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morality

Pondering: futility of godless stories

March 28, 2016 by AuthorAppleton 3 Comments

Ponder with me the shallowness of stories that omit any divine purpose. Any intervention or God-given purpose. As writers creating fictional realms we have the opportunity to omit God… or do we?

A story I moderately enjoy centers around a Buddhist monk who is on a quest to find the equivalent of the chosen one. The chosen one must have certain qualities and the monk seeks out a man with those qualities. In his quest he relies heavily on a prophecy that gives him signs he can follow so that he will know for certain he has found the one. There is never a mention of divine intervention. The story as a whole is devoid of God and in this missing element it becomes shallow.

It makes no sense for there to be a prophecy unless there was One to inspire the prophecy. And it is contradictory to choose one man based on moral qualities and yet ignore where those moral qualities come from.

Is it not interesting? While purporting high moral standards, secular stories miss the all-important question, which is, that if there is a moral law then Who gave that law. And if there is no Divine giver of moral law then morals are dictated by mankind. And if mankind dictates morals then he is not responsible to a higher power, and without that responsibility mankind is free to follow their own moral codes. One person may say that a thing is wrong while another will say that it is right. Who is to say which is which? They are both men. They are both fallible. More importantly there is no Judge to hold them to a standard of morality.

You cannot have moral law without a Lawgiver, and the same law loses its power if you deny the existence of the One who established and enforced those laws. In truth there would be no solid consequences to immoral actions because no one could say that the law was any better than the lawbreaker’s moral opinion.

Q: Do you ponder the necessity of God in stories?

 

Filed Under: Christianity, Fantasy, fiction, writing, writing tip Tagged With: fiction, God, morality, morals, stories, writing

Divinity and accountability in Fiction

July 27, 2015 by AuthorAppleton 4 Comments

When writing I have often pondered the futility of leaving God out of the story. His presence, whether embodied or as a distant spirit-being, omnipresent and omniscient, is necessary even in fiction. Without an ultimate accountability characters lose their punch.

All stories need a level of good versus evil. Characters make choices between right and wrong. Humanism would have us believe that we do not need God to explain the choice between good and evil, whereas the standard of morality we know is completely dependant on Him.

Western society is founded on the moral system passed down by Judeo-Christian values. Without a Common Standard of morality society is left to the whims of its individual members. One person may say that stealing is wrong, but another may say it is not because they believe in survival of the fittest.

Why is sin always sin? Why believe in truth and falsehood? Because we do have a standard in the laws passed down by God through Moses and the prophets and Jesus Christ.

This is pivotal in writing. Literature needs to reflect that God is the same always, whether in the past or in the present or in the future. An eternal being whose standards are not dependant on our desires, whims, or failings.

Without that standard a story becomes dependent on the characters’ perspectives. But when that standard is used the story gains coherancy because all actions, whether good or bad, have consequences temporal . . . and eternal.

Freedom of choice does not mean your characters can escape the fact that they are created beings.

Question: How does accountablity to God factor in the fiction you read and write?

Filed Under: Christianity, Counter Culture, fiction, inspiration, writing Tagged With: characters, Christianity, fiction, morality, western civilization, writing

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