Apocalypses

Daniel Otto Jack Petersen · 29 Mar 2014, 12:47 · from 2014-March.txt.gz

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From: danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com (Daniel Otto Jack Petersen)
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 12:47:08 +0000
Subject: (urth) Apocalypses
In-Reply-To: <5336B5FE.7050807 at clueland.com>
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*IIEC Wolfe was fairly harsh on the emotional level in ascribing the cruel
humor of a Turkish joke book to the Turks' lack of Christianity in the
Jordan interview.*

Ah, interesting.  Of course, I'm not saying Wolfe's *never* harsh or
emotional about ideological opponents - but it does seem to me that a vast
and deep element of his body of work (especially the Solar Cycle) is the
entering into the mindset and lives of non-Catholics and creating
sympathetic characters out of that.  (Also, 'IIEC'?)

But looking at that bit in the interview I'd say it's a little more complex
than your soundbyte implies.  I hear these kinds of claims from
non-Christians about Christianity ALL the time.  Sometimes it's emotional
and harsh and sometimes it's part of an actual honest-to-God argument and
when it's the latter, even if it raises my hackles, I (as a Christian) have
to simply consider its truth value.  Wolfe here is raising a
historical-ethical argument about the influence of Jesus on some
civilisations and the absence of that influence on other civilisations.
 He's here pointing to what he takes to be some of the egregious samples of
the latter, whereas his fiction shows he's perfectly capable of pointing to
what he takes to be admirable qualities of, for instance, Arab cultures.

Here's the bit from the interview for those interested (found here:
http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfejbj.html)

*JJ:* That is an interesting perspective on it, I hadn't thought of at all.
My wife had one of her professors that taught in a Moslem country for a
while and said he woke up one day and saw the children had a bunch of
kittens they were throwing up in the air and hitting them with a baseball
bat against the wall and the mothers just sat by and watched. He said "I am
not a Christian, I am an atheist, but I am a Christian in that I could not
tolerate that." There has been an influence in our society that has made us
different from pagans.

*GW:* We vastly underestimate the importance of Jesus. We think we don't.
We have all these churches and we say how can we be underestimating Jesus?
We don't until we start trying to figure out what it would be like if he
had never lived. When you really start trying to figure out what it would
be like if He never lived you realize that He is a much more pivotal figure
than we give him credit for. All of these people, everybody at this
convention is in that sense a Christian although most of them would tell
you that they are not and some of them would tell them quite truthfully
that they were Jews who practice Judaism in one of its various forms and so
on and so forth. Nevertheless they have been influenced by Christ much more
than they realized. We are very lucky to have had Him. We are very
fortunate. A friend of mine learned to read Turkish. And he got hold of a
Turkish joke book and read it. And I said, "What were the jokes like?" He
said it was horrible. They were all about ugly tricks that were being
played on blind people and things like that. This is what we have escaped
from and we don't realize that it is there and we came very close to
falling into it. We very easily could have and we still may.

On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Jeffery Wilson clueland.com <
jwilson at clueland.com> wrote:

> On 3/29/2014 5:25 AM, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen wrote:
>
>> It's one
>> of the many examples throughout his fiction of a profound generosity in
>> tension with an equally profound antipathy toward his ideological
>> adversaries.  (To be honest, I think you find something similar in Wolfe
>> at an intellectual rather than emotional level:  he doesn't show
>> antipathy, I think - quite the reverse.
>>
>
> IIEC Wolfe was fairly harsh on the emotional level in ascribing the cruel
> humor of a Turkish joke book to the Turks' lack of Christianity in the
> Jordan interview.
>
> --
> Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
> A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
> < http://www.tamut.edu/cil >
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

-- 
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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