Dispute Between a Man and His Book: Part 2 of 2

...Continued from Part 1

So my young son is well-versed in Ancient Near East culture.

In my first part of this reflection, I reveled in the sheer lunacy of it, making him out to be a closet scholar precocious beyond his years.

Reality is a bit more complicated, and not quite so humorous.

My son knew this ancient word Ba because he had been reading books from a certain genre. I knew that Rick Riordan had brought the Greek gods to life (witness the popular Percy Jackson movies) but was unaware that he also has a series of books set in ancient Egypt.

My son drank deeply from that well. While I wasn't looking.

Realizing that he was probably not the only one who had been reading these books, I asked my oldest daughter if she knew what a Ba was.

She did.

This is the daughter for whom school-related memorization of "boring historical facts" is an enormous and terribly unpleasant chore.

I'm not sure how I feel about all this.

On the one hand, I'm glad the kids are reading.

On the other hand, I am disquieted by what they are reading.

In one sense, perhaps my disquiet is misplaced. These are all dead gods. Gods that passed from the scene about 2,000 years ago.

In another sense, I'm a bit apprehensive as to how successfully these gods are making a resurgence in today's culture.

Now realistically speaking, I am not concerned that my children will come to believe that the Greek gods or the old Egyptian gods are real.

But I am a bit concerned that by taking these gods so lightly, even in book-land, we invite a nonchalance about all religious systems, treating them as good for entertainment, and not much else.

Religious systems make for dangerous playgrounds, but we as a culture have forgotten that simple truth. The situation I blogged just a few days ago was, in hindsight, entirely predictable.

We now have teachers and educators who have lost all sense of mooring and who therefore give blasphemous homework assignments without even realizing the nature of the offense.

Parents for their part are likewise blind — and voice no complaint.

If I had not spoken up, that homework assignment would have proceeded without a hitch. The only problem, so to speak, was me.

I am reminded of a passage from Nehemiah:

Nehemiah 13:4-8
Before this, Eliashib the priest had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. He was closely associated with Tobiah, and he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles, and also the tithes of grain, new wine and olive oil prescribed for the Levites, musicians and gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests.

But while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem, for in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon I had returned to the king. Some time later I asked his permission and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God. I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah’s household goods out of the room.

Nehemiah had helped to restored the temple to its proper, holy state... only to see a non-Israelite take up residence in the temple as soon as Nehemiah left town. It happened with the priest's blessing.

When Nehemiah returns, he throws Tobiah back out. But I can almost hear the priest Eliashib muttering under his breath.

"The only problem here is Nehemiah."

Maintaining purity in this world is a task of constant gardening.

In our culture today I see few gardeners. Even among our priests.

Anyone looking here for final conclusions about those Rick Riordan books will come up disappointed. I'm not sure where I'm falling on this. The kids did nothing wrong in this matter, and I'm not even sure the books are of the sort I should ban from the home. I read fantasy books as a child, too.

I'm just putting pen here to my disquiet, my growing dis-ease.