Assume for the moment that the god of the Bible is real and the Bible is his revealed word. (Please, bear with me here)
Here we have a man claming perfect understanding of that book who, regardless, makes prophesies that always fail, mocks all scholars,
mocks anyone who asks for clarification, stomps away in a fit when too many people call him on dodging the questions and displays a profound, even comical, lack of understanding about the actual content of the bible.
Is he, in the context of a Bible actually provided by a universal creator, more likely to be an actual prophet of that deity or a false prophet being led to Hell by a singularly inept demon?
I ask in part because
I'm trying to decide if I'm going to have an overt supernatural element to the story I'm writing, if I'll leave it implied and hinted or just scrap the supernatural component all together. As tempting as it is to have Pauwel Jansen engage in a religious debate with someone who stands up to him intelligently and articulately that runs the risk of a
Mary Sue moment.
Leave the "supernatural" hinted at...even celebrate the ambiguity between what the character may (or may not) believe, and what can be demonstrated to be...IOW, subvert the trope.
As Slowvehicle suggests, an ambiguous authorial stance with regard to any "supernatural" elements would keep the subject of your story in the focal distance region away from the reader's reality, so that his subjective reality would remain as his psychological demesne, which is the demesne of his story, after all. Bringing that psychological manifestation "out" into the real world would puncture his inflated persona, and flatten the story.
In other words, allow the reader to experience his confusion, without giving your subject character any credence through validating his delusional world. That way you don't force the reader into the suspension of disbelief which we would have to build (like a gallows for the human tragedy of his predicament, to entertain a momentary conceit, ha ha!), draining our engagement with the story into the side effort of changing our attention away from the man and onto the realisation "oh, this is a fantasy story".
His subjective experiences can be described from his point of view, but never validated by you, the author, so that the character is a sort of "unreliable narrator", into whose delusional reality the reader can be drawn without conflicting the reader's actual experience.
(As an aside, about the use of words in writing, in that last phrase I left out the "with" that maybe should properly follow "conflicting", because I wanted to imply that the "reader" I refer to there would be inappropriately disturbed, knocking him out of the story, rather than the more passive description of your story being at odds with the reader's experience of the world, which would be the flat result of inserting "with" there. I put this paragraph in because I'm not sure my use here was strictly correct in grammatical terms. But writing is not about grammar, it's about poetic effect, and affect.)
As I have stated I have responded to over 900 post—I do not relish the Idea of sitting in front of the computer responding to all the post—some are very good and some are ridiculous.
It is time consuming, and although it keeps me thinking, I believe I have extracted all the helpful responses from the posts.
No response at all to my reference to and discussion of the nature of loving kindness. Just a legalistic and uninspired threat about subjugation to the god.
Are you incapable of responding to actual love? What a bad advert for your god! You say you have been doing this for years. Unswerving moralistic dumping and thumping, which you arrogantly assume is "doing the lord's work"? Sad. Simplistic. Dull. Unattractive. Failure.
I am not running away—and will at times respond to a few posts that are interesting—in the meantime I will concentrate on more important matters pertaining to my passion.
Obsession and passion are not quite the same thing. In this thread, however, you have conflated them, and be it noted, to no constructive end. 81 pages of trying to push a dead horse across a non-existent finish line . . . . . . .
As in "the passion of christ" I suppose he means… raising himself to the status of the christ in his own mind.
Just imagine the tiny hell this guy would find himself in, if the vengeful, hateful creator he envisions were real!
Perhaps in that alternate reality, the demons assigned to each of us would be exact replicas of ourselves!
Luckily "Paul Bethke" (does the real Bethke know of this abuse of his name?) lacks the imagination, let alone ability to reflect on himself, to entertain such doubts… luckily for him, that is, at the expense of the people around him.
Always nice to know you're appreciated!
