Secular Novels

One of the reasons I prefer Patchionalism is not only because it is more scientifically reasonable, but also because the yeshivist view of the ancient world is not theologically acceptable. To yeshivists, the Biblical and even Talmudic times were full of unicorns, mermaids, dragons, giants, dwarfs, magic and other cool stuff like that. Our ancestors, being on extremely high levels of kedusha could incinerate people by looking at them, light fields ablaze by staring at them, create worlds, bring people back to life, and other really epic stuff.

But lets ignore nerdy scientists for now. There are other nerdy problems with this. This description for the world kind of reminds me of  the Lord of The Rings, Eragon, Pendragon, Harry Potter, and sparkly vampires.

I remember from elementary school that once one of my Rebbeim told us that he was telling the class a story, and a kid piped up, " So what? Pokemon can do that to." Of course this Rebbi was trying to bring out the evil of pikachu and his group of friends (I wasn't about to go ahead and argue with him about really Team Rocket are the evil yetzer harah right then and there, but its probably what I was thinking).Anyways, now I've come to ponder. Is that an inherent evil in the reading of fantasies, or is it a flaw in our lack of perception of reality? Who is at fault? Rabbi Reuven Schmeltzer or Bilbo Baggins?

Of course, any good yeshivist will tell you that all these mystical fantasies weren't created by minds of people like J.R.R. Tolkien, but rather they had been common myths that he simply did some minor research on in order to throw them into the Shire and the rest of Middle Earth. These myths, if anything, prove the validity of the existence of such creatures. Whispers and rumors of there whereabouts are passed on through the generations.

I still don't like the vision of Moshe Rabbeinu being Gandalf.