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@r-m-archer

Well, thanks for all your thoughts. 🙂 I hope that your writing will never shine a bad light on Christianity and that you will really think through the act of creating your own religions and supernatural beings, gods, and abilities (like Sanderson’s and Riordan’s) before you use them.

@denali-christianson

Hey Denali, glad to have ya! Tell me about yourself, what genres do you write? How long have you been writing? What’s your current WIP about?

I’m feeling happily overwhelmed right now!

I know the feeling. 😄

Well since I’m the author of this chaos, let me give you a quick summary of my main arguing points, and where Archer, Taylor, and some of the others disagree with me.

My main points were these: First, magic is supernatural, and even though some use it in different way today, the bible still calls it supernatural, and so I think it is anti-biblical to have characters use magic in the way books do. In other words, anything supernatural, demonic, or from a spiritual or sub-natural realm, is anti-christian to write or read, seeing that the bible teaches against it. This includes writing about angels, demons, witchcraft, magic, sorcery, and wizardry.

My second main point was that fantasy does not mean magic, and is very different than magic. Fantasy (and I included definitions of these words in my original post), is something unreal/fictional, that could not be real in our world, placed in a made up world or universe. So, if I created a fantasy world, and in that fantasy world, people could harness energy from say, trees,  and use it in combat or to move things with their mind, that would not be magic or supernatural, that would be part of the natural world building. That is how I think people should create fantastical abilities. Instead, writers and readers use the word magic to describe things like that, making it supernatural and anti-biblical, which is very irritating. If you want to see more on my points, the original post is where it is. 🙂

What are your thoughts on these views?

Now, to the main rebuttals: I can’t encapsulate everyone’s nuanced views in one paragraph, but I’ll try to give you the gist of it.

First off, the one point I did kinda agree with, was Archer saying that magic/supernatural abilities could be portrayed in a Christian like way if they were portrayed like any other sin (murder, theft, etc..). I think she is right, but only if it is done very carefully. Extremely, extremely, carefully. Because if it is not explicitly clear that the magic is sin, then we as Christians will be shedding a bad light on our religion, and our God.

One point Taylor made was that definitions of words change, and so I shouldn’t dictate definitions to people. He is partly right, but since the bible clearly calls the act of witchcraft and magicians (in the old sense) a sin, then we should not use it in a fantastical setting where it could and probably would be confused with the supernatural. Two side points with this: First, even though people throw around the word magic now days to mean anything fantastical, it is still used in the supernatural sense most of the time by most authors, so the definition really hasn’t changed at all. Secondly, magic used in the sense of street or card magic like David Blaine does, is slang, and not the common way it is used, and besides, doing a card trick isn’t likely to make people think you’re actually doing real magic. Fun fact though, I do card tricks and other illusion tricks, but my dad actually encouraged me not to call it magic, even though it was clearly not magic already. I’m not completely against it being called magic, but he is right, we need to be a clearly distinct people from the world, and act and talk like bible students.

As a whole, the others mostly disagreed that using magic is bad.  They don’t seem to think harnessing power from the supernatural realm, or creating other religions or gods is bad or anti-biblical. We argued some about Riordan and Sanderson books, and how I think those books (and will say it again, I have looked through The Way of Kings people, so quit saying I haven’t looked at the manuscript xD), are way to caught up with made up gods and supernatural realms.

I didn’t include everything, but that was the main stuff. I’m intrigued to see your thoughts Denali! 🙂