[ExI] Homeless in Hell- A Christmas Story, by Orson Scott Card

[Ben Zaiboc]

Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
>
> I don't
>think asking people to do something positive while they can is religious
>propaganda. 


Agreed.


> OTOH, if they are more willing to help because of their
>religion, kudos to them anyway, because what really counts is helping.


Agreed that religion can accidentally or incidentally cause people to do good things.


>And if he really is religious (I'm not sure,
>don't remember this smell in few of his stories that I have read)


Really?
They reek of religion to me.  I've read the first 3 or 4 'Ender' stories, mainly because of other people's enthusiastic recommendations, but found them rather unsatisfying.  It seems evident that the author is not just writing about people with religious beliefs of one sort or another, but that he has them himself, and that colours the writing, to its detriment, imo.  There is the same bad taste in the mouth as I got right at the end of Arthur C. Clarke's 'Rama' books (although not the same sense of surprise and disappointment.  I was SO disappointed at that, it was almost as though he'd lost interest and just wanted to end the story quickly. "Uh, yeah, Goddiddit.  That'll do.")

And yes, OSC is religious (mormon, homophobic: http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html).


> - it
>would've been a difficult thing for him, putting himself in a different
>point of view. 


Well, this is kind of my point, he's not.


> If you think it is easy, you should try to write s-f story
>putting your narrator in the shoes of catholic bishop or cardinal, make it
>acceptable and credible to different readers and so on.


I'm not saying that it's easy, I'm sure I would find this almost impossible to do convincingly.  
And besides, I'd find it very distasteful to do, and probably would abandon the attempt.


>Allow me to remark, perphaps you are a bit too afraid of religion


I don't think that's possible.
Can you be 'too afraid' of being lobotomised, or tortured or raped, if those things were about to happen to you?  
Religion has been happening all over the world, for a long time, and it has had some very bad consequences.  It remains a serious threat to the physical and mental health of huge numbers of people, and is one of the main things holding back our progress.


> - maybe
>too many encounters with aggressive preachers. They can be funny when seen
>from some distance, when one grows enough to recognize this.


Believe me, I know how funny religion can be.  Funny like clowns.  You know, the ones that scare the crap out of you.

Seriously, if religion doesn't scare you, you're not thinking about it deeply enough.



>OTOH, it may be the fact that I have grown in a place where people - both
>religious (mostly catholic) and not (mostly atheists) still can agree on
>something because it is a bit more constructive to have things done rather
>than drooling over issues (and knowing no agreement can be achieved on
>them). 


And that's fine.  I don't really care what somebody believes, as long as they don't try to make my actions conform to those beliefs.

Unfortunately, there are very few religious people willing to respect the principle of 'live and let live'.  Let's talk about abortion, shall we? (no, let's not. We all know where that goes).

Just because nobody burns witches anymore (oh, except for in parts of africa) doesn't mean that there aren't people who hanker after the good old days, and given half a chance, would take us back there.  Even the watered-down english variety of protestantism has a problem with Harry Potter.  It's a demonic influence upon our young people, you see.

Mediaeval superstitious beliefs still have a firm hold on the minds of hundreds of millions of people.  Don't you find that scary?


> So I perceive one's religion as some kind of mental "facial
>feature"


More a kind of mental disease, I think.


>Anyway, I tend to downplay religious differences, simply because I am not
>going to allow them to rule my judgement of other people's worthiness.
>That way of thinking comes from time when I have learned about thing
>described above (doing things is more important than not doing them and
>the rest is meaningless long term).

Yes, and religion leads people to do the most dreadful, evil things.

Try being a gay woman who's just been raped and wants an abortion.
In Iran.

What does such a person deserve:

A) sympathy, support, counseling and medical help?

or

B) condemnation, estrangement and punishment, up to and including a barbaric and agonising death (after being forced to bring the unwanted baby to term)?


As an evangelist once shouted at me in a public square after discovering that I didn't believe in his (or any) god:
ENJOY THE FLAMES!!1!
(accompanied by enough spittle to put the flames out!)

Ben Zaiboc