All posts by Lars Walker

Religion

Messiah Number 4,872

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I was amused to find a little bundle of booklets in my mail today at work. It was about half a dozen copies of a 39-page “novel” called …And God Created Love, by “Aytekin Kurtaran.” (A 143-page version is available on request.)

I resisted the temptation to read it through but, flipping through the pages, I found it to be the story of a “handsome youth” named Aytekin Kurtaran, and how he (with his beautiful lover), inspired by the true God, overcome all the evil powers that are making war, and establish a worldwide government and a worldwide religion, based on love. The author’s native language seems to be German. I can’t testify to the quality of the German prose, but the English translation is pretty rusty.

Apparently Mr. Kurtaran is confident that if he sends out copies to people all over the world, the simple logic of his program will convince everyone to visit his website (not much going on there) and join his campaign for world government and religious reform.

I’m a little embarrassed to speak so slightingly of the fellow. I’m guessing he’s extremely sincere. Perhaps he thinks his idea (one world government, one world religion) has never occurred to anyone before. Perhaps he imagines that, once we read his story, we’ll all slap our foreheads, say “D’oh!” and sign on.

What Mr. Kurtaran doesn’t understand is that his idea is not new. Far from being fresh and novel, it’s been done to death—lots of people’s deaths. Again and again, highminded and noble efforts to unify mankind in love (or something like love) end up in acres of bloody corpses.

There are few things so fearsome as a lover of mankind who just can’t persuade everyone to get with the program.

What Mr. Kurtaran doesn’t understand is that there’s something wrong with people. People are not good (but deluded), merely awaiting someone to tell them, “Love your neighbor and unite!” People are bad (and deluded). They need radical change.

If Mr. Kurtaran could take all human evil upon himself, be put to death, and rise from the dead, he might have a shot.

But even then, it wouldn’t happen as quickly as he hopes.

Blogs, Socials, Religion

Note: Distorting Scripture is a sin

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Kudos to Dennis Ingolfsland of The Recliner Commentaries for thoroughly fisking a video making the rounds claiming that Barak Obama’s name proves him to be the Antichrist, based on Luke 10:18.

Fourth: Now comes the “slight-of-hand” so to speak. In Luke 10:18 Jesus says he saw Satan fall as lightening from heaven. The video doesn’t give you the Hebrew word for “Heaven.” The Hebrew word for heaven is pronounced like “Shamayim (Shamayah in Aramaic).

Obviously the words “Barack Shamayim” don’t work well with the slander this video is attempting to perpetrate, so instead, the video does a little bait-and-switch by referring the listener back to Isaiah 14:12-19 which refers to the fall of Lucifer (Satan).

If you hold a high view of Scripture, as the person who made this video apparently claims to, you should never, never, never, twist its words and falsify facts in order to make a political point. Shameful.

Blogs, Socials

Hubris alert

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In my ongoing effort to overcome the limits of my shyness disorder, and to put myself squarely in a position where failure and humiliation are inevitable, I’ve accepted an invitation (through the good offices of Hunter Baker, who’s written a book called The End of Secularism, in case you hadn’t heard) to become a blogger at Touchstone Magazine’s Mere Comments blog.

That does not mean I’ll be leaving Brandywine Books (which may be good or bad news for Phil). I expect my blogging at Mere Comments to be fairly occasional, proportionate to the frequency with which I have anything to say worth writing. (This qualification doesn’t bother me here, as you’ve already noticed.)

No point looking for anything from me over there just yet. I haven’t even signed up as of now. I’ll do that later this evening, barring a coronary or a home invasion. My plan is to start with a cross-post of my piece on the Great Minneapolis Tornado. This will doubtless provoke numerous angry comments, which will hurt my feelings; I will then retire to my room and refuse to ever post again, and it will be the last anyone hears of me.

But I feel I need to raise my profile a bit, because as far as I can tell the buzz that greeted the release of West Oversea has dissipated like the waves churned up by a very small stone thrown into very deep water, and is gone as if it never were.

Oh, did you know I wrote a book? You can buy it here.

Authors, Fiction

“Save the Dragons”

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David Freer is a Baen Books author, and a very nice guy with whom I’ve chatted once or twice online.

He’s in the process of arranging to move from South Africa to Australia. He wants to take his numerous pets with him. That means time in quarantine, which is expensive.

So he came up with this website. He’s telling a story here, a chapter a week, but the chapters (after Chapter 1) come only when he gets $400 in his Paypal jar for each one. Four subsequent chapters have been paid for to date.

If and when the book gets published, subscribers who have given over $25.00 will receive a signed copy.

Read a good comic fantasy. Help an author.

Tip: Ori Pomerantz.

Publishing

Maybe I’ll never see one of my books in hardcover…

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Joe Carter at First Thoughts passes on excerpts from a Financial Times article, about how Amazon’s and Google’s pricing policies are destroying the market for hardcover books.

Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre, said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy profits and kill the lucrative trade in hardback editions.

Most of my book buying is in softcover, mainly because I’m poor. I made it a project, years back, to get most of my C. S. Lewis in hardcover, though. I suspect that if I checked closely, I’d discover that the majority of the hardcovers I own have been bought used or from clearance tables.

But still…

Publishing, Religion

Word up on the words in the Word

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Our friend Ori sent me this link today, about the upcoming really, really even newer revision of the New International Version of the Bible. The tone of the article is that they’re going to make it even more gender neutral, and that people who objected to the last “humankind” revision were complaining on purely ideological–not scholarly–grounds.

And over at Worldmag.com, I see this piece by Alisa Harris, linking to this article from Christianity Today, which talks about the same revision. The tone of this article is that they’re going to tone down the changes, and that the publisher recognizes the legitimate concerns of past critics.

Methinks, if you’re looking for a job, they’re hiring in the Spin Control Department over at Zondervan.

Me, I still sometimes use my old (pre-revision) NIV Study Bible, because the notes are excellent.

But in general, I’ve decided I prefer something a little more literal, like the New American Standard or the English Standard Version.

If I live long enough, I’ll probably just go back to the King James. Or the Geneva Bible, just to irritate people.

Uncategorized

My Roman holiday

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It was a strenuous weekend, by my standards. And quite a lot of fun, all in all.

A while back a fellow I know through Viking reenactment alerted me to an event coming up in September in New Ulm, Minnesota. It’s a battle reenactment, in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (something that only happens once a millennium. I did the math). They’re bringing in a bunch of Roman reenactors from various places in the U.S., and they needed something approximating Iron Age Germans. Vikings are close enough for the purposes of the exercise.

You can read about the battle of Teutoburg Forest here, and about Arminius, the German chieftain who made his name there. Whatever it was. We don’t actually know what he called himself, but Martin Luther (who got pretty excited over the story of a German who smashed the Romans) decided his name must have been “Hermann,” and “Hermann the German” he has been, in popular imagination, ever since.

I drove down with a (different) Viking friend, and we managed to show up only about an hour late. (We wanted to avoid Highway 169 because the Renaissance Faire tends to back it up pretty awful on Saturday mornings in season. So we took a roundabout route, and managed to miss every intersection we tried to find. But eventually we made it, mostly by process of elimination.) Continue reading My Roman holiday →