God: Showing Up in Unexpected Places

I've gotten used to not hearing much in the way of truth out there. At this point you may think that this will be a "damn leftwing media" post. Ok one of those is coming, but this one isn't it.

I enjoy stumbling across biblical truth in startling places I don't expect it. For instance while Howard Tayler is a practicing Mormon, I didn't expect to see a brief discussion on the nature of God and evil in Schlock Mercenary. Instead I expected to see a character that looks like a puddle of crap shooting things with a plasma gun. Shooting things with guns is fun (trust me I know!), but this was better.

John Scalzi's interview of David Louis Edelman provoked a similar reaction.

The thing to remember about predicting the future is that human nature doesn't change. We're still the same people that Adam Smith wrote about. We're still the same people that Shakespeare wrote about. In fact, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in 2001, we really haven't changed much since that first dude figured out how to hit the other dude on the head with a bone. In some ways, all of human history is just one long story about two groups squabbling over limited resources.

So when you're trying to predict the future, it's really the human motivations that matter.

Exactly. This is why I have a hard time watching Star Trek. (Sorry Hube if you're reading this.) The idea that mankind is just going to have some great awakening and become paragons of moral virtue doesn't work for me. We've always been petty, stiff-necked bastards both collectively and often individually. Ok, with the exception of one guy. Sadly, it is in our fallen natures to act this way. But it is nice for a writer with no particular ideological agenda to recognize the constancy of our nature for what it is.

Anyway, that's my two cents.