As part of my decompression from the election, I am trying to read blogs dealing with more than politics. Having SlashDot as my home page helps. Another endless source of fascination is BoingBoing, a site that collects curious and stimulating items from a techno-scifi perspective. This week Cory Doctorow picked up on an article from the UUWorld:
UU World Bookshelf: Speculation and revelation by Will Shetterly
I lost my faith in God when I was young because conservative Christians did not offer stories that seemed literally and morally true. Their insistence that I believe made it impossible for me to believe. But my love of fantasy and science fiction helped me see that ants do not need to talk for Aesop’s fables to be true, and Jesus’ message of sharing and peace does not require him to rise from the dead. My love of these genres took me further: Jesus rising from the dead is no longer an obstacle to my belief in his teaching. That rising is not a supernatural being’s show of power; it’s a writer’s call for me to trust that, when all hope appears to be lost, hope remains.
Conservative Christians would say that fantasy and science fiction led me astray. I say those stories led me home. They made it possible to read the Bible as if it were a new text, without two thousand years of accreted interpretation by people who wanted me to see what they saw or wanted me to see. Those stories made me a Unitarian who believes that God is in everything. They made me a Universalist who believes that love is available for every living creature. They made me a Christian who believes that heaven is in us all, if we only know how to look. Many writers and readers of science fiction and fantasy will tell you there’s nothing religious or spiritual in these books. As a Unitarian Universalist, I respect their interpretation. But I still take revelation where I find it.