To read an excerpt from the book, please click on the following link:

ashaveilbook.blogspot.com

An excerpt from The Pleasure Palace, my romantic comedy, can be found here:



Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Did God Create Satan/Who's on First?

One of the ideas I am batting about is how to weave in the idea of the origins of evil and good into my novel.

 There is a thought that if God created everything, then He created Satan, and subsequently created evil...and so then, by default, is God capable of evil?  There is as much conjecture on this particular subject as there are stars in the sky, it seems....so much so that, in The Gospel of Demeter, I decided to have two characters become embroiled in a huge theological debate on this subject, which will devolve into a mutual (verbal) misunderstanding based on Abbot and Costello's comedy routine "Who's on First?"

 I figure that "Who's on First?" but with God and Satan instead of baseball players is pretty irreverent, and it also makes a point that I think shakes people up a bit:  we really don't know ANYTHING at all in terms of hard facts about these subjects.  So much has been said about what God supposedly does, didn't do, what he created, what he didn't create, etc--and I want to present this tangle as something kind of ridiculously funny....because, serious as the matter is, it IS a bit absurd.  We know more than we think we know, and we also know a hell of a lot less than we think we do.  I think that's pretty  much the conundrum of my own spiritual life. 

Not sure how to approach writing it, and of course it may not work, but it strikes me that a lot of theological discussions are a bit like "Who's on First?" anyway.

If you grew up on Mars and don't know the comedy routine, here it is (I find it a bit harsh for modern ears, but it's really clever, and 90 percent of its success is in the delivery):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTcRRaXV-fg

The idea might not work, but I think it is worth a try.

And that's the latest transmission from Planet Joanie.








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