Imaginary Worlds - Faith in Fantasy

Episode Date: November 1, 2018

Science fiction has not always been compatible with religion -- in fact many futuristic settings imagine no religion at all. But sci-fi and fantasy have long fascinated people of different faiths because the genres wrestle with the big questions of life. I recently moderated a discussion between Minister Oscar Sinclair, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat and Alwaez Hussein Rashid about why SF worlds intrigue and inspire them. List of References: "Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. TolkienX-Men comicsDoctor Who Season 6 Episode 13 “The Big Bang” “The Mists of Avalon” by Marion Zimmer Bradley Isaac Asimov, novelist“Speaker for the Dead” by Orson Scott Card “Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke“Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein “Record of a Spaceborn Few” from The Wayfarers Series by Becky Chambers“Small Gods” by Terry Pratchett Octavia Butler, novelistStar Trek: Deep Space Nine- Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin Monstress comics by Marjorie Liu “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Larry NivenMelancholia, film by Lars von Trier The Dragonlance series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman The Bloodprint Series by Ausma Khan“City of Brass” from The Daevabad series by S.A. Chakraborty Sabaa Tahir, novelistNarnia series by C.S. Lewis "Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land" by Ruthanna Emrys"The Sparrow" by Mary Doria RussellFirefly TV series “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” play by Jack Thorne  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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apply. We value your opinion. Make your voice heard by going to megaphone.fm slash opinion to take a short survey that will help support our network. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Before I begin, I want to welcome new listeners who may have just discovered the show because the podcast 20,000 Hertz aired the crossover episode that we did on Radio Dramas. Now, if you are new to Imaginary Worlds, a great place to start is the first episode from 2014, which is called Origin Stories. Actually, some people start there and binge through the entire podcast in order. But you can also check out the different mini-series that I've done about Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Harry Potter.

I've also covered Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, DC. So, have fun geeking out. Today's episode is going to be unlike any episode I've done before, because this is a roundtable discussion. You won't hear me as the narrator very much because I'll be taking on the role of moderator. The inspiration for this episode came from a call-out that I put to my listeners on Facebook about what topics they'd like to hear. And a lot of people suggested the role of religion in science fiction fantasy worlds. I found that really intriguing, but I also thought, you know what I'd really love to hear?

Leaders of different faiths discussing that topic with each other. So I recently brought together three leaders of different faiths for conversation. Hussein Rashid is a professor at Columbia University, and he's an al-wa'ez, which is a traveling preacher at Muslim religious gatherings. And he often talks about science fiction and fantasy in his sermons. I've used Lord of the Rings quite a bit. And the X-Men, of course, are the perpetual outsiders. Oh, and of course, I have to mention the Jedi as Sufi orders, you know, Muslim mystics. I've also made use of science fiction and fantasy in my sermons.

Rachel Barron Blatt is a rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, Massachusetts. A few years ago, at the time of the last regeneration of the doctor, when Peter Capaldi came into the role, I gave a sermon on new life and new beginnings and the Jewish concept of teshuva. It's often translated as repentance, but literally it means return, like turning around, starting over, beginning again. Yeah, Doctor Who is a rich place to go for writing. Oscar Sinclair is a minister at the Unitarian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. There's a line that Matt Smith says in one of his early episodes that he says, in the end, we're all stories. Make it a good one. And I have used that line and that idea at a number of memorial services.

Because in our tradition, we start out memorial services by saying that we make no claim on what happens after death. But what we can say is that the stories of a life matter. And in the end, that is what we carry forward. So in the the end we are stories and make it a good one that's all that's lovely um do you remember for each of you what's the first time you came across a work of fiction that made you think differently about either your religion or just faith in general for me in some way this goes back to the Doctor Who quote that we're all stories in the end, just make it a good one. For me, the story that shifted my relationship with both story and faith was Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. I think that counts as fantasy.

I think it's a kind of high Arthurian fantasy. Oh, yeah, definitely. Because I read that, I was probably 11 or 12. And it was the first time that I encountered a story I already knew, right? The Arthurian mythos, but retold from the perspective of a different character. And when you make Morgan Le Fay the protagonist rather than the antagonist, it completely changes the story. Which now, right, as an adult is an idea that's kind of old hat. I mean, of course, if you tell the story from someone else's POV, you get a different tale. But for me at 11 or 12,

that was radical. And I think has impacted the way I encounter scripture and sacred texts, which is to say, it's a kind of midrashic story. It's an interpretive story that turns the original on its head by giving us a different window into it. I was a really big Isaac Asimov reader growing up. And I think one of the things I really appreciated about him is that he had this arc, this vision of human progress that really assumed religion didn't exist, but he wasn't dismissive of other people's belief. It was always through the lens of what rationalism, what his vision of rationalism was. And so I think that allowed me to think about the relationship between faith and rationalism.

And actually also to understand that faith is its own type of rationalism, understand that faith is its own type of rationalism, that this logic that we sort of laud, the scientism, is just as logical as faith believes and the premises that faith operates out of. I was thinking through early influences and staring at a picture of my bookshelf here. And the oldest book on the shelf that I've held on to was Speaker for the Dead, the Orson Scott Card book. And it's interesting now because Orson Scott Card and I probably, if you sat us down, would disagree on just about everything. But when I was reading that for the first time, it was one of the first contemporary science fiction books that the pace was slow and it took questions of faith very seriously. I also wanted to go back a little bit to this conversation about rationalism and

religion, because that is fascinating to me. Many of the original science fiction authors, That is fascinating to me. Many of the original science fiction authors, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, took their worlds as ones where religion didn't exist, but they were still asking what I would say are pretty fundamental questions about religion. So a book like Rendezvous with Rama is really fundamentally about coming across something unknown and unknowable that is at a scale that we don't understand. That's fundamentally a religious question being asked in the form of science fiction. Hearing you talk about kind of the classics, Arthur C. Clarke, you're making me realize that the book I probably imprinted on most as an adolescent, and I'm a little embarrassed to

admit this on the air, but here we go, was Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which I don't think I could bear to pick up now. I think I would find it appalling on a variety of axes. But its fundamental question in some way has to do with otherness and community. And he invents this kind of religious ritual around what we do when someone dies, the literal eating of our dead, which is a little macabre. And I don't think it had occurred to me until now that that was what he was doing, that that was a fundamentally religious question. One of the books I've read recently that does this in a really beautiful way, and maybe in some way, this is a response to Orson Scott Card. Becky Chambers has a trilogy out called The Wayfarers Series. And it posits that after humanity destroyed planet Earth,

deposits that after humanity destroyed planet Earth, we created a fleet of ships and we engaged in an exodus from this planet. And she invents this beautiful set of religious rituals around what's done with the dead on these ships and the liturgy that's spoken when someone dies and the role of archivist who tells the stories of those who have died, and the role of caretaker to the dead, which ultimately means caring for their bodies and composting them so that they can become the soil that literally nurtures the next generation. And it's a really beautiful, really contemporary way of thinking about this religious question of what happens, what is our source of meaning once we take to the stars? One thing I'm actually really curious to hear is, have you ever

encountered a religion that was constructed completely by the author of this or screenwriter of this fantasy world that only exists within this world, but you've thought that's pretty intriguing? For me, the first answer that comes to mind is the Becky Chambers book that I mentioned, Record of a Space-Born Few, probably for two reasons. One is that they self-identify as the exodus or the exodus fleet. There's a piece of their liturgy that says, we are the exodus fleet. We are those that wand are those that wander still. And that resonates so much for me.

Maybe this is my Jewishness coming through. Because for Jews, our core narrative is we were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, and God brought us forth from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. That's the Passover story. That's in our daily liturgy. And so the notion of humanity heading out to the stars and maybe letting go of Judaism and Christianity and Islam and Hinduism and all of the many beautiful faiths that have arisen on this planet, and instead clinging to a single guiding narrative that says, we are the wanderers, we are the ones on this quest, and this is what we came

from, and this is what we're going toward. And while I wouldn't willingly give up my own religious tradition for anything, as a rabbi, I'm pretty attached to it. This is the first fictional religion I've encountered that has made me feel like, oh yeah, I could do that. If I needed to pick another one, put me in that book. Does anybody else here know Terry Pratchett's Small Gods? Yeah. I mean, that's the one that jumps out at me for that. Not so much because he's creating a religion, but he's creating a theology as it goes. The plot of the book starts with this assumption that gods, plural, exist, and they exist with power relative to the number of people that believe in them.

So this formerly very, very powerful God, because he's one of the major religions in the area, has only one true believer, so he has been essentially shrunk down to the size of a talking tortoise. And he eventually meets this one person that still believes in him who's a gardener. That book and that way of thinking about sort of a pantheist divinity, but in a very concrete and funny way, has really stuck with me. I haven't figured out how to work it into a sermon, but someday it will. What, I'm just curious, what was it about that really stuck with you? There's been a long debate within Unitarian Universalism as to how we talk about

the existence or not existence of divinity. And so I'm constantly looking for different ways of coming at that question that can engage my folks in ways that make us think deeper about the question between just a binary of a personal God exists or nothing unreal exists. Anything that presents a narrative in between those two things is naturally curious to me. I went through just shelves of what I had at home and I looked at Octavia Butler and that was sort of like a transformation of religion as we know it. And I looked at Octavia Butler, and that was sort of like a transformation of religion as we know it. But I think for me,

the one that comes closest to really creating almost a system, Star Trek T-Space Nine, with the Bajoran religion, where Star Trek's never really dealt with religion in a meaningful way. People don't have religion. And all of a sudden, there's this federation of people who have religion and they take it very seriously. And are they aliens, wormhole aliens? Or are they really these more powerful beings that really are gods? that really are gods.

It sounds like what a lot of everyone is getting at is this idea that what attracts you to science fiction and fantasy is that they ask a lot of the same questions that religion asks. If you were to summarize what some of those basic questions are, what do you think they are? There's a verse in the Quran that says, God created his tribes and nations so that we may know one another. And also that wherever you look at creation, that creation is a sign of God in all of creation. And I was reading N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series and Marjorie Liu's Monstrous comic series at roughly the same time.

And they were both dealing with this question of how do you deal with difference? And how do you marginalize people who are so different from you, even though you need that difference to survive? And so even recognizing that there's power in that difference and still pushing it away. And so for me, those questions of difference,

navigating that, is there a greater plan in having this difference or is it simply may the strongest survive? I'll just add on that another question that science fiction can often pose is how do things end and what is our response to it? So I'm thinking of the Larry Nevin, Lucifer's hammer, or the movie that came out a couple of years ago about a planet crashing into the earth. Melancholia, I think. Melancholia. Thank you. Just this idea that at some point stories end and how do we tell a story about how that happens and on a really big scale? That's a question that recurs every once in a while in science fiction.

And like a whole lot of science fiction, I think, is standing in for conversations that we all have to have with ourselves of our story is going to end. How will we respond in that moment. In Judaism, there's a meta question of, are things getting better or are they getting worse? Which is to say, is it the case that the greatest Torah interpreters, the greatest religious scholars are in the past, right? Moses was the pinnacle and we're all just kind of downgrading from there. Or is it the case that we're growing upward, that we're getting better, that we're expressing and expanding more of human potential from generation to generation? And you can find both of those viewpoints in Jewish tradition. And I've probably just subtly signaled which one of them is mine, which is to say, I like to imagine that, I like to hope that humanity is getting better over time. And that's the impulse that I see in

science fiction as well. It's a vision of the world as it could be if it were much bigger and wilder and stranger and more amazing than most of us know it to be in our day-to-day lives. And to me, that's also the promise of religion. That's part of what I turn to religion for, is that sense of hope in a wider world and a world where things don't need to be as broken as we have known them to be until now. You know, both of you are hitting on something that really resonates with me. But I also wonder, again, reading these books now 20, 30 years after I first read them, what would bother me about them? Oh, yeah.

Because I think for me, a lot of the appeal of science fiction fantasies, it's the promise of what is possible. But now when I go back and look at these stories, I realize just how constricting they are. And I wonder, were they right when I was 12 and they're not right now? Or are conceptions of what it means to be human grown in the past 30 years as a society? One of the things that I have to struggle with a lot, especially when talking about the early science fiction writers of sort of the Asimov-Clark generation, is that, you know, I'm a straight white dude. And so are they. And so when they're writing about what they see as possible and what they see as sort of culture becoming,

they're writing from a very particular point of view. And because that's a point of view that in large part I share, it makes it very easy for me to read those books and read them as, oh, yeah, that's a reasonable interpretation of where things might go. What are some of the bad cliches that you notice when you come across religion and sci-fi fantasy and you're like, oh, not that again? The religious figures who are fools, who are obstinate, don't believe what their own lying eyes are telling them to show

that this belief is so outside the pale. How can you trust anybody who's religious? I think that's a trope I would refrain. But again, I think fantasy deals with this differently than science fiction. Because I think about the Dragonlance series, which is still one of my favorite fantasy series, where the mages are clerical figure and they are looking at this higher power and trying to conjure these different gods

to do work for them in the world. Hussain, earlier you mentioned Deep Space Nine. And one of the reasons I bounced off that show a little bit was the Ferengi who felt to me like a really weird antisemitic caricature. Little squat people with big noses who are fixated on money and jewels. I mean, if that's not antisemitism, I don't know what is. And so every time they were on screen, I kind of cringed away like, oh, do we really have to be doing this again? Like it's whatever century Star Trek is set in, 24th century. Could we not be beyond that already?

I think it's this idea that religion will be transcended, that religion will not be a live question in books set even 200 years from now, or Gene Roddenberry's idea of Star Trek, which is a post-scarcity society, and part of that post-scarcity is that there is not religion. The thing about that is that the questions are always going to be there. We are always going to be asking, who am I? Who are you? How are we related? And how do we tell stories of ourselves and each other? And those are fundamentally religious questions. We don't get to skip over them because we've advanced enough as a society.

Our conversation continues just after the break. Imaginary Worlds is brought to you by Dell. If you enjoy listening to our show, that means you might like getting into the details of the technology we talk about on the show. And if that's the case, you should check out the new podcast, Luminaries from Dell Technologies. Mark Schaefer and Douglas Carr are authors and futurists who host Luminaries, and they're joined by some of the brightest minds in tech. You'll hear from industry experts, business leaders, and partners on how technologies such as augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and data science are

currently being used to grow businesses. In a recent episode, Luminaries spoke to the CEO and co-founder of AeroFarms, a company that's able to grow high-quality nutritious greens without sunlight, soil, or pesticides, all thanks to technology. And if that piqued your interest, start with the agriculture episode first by searching Luminaries on your favorite podcast app or by visiting delltechnologies.com slash luminaries. All right, so let's return to our conversation with Hussein, Rachel, and Oscar. And since each of them is a spiritual leader in a different tradition, I asked if there was ever a work of sci-fi or fantasy that they viewed in a particular way because of their faith.

There have been a series of authors I've been reading. There have been a series of authors I've been reading, Asma Khan and the Bloodprint series, Shana Chakrabarty and the City of Brass, the Devabad series, Sabbat Tahir's work, where Islam is transformed, is really integrated in very interesting ways.

And either it's divorced from this thing called Islam, but it still is Islam, or it's taking a different vision of Islam. Like what if GDs were the focus of how we understand how they practice Islam rather than human beings? And I remember when I first read Narnia, obviously as an adult, I look at it now, and it's a Christian allegory. But it also works really well as a Shia Muslim allegory, because the first imam of the Shia, the rightful successor to Prophet Muhammad's spiritual and religious authority, Imam Ali, is described as the lion of God. And so, Aslan becomes a lion, is described as the lion of God. And so, Aslan becomes a lion. And when the lion, or when an imam dies,

a new imam takes his place. And so, when Aslan dies and is reborn, I understood it totally as a succession of the imam. And so, I still use that when I do youth group meetings to talk about, hey, did you know that C.S. Lewis was writing really good Shia stories and nobody wants to talk about it? Oh, Hussein, that's fabulous. I think many of us who are not Christian, but grew up on Narnia, had the experience of reading that book and then finding out later, oh, wait, it's Christian allegory. Which knowing now what I know about C.S. Lewis, of course, it was Christian allegory. But that all went right past

me when I was a kid. I didn't have a relationship with Jesus. It never occurred to me that Aslan was meant as that kind of archetypal Jesus figure. And I know a lot of Jews who have felt sort of betrayed by that when they have found out later in life, like, oh, I thought this was my story, but it turns out it doesn't belong to me. I just recently read a short story by Ruthanna Emerus, published at Torah.com, called Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land, which is explicitly a Jewish reaction to Narnia. And it poses a magical land called Tikanu, which comes from the Hebrew root, to heal or repair. So in some way, the whole story is a tikkun. It is a repairing for our relationship with Narnia and proposes that one can enter this

mystical land not by going through a wardrobe, but through a magical patch of mint that could grow in anyone's yard. Just this summer, I was a little late to the game, but I read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. The premise of the book is that we discover that there's life on Alpha Centauri. And the first people to send a mission is not NASA. It's not the European Space Agency. It's the Vatican. But it becomes a retelling of contact

between the Catholic Church and a culture it does not understand, which is a way of telling stories that happened 500 years ago in really terrible ways. And rethinking about those stories and the ease with which we can misunderstand each other. And this is, I guess this is a question that I'd pose to the group. I think in this country, we're seeing the decline of institutional Christianity as a norm, right? The expectation that you will go to a Protestant church on Sunday morning has dropped in the last generation. So mainline Christian churches, be it Methodist, Presbyterian, the Episcopals are just hemorrhaging membership.

So what does this conversation look like in 30 years? in 30 years? For me, one of the interesting questions is living in a modern age where not everyone resonates with our ancient religious stories. Do we sometimes relate to pop culture stories, whether it be Star Trek or Star Wars or Narnia or Firefly, right? Do we relate to those stories in a quasi-scriptural way? Do they become the stories that we tell when we're searching for meaning? And if so, then what do we as religious leaders do with that so that we're able to tap into that source of meaning for those whom we serve? That's a really interesting question, because I've seen what you've just said. I've seen a lot of people make that observation. Are we relating to these more as religions now, especially for people who are leading less religious lives? Are they looking for the same kinds of questions in sci-fi fantasy?

You know, I just saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. One of the things that really came out in that for me was sort of this folkloric paradigm of the orphan hero who leads his people to salvation, right? The Harry Potter myth. But that also follows for Moses and Muhammad and Jesus. You know, I don't necessarily buy into Joseph Campbell's framing of there only being certain type of archetypes, but there is something that resonates with us as human beings in terms of how these stories are framed. And I think it's really important to realize that we are basically telling the same stories again, and simply taking them out of the Tanakh, the Torah, the Quran, the Gospels, doesn't actually make them any less recognizable.

They're just ways that are more palatable to people who don't want them to be religious stories. But that doesn't mean they're not recognizable as religious stories still. You know, everybody, I really believe this, that everybody has some question and need to figure out core questions about what it means to be human. And for me, those questions are tied up in religion because that's what I do for a living. But those questions don't suddenly disappear if you

get a big raise or if you are off exploring the universe or if you have a time travel machine. There's a fundamental part of what it means to be human, to want to know how we're connected with each other and how we're connected with the greater universe that we're in. It's funny, I hadn't thought about religion asking what does it mean to be human, because I guess I often think of that in a science fiction context, when you literally have somebody like the doctor or Spock, who isn't human, but is human. And, you know, it's a very clear, oh, that's what this is being used for. But that's true. I hadn oh, that's what this is being used for. But that's true. I hadn't thought that religion as well is asking that question.

For me, being Jewish means engaging with our stories, the stories we've inherited, and the stories that are being written now. And then through the lens of those stories, grappling with the question of what does it mean to be human? And what does it mean to be ethical and just and to live a righteous life? And what are we supposed to be human and what does it mean to be ethical and just and to live a righteous life? And what are we supposed to be aiming ourselves toward? The other parallel for me is that while it's possible to be a Jew in isolation, it's much more fruitful to be a Jew in community, to have a study partner with whom you study text, to have a community with which you pray. And as a reader of speculative fiction,

the real joy for me is connecting with other readers and having conversations about what did we find in the text and what did it teach us and where did it grate against us the wrong way? And what windows does it open for us into the world that this could become? What it means to be human is a question for the gathered every week. Good science fiction is often asking, how do we interact together as individuals across difference? How do we figure out where we are going as a collective whole and where our stories intersect with that broader story of journey? It is a rich place to mine metaphor from. A lot of Parrish work is just finding metaphor and finding new ways to explore metaphors that have been with us for

thousands of years. And science fiction can be a great resource for that. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Oscar Sinclair, Rachel Barenblatt, and Hussein Rashid. I have included a list of all the novels, movies, and TV shows that they mentioned in the show notes and on my website.

Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and imagineworldspod. My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Thank you.