Blasphemy Night at St. George’s Church

Tomorrow at 7 p.m., at St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catherines, Ontario, a group of feminist “priests” will perform The Vagina Monologues from the altar of the church.

I’ll have more to say about this in my column for News With Views this week. For the time being, let Christians pray for the reclamation of this church–before it becomes like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

If you don’t know anything about The Vagina Monologues, look it up on the Internet. You’ll be appalled by what these silly women propose to present from the altar.  I think I would put this on a par with Belshazzar and his concubines drinking out of the vessels from the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem.

No, I Won’t Watch the Stupid Game!

Tomorrow I will join dozens of other Americans in not watching the Super Bowl.

Oh, no! I’ll miss Madonna’s halftime show! Thanks, but I’d rather watch ants crawling in and out of the ant-hill. The Stupid Bowl halftime show is always some boring entertainer that you’ve already seen hundreds of times, whether you wanted to or not. The real trick is avoiding Madonna altogether.

But you’ll miss the six hours’ worth of pre-game coverage! Eh? What can they find to talk about for six hours?

I have banished TV from my home, but I still have to listen to an infinite number of radio ads with Stupid Bowl themes. These are almost indescribably offensive. In most of them, adult males are portrayed as the equivalent of poorly brought-up four-year-olds, who would be almost certain to defecate on the sofa if their long-suffering wives didn’t nag them constantly. And on Stupid Bowl Sunday, the talking heads who nag you all year about healthy eating turn around and exhort you to sit on the couch for 16 hours gobbling snacks and fast food.

Somewhere along the way, they supposedly get around to actually playing a football game–not that you’d notice.

Alas! Is it come to this? Are we Americans become so tame, so lame, so empty-headed, that we can be led around by the nose, and brought to invest so much time, so much passion, so much money in a freakin’ football game? I suppose 150 years of public schooling, with its emphasis on mindless conformity, has truly done its work. If we’re told to do it often enough, by enough voices in the media, who knows what we might not do? How else do you think a community-organizing mystery man, with no more biography than a robot or a lizard-man, gets elected president?

It must be some kind of hypnotism. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl. You are passionately interested in the Super Bowl…

No, no, no! You shall not tell me what I’m passionate about! I refuse to waste my passion on a stupid football game! (But isn’t that kind of what you’re doing now, old sport?) All right, all right–I have gotten cranked up about it. Maybe football brings out the worst in me.

But really, it’s not about football at all. It’s about cultural slavery, and marching when they tell you to march, and stopping when they tell you to stop, and, finally, drinking the poison Kool-Aid…

Splat! Goes the Writer

Yesterday it was raining cats and dogs (as usual–and I don’t even live in Seattle), and as I was going out the front door, my foot slipped on the wet doorstep, my ankle buckled, and I was launched into a swan-dive to the cement sidewalk.

It could’ve been very nasty, but I escaped with a scraped knee and nothing else. Obviously God was watching over me. But I must also thank my judo instructors of long ago, who drilled us incessantly in the art of taking a fall. After all, if you can’t fall without getting hurt, you really can’t practice judo. Even after all this time, I have retained this skill. I might’ve wound up like Humpty-Dumpty, otherwise. Certainly I would recommend this training to everyone!

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the signal to start writing Book #6 of my Bell Mountain Series. Our artist, Kirk Douponce, says he’s ready to start work on the cover of #4, The Last Banquet, and I’m in the process of proofreading it. Hopefully it’ll be ready for publication by the end of this summer; and then we can all get to work on #5, The Fugitive Prince… provided I continue to survive any additional falls I might take.

 

My Spam

I have a lot to learn about blogging. For instance, I just checked to see what WordPress could possibly mean by setting aside some of the comments as “Spam.”

Would you believe it? They’re commercials–lousy commercials! Not only that: they are also attempts to use my blog space for advertising, without paying for it. This is a new form of parasitism.

There was also an oddball in the bunch: a one-line message that said, simply, “I think I’m pregnant.” What’s that going to turn out to be an ad for? I don’t think I want to know.

Oh, I know, it’s a little thing, a trivial annoyance. But we are getting awfully slipshod about our ethics lately, aren’t we? A more casual approach to “Thou shalt not steal” can hardly be imagined.

So What’s ‘Bell Mountain’ All About?

I’m always asked this question when I give an interview; and so far I’ve been very simple about answering it. “It’s about these two children who believe God has called them to climb a mountain and ring a bell on the summit…” Well, yes, that’s true enough. But it’s also just a peek at the plot. It’s like saying “Moby Dick” is about a whaling voyage. True, but terribly incomplete.

I have finally realized what my books truly are about.

“Bell Mountain” is about a human race that has grown deaf to God’s voice. It’s about how they learn to hear God’s voice, and how they learn to call on Him. Above all, the books are about restoring the human connection to the Living God–learning to know Him, to love Him, to obey Him, to trust Him.

In other words, the fantasy world depicted in the book is an indirect way of looking at our world, the one we live in here and now.

See what people do, these days, and hear what they say. We as a nation, as a whole civilization, don’t hear anymore; nor do we see. We proceed as if there were no God–worse, as if we ourselves were gods. This is how we wind up worshiping fornication and every form of filthiness.

The church in the world of “Bell Mountain” is a dead church which has severed its connection to God (for only God can give it life). That description fits most of the institutional churches of our own world.

To connect to God is to live. To carry on without Him is to die.

That’s what “Bell Mountain” is about.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Reading Fare for Teens – Christians vs. Witchcraft, Dystopian Death Games, & Vampires

Stories about girls vomiting themselves to death and dystopian death games entertain the youth of the present day. Kevin Swanson takes a brief journey into popular teen reading fare, and discusses a Christian view of fiction with Christian author, Lee Duigon.

Check It Out At Sermon Audio

Thunder King Review by Rev. Stephen R. Wilson

Originality – 4/5
Writing Style – 5/5
Plot – 4/5
Characters – 5/5
Aesthetics – 4/5
The dog Cavall and First Prester Reesh steal the show.
I’ve been a big fan of the Bell Mountain series since reading the first volume. In book 3, the Boy King’s formerly-Heathen army continues to grow in their faith in the One God under the tutelage of the Old Prophet. But is the Boy ready to be King?
As the action and characters in this novel shows, God more often than not calls us to do things that are much bigger than ourselves, and hardly ever reveals how He’s going to help us accomplish them.

BOOK GUIDE: “The Thunder King” @ Movie Guide

Third in Bell Mountain series takes readers to the brink of apocalypse

By Robert Knight

In tough times, it’s difficult enough to convey hope without sounding like Pollyanna, the ridiculously upbeat heroine of the Disney movie of the same name.

But, how about offering real hope while the world is coming apart at the seams, evil is on the march, and prophets are predicting doom?

It’s all there in The Thunder King, Lee Duigon’s third installment of the Bell Mountain series, a fantasy of epic proportions set in a medieval world that arose on the ashes of a sophisticated civilization.

Duigon, who wields one of the sharpest and funniest pens as a cultural/political columnist, keeps the action crisp, the characters believable, and the reader guessing where it will all end.
Read More”

Fantasy Disguised as Politics

Sorry to bring up politics again. But when utter, unadulterated fantasy is repackaged as a political program that people are urged to vote for–and actually do!–it mightily cheeses me off.

This particular fantasy raises anguished howls of protest over “income inequality”–as if there were ever such a thing in the real world, or ever could be, as “income equality.” The message is that if we elect a bunch of really cool Democrats, they’ll get rid of all that inequality and transform America into the land of equal incomes.

Does this mean that a gang of crooks and schnooks in Washington will wave a magic wand, and you and I will suddenly be blessed with incomes equal to Nancy Pelosi’s, or Al Gore’s? I mean, what is this–the Arabian Nights?

The only place in the real world where there is income equality is the cemetery.