross.

Without original sin as a reason for his "sacrifice," Jesus becomes just another in a long line of failed messianic pretenders.

When you look at the messianic prophecies believed in by the Jews of Jesus' time, the central theme was the relief of the land of Israel from foreign domination, not the remittance of original sin (which Jews never believed in anyway). Hezekiah, Josiah, Bar Kokhba, and even David Ben Gurion all came closer to fulfilling those prophecies than Jesus ever did.

The necessity for original sin goes a long way toward explaining the desperation exhibited by Christians in resisting objective reality. They want creationism taught in schools because accepting that Adam and Eve never existed means the central tenet of their belief system is meaningless. Without Adam and Eve they don't need to be "saved" because there's nothing to be saved from. If you're not born already doomed to an eternity of punishment in hell for the failings of a mythical ancestor, you're just not going to be as worried about that fate.

If you don't need saving, and you don't have to worry about eternal punishment in an imaginary hell (which, remember, apparently didn't exist until the New Testament writers dreamed it up), then you also don't need churches, or preachers, or any part of the multi-billion dollar industry that is Christianity in America.

You might even start doing really radical, dangerous things, such as thinking for yourself instead of just doing as you're told. And the churches certainly can't be having any of that!

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For more ramblings along these lines, be sure to pick up a copy of my latest book, More on Theistic Atheism & Other Essays, which is now available in trade paperback and on the Amazon Kindle reading device. In addition to the titular work, this little (160 pages) book includes essays on the afterlife (or the lack thereof), some reasons why I don't believe in debating creationists (it lets them claim there's actually something to debate, among other things), and the idea that not only is it not wrong to test god, it's actually long past due. If god is real, let it prove it.

Politics is rung in. Just imagine how tough it is to be a traditional Republican in a party currently dominated by, for want of a better term, a pack of fugitive Dixiecrats and religious nuts. The proper relationship between government and religion is discussed (essentially, government should offer zero support to religion, and religion needs to butt out of government), and between religion and science. I see science as mostly not caring that much about religion, and religion as an active enemy to science, unless they can find a way to pervert scientific findings into appearing to support religious dogma.

Modern myths are also brought up, particularly the rather silly notion that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. How many times has the end been confidently predicted, and then not happened? Hell, if Jesus couldn't get it right (he was confident he'd be back no later than the early 2nd century), why would anyone think a bunch of so-called psychics and sensitives have got a lock on it? Getting one up on the Millerites, the 2012 doomsday types are already starting to fudge their predictions, without waiting for the end to not happen.

There's a little on gay marriage, my essential theme there being, "who cares?" After two marriages I'm personally more inclined to say, "Just go shack up," but if two people want to get married, why not let them? It isn't even a religious function in this country, though the state governments do allow clergy to act for them and sign the license. Marriage is really about property and inheritance, which is hardly an exclusively heterosexual concern.

I even talk about god. There's an essay on The Nature of God, and another called The Childish God, either of which will no doubt upset a few readers. Religious people don't like to be reminded that their deity frequently comes across like a self-centered two-year-old whose mother wouldn't give him the last cookie. Very close to the end we find Dissecting the Decalogue. It's just what it sounds like, a further look at the ten commandments (which were also discussed in This and That), this time the Deuteronomy version.

The book ends with Odd Animals and Space Aliens. I think there's probably something to cryptozoology as long as you're talking about insects and fish, but it's mostly a load of hooey when you start claiming that Bigfoot is really roaming the Pacific northwest, or the Florida Everglades. As for space aliens, I have to agree they almost certainly exist (even a very conservative estimate suggests quintillions of potentially inhabitable planets in the universe, so the probability there will be intelligent life on at least some of them is fairly high). I also argue that there is virtually no chance any of these aliens have ever visited earth, or would even be likely to know anyone was living here. The number of potential inhabited planets is vast, but so is the distance between them.

Anyway, if an alien civilization was able to build a starship and travel to a distant planet, don't you think their medical science would probably have advanced slightly beyond proctology?

So Just Who is Jacob Thomson?

Jacob Thomson is an imaginary person. I made him up as a pen name when I was writing a book called The Alukam a number of years ago. I decided that the book was so completely different from anything I'd done up to that point that it needed to come out under a different name.

I usually wrote about submarines. A couple novels, and some non-fiction stuff I'd edited. There were no submarines in this new book. Doing one of those high-concept Hollywood things, one of the tag lines I came up with was something along the lines of, "Dracula meets Rabbi Small at the 87th Precinct and tells the story in the Penthouse Forum." There was an Orthodox Jewish detective, a Jewish vampire (two of them, actually, one male, one female), and tons of sex. There were no dirty words, though. You'd be surprised just how raunchy you can get without using any dirty words at all. I learned that reading Ted Mark back when I was in the Army.

So I created Thomson to take credit for writing the book. He was a full-fledged character himself, complete with a biography. He even did interviews, though I was the one asking the questions, so he was never exactly ambushed. I wasn't too worried Oprah would out the guy as a fraud, if only because there was never any real question that he wasn't made up. Ostensibly, he was this old guy from Brooklyn who served as a B-17 bombardier in World War II, came home and got a PhD in Literature from Columbia and ordination from some Yeshiva in Brooklyn, and spent the next few decades leading an Orthodox congregation that would have been horrified to discover that he was writing dirty books after he retired. 

He had to be Jewish. Anyone who has ever read the book would naturally presume that the author was. The whole story sort of screams out Rowan Atkinson's words as he separates the Christians from the other departed souls and points down, "Sorry, the Jews were right."

Why did I "out" him as being my pen name and not a real author? For one thing, he'd be 89 this year, so how much longer could I keep him around? Okay, sure, there are precedents. Going by when he first started chasing down the bad guys, Superman has to be at least 110 by now. Dondi was still an 8 year old Italian war orphan (World War II) in the late 1960s. Dennis is still five. But I didn't feel like taking that out.

Anyway, I needed a few more stories to fill out my most recent book, This and That, and there were several Thomson stories that would fit the bill. There were several stories in that book that had been published before, though not where very many people had actually read them.

While I was using him, I used him mostly for the spooky stuff. Stories with vampires, and golems, and generally creepy characters.

I also made him a retiree, and a resident of Pine Island, Florida. Anyone from that area who's read The Alukam would almost certainly recognize the main setting, Port Morrow, as a version of Fort Myers. If that didn't work, some of the surrounding communities include Cape Marl, Belle Springs, and Punta Ancha. The last one is a slightly mean pun on Punta Gorda, because many residents of that town like to translate it as "Broad Point," which is actually Punta Ancha in Spanish. "Gorda" doesn't mean "broad," it means "fat." If you look at on a map it looks like a big old beer belly hanging down into the bay.

So, anyway, Thomson is me. I'm sure some people figured it out on their own. After all, my own Hebrew name is Yaakov (Jacob), and my father's name was Thomas, which would anyway make me Jacob Tom's son.

I did drag him out one more time recently. I put on his character as much as I could and recorded one of his stories, called Mission Twenty-Five. I think the voice ended up with a strong Archie Bunker influence, with the occasional touch of George Carlin in certain inflections. It is, at least so far, the longest thing I've put on YouTube.

 

 

 

 

 

The Best Book You Haven't Read Yet

From the latest sales figures I'm guessing there may be a few people who are still unaware of my most recent book. Most of the United States, probably.

This book is, admittedly, a little different. You might even say that it's really three books between the same pair of covers. I started out with a collection of 13 short stories, including a few that were originally credited to that ancient Brooklyn bombardier, Jacob Thomson. I invented him as a pen name when I wrote The Alukam, another rather odd book, being a police procedural featuring an Orthodox Jewish detective in a small Florida town, hunting a "vampire" serial killer, who turns out to be a real vampire. A Jewish vampire, at that, strongly resembling the detective, and actually something like his sixth-great-uncle. It also had a lot of sex in it, but no dirty words.

There's not much sex in the new book, though. Some, but nothing to run screaming to the board of censors about. The short stories in this book cover several genres, including the World War II stories I'm best known for, a little hard boiled crime, and some horror. A couple of them are just strange. Strange is good, I think, and you'll probably enjoy them.

The second part of this book is autobiography. I can't say that I've led a life anyone is likely to make into a Bruce Willis movie, but I tried to leave most of the boring parts out. Back in the early '70s I spent some time hanging around the Broadway scene, and some of that is included. So is my year in Vietnam, along with some stuff from my school days.

The rest of the book is mostly short articles and essays. Some of the shorter pieces originally appeared in this blog. Most of the last part, which includes some religious (a couple of people have said "anti-religious") essays, is new. Just call me a skeptic. I'm just one of those odd people who want their proofs to be externally referenced, and not based on circular reasoning. That applies whether you're talking about religion or alien abductions. I'm not much of a believer in visiting space aliens, either. Why the heck would they decide to pick earth as their favored location for a proctologists convention?

Predictions for 2012

I know this is a little late, but I've decided there is still time to put forward my list of predictions for this year. These are all based on the most reliable of all psychic principles, as explained after the list.

• The sun will come up tomorrow.
• There will be an earthquake in California.
• Someone will be elected President of the United States in November.
• Jesus will return. This will be a previously deported carpenter from Guadalajara, not a religious figure.
• A well know evangelist will be involved in some sort of scandal.
• I will write another book.
• A large number of children will be born.
• A politician will say something stupid.
• The world will not end in December.
• Love Never Dies will finally get a Broadway production.

I suppose the psychic principle involved is now obvious. With the exception of the presidential election, it would be a very odd year indeed when most of these didn't occur. Okay, I don't write a new book every year, but as the new one is nearly done, I feel safe enough predicting it will be completed this year.

As for the others, musical theater references are always handy, and there are always earthquakes (mostly minor) in California. Children are born every day, evangelists (like other con men) are always screwing up in one way or another, and politicians can always be counted upon to say something stupid (it seems to be congenital with a certain Pennsylvanian). Jesus the carpenter returning is a little more tenuous, but it's an extremely common name, so the odds are actually pretty good. It's the Guadalajara part that's iffy.

As for the final prediction--well, you expect to get at least one wrong, don't you? It would be nice if it happened though.

Reading on Camera

When you write a new book, one of the problems is always getting people to buy it. The most difficult part of this is letting potential buyers know that the book exists. Small publishing companies don't have budgets that allow them to buy network television time for the author to ponder killing off his most popular character, thus giving the readers an incentive to buy the book to discover if he did. Thirty seconds of James Patterson on CBS costs more than my publisher spends on their entire operation during a year.

So the only way I'm getting on CBS is if I do something newsworthy. Writing another book isn't, so I don't think I'm likely to need to skip work some morning to talk to Charlie Rose.

One thing I can do is get on YouTube. I did some acting when I was younger. I also worked in radio for quite a few years. The combination provides sufficient confidence for me to figure I can sit in a comfortable chair reading a story from my new book, This and That, without making a complete fool of myself. So I took my camera, which has a video setting, put in on the tripod, and gave it a shot.

Pretty awful. The image, that is. The reading wasn't bad, but there wasn't enough light on my face and there was a blue reflective bar running vertically through the scene.

Now I needed to make two purchases instead of one. The first was MoviePlus X3, which Serif has on sale at a steep discount now that a newer version has been released. My editing needs are extremely simple. I need to be able to create title cards at the beginning and end of the video, and I need to be able to cut the shots together. The hope was that I'd be able to read an entire story or essay right through without any fluffs. If I couldn't, I needed to be able to pause for a few seconds, then start over with the paragraph where I'd screwed up. Then, during the editing, I'd be able to cut out the fluff and pick up where I'd started over.

The second thing I needed was a better camera. So instead of shooting the reading on my old Kodak Z1015IS, I went over to BestBuy and picked up a Sony HDR-CX160. Instant jump in quality, with a 1080 x 1440 image area (full HD, in other words). Converting the finished image for YouTube results in a reduction in quality, but it's still reasonably good. An additional advantage of the Handycam is that you can turn the display around 180 degrees, so you can see it as it films you. Makes for a lot more confidence that you haven't accidentally moved out of frame.

So last night I set up the camera, turned on some extra lights, picked up my Kindle Fire, and started reading A Patient Man, one of the stories in This and That. As expected, there were a couple of fluffs, which were cut out with only a minimum of fuss. I picked that particular story for various reasons. It's fairly short. It's written in first person form, with only a few lines of dialogue. And it's suitably creepy. I grew up reading Poe, so I like creepy.

I also do it well. My favorite part as an actor was probably Jonathan Brewster, and the resemblance to Boris Karloff was likely brought across most strongly by the voice, rather than the makeup. I didn't quite go full Karloff for this story, but I think I managed the proper genially sinister effect.

Don't take my word for it, though. The upload went smoothly, so please feel free to pop over to YouTube and take a look. J.T. McDaniel reading A Patient Man

Get a free book

Starting at midnight tonight, and for the next 24 hours, Kindle owners can get a free copy of my new book, This and That. If you love it, feel free to write a glowing review. If you hate it, well, it was free, so just keep it to yourself and go complain about something you actually had to pay for.

Up to this point, I have mostly written novels and edited history books. With this one you get a short story collection, followed by autobiography, and finishing up with all sorts of stuff ranging from the silly to the infuriating. I suppose some would be well advised to just quit reading when they get to the religion section, as I don't want anyone showing up in my front yard with a stake and firewood.

I had fun with the stories. As you might expect, I started out with a submarine story. Then I let the subjects range a bit, so besides the Navy, you get some mystery, some horror, a bit from the Army Air Forces, and baseball. I happen to like baseball, particularly if it's the Indians or, at the AAA level, the Clippers. What's not to like about the Clippers? They've only won the AAA championship two years in a row now, even with the Indians calling up their best players late in the season.

There's a certain amount of childhood in the autobiography. Not a lot of it. Every time I watch Glee I find myself thinking it's nice we didn't have any dumpsters handy. I was actually pretty good at getting out of a locker from the inside. There's a lot more about New York and Cleveland theater in the early 1970s. You'll also find some stuff about Viet Nam. Not my favorite place, all things considered, though you do get to hear about Sebastian Cabot's arse. I liked Japan a lot better.

A few changes

I took a little time this evening to remove a number of short stories from my website, and several old posts from this blog. It just seemed like a good idea. Everything I removed is included in my new book, This and That, so they haven't really gone away, I'm just making people pay to read them now. Lot's of new stuff in there, too, of course.

I'm seriously thinking of adding the book to the Amazon Kindle Owners' Lending Library. This is a system that lets Kindle owners who are also Prime subscribers borrow one Kindle book every month. I figure the borrowers probably wouldn't buy the book anyway, and depending upon how many people borrow books in any given month the publishers (and, hence, the authors) get paid a variable fee for every book borrowed. Under the right circumstances, you could theoretically make more with people borrowing your books than if they buy them. Most likely, though, that's not going to happen.

For the time being, This and That will be exclusive to Amazon (as an eBook). The printed version is available at all the usual on-line stores.