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@michael-erasmus Yeah, when you post, you have a very short time in which you can edit it, and I don’t believe you can delete your own post at all. Also, editing (or sometimes even posting) a very long post, especially one with external links in it, will probably get your post sent into the spam filter and you’ll need to reach out to @ Josiah to get it reinstated.

I strongly dislike Judeo-Christian God being copied and pasted into fantasy worlds. Narnia is an exception because of its purpose as a tool to help kids know Jesus better, but I immediately put Christian fiction down (unless I’m beta reading it I guess) if I think the author is just trying to spin me the Gospel in another world. And I guess Lewis’ view that all good things in the world and all devotion and reverence to the divine is likewise God’s is something different enough to what I hear every day that it doesn’t rankle me so much =P

I guess my first issue is the closer you get to “actually just God,” the closer you come to putting words in God’s mouth and actions in His hand. That really rubs me the wrong way, and was a huge problem I had with Fawkes by Nadine Brandes, which we were going over as a whole website some months back.

Second, it makes me feel like the author was… too scared, I guess, to write anything different? I get the feeling sometimes that fantasy authors want to have another world full of wonder and magic but don’t want to wrestle with theological and worldbuilding questions of morality that arise from having another world with different supernatural forces than just “literally God.”

When we divorce all virtue and the idea of what it is to live a good life from Jesus as we understand Him in the New Testament, can we not still have a life worth living? Okay, that came out terribly. I mean that in the Old Testament, yes, people believed in the Christ yet to come, but God loved them for their love toward Him, and for their love of what was good in the world, and for their obedience to Him. Their idea of virtue and a good life was still rooted in God’s presence in their lives.

I think we can use that as, at least, a strong starting point in a fantasy world. Devotion to and reverence for the divine is a universal theme. Lewis recognized that. Missionaries for thousands of years have played off it to convince people to give the devotion and reverence they have within them to Someone worth that love.

I believe it’s a much better way to go about anything not intended for eight-year-olds than literally having a Son of God come and die for the sins of humanity in the Ochre Mountain-Turtle-Plains of Arre’Bacedius.