Worst opening lines to possible novels

Once a year there is a contest, named after a nineteenth-century novelist, open to people who can create the most awful opening sentences to imaginary novels. They are a lot of fun to read. Here are a few of the best from recent years:

1. As Holmes, who had a nose for danger, quietly fingered the bloody knife and eyed the various body parts strewn along the dark, deserted highway, he placed his ear to the ground and, with his heart in his throat, silently mouthed to his companion, "Arm yourself, Watson, there is an evil hand afoot ahead."

2. Through the verdant plains of North Umbria walked Waylon Ogglethorpe, and, as he walked, the clouds whispered his name, the birds of the air sang his praises, and the beasts of the fields from smallest to greatest said, "There goes the most noble among men" – in other words, a typical stroll for a schizophrenic ventriloquist with delusions of grandeur.

3. For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

4. When Hru-Kar, the alpha-ranking male of the silver-backed gorilla tribe finished unleashing simian hell on Lt. Cavendish, the once handsome young soldier from Her Majesty’s 47th Regiment resembled nothing so much as a crumpled up piece of khaki-colored construction paper that had been dipped in La Victoria chunky salsa.

5. The wood nymph fairies blissfully pranced in the morning light past the glistening dewdrops on the meadow thistles by the Old Mill, ignorant of the daily slaughter that occurred just behind its lichen-encrusted walls, twin 20-ton mill stones savagely ripping apart the husks of wheat seed, gleefully smearing the starchy entrails across their dour granite faces in unspeakable botanical horror and carnage – but that’s not our story; ours is about fairies!

6. In Southwestern Germany just east of the Luxemburg border and north of France where history pitted various related Hapsburg Royals against each other and the Archbishops of Trier, the Abbots of St. Maximin, various members of the nobility, and mobs of axe-bearing villagers, there stands a ruin whose building stones mostly were carted off to build other buildings.

7. The band of pre-humans departed the cave in search of solace from the omnipresent dangers found there knowing that it meant survival of their kind, though they probably didn't understand it intellectually since their brains were so small and undeveloped, but fundamentally they understood that they didn't like big animals that ate them.

8. The wind whispering through the pine trees and the sun reflecting off the surface of Lake Tahoe like a scattering of diamonds was an idyllic setting, while to the south the same sun struggled to penetrate a sky choked with farm dust and car exhaust over Bakersfield, a town spread over the lower San Joaquin Valley like a brown stain on a wino’s trousers, which is where, unfortunately, this story takes place.

Liberals and their word choices

As an English teacher, I love words—how they are used and misused. A recent example comes from a smart man in the Senate, John Kerry. At least, he tells us he’s smart.

He had a town hall meeting the other day. Kerry had to offer an apology to a woman who was there. But check out what the apology was for and what it says about uber-liberals and their word choices.

The senator apologized to one woman who had a complaint against him. She claimed he had called her a Neanderthal for not believing in global warming. Now, watch how Kerry got out of this. He said he was referring generally to those who do not believe in the science of global warming and not to the one woman in particular.

OK, let’s review this apology. Kerry said he was not specifically accusing this one woman. Instead, he was smearing an entire group of people with this negative term, “Neanderthal.” Think about what the term implies—stupid, semi-human, backward, doomed to die out, ugly, anti-intellectual. There's a word with heavy negative connotations. It ranks right up there with "fascist" and "racist."

Now, consider the implications of what he said. He thinks it is OK to attack a huge number of serious people and smear them even if they have scientific backgrounds and have looked long and hard at the issue of global warming. But he’s sensitive to a single person standing in front of him.

Haven’t we heard that before, coming out of the mouth of bigots? “Hey, when I bad-mouthed that entire group of people because of their ethnicity or religion, I didn’t mean you.” Sure, that really works. The individual is not comforted one bit. “Some of my best friends are . . .” just doesn't cut it.

But that’s where we are today. People like Kerry think they are open-minded and tolerant. Well, maybe for a solitary person they are dealing with. But they have no problem attacking and smearing an entire group—“Christians are stupid,” “Conservatives want people to die,” “Those against same-sex marriage are bigots,” etc. I’m hoping we see behind these verbal barrages and realize how intolerant they really are.

Read a good book lately?

I love to read, which is a good thing because I'm an English teacher. I wanted to share some recent good books I've read.

To Try Men's Souls is a historical fiction written by the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. He has done an excellent job in re-creating a hugely important battle during the American Revolution -- the attack on Trenton. We read current accounts of famous battles but don't appreciate what it was like to actually be there. In this account, we accompany soldiers as they struggle on a night march to attack the feared Hessians, mercenaries hired by England to devastate the rebel Americans. We have a chance to encounter Tom Paine, George Washington, and other famous Americans as they struggle to make the revolution succeed against tremendous odds.

Then there is Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, an in-depth look at Japan's lead up to World War II, the war itself, and its aftermath. The author' s main point is simple -- the Emperor of Japan, Hirohito, was not the innocent puppet of militarists. Instead, he was actively involved in seeking the war, prosecuting the war, and extending it far longer than the Japanese could afford. I have always wanted to look at the war from the Japanese side, and this does an excellent job. One thing that struck me was how many of the Japanese leaders knew that they would lose the war. Somehow, I had believed that Japan was taken over with crazy zealots who had grandiose notions of ultimate victory.

I had heard about Heart Of Darkness being the basis for the movie Apocalypse Now but it was only recently that I had a chance to read it. The book starts in sunny London during the day. At a gathering of several men, one of them relates the story of going to Africa. It is this story which takes up 90% of the book. Once the tale is completed, we go back to the gathering of men, now looking out on dusk as it settles over England. This ending reflects the theme of the entire story -- the darkness in all of us. Evil and ignorance are not located geographically; they are much closer than that. As the narrator travels up a major river in Africa, he finds more and more corruption and horror. This account reminded me of Lord of the Flies, a tale of proper British schoolchildren left alone on an island where they gradually descend into madness and murder. Both of these novels have Christian themes in their hearts -- the sin nature that each of us has.

Ah, then there are the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I read different ones from time to time, but a new one that I recently completed was called "A Study in Scarlet." The character of Holmes is just as interesting as the cases he solves -- prickly, eccentric, brilliant, aloof, and brave. Of course, we appreciate his unique qualities because he is set up in contrast to the good Dr. Watson, who represents intelligent, rational, and solid middle-class values.

I also read a collection of the year's best science fiction. Now, there are those who think science fiction is a waste of time, so I need to argue for the value of this literature. Someone once said, "I am going to spend the rest of my life in the future, so I need to prepare for it." Science fiction tells us that the future is not what we expect it to be; it focuses on change, which can be difficult for most of us. It is science fiction that is subversive literature, telling us things will not be what we think. In addition, science fiction can challenge us intellectually as we grapple with issues of science and human nature. The big question of science fiction is "what if?" Plus, this genre can be a great roller coaster ride, full of thrills and unexpected surprises. In addition, it is science fiction that can make us see our own times better by contrasting it with a future that may be better (or, more likely, worse). We can use sf to extrapolate: "If we continue down the current path, this may be the result. So, sf can serve as a warning. Maybe in a future blog I will go over some of my favorite science fiction authors. In the meantime, let me know if you have some favorites of yours so we can compare notes.

What do they say? "So little time, so many books." Yeah, that's how I feel. But I'll keep plugging away at my reading and hope that someday I can catch up on my list of books I want to read. Nah, who am I kidding?

Laughter is good for you

OK, times have been tough, but there are always jokes to help us survive. Here are some favorites of mine taken from Reader’s Digest.


Man at counter of a business selling cell phones: "I figured out how to send E-mails and faxes, take photos, play games, and film videos, but what I'd really like to do is make a phone call."

I dialed the wrong number and got the following recording: "I'm not available right now, but I thank you for caring enough to call. I'm making some changes in my life. Please leave a message after the beep. If I do not return your call, you are one of the changes."

Woman on telephone: "That sounds expensive. Is there anyway you could ship it without handling it?"

Bad weather meant I was stuck overnight at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Along with hotel accommodations, the airline issued each passenger a $10 meal ticket called a chit. That evening after dinner I presented my meal ticket to the cashier. "Is this chit worth $10?" I asked. Looking up nervously the cashier responded, "I'm sorry, sir. Was the meal that bad?"

I'm an attendant in a laundromat. A woman came in, sat near my counter and chain-smoked cigarette after cigarette. The smoke was bothering me, so I turned on the fan. "Could you please point that thing in another direction?" she asked. "I'm just getting over pneumonia and the last thing I need is a breeze blowing on me."

A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children.

There's no such thing as fun for the whole family.

My sister was busy getting ready to host our entire family for Easter. On her to-do list was a hair appointment for her daughter. "So, Katie," said the stylist as the little girl got up in the chair, "who's coming to your house this weekend with big ears and floppy feet?" Katie replied, "I think it's my Uncle Brian."

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.

When it comes to raising children, I believe in give-and-take. I give orders and they take them.

Visiting his parents’ retirement village in Florida, my middle-aged friend, Tim, went for a swim in the community pool while his elderly father took a walk. Tim struck up a conversation with the only other person in the pool, a five-year-old boy. After a while, Tim's father returned from his walk and called out, "I'm ready to leave." Tim then turned his new friend and announced that he had to leave because his father was calling. Astonished, the wide-eyed little boy cried, "You're a kid?"

One of my fourth graders asked my teacher's assistant, "How old are you, Mrs. Glass?" "You should never ask an adult’s age," I broke in. "That's okay," Harriet said smiling. "I'm 50." "Wow, you don't look that old," the boy said. I was breathing a sigh of relief when another child chimed in, "Parts of her do."

As my five-year-old son and I were heading to McDonald's one day, we passed a car accident. Usually when we see something terrible like that, we say a prayer for whoever might be hurt, so I pointed and said my son, "We should pray." From the back seat I heard his earnest voice: "Dear God, please don't let those cars block the entrance to McDonald's."

Where does morality come from?

This is a quick blog today dealing with similar ideas obtained from two different sources.

The first is from Greg Koukl, a great source of wisdom and practical knowledge about all apologetics issues. He’s on the radio every Sunday from 2-5 p.m. on KBRT-AM 740. If you can’t listen to him, go to his web site (str.org) for downloads and great articles.

He was talking to someone about the issue of morality. He claims atheists can be moral, but they have no grounding (ultimate reason) for their morality. He ended the conversation by saying something simple but profound. Atheists and evolutionists can talk a good morality line, but they fail at a key point. Evolution is descriptive—it tries to tell what happened. But morality is prescriptive—it tries to tell what we ought to do.

These are two very different things. They don’t overlap. You can talk all you want about how things came about, but you’ll never be able to say why we should obey the rules that you say have evolved.

The second reference to this concept came about from a CD I’m listening to. It’s The Lamb and the Fuhrer by Ravi Zacharias, an imagined discussion between Jesus and Adolf Hitler. This question came up: “How can you make moral judgments in a world without moral laws?" We see this today—people refuse to say things are truly immoral because they have jettisoned the idea of moral laws, existing beyond the whims and opinions of fallible human beings. If there is no higher morality and it’s all a matter of taste, then we can’t judge anything as immoral.

But it’s impossible to live this way, so we hear people complaining of true moral issues (“the war is wrong,” “that’s immoral,” he’s guilty of genocide,” etc.). We need to call them on it. If they have turned their back on the existence of a God who has standards of morality, they can only say they don’t like the issue at hand. Morality becomes an issue like flavors of ice cream—we like some and dislike others.

Those who say God doesn’t exist don’t want to do this, so they act as if there is true morality in their issues. They have smuggled in Christian morality while rejecting the God who established the standards. Again, we need to remind them of their double-mindedness.

Radical Islam and multiculturalism

In our apologetics class at church, we discussed Islam last week. We focused on the beliefs of this faith as well as ways to approach Muslims with the good news of Jesus and Christianity. Of course, the issue of sharia law and other features of radical Islam came up, but we didn’t want to get bogged down exploring the political and cultural landscape that changed so drastically after 9-11.

However, an article that recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Cameron’s Multicultural Wake-up Call” made me think about the folly of the Western world over the past 10-20 years that has a tie-in with radical Islam. During that time period we have had educators, political activists, media stars, and others tell us that we needed to embrace all cultures. Now, in general that sounds fine, exploring the good things from people all over the world. But the real message from these multicultural supporters was to denigrate the Western culture and to suggest all cultures were the same. Those who disagreed were branded racists.

Just the other day, a major Western politician discovered how stupid this view was. 'Multiculturalism has failed," said British Prime Minister David Cameron last weekend in Munich. He was echoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had said the same thing a few months ago. Finally, Europe's mainstream party leaders seem to be realizing what others have long noticed: Multiculturalism has been the most pernicious and divisive policy pursued by Western governments since World War II.

State-sponsored multiculturalism in Europe ended up Balkanizing the Western nations that bought into the theory. It judged that the state should not "impose" rules and values on newcomers. Rather, it should bend over backwards to accommodate the demands of immigrants. The resultant policy was that states treated and judged people by the criteria of whatever "community" they found themselves born into. This led to some bizarre situations. In 1984, a British school principal named Ray Honeyford politely suggested in an article in the Salisbury Review that it might be a good idea if students at his state-funded school were able to speak English and did not disappear to Pakistan for months at a time. The result was a rash of accusations of "racism," which willfully ignored his arguments and precipitated the end of his career.

The multicultural model may have continued a lot longer if it hadn't been for radical Islam. The terrorist assaults and plots across Britain and Europe—often from home-grown extremists—provided a breaking point that few intelligent people could ignore. The fact is that Britain, Germany, Holland and many other European countries have nurtured more than one generation of citizens who seem to feel no loyalty toward their country and who, on the contrary, often seem to despise it.

This should be a wake-up call for those of us in the United States. We must reject mindless babbling about the joys of other cultures and how much better they are than our own Western variety. We can’t allow groups living within our borders to stay within their cultural walls and refuse to blend into our society. Please read my blogs on The Grand Jihad, which illustrates examples of this happening right here in our country. We have to defend the strengths and virtues of what we have here.

Are you a Baptist? Do you care?

I grew up in a nondenominational church, went for several years to a Baptist church, and now am back to a nondenominational one. So, I’ve seen life from both sides. A recent poll in The Wall Street Journal covering the rise of nondenominational churches was interesting.

Studies conducted by secular and Christian organizations indicate that fewer and fewer American Christians, especially Protestants, strongly identify with a particular religious communion—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, etc. According to the Journal, a study conducted by Baylor University found that nondenominational churches now represent the second largest group of Protestant churches in America, and they are also the fastest growing.

It looks like churches are being selected for practical matters. Is the nursery easy to find? Do I like the music? Are there support groups for those grappling with addiction? I see this as both good and bad.

Many were tired of denominations full of tired clichés and boring sectarian formulas. The life had disappeared out of the church. People wanted to get back to basics, to recover the centrality of a personal relationship with Jesus. This could be done without regard to specific theological issues.

But the bad is contained there too. Christians today know so little about the theological basis for their faith. In our apologetics group we studied Islam. One of the big issues there is the Trinity—Muslims don’t believe in it. But how many people can even defend the belief from the Bible? Probably very few. This is not good. That’s why a long time ago I blogged on Charles Colson’s new book, The Faith, in which the author talked about the basics of the faith that we should already have known.

So how has this emphasis on nondenominational churches worked? The movement exploded. The Journal reports that before 1955, there were virtually no megachurches (defined as 2,000 people per worship service) in the country. Now there are between 850 and 1,200 such churches and many are nondenominational, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

Where does the church go from here? The Journal says there are some signs of a growing church-focused evangelicalism. Many young evangelicals may be poised to reconsider denominational doctrine, if for no other reason than they are showing signs of fatigue with typical evangelical consumerism. As an example, consider Alabama preacher David Platt, who is igniting thousands of young people with his book Radical, which calls Christians to rescue their faith by lowering their standard of living and giving their time and money to Church-based charities. The author of the Journal piece also reported that the Southern Baptist Convention—the nation's largest Protestant group—has over 10,000 students studying for ministry in six seminaries right now.

The author believes denominations can focus on the issues Jesus cared about—personal conversion, discipleship, mission and community. We may be seeing a return to denominations. OK, looks like we can start up the jokes again. “These two Pentecostalists go to heaven . . .”

Life in the Lab

For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in astronomy and related areas of science. This has led to my curiosity about life's origin-- how did it all get started here on planet Earth? Growing up in the Christian church, I heard the story of God's creation. Then along came college. Now all I heard was the evolutionary model, based on the assumption that life was pretty simple to get started. All you needed were the right chemicals and a spark to set it all off. But thanks to Hugh Ross and his organization Reasons to Believe, we now know the real story.

Hugh and Fuz Rana have written extensively about the frustration of origin-of-life researchers over the last few decades. Knowledge about life's intricate complexities has grown to the point where naturalistic explanations seem pretty desperate. International researchers gather at origin-of-life events, tear down each other's theories, and leave more confused than before.

But the problem for theists is simple -- we haven't been able to get the true message out to enough people. Most still believe life came from primordial soup that was zapped by a bolt of lightning. They don't realize what recent advances have done to this picture--naturalistic theories simply don't match the current scientific understanding of the early earth and the intricacies of the "simple" cell.

Dr. Rana has just released a brand-new book that should help clear up some of this confusion. It's called Creating Life in the Lab. In this book he describes what researchers have investigated and discovered as they have attempted to assemble constituent parts of what we call life. He tells of synthetic biology, the most recent frontier in life sciences, which holds out both dangers and promises.

I'm planning to get a copy and read this book. I hope you will consider doing the same. You can go to Reasons to Believe's web site (reasons.org) to order the book. As some of you know, Dr. Rana came to our church a couple of years ago to describe the incredible complexity of the cell. I'm sure he will bring the same insights and clarity to his new topic.

And in this corner . . .

This is a short note, but I'll add another blog this weekend. There's a debate coming up at UCSD in early March. The title is pretty simple: "Is Religion the Problem?" The subquestions are the following: "Is belief in God a menace to civilization, as the new atheists contend?" "Would a secular world be a more rational, peaceful, and decent world?"

Arguing against the question will be Dinesh D'Souza, president of The King's College. I've read some of his works before--a very solid thinker. Going up against him will be Dan Barker, American Atheist activist. I don't know much about him, but he's the author of a provocative book called Losing Faith in Faith; From Preacher to Atheist.

The debate is on Monday, March 7th at 7 p.m. on the campus of UCSD in the Price Center West Ballrooms. It's free and open to the public.

By the way, Emmanuel Faith Community Church will be hosting Greg Koukl on April 1st at 7 p.m. to hear his presentation on the new atheists. Greg will be arguing that science, morality, and logic is actually on the side of the Christians, not the atheists.

It's healthy to have open discussions like this. I say that knowing that Christianity can hold its own in a rational discussion.