I’m sure everyone reading this post right now has heard of evolution and I’m quite sure all of you know what that means.
 
Most people think of evolution as a series of random gene mutations that naturally arise over the generations. These mutations create different patterns of behavior, body morphology, and physiological processes.
 
Environmental pressures such as food scarcity and weather changes eliminate those individuals with disadvantageous mutations. The same pressures favor certain other individuals whose mutations match the current conditions. The mutations give these individuals a selective advantage over others who don’t have these mutations.
 
These individuals then produce more offspring who also carry the mutation. The mutation spreads to the rest of the population and confers the advantage on the whole group. What was once a mutation becomes normal and hence a new population develops that is more evolutionarily capable of handling the new conditions.
 
This is the traditional, conventional, Darwinian version of evolution. It’s a genetically deterministic view that shaped a whole generation of scientific thought. This view is based on the idea that our genes dictate who we are, what we’re capable of, and how we cope with the world around us.
 
If we randomly get born with the advantageous mutation, we thrive. If we don’t get born with the mutation, we die out. End of story.
 
We now know that this isn’t the case at all. More recent scientific research shows that our DNA is not as carved in stone as scientists once thought. DNA is always changing and is in fact influenced by our behavior and the environment around us.
 
Our bodies, our senses, and our minds are constantly adapting to environmental conditions, including social conditions. We act and react to these conditions and our behaviors and even our thoughts dictate how genes express themselves.
 
This process happens within each generation, within each individual person’s lifetime, and even on a day-to-day basis. There is virtually nothing we received genetically from our parents that we cannot at least modify through changes in our behavior. This includes physical traits, thinking patterns, and even the outcomes of certain hereditary diseases.
 
If that wasn’t enough, these genetic changes get passed down to the next generation. The old deterministic view of genetic absolutism is in fact not the case at all. Evolution happens exactly the other way around.
 
What actually happens is that everyone—all of us—every living thing on the face of the Earth—is constantly, constantly adapting to conditions both within and outside ourselves. These adaptations are so constant and so universal that we don’t even notice them—unless we go out of our way to change our behavior to alter our lives, our bodies, and our conditions.
 
These constant adaptations affect how our genes express themselves and these are the genetic changes that get passed down to the next generation. This is how we evolve. No one is making us do anything. Our genes aren’t making us do anything. We aren’t victims to our genes or evolutionary processes—not at all.
 
We have a lot more power over what happens to us than we give ourselves credit for. We also have a lot more power over what we pass down to the next generation. It’s up to us to maximize that and make it the best it can be.
 
Once we realize we have this power, we take responsibility for either improving conditions for the next generation and setting future generations up for success. The alternative is to leave them unprepared and living in a world that is falling apart without the tools to fix it.
 
None of us wants that, so we all need to step up and start harnessing this power. We’re responsible for the outcome either way, so which one are we going to choose?
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

It seems ironic that we should have to go out of our way to highlight, celebrate, and acknowledge good fiction in today’s market, but that’s exactly the situation in which we find ourselves.
 
We’re living in a world awash with bad fiction where none of the stories work and they don’t mean anything. The vast majority of what we consider “entertainment” is really just a colossal waste of our time. This brand of entertainment teaches us nothing, tells us nothing, reflects nothing of reality, and changes nothing except to get us a few more hours farther down the road in our lives toward our eventual and inevitable demise.
 
Successful fiction leaves us satisfied at the end—not just because the story came to some conclusion. Any story can do that. Even a bad story comes to some conclusion at the end.
 
Successful fiction leaves us satisfied by making a point and drawing the entire narrative full circle to its starting point.
 
Successful fiction accomplishes the purpose it set out to accomplish. It actually tells us something so that, at the end, when we finish reading or watching it, we think, “Yeah, I got it.”
 
We get the message. We see what the writer was trying to create and we understand all of what they were trying to communicate and convey through the story.
 
Bad art asks no questions. Bad art leaves us unsatisfied because we understand intuitively that it isn’t worth our time. We understand that consuming this material accomplishes nothing. The artist is insulting our intelligence by implying that this is all we’re capable of. We don’t respect the artist, either, because we understand that this is all he is capable of. We expect better and he didn’t deliver.
 
Mediocre art asks the questions and answers them for us. Great art asks the questions and leaves them unanswered. Great art asks questions about what human life and the world are all about. Great art shows us a slice of life and lets us answer those questions for ourselves.
 
If the artist did his job, his work leads us to come to the conclusion he wants us to come to. He makes his point by painting us a picture of life from a unique perspective. He doesn’t tell us what to think. He lets us do that on our own. This is how he communicates his message if he’s doing his job correctly.
 
This is how art can teach us something, show us a perspective we may never have considered before, improve our lives, tear down prejudice, and cause massive social change.
 
Charles Dickens accomplished this with his work. He didn’t go around telling everyone that the child labor conditions in England were appalling, abusive, and in some cases, deadly. He didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already know.
 
He simply showed people a side of the issue that made it obvious what horrific conditions these children were living under. His work caused a groundswell of public sentiment that got the laws changed for the better.
 
This is why it’s so important for us as artists to make our work mean something. We have incredible power over our audience’s thinking.
 
The vast majority of the fiction market asks nothing of us. It barely asks us to pay attention enough to understand what the story is about. In some cases, it doesn’t even do that much.
 
This is why it’s so important when a piece of fiction actually does challenge us to think and presents us with a story that tells us something meaningful.
 
This is the case with District 9, a 2009 sci-fi action film directed by Neill Blomkamp. The story premise covers events thirty years following an alien race landing on Earth and staying to live here. These aren’t invaders or conquerors nor are they bent on annihilating the human race. These aliens are intergalactic refugees seeking asylum and protection from the disaster that destroyed their homeworld.
 
The humans of Earth react to the aliens’ arrival by confining them in a ghetto known as District 9. The company tasked with policing them treats the aliens as worthless criminals. The aliens are denied civil rights and treated as unintelligent animals even as the company attempts to plunder the aliens’ advanced technology for its own profit.
 
The story follows Wikus van de Merwe, a company agent in charge of relocating the aliens to a new camp. A series of unfortunate incidents cause him to get infected with an alien substance that causes his body to start to mutate into an alien.
 
The company starts to experiment on him in horrific, inhuman ways—ways the company has been experimenting on the aliens all this time. Wikus escapes, goes on the run, and the company sets out to recapture him. This leads him on a journey to discover what the aliens are really capable of and where his loyalties truly lie.
 
This movie was set in South Africa, directed by a South African director, and acted by a South African cast. The most obvious allegorical implications would lead us to believe that this movie is a commentary on South African Apartheid and the movie works as that.
 
This movie actually covers so much more important and deeper territory. The same process of one population scapegoating, isolating, and dehumanizing another has taken place countless times in human history.
 
The process follows the same sequence of events in which one group vilifies the other, assigns malice to their actions based on scant or no evidence, applies these stereotypes to the entire group, and ghettoizes the subject group to isolate the “others” from the rest of society.
 
The dominant society treats the subservient group as less than human, turns a blind eye to their suffering, and even deliberately inflicts additional suffering on them as punishment for these fabricated crimes and imagined malicious intentions.
 
The dominant society inflicts exactly the same mistreatment on anyone who sympathizes with the subservient group or displays even the most marginal indication of resembling them.
 
Looking like they do, believing as they do, behaving as they do, and actually belonging to the other group isn’t necessary to get a person treated the same way. In some cases, the dominant society will even kill a person thinking or saying out loud that the other group might deserve some better treatment.
 
Our current culture likes to blame this behavior on the White race when, in reality, every culture on the planet has done exactly the same thing. Africans do it to each other. Asians do it to Africans. Asians and Middle Easterners do it to White people. Every race on the planet even does it to their own kind. No one is innocent in this.
 
Blaming it on the White race is the flimsy argument of people who know nothing about history. History teaches us a very different lesson about what human beings are capable of when they ostracize and dehumanize each other based on things like racial characteristics, political views, religion, or social affiliation.
 
History teaches us a very different lesson when it comes to certain individuals waking up to their own prejudice and actually seeing the ostracized group as human who deserve decent treatment and basic civil rights.
 
These are the stories of true heroism, compassion, and self-sacrifice that counterbalance the horror of humanity’s atrocities against our own kind. These abuses bring out the worst in people, but they also bring out the best in us when we break the bonds of prejudice and give each other the care and dignity we deserve. These are the situations where humanity really shines.
 
This is the story District 9 tells us. It’s the story of humanity at its worst and the circumstances that bring out the best in us when it counts the most. It’s the story of one person who is willing to sacrifice everything for what he knows is right, to rectify the wrongs of the past, and to give someone else a chance at the happiness he knows he can’t get for himself.
 
District 9 is what all of us as fiction writers should be striving to achieve. It tells an awesome, entertaining story, but it also makes a comment on history and human nature that teaches us and inspires us to do better. The story leaves the audience with a strong message of what is possible when it comes to overcoming our differences and seeing the humanity in each other even when our entire society is pressuring us to do the opposite.
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 All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. 

My daughters’ kindergarten teachers once pulled me and their dad aside at afterschool pickup time to have The Talk with us about our daughters’ behavior at school.
 
What was the crime for which my daughters, their dad, and I got reprimanded? My daughters had been telling the other kindergarteners that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
 
The other children who did believe in Santa Claus naturally got extremely upset by this news—and their parents got extremely upset by it, too. The parents wanted the teachers to tell us to tell our daughters to stop this behavior. My children were raised Jewish, so these other parents wanted my daughters to keep this information to themselves to preserve the illusion.
 
These other parents called it preserving, “The Magic.”
 
We had a lengthy discussion with these teachers in which I refused to instruct my daughters to do anything of the kind. I stated categorically that I was proud of my daughters for standing up for their convictions and having the courage to challenge others in theirs.
 
I stated that, if my daughters were out there telling people that Santa Claus isn't real, then more power to them. I stated that the issue when much further than merely believing a Christmas fairy tale. It strikes at the very heart of truth.
 
Your opinion means nothing. No one in the world is under any obligation to accept your opinion on any subject whatsoever just because you stated your opinion out loud.
 
Opinion is the lowest and weakest form of intellectual rigor.
 
If you believe that Santa Claus exists, you better be ready to back it up with facts and evidence. No one will nor should they take your word for it.
 
If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God or that God exists or even that science is the only real truth—whatever it is you believe—you better pack a lunch and bring all your arguments, logic, examples, and demonstrable, repeatable data to support your claim. Your opinion doesn’t fall into any of those categories.
 
If you believe there are only two genders or that there are twenty-two genders or if you believe that there are unlimited genders—no matter what you believe—the burden of proof is on you to convince people using the power of your evidence, logic, and critical thinking skills.
 
There is no one alive on Planet Earth who is under any obligation to believe as you believe just because you opened your mouth and a certain combination of sounds came out.
 
Your opinion means nothing if you can’t back it up and actually convince people to change their views.
 
We have a problem in the world today. We all seem to think that those who believe differently are committing some sort of crime and might actually deserve to be taken out and shot simply because they believe differently.
 
We think this and even say it in the media when none of us even takes the time to think about why WE believe as we do. If you really believe something, you should be able to explain why. You should be able to point to the logic and evidence that convinced you to believe that. You should be able to repeat these arguments to others to show them why they should believe as you do.
 
It doesn’t work to simply write these people off by saying they’re stupid or evil or just lost. The burden is on you to convince them using language they can understand. You can’t use the language of your own belief to convince someone to believe something they already don’t believe. That doesn’t work. You have to use their language to convince them.
 
If you really believe what you say you believe, you should care enough about the other person to want to show them a better way. You wouldn’t be so quick to write them off and consign them to the ash heap of eternity for the crime of believing something you disagree with.
 
If your opinion has any validity at all, if your opinion is worth enough for anyone to respect it even for a second, then the other person’s opinion is just as important as yours. You are the one who is under an obligation to take their opinion into account and consider the possibility that they could be right and you are the one who is lost, ignorant, or just misinformed—which, let’s be honest, is a very real possibility.
 
I made these arguments to my daughters’ kindergarten teachers and I told them that I wasn’t in the habit of lying to my children about the nature of reality. I wasn’t about to start lying to them just so some other parents could lie to their children about it. If some parent does want to lie to their children and tell them Santa Claus exists when the parents know for a fact that he doesn’t, then that’s the other parent’s decision. I’m not going to take responsibility for the outcome.
 
When I said this, one of the teachers got tears in her eyes. She admitted that her sixteen-year-old son still had not forgiven her for lying to him about Santa Claus.
 
Lying to our loved ones about something we know to be untrue has massive, long-term consequences we may or may not have considered. We all might want to think about that when we choose which beliefs we teach our children.
 
Whatever beliefs we teach our children, our children need to be prepared to go out into the world and meet people who believe differently. Our children need to be prepared to defend their beliefs—not with torches and pitchforks and lynch mobs—but with logical arguments, hard evidence, and real-world, repeatable examples that prove the truth of what they’re saying.
 
Our children need to understand that no one has any reason to protect your feelings just because they’re yours. We all have feelings. We all have opinions. We all have deeply held convictions and beliefs.
 
Your feelings, opinions, and convictions are no more valid than the next person’s. You are under just as great an obligation to consider and protect the other person’s feelings and beliefs as they are to protect yours.
 
If you think you have the right to go out into the world and challenge other people’s beliefs and opinions, you better be ready for the other person to do the same thing back to you.
 
You might discover that their logic, evidence, and arguments are actually far more robust than yours. Your logic, evidence, and arguments might crumble before theirs and you might be forced to change your position.
 
This is how we arrive at the truth. We don’t arrive at the truth by getting up a lynch mob every time we discover that someone believes differently than we do.
 
Attacking another person’s beliefs in this way actually blocks us from arriving at the truth. It prevents us from hearing the evidence that might convince us that what the other person believes is actually true and we are the ones who have been living a delusion.
 
None of us wants to live a lie—and yet that’s exactly what we are doing when we refuse to listen and actually take the time to communicate the reasons behind our beliefs to others. Stomping your foot and throwing a tantrum because someone hurt your feelings is not the way to convince someone that you’re right. It actually makes you look even weaker than you already are.
 
That behavior on its own is proof that your position is fragile and you don’t have the logic, evidence, and arguments to support your view. You’re announcing to the world that you already know your position is indefensible. This is the quickest way to convince people that your view is wrong. No one would want to sign up for an indefensible position and that’s exactly what you’re asking them to do.
 
Your opinion means nothing. You need to bring something a lot stronger than that or pack up and go home.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

Do a quick internet search on the Christian Trinity and you’ll open up a whole hornet’s nest of ideas, debates, discussions, and explanations of what it is, what it isn’t, whether it’s strictly, doctrinally correct, whether it’s ever explicitly stated in the Bible, and whether a person (or Christian) really needs to believe in the Trinity in order to the “saved”.
 
So let’s break this down and figure out exactly what we’re talking about here.
 
The Christian Trinity is the belief in, “The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit” as equal and co-dominant attributes of the one unified Godhead.
 
Christian theologians and believers explain that the three-part nature of the Trinity doesn’t contradict the oneness of God and that this is one of the paradoxes of religious belief.
 
One explanation of the Trinity uses the analogy of water. Water has three states—solid, liquid, and gas. Steam is water. Ice is water. Liquid water is water. It’s all water. It has three states or expressions, but at its core nature we’re talking about one thing.
 
Some explain the Trinity by using the analogy of an egg. The egg has three parts—the white, the yolk, and the shell. The egg isn’t a whole egg without each and every one of all three of these parts, but we’re still talking about one thing—the egg.
 
Others describe the Trinity as three manifestations of God’s expression in the world. Some say we aren’t talking about three different “whats” but three different “hows”. God expresses Himself in three different ways—through The Father, through The Son, and through The Holy Spirit.
 
These concepts start to fall apart when we analyze them in their own context. The entirety of the Christian faith is built on the belief that Jesus is the Son of God and that he represents “The Son” aspect of the one Godhead.
 
We’re going to put aside the question of whether or not this is true because that’s a different discussion altogether.
 
For the purpose of our analysis of the Trinity, we’re only going to examine the doctrine of the Trinity in its own right. We’re going to take apart these arguments by showing that they don’t hold up even under explanations given by their own adherents and believers.
 
Let’s take the egg argument. It is true that an egg is made up of a shell, a white, and a yolk. Each of these is a constituent part of the egg, which is the whole.
 
The yolk, the egg, and the white are each finite parts of a finite object in space. We can separate these parts from each other.
 
If we’re going to pledge allegiance to something, it would make more sense to say that we pledge allegiance to the egg rather than, say, the yolk.
 
We would assume that the egg itself, being the whole, would be a more important and more complete form of whatever it is we’re supposed to be pledging allegiance to, venerating, and worshiping as the Godhead.
 
We wouldn’t think we should be giving that kind of allegiance to something that’s just a part of this Godhead.
 
It would make no sense whatsoever for someone to say that you aren’t completing your obligations to the Godhead because you’re giving your allegiance to the egg instead of the yolk.
 
It would make no sense to say that believing in the essential nature of the yolk is somehow more important than believing in the whole entirety of the egg.
 
It would make no sense for certain people to say that you or I were actually demonic, misguided, forsaken, and even outright damned because we choose to venerate the egg as a whole totality rather than one particular part to the exclusion of all the other parts.
 
By the same argument, it would make no sense for anyone to say we have to venerate ice as the most essential form of water instead of just giving our allegiance to water in general.
 
Yet that’s exactly what the Trinity and Christian doctrine is asking us to do. It’s asking us to deny or downplay the supremacy of the whole in favor of a part—and at the same time asking us to reaffirm the supremacy of the whole. It’s a contradiction that goes way beyond being a paradox.
 
A paradox is a supposition that makes sense and its opposite also makes sense. This isn’t a paradox because one of the suppositions doesn’t make sense at all.
 
The only logical response to these arguments—if they are valid at all—is that we should venerate and give our allegiance to the whole, not the part.
 
If Christians truly believe in the one indivisible nature of the Godhead, then it only makes sense that we should give our allegiance to that instead of to some divisible part of this one whole.
 
Christians also claim to believe in the divinity of the Ten Commandments.
 
The very first commandment enjoins us that we should never have any other gods before the One True God or to worship any facsimile of Him or any particular aspect of His nature.
 
It makes no sense for Christians to say that we are worshiping and giving our allegiance to the One True Godhead by believing in the divinity of Jesus because—they say—he is the One True Godhead.
 
If that was true, we either wouldn’t need a separate name for him nor would we need a separate religion that elevates him above all the other supposed parts, facsimiles, and representations of him.
 
If that was true, it would be just as valid to say that you believe in and follow the Holy Spirit—which is what religions like Buddhism do.
 
If this was true, there would be absolutely no benefit to following Jesus verses following the One True Godhead as embodied in the Father or just the One Ineffable Wholeness of the Infinite Godhead. We wouldn’t need Jesus at all.
 
The reason we have different names for the shell, the yolk, and the white of an egg is because these things are separate and distinct from each other. Each one is finite and divisible from the others. They aren’t one and the same as the whole—which is exactly what the Christian concept of Jesus as the Son of God is. They say he is God as well as being one of these parts or separate expressions—and that isn’t possible.
 
It wouldn’t be correct of us to say the shell is one and the same with the whole egg. It wouldn’t be correct of us to say that ice is one and the same with the totality of water because it isn’t. Water can be other things that are not ice just as an egg can be other things that are not shell.
 
The expressions or manifestations theory doesn’t work, either. If we’re going to say that God expresses Himself in three different ways, then it also follows that He would express himself in thousands of ways. It would be just as valid to say that He expresses himself through each and every human being alive and every human being who has ever lived.
 
If the Christian argument is that something can be one thing and three things at the same time, then it would be just as valid to say I’m going to put my faith in the one thing. I don’t need the three things because the one thing is just as valid.
 
If we take the egg and water arguments at their face value, then the one thing is the more valid definition of what we’re talking about—not the three separate things—none of which embody the totality of what we’re talking about.
 
Gone are the days when any religion or group can tell its members to just accept an ideology without question and threaten its members with negative consequences if they do question.
 
During the 2002 Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, one frustrated investigator stated that the Church’s delays, obstructions, and secrecy resembled the behavior of the Mafia more than a religious institution.
 
Abusive authoritarian cults tell their members to accept an ideology without question and punish those who do question. That’s what cults do. A truly religious organization—an institution that truly wishes the best for us and wants us to follow truth, goodness, and holiness—such an institution would never ask us to accept any ideology without question.
 
A truly benevolent belief system would encourage questions and challenges. A truly benevolent belief system would want us to investigate on our own, to think critically, and to discover the ultimate truth that would give our lives the most meaning and connection to the Divine.
 
The days are long gone when any belief system can expect us to just swallow a totally illogical argument that makes no sense and doesn’t comport with reality. Critical thinking is the essence of spiritual belief. If a belief system doesn’t give us that much, then it’s useless to us and has no place in our lives.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.