[Scott Bakker]

As an epic fantasy author, I never cease to be startled by the following fact: if you take a map of Biblical Israel, erase all the names and replace them with ones you invent, then do the same with the shorelines, the mountain ranges, and so on; if you change everything except the way the ancient Israelites thought things worked, you find yourself with something very similar to Middle-earth: an alternate world where magic is possible, where divinity is palpable, and where good and evil prepare for an apocalyptic confrontation. You find yourself, in other words, with a fantasy world.

What could be going on here? Why this strange connection between scripture and fantasy?

[Beleg]

What could be going on here? Why this strange connection between scripture and fantasy?

Probably because both things are mutually interchangeable. :p

Of scriptures I have only read the Holy Quran, and I cannot really see any similarity there likely because it reads less like a story and more like a treatise [and a cryptic one at that].

[Holbrook]

The same could be said of a fragment of any map ancient or modern. Maps show what we know to be true. Old maps included not only what they knew to be true, but what faith/legend told them was true. Hence the "Here be dragons" or the "pillars of Hercules".

Man has always wanted to know everything, what he could not prove at a certain time he looked to faith/legends etc to fill in the gaps.

Strange thing is the more we have found out, the more we look to "other views" of the truth. Once the past, present and possible future was recorded and explained in stories, in a way the past present and possible future we would wish is now explained the very same way....

[Scott Bakker]

I don't think the same thing holds for modern maps, Holbrook. If you change the surface details of a map of a scientifically understood world, you would simply have an alternate world not a fantasy world.

This is the thing. As Beleg says, there is something interchangeable between fantasy worlds and scriptural worlds. I think things like the Harry Potter controversy are a clear demonstration of this. What this means, is that the structural features that define - for the majority of people - the truest of the true worlds (that described in scripture), are the same features that identify other worlds as fantastic, which is just to say the falsest of the false worlds.

Now that is one helluva contradiction for any culture to stomach. It says something profound, don't you think?

[Dawnstorm]

What this means, is that the structural features that define - for the majority of people - the truest of the true worlds (that described in scripture), are the same features that identify other worlds as fantastic, which is just to say the falsest of the false worlds.

Belief = Tool: Reality = inaccessible without recourse to some sort of belief.

Belief comes in hierarchy, and fantasy and scripture do tend to clash within people who nowadays would be often referred to as narrow minded (see anti-Harry-Potter campaigns). Most believers, though, don't see Fantasy as competition.

I don't have a problem with that at all, as I don't want to be a believer (though, no doubt, I do believe stuff, but as long as I can ignore it, so what?). Or differently put, for me, belief works best as "makebelieve"; just as efficient as a tool, but none of the responsibility to abstracts such as god or justice.

I've been a child with a very vivid imagination, and all kinds of supernatural story stuff had pretty much the same effect on me. Which means that I've always believed in that kind of stuff more than a rational kid should have, and that I took the Bible less seriously than a devout kid's supposed to.

But then, I've always been strange...

[Scott Bakker]

What do you think it says about our culture, though, Dawnstorm?

[Holbrook]

I don't think the same thing holds for modern maps, Holbrook. If you change the surface details of a map of a scientifically understood world, you would simply have an alternate world not a fantasy world.

Not quite. I can go five miles from here and stand in the middle of a raised earth embankment of an Iron Age fort. Same world, same place, but it once had a different name; people there had different beliefs, different dreams, myths and stories. The present world to them would be a fantasy world, their world, though we call it history, is as fantastical to us.

It is layers and the prospective of the observer.

I was lucky I was brought up in the last dying gasp of a traditional English village, before it became a dormitory for people who work as far away as London! (One and half hours by express train.) The past, both real and imaginary (that of legends, local traditions etc) was part of the way of life. Today you need to get a book from the local library to learn these. People here no longer pass on the oral tradition. I have tried with my daughters; to tell them about the world they live in, not just the world shown on the TV and in the papers. To show them the layers of the world they live in, both history; myth and legend. The fantasy all around them. The ghosts that are only a layer away.

Hell, none of the children know what a boggert is and there were supposed to be a few round here ;)

[Dawnstorm]

What do you think it says about our culture, though, Dawnstorm?

That we're living in a culture where scripture and fantasy can have similar structure and content, but different functions. Not only does this culture bring forth believers and fantasy readers, it also brings forth you and me.

The fact that you consider this an important point and that I see how (I think), also shows that we're living in a culure that puts special value on words. (Other than, say, Buddhist cultures which is more about ritual action, if I'm not mistaken - I'm not an expert.)

If you want a moral evaluation of this, I'm sorry, I don't have one. This plays out differntly in different situations, doesn't it?

[Scott Bakker]

Not a moral evaluation, a socio-historical one. How does a society get to the point where the same features that identify the fantastic also characterize the sacred?

[Dawnstorm]

Not a moral evaluation, a socio-historical one. How does a society get to the point where the same features that identify the fantastic also characterize the sacred?

Ah, I'm not really qualified to comment on that without research. Would be interesting to look at the history of scepticism. I have a hunch there are a lot of hints to be found in that one.