The Holy Vulcan!

 Greetings! 

I thought about making a podcast.  I'm very self-conscious about my talking voice, so, we'll see if that ever goes anywhere.  My name is Curtis.  I have recently been viewing this aspect of myself as the Holy Vulcan.  Silly, I know, but it intersects exactly through two things I'm passionate about: Christianity, the Church, and Jesus; as well as Science Fiction/Fantasy, Geeks/Nerds, and Science/Technology.  In fact, I'm passionate and educated enough about it that I have successfully written a long paper about how these topics intersect to graduate college.  It wasn't a thesis, it was an undergraduate degree, but it was in the same vein as such endeavors.  

Who am I and why the heck should you care about how these two things intersect?  Well, I don't know the answers to why you should care, but I can tell you why I care and that can help answer the first question.

I am white, middle-classed, male, Christian.  I grew up in suburban New York in the NYC metropolitan area.  My family is/was conservative, religious, and while not wealthy, assuredly privileged.  Faith, specifically the Christian faith, was always at the very least an undertone of the general culture in my home.  My family has a history, too, of mental health issues.  My dad's side of the family has bipolar disorder pretty rampantly, my mom's has acute anxiety and depression, as far I can tell.  While bipolar disorder may be mostly biological, as far as I know, mood disorders like anxiety and depression are a bit more layered and complicated than that.  There are biological components, but there are also environmental, diet, and behavioral components.  

Growing up, a lot of attention was offered to my older sister, who struggled with bipolar disorder, or something like it, for most of her life.   I wasn't friends with her for many years, and my parents seemed pretty preoccupied with her.  I moved around a bit in the early years of my childhood, having left my dad with my mom and sister, moving into the apartment above my grandparents, then moving out of that apartment into an apartment with my stepdad, finally moving out of that one into the house I basically grew up in.  Suffice it to say, I never had friends for very long, never really learned the secrets to making them when my brain was most likely to form the connections necessary to do so.  

I found solace and companionship in the presence of fictional characters, from books and television shows, to movies and video games.  I preferred to mentally live in fantasy worlds.  I could rely on the acceptance of these not-real-people, the consistency of their company.  And, as characters that have been formed by the minds of people who have a healthy dose of respect for science and a seriously heavy dose of skepticism in regards to religion of any kind, I found myself confused.

I had Jesus in my blood!  Christianity was a family trait and as I got older, I appreciated the things it gave me.  I had experiences, too, that dovetailed better with an interpretation of reality that contained God in general and Christ specifically.  But I felt more kinship with a community that had "grown past" the need for God, had placed itself as the masters of creation, ever moved forward in the name of progress.  Reconciling these two was a pretty existential inner conflict that lasted years.  

Helpfully, both sources had tools I could use to figure things out.  On the Christian side, thank God, is Jesus himself.  He's SO different from the rest of the Church.  When you actually give a listen to what he values, the whole system flips on its head.  I suggest starting with the Sermon on the Mount, starting Matthew chapter 5.  But the whole book of John is pretty impressive, too.  He lived for that one lost sheep.  He valued love and social justice and the oppressed masses more than anything else.  You want to start somewhere real in Christianity, follow his example.  The only people he got mad and violent with were those that thought they knew all the answers, the ones that put themselves up as the mouthpiece of God, then used that authority to oppress and exclude others.  

On the SF side, there was the way of thinking behind the genre itself.  Science fiction is a cognitive estrangement type genre.  Unlike fantasy, or fables, or mythology, which are all estranged types of fiction, SF is not metaphysical.  What happens in the stories are generally not the result of ethics or morals, and good things don't happen to good people just because they ought to.  In this way, SF is very like realistic fictions, which try to mirror reality as best they can.  That's what makes it cognitive.  But unlike realistic fictions, you can't just take for granted that you understand how everything works, because it's always worked that way.  You read good SF often enough and you learn not to make assumptions, but keep an open mind and try to figure out the rules as you go along.  This is a great skill to have and when you apply it to real life, it can turn a lot of things on their heads, too.

Together, I was able to discard a lot of the garbage my Christian upbringing left in my lap.  But I was also careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  I like to remember that theology, or the study of God, was considered to be the mother of sciences.  When you have faith that God is faithful, that he is rational, it's easy to look at the rest of the universe that way, too.  

I think that's it for my pilot post.  Any questions, feel free to ask.  Any comments are pretty welcome, too.  See everyone on the other side.  

I'm going to include a reading list of these posts in this blog soon.

Edit: I have a list of the reading order for the articles that express the themes I'm going to be using to make sense of the topics that come to mind in the future.

• Moral Compass
  
• Best Laid Schemes
  
• Me, Myself, and I
  
• A Whole New World

These are the best places to start. I'd really appreciate if you guys left some comments. I'm trying to gauge the readership and the interaction that these articles incite.