Bad Air

After finally landing after possibly the worst flight of my life, where I was delayed for eight and a half hours and received horrible compensation, I feel inspired for a prompt: write about the worst experience flying you've ever had and then write how your character would handle the same situation. Tate would probably threaten to hurt someone and be taken away by security.

Dealing With Conflicting Beliefs

Douglas Adams, who I wrote about the other day, is a radical atheist. Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game, recently came out as being homophobic. How do you deal with an author you like who has a belief conflicting to yours?

The easy answer is to focus on not the author, but their work. I don't think that Ender Wiggin ever beat up a gay kid at Battle School (I don't know, I haven't read the series). Jesus and God come up once each in the first Hitchhiker's book, but neither are completely atheistic. The first is when it says "nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change". It's not exactly promoting Christianity, but it isn't calling Jesus a sham either. When the Babel fish, which translates for you, is being discussed, a story is mentioned in which due to the Babel fish, it is proof that God exists, and coincidentally he does not. However, the next sentence is "Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys."

If an author does happen to mention something that you personally disagree with in their writing, it becomes your choice as to whether you should continue reading or if you are simply going to disagree with him/her (although both the examples mentioned are he) and keep going.

Happy Belated Birthday, Douglas Adams!

March 11 would have been Douglas Adams's 61st birthday, had he not died of a heart attack in 2001. His work with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is his most popular work, but everything that he has written involves a heavy hand of humor and whimsy that turned him into a hipster cult phenomenon. Who knows what he would have done had he been alive now?