I study the worst of God’s creation as a hobby. It could be due to my own skepticism looking for chinks in nature to see if the world really is good or not. It’s easy to look at a beautiful tree and see the majesty of a great Mind but it would be cheating to only allow that evidence into the trial of general revelation. The gross creatures came from the mind of God and I find it enlightening as soon as I get off the first base of my skeptical culture.
Behold the glorious maggot, the ant and the great white shark, for they display an economy of life and death that rivals the works of Shakespeare. Up close animals are savage in their ruthlessness. There are wasps that lay their eggs in the living bodies of spiders, caterpillars and other helpless critters that only serve as hosts to disgusting offspring that devour their landlords in a grizzly living sacrifice. Earth’s economy of the living is a story of dealing with death, even using death, to create more life. Without the sacrifice of innocence there can be no life on earth. Likewise, we couldn’t even drive our cars without a few billion years of dead cool dinosaurs to create the fuel in the first place.
One can try to avoid killing animals by embracing the Vegan way, but you’ll still have to eat plants to survive. Our bodies use bacteria and enzymes that essentially process life to keep us from dying. Even the kindest Vegan is a life-eater. In fact, given I prefer eating plants that aren’t rotting with death, I’m even more of a life eater than your average maggot. Maggots eat death so we don’t have to deal with it.
My Scoutmaster served in Viet Nam and our favorite story of his was how the medics used “clean” disinfected maggots to eat out rotting flesh from war injuries. A soldier had an infected wound on his arm and the medical team scattered maggots on his arm and covered them with a bandage. The maggots ate only his dead flesh and wouldn’t touch the living skin cells. Maggot debridement therapy is still used today. But let the skeptic hold up the maggot as exhibit A against a cute, tree-making God and he’ll come up short for not only could the soldier die without such a therapy, so we all would die within months without the death eaters.
It is estimated that ants process death so well and are so plentiful, that if ants ceased to exist today, Earth could no longer sustain life within 3 months. We would literally rot to death. Even in the biological microcosm, if death is ignored it will wipe out all of life. Man’s great problem with death isn’t just physical, for the physical world follows the non-physical world too. Maggots don’t go to discredit God’s reputation as an amazing creator, they actually display His mastery over even death to serve his better purpose.
There is another simple truth that comes to mind when I think about parasites, ants and gross things, that death is a second thing that requires the first thing of life for it to exist. In short, life comes first. The positive case for the good comes before death can happen. God creates the world out of nothing and he made life first. You have to do something to get life. The natural degradation of things comes second. Earth is like a charged battery we find that demands a divine, non-physical Battery Charger. Or if you prefer, it’s like finding a hot cup of coffee sitting on the kitchen table. When we find such a cup, we don’t assume it got there by accident of its own accord. We know that a causative agent must have put it there, a finite amount of time ago, because life is not automatic, self-creating, or eternally existent in the past.
So here’s to the death eaters. Without some living things that process death, life in this earthly economy would be impossible. Death is a problem that doesn’t go away because we wish it away. It’s here and must be negotiated with or it will consume even the living and every living thing must pay a price for life. Life is not free. For life to exist some other form of life must die and that life form likely did nothing to deserve its death. Innocent life dies that others may live. Get it?
Writing comics is a blast. There’s nothing like cracking a story, playing with characters and developing ideas on the page. I get why writers write, it’s fun. Comics (and screenwriting) are unique writing mediums because they don’t require as much text as novels and traditional stories. They are a short-hand, so a lot of the painful bulking out of words just isn’t part of this particular medium.
I tell the story once in script form. It has to be tight, read well enough and come to a point of being finished before I can move on to pencils. But by the time I’m doing pencils, I am telling the story for the second time. By the time inking begins I’m on the third pass. Then the book is all inked and ready to be colored. I have little interest in color. It’s the fourth time I’ve told the same story and coloring is every bit as much work as writing, penciling or inking.
This is why I generally have my pals color my books for me. I can still go in and do touch-ups, but the heavy lifting is done by others who love color. I have nothing but respect for colorists in the comics field. They work on the cheap and generally don’t get the credit they deserve. If a color book reads well, it will almost always find twice the audience of a black and white book. For that alone, color is a key that opens the door to readers who just wouldn’t want to read my black and whites.
The colorist for my graphic novels GEAR, GHOSTOPOLIS and the up and coming BAD ISLAND is my pal Katherine Garner. She’s English. That’s like having my books colored by a Bond Villain.
Every once in a while, I get to teach my kids from the Bible. They look at me kinda funny because I almost always read from the book of Genesis, which I consider one of the greatest books ever written. No matter if you think it fiction, history or poetry, the book of Genesis is where the ca-ca hit the fan in civilization.
I start my kids off by preparing them to not be believers in God. I tell them that this book is mocked as false by some people in the world, that they might one day lose their job in a university setting for claiming this book is true, and that it can be a difficult book to believe. I also remind them that while our family observes the Christian religion, that they can never be made into Christians by someone else. Nobody can really explain what makes some people believe Genesis while others doubt, but the answers and explanations for belief I’ve heard so far all ring false.
Dumb people neither necessarily accept nor reject the book. Smart people neither necessarily accept nor reject the book. Both smart and dumb people who reject Genesis are not generally people I want to be like. Most of my heroes (with the exception of Aristotle who didn’t likely have access to the book) all read and enjoy the book of Genesis.
I never tell anyone to believe in the Bible out of hope or wishful thinking. Nobody should make an irrational jump into anything, especially into a world view, religion or philosophy. My kids are treated with the same respect I would offer to anyone else, they deserve an education, not a religious bumper sticker. The Christianity I had been exposed to for most of my life was a form that came from believing Baby Boomers. Like all things Baby Boomer, it was perhaps the most irrational form of Christianity known to man. It’s a deliberately feelings based, illiterate, squishy belief structure that should be rejected whole cloth. Baby Boomers are the gift that keeps on taking.
Back to my kids. I like to think about kids who were around before the book of Genesis was written over 3,300 years ago. I put the Bible behind my back and say, “Let’s pretend that this story didn’t exist. What do you think we would believe about how we got here?”
I get out the whiteboard and start drawing whatever they come up with. I draw little cave men and show them making up stories about where the world came from. We also go over the competing creation stories that Moses would have encountered in Egypt of their sun god Ra rising from the chaotic waters for the first time.
My point is that the best way to prepare my kids for the Paganism and Pantheism they will likely encounter as adults is to educate them about the Paganism and Pantheism of the past. The competing creation stories before Genesis came along would worship deities that were dependent or associated with the material world. The best story going before Genesis came along was to worship creation or a creator that was essentially created.
Fast forward 3,300 years or so and if you remove the Bible from the conversation of creation and you have Materialist scientists saying almost identical things as the ancient Pantheists and Pagans:
“The world was not made by the gods, but instead was the work of material forces interacting in nature.” – Carl Sagan
In short, nothing really changes. There is either a creator of the materials or the materials are all there ever was, is, and will ever be. If the materials don’t require a maker then they essentially are God in that they perform the same acts of creation. The materials are no less miraculous in this cosmology, just more irrational.
Finally, I read my kids those first four words of Genesis, “In the beginning, God…” and I stop. Within four words the Bible has already pissed off most of my employers, most of the philosophers I read, many in the arts community and many of my neighbors here in Los Angeles (come on, you live a city named after angels). There’s little more offensive than to claim that God existed in history, is really there and that this can be known.
I’m not sure if Moses was into debate, but he sure threw it down with those four words. The rest of the world largely deified creation and worshipped it then Genesis comes along and says that man can no longer worship the creation. He had to worship the Creator. Of all the Creators in the world we could have gotten, we had to have a jealous one. “In the beginning, God…” is where it all began. You wouldn’t have Western Civilization if those four words weren’t written. Without them, you and I wouldn’t likely even be here.
My children asked me about what happens when we die. It’s easy to just say, “We go to heaven.” and be done with it, but even in orthodox Christianity, that’s a simplification that practically rises to the point of being a lie.
I tried to unpack what death means to my children, how the body is alive at one point, and then it is not, and how our consciousness continues to live. They didn’t like what they heard. I could tell by the kinds of follow up questions they ask afterwards, “Will I still be me?” and “Will we all still be together?” that their minds were opened to greater and greater horror as they examined the end of life. It became an act of unkindness to bluntly speak of something so unpleasant as death, especially to children. Besides, their questions about death were really questions about life, meaning, man’s purpose and God’s reward or punishment for the good and evil He allows.
My four kids were aged six and under so though they were intelligent enough to ask these kinds of questions, they weren’t prepared to grasp the end of life answers. I know some adults who are the same way. Like all truths, the ones that are good enough for kids are usually good enough for adults, too. Stories forgotten or left unlearned by children don’t go away, they still need to be learned at some point, by someone, no matter what age. I have friends who lost their children to death in their early years, so it’s not as if it’s not a topic some kids will never have to deal with.
In some parts of the world and even at times in our recent past, it was commonplace for kids to deal with death in youth. I respect the innocence of my children, but I don’t shelter them from the truth. There’s a difference, and often the ones who preach the most about secularizing our youth in the name of not sheltering them, hide the hardest truest truths one can grasp. Thus, condoms in schools with no Bibles. Your average secularist knows not only how dangerous some fairy-tales are but also know how maturing the repercussions of one’s youthful sexual appetites can be. They long to shelter children from the normal life teaching of both.
When I think about how to raise my children, I don’t consult modern parenting authors, and I rarely consult Baby Boomers for answers. Those are great sources for what not to do. Instead, I go to the past. There’s this rule I coined, called “The 5,000 Years of Parenting Rule”. It’s where I ask what kinds of solutions would work for a father in 300BC and I learn from it. For surely God intended good fathers to be able to be a good parent without the benefit of a parenting pop-self-help author in the year 2010.
I took one of those birthing classes where the father learns how to help the mother breathe during birth. Perhaps the stupidest thing any chump ever came up with. Fathers are truly worthless in the birthing room, and while I did all of the things my wife asked me to do, we all knew I contributed exactly zero to the birthing process by encouraging her breathing. Come on, folks, I’m telling her how to breathe! You know what makes a lot more sense? When Fred Flintstone sat in the Dad’s waiting room smoking cigarettes with Barney. That’s where a father belongs, outside of the birthing cave. Mom just needs to know that if a saber-tooth tiger decides to attack during birth, that father is waiting at the mouth of the cave with a spear to skewer the great cat, ritually eat its still-beating heart, then string his fangs over his son’s crib as a mobile.
Fathers of the past were great story tellers. They passed on tribal stories, morality tales and parables. In recent history, came the Fairytale, which helped guide the wisest generations we’ve known. Shakespeare wasn’t raised on academic parenting techniques, he was raised on the wisdom of the ages. You don’t get a Dante from Dr. Spock’s parenting books… you get the generation that invented MTV.
It was this need for fairy tail that began my story telling about the afterlife. My three oldest kids read the book and were exposed to the ideas of death, regrets in life, heroism and destiny using a language they can understand. It is also told in what is defiantly not Modernist, or Post Modernist style. For Modernism kills the fairy while Post Modernism makes the fairy a God.
I’ll get into more of this later, but I’m announcing it now. We could use a little more fairytale these days.
My daughter Olivia and I have a guest episode of AXECOP RIGHT HERE!
