Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

“ Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing. ” C.S. Lewis ~ The Abolition of Man ____________ I’ve been interested by a pattern that I’ve noticed on Gamasutra and a few other game design related sites. Almost every time an article or blog is posted that gets into the psychology of gaming and game design there will be a comment or two along the lines of: “You can’t turn art into a system of numbers and metrics! You are killing the FUN in games when you analyze them like this! Don’t deconstruct the magic that makes games what they are!” Personally, these right-brained knee-jerk responses don’t really appeal to me. They usually strike me as sad, inarticulate slippery-slope arguments. But I’m also philosophically opposed to dismissing ideas out-of-hand. I prefer the Hegelian method of searching out the thesis/antithesis and hashing out a synthesis whenever possible. That’s why I love boun...

My wife does a very good job of presenting the way the average person perceives me and my words. I think I understand her to be saying that my last two posts communicate to most people two things. First, that words are completely meaningless to me, so I’m free to make up whatever the hell I want. And secondly that I’m better or smarter than everyone else because see beyond their petty common concerns. I can see how people would see it this way. What I’ve found over the past several years in my own life is that there are messages and ideas that completely repelled me in the past, but after some time I’ve seen that there is validity in them. I think this is an issue of mental stretching. Most ideas have several foundational concepts, that if you disagree with, the idea will seem foreign, scary, evil, stupid, etc. So if I haven’t had time to digest any of those foundational concepts, I’ll reject the idea out of hand. It would be like taking calculus before learning addi...

I want to unpack a concept that I left a bit hazy in my last blog where I said: “ So if you ask me if I "accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior", I simply can’t give a yes/no answer. Not because I’m being evasive, but because I respect definitions too much to pretend that my definitions for those words perfectly match yours…” Most Christians I know would say that this is ridiculous. They think that the idea of “accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior” has a very simple and obvious meaning, so not being able to answer it must mean that I’m being purposefully obtuse or deceitful or have simply “fallen away from the faith”. The main point of that blog was to point out that theological words and concepts are necessarily metaphorical, and thus cannot contain Truth in and of themselves. You cannot say that the statement “Jesus is God” is True, because the word “God” has so many conceptual supporting words (such as Perfect, Omniscient, Loving, Just, etc) all of which have the...

I bought Rob Bell’s scandalous new book titled Love Wins because my wife was interested in reading it. It’s causing a ruckus because it directly questions eternal hell doctrine, though Bell insists that he’s not a Universalist. Well, since I passed that point a long time ago this book really doesn’t hold much interest to me. From what I’ve read, and heard from others, this book is not aimed at my demographic. I own 5 or 6 books on Universalism that do what Love Wins apparently does not. Which is to lay out an argument for a particular theology, present the verses that support it, present the ones used to dispute it, explain why those ones don’t actually mean what opponents say they mean, talk about the history of the idea and explore its ramifications. Since I’m past the timid questioning of inherited-doctrine stage I don’t have time to retread it in Bell’s book. I just wanted to note that the title is brilliant. Besides being short, memorable, and explanatory enough to...

Woah! So cool. I like this theory a lot. I guess because it mirrors the way my thinking has been evolving to a great extent. In my previous faith paradigm I thought that the only way you could move from one belief system to another is to totally reject or denounce the first and embrace the second as a new Truth with a capitol T. In other words, I thought you had to rebel against the old before you could consider the new. But now that I view language as an ethereal medium, like a gas that changes shape to fit many ideas, I view new thought paradigms simply as fun exercises in imaginative power. As attempts to find the best tools for living and understanding this crazy thing we call reality. http://vimeo.com/22815564 http://vimeo.com/22894310 http://vimeo.com/23181244

Wow, has it really been a year since my last post here? I guess it has. I’m not sure why exactly I haven’t been as enthusiastic about blogging as I was the past 7 years. I can’t really claim to be more busy. I’ve always been too busy. Maybe I’ve just been better about staying focused at work. I’ve still been writing a lot, just been keeping it to much smaller posts on Face Book, embroiled in conversations. Been having a lot of fun interacting with other heretics there. Speaking of heretical beliefs, I think I’ve been drifting at pretty much the same trajectory as I have been since I started this blog. Still contemplating all sorts of things, but I think I’m over a hump where every new thought is profoundly unsettling. I’m thinking that the very basic issue at the root of my heretical bent has to do with the limits of language. After recognizing that all religious talk is highly malleable metaphor, I realized that all the debate about the details is close to pointl...