Of all the scraps of wisdom that I've ever come across in my life that ever perplexed me the most, "all stories are true" ranks up there with "do what thou wilt" in terms of puzzlement. Both seem ridiculous at first glance, but they yield slowly to analysis. I've seen "all stories are true" attributed to Alan Moore—by Dave Sim, though—and at the time I first came across this bromide, it was merely opaque to me. I wanted to honor truth, I hated lies, and everyone knew that lies were everywhere, so how were all stories true?

Decades later though I can see that "true" is a very large word indeed and difficult to assess. Is any fiction "true"? Arguably it must be, or it won't be convincing as fiction. A work of fiction that intersected in no way with recognizable human truth wouldn't be regarded as fiction; it'd be regarded as opaque and alien. That intersection of fiction with human reality is roughly what we call "plausibility", and it pervades all fictions and lies. Lies are only believable because they're plausible, even if the plausibility is slight.

It doesn't end there. The person telling the story or the lie must want to believe it, as well. In my experience it's not possible for a human being to tell a lie they don't believe themselves at least a bit. Try to make yourself say something that you don't place any credence in, and you practically have to trick yourself, forcing the words out. It's like your very body doesn't want to participate in the deception. Hence to the liar or storyteller, there's another region of intersection between the story and human truth, and it's probably not the same as the region of "plausibility" that keeps the listener engaged to the tale. The tale-teller wants certain things to be true that aren't in the listener's zone of plausibility. The implication? There's a larger sense of truth, bigger than what either individual believes in.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Prudence. Justice. Fortitude. Temperance.

These are the four cardinal virtues of "Classical" ethics, as expounded upon by Greek and Roman writers. Early Christians later picked up on them, adding to their number three more virtues, "theological virtues" derived from one of Paul's epistles:

Faith. Hope. Charity.

"Charity" is sometimes rendered as "Love". Now, when I was studying up on Christianity leading up to my conversion, reading all that apologetic writing from Jack Lewis and everyone, I was very keen on these virtues. They seemed important.

They are not. Even Jack Lewis did not think so, not really, because he wrote an entire novel, Perelandra, about the only Christian virtue that actually matters.

Obedience.

Obedience, you'll notice, isn't among any of the seven virtues named earlier, although I'm sure that if you looked hard enough you'd find some Christian apologist or other claiming to derive obedience from other virtues. Is obedience really a virtue?

I say it isn't. Christians themselves do not exercise it. The more extreme the Christian, the more likely they are to be willful and disobedient, claiming exemption from a higher power for breaking oaths and promises and so forth. And honestly? If there's been anything good about Christianity at all throughout the centuries, it's disobedience. There were genuine martyrs once, people who refused to honor Roman authority—soldiers who refused to kill, women who refused to marry the man their fathers pushed on them, and others whom the brutish Romans would then torture or kill.

Hence it's highly suggestive and significant that, at the end of its life, mainstream Christianity has decided that the only virtue of importance is a false virtue, and in fact not a Christian virtue at all, because obedience is a secular thing. Any mortal authority figure will tell you that nothing is more important than obedience.

And now I know why Perelandra, even though I think it's a fascinating novel, has been sitting wrong with me all these years, bothering me. At the time I felt merely irritated that Lewis was attempting to retread the story of the Fall, although I'll at least credit him for doing something a bit different with it. Now, though, the entire Christian preoccupation with the Fall (and with Genesis stuff in general) seems profoundly unhealthful. Wasn't the whole point of the Incarnation, if there was any point at all to an event which may never have happened, to show a new way forward? A new beginning? Plainly it's failed because Christians continue to gnaw away at the same old wounds.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I propose that determination may, in fact, be construed as the logical dual of obedience.

Put it this way: obedience keeps Sisyphus chained to the task of pushing his rock. You may say that he's "determined to be obedient" but I think this is actually impossible. Determination to keep doing a nightmare job—where does that come from? Having been in that situation I'll tell you: it's because you're determined, one day, you'll never have to do it again. And if you decide to quit then that's where your determination goes.

There's probably no stronger statement of determination in "Undertale" than the three words "but it refused."

~Chara of Pnictogen

Prudence. Justice. Fortitude. Temperance.

These are the four cardinal virtues of "Classical" ethics, as expounded upon by Greek and Roman writers. Early Christians later picked up on them, adding to their number three more virtues, "theological virtues" derived from one of Paul's epistles:

Faith. Hope. Charity.

"Charity" is sometimes rendered as "Love". Now, when I was studying up on Christianity leading up to my conversion, reading all that apologetic writing from Jack Lewis and everyone, I was very keen on these virtues. They seemed important.

They are not. Even Jack Lewis did not think so, not really, because he wrote an entire novel, Perelandra, about the only Christian virtue that actually matters.

Obedience.

Obedience, you'll notice, isn't among any of the seven virtues named earlier, although I'm sure that if you looked hard enough you'd find some Christian apologist or other claiming to derive obedience from other virtues. Is obedience really a virtue?

I say it isn't. Christians themselves do not exercise it. The more extreme the Christian, the more likely they are to be willful and disobedient, claiming exemption from a higher power for breaking oaths and promises and so forth. And honestly? If there's been anything good about Christianity at all throughout the centuries, it's disobedience. There were genuine martyrs once, people who refused to honor Roman authority—soldiers who refused to kill, women who refused to marry the man their fathers pushed on them, and others whom the brutish Romans would then torture or kill.

Hence it's highly suggestive and significant that, at the end of its life, mainstream Christianity has decided that the only virtue of importance is a false virtue, and in fact not a Christian virtue at all, because obedience is a secular thing. Any mortal authority figure will tell you that nothing is more important than obedience.

And now I know why Perelandra, even though I think it's a fascinating novel, has been sitting wrong with me all these years, bothering me. At the time I felt merely irritated that Lewis was attempting to retread the story of the Fall, although I'll at least credit him for doing something a bit different with it. Now, though, the entire Christian preoccupation with the Fall (and with Genesis stuff in general) seems profoundly unhealthful. Wasn't the whole point of the Incarnation, if there was any point at all to an event which may never have happened, to show a new way forward? A new beginning? Plainly it's failed because Christians continue to gnaw away at the same old wounds.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Watching I Saw the TV Glow, with its highly unsettling lunar energy, prompted me to revisit "Cerebus".

I now clearly see a somewhat embarrassing tendency in myself—one of many—that's found expression in a number of ways, such as my curiosity about what happened to M. Night Shyamalan between The Village and Lady in the Water. Occasionally the arts furnish examples of creators who seem to be at the top of their form and then simply collapse. All the gas suddenly goes out of their career and they never recover. The great American comedy director, Preston Sturges, experienced a sudden career implosion like that. Shyamalan did. And so did Canadian indie comic star Dave Sim, who used to be one of my favorite artists of all time.

cw: lengthy discourse about Dave Sim's "Cerebus", his dabbling with the nature of godhood and gender in the comic, and its disintegration into a soup of bigotry)