Tales of Tiberius: Backstory Blog

Badly needing a new job, in addition to hitting the want ads, I decided to fire up my Prayer of Jabez DVD. Early on they suggested writing a ‘Prayer of Jabez’ journal. I can write, so I thought I would do that.
The good news is I have a new job and I got it exactly one month after starting the DVD journal. The bad news is it’s still a temp job and possibly very short term, but one day at a time.
My personal experience with the Prayer of Jabez is that it works…kind of… I’ve always found it helpful, just not very helpful. Other people seem to get a lot better results with this.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot to be thankful for. I thank God every day that I live in the USA , for example. I’m very grateful for the help in getting this current job. Still I can’t help feeling like a character in a 1930’s serial around chapter ten. Thank God I’ve escaped from certain death…again…for the tenth week in a row…yea, this is…great… It does beat the alternative, but could I have a word with the writer about NEXT weeks episode?!?

Outliers are strange data points. If you take a survey of how tall everyone is in your office, and you get a report that someone is twelve feet tall. That’s an outlier. Probably it’s a bad data, someone wrote down Fred is 72” tall and it looked like 12′ tall after coffee got poured over the paper. But good science says that we have a glance at Fred to see if he really is twelve feet tall before you toss out that data. Or as it says in the Wikipedia section on outliers: “Unless it can be ascertained that the deviation is not significant, it is ill-advised to ignore the presence of outliers. Outliers that cannot be readily explained demand special attention.”
So what if, instead of talking about how tall everyone is in our office, lets talk about what critters we see in the neighborhood. Lets see, dog, cat, cow, Bigfoot….Bigfoot?!? Yep we have outliers in the field of biology. They are called Cryptids. Some of these pan out, like Black Swans which were once thought not to exist.
So what about elves? What’s interesting about Elves is that just like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, people claim to have seen Elves. The reports are rare, definitely scientific outliers, and frankly some of them, like the famous photos that A. Conan Doyle pushed, are extremely questionable.
So, are there really faeries, dragons, dwarfs or mermaids out there? Probably not, but you don’t ignore outlying reports. You want to keep an eye on them. After all if it turns out that really was a mermaid dancing off the Coast of Israel recently, that’s important news.

Last night I was challenged with the question “Are there morality lessons in the Iliad?” The short answer is yes. The book is actually so thick with morality lessons, it’s hard to discern them all.

This book can be a little confusing for the modern audience. It isn’t, as some people expect, a fairy tale. This is actually a history book. It’s not written in the style of modern histories, we don’t after all, talk of the Archangel Gabriel standing beside the Rangers as they made their charge up Pointe du Hoc. But that is just the way things were written back then. It has been well demonstrated that you can follow the history of the actual historic battle by reading Homer, if you understand his writing style. Understanding that it is a history explains why there are some boring lists in the book of who killed who and exactly what ships showed up. You will also note this is not the near mythical Achilles with invulnerable skin who takes the battlefield. That was a later creation of the poets. No this Achilles is an actual man. The over all plot structure is not dictated by the needs of fiction, but by historic events.

I should also note that the Iliad is not the story of “The Trojan War.” It’s a story of a battle during the Trojan War. It’s more like reading about D-Day, than World War II.

Nevertheless there are plenty of morality lessons to be found. You look for them in the actions and speeches of the individual characters. It helps to have a bit of a list in front of you before you dive in, so that you know when Nestor opens his mouth you’re going to hear the voice of wisdom and experience speaking.

As an example, here’s a random bit of wisdom from the opening scene of the Iliad. What answer does Achilles give his King, when the King tries to order his subjects about without properly consulting them. (Read in your favorite modern politician demanding that someone do such and such). “I should be a mean coward,” he cried, “were I to give into you in all things. Order other people about, not me…”

My favorite example of buried wisdom in the Iliad is Achilles commenting on socialism. Over three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks also faced the question of whether it was better to ‘spread the wealth around’ or should they give unique rewards for exceptional accomplishment? In refusing to fight any more for the Greeks, he says: “I see I have no thanks for all my fighting. He that fights fares no better than he that does not. Coward and hero are held in equal honor, and death deals like measure to him who works and him who is idle.” Something to think about. If you spread the wealth around too much, don’t expect your great heroes to exert themselves on your behalf. This is why Communism fails. The Greeks knew it in about 1250 B.C. Who says there are no morality lessons in the Iliad?

I hesitate to say anything bad about spammers as so far they are my biggest fans. Nevertheless too much of a good thing can be tiresome, so I’ve implimented some new security features. Appologies to those few humans who have visited here for the inconvienence.

I’m forever reading in fantasy books about some Ancient enemie returning from thousands of years ago and everyone is surprised and disapointed that no one is ready for them. Really? Thousands of years? You are suprised? What do we have now that’s over a thousand years
old? England? The Vatican?

Now there might be a story if the Nephilim returned. Of course a 12 foot giant might have a bit of trouble with an M1 tank.

In modern fantasy novels it’s very common for the author to make up their own deities. It is a tradition better honored in the breach than the observance. I don’t say it’s never appropriate, if you are writing about Ancient Atlantis or some place like that it’s logical to assume they would have some crazy pantheon of their own. But even in these cases there is too little use of the model Tolkien and C.S. Lewis used, i.e. giving new to the Christian Pantheon. I prefer to follow the model of the tales of Arthur and Charlemagne where we uphold Jesus as the true defender against the darkness. It’s something we need to be reminded of in this world which so often tries to deny that there is anything dark about the dark. In a world where it’s common to talk about killing fetal babies to make potions to prolong our lives, can we continue to deny the existence of black magic?