Mark’s Comments (group member since Jun 28, 2012)

Mark’s comments from the Geekklesia group.

Gee--fair warning, in my mouth all stories are long. Well, I suppose my resume starts with "always picked on". I blame my preschool acute nephritis for setting me back on physical/athletic skills, and in retrospect being bad at them made me disinterested in them and so prevented me from becoming much better, so I was always excluded from "boy" things. I liked to read, and must have been about ten when I read The Time Machine, and I liked the original Star Trek and Lost in Space and other sci-fi stuff, including being a fan of Time Tunnel (it's one of the few shows I have on DVD). I was a Ray Bradbury fan in high school, and a band geek and sort of peripheral member of stage crew and AVA, and still pretty much reviled by my peers. I got more into fantasy in college, when I was introduced to Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams.

Being a musician, I ran a band, I'm not sure whether it was a series of bands or a band that kept morphing, but by my senior year of high school it was a Christian band--'72-'73, the Jesus Movement was hitting our area pretty big at that time, and by '75 we had played most of the major North Jersey coffeehouses and special concerts at a couple of colleges (and we called the American Bible Society's New York office to get some literature, and they'd heard of us), so we were about as successful as might be expected for the time and place. I went to two Bible colleges--Luther College of the Bible and Liberal Arts now exists only as a Facebook alumni group, but after getting an A.A. there I got an A.B. in Biblical Studies (that's a fancy B.A., really) from Gordon College. Then I looked for a job, tried out for the band Found Free (they needed someone single, and I'd gotten married in college), and landed as a DJ on a contemporary Christian radio station. When I left five years later, I was program director.

A little over a year into this--about 1980--my wife brought home a copy of Psychology Today with an article in it about a game. We were gamers--board games, pinochle, bridge, pinball, Atari, miniature golf, bowling, bookcase games, even the occasional light war game--but this sounded fascinating. We'd tried the (Avalon Hill?) Dune and Middle Earth games and had been disappointed, but this thing called Dungeons & Dragons sounded like it would create Tolkienesque adventures.

We couldn't find it at first. Eventually we found the D&D Basic set (blue cover, first edition) and did not know that it was different from the Advanced game (after all, you start basic, you expand with advanced, right?). I was the DM, and as we started to find supplements (some from Chainmail) I tried cobbling it together into a coherent system for our group of friends. I got pretty good at it, and never got to play--others in our group started running Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, Star Frontiers, and Traveler, in which I played, but no one else ran D&D. My group got to be big--about fifteen players, I think, but never all there at the same time. Then I left the radio station, went to law school, lost touch with the old gamers, and didn't play for quite a while.

A kid a few doors down, seventh or eighth grade, and a friend of his (cousin of Bruce Willis), knocked on my door, said they heard I knew how to play D&D and they wanted to play, could I teach them. I did not want to invest the time in running a game for kids, so I tried to advise them--until one day I pulled them into my dining room, started a game on the fly with my eldest son (second grader but had played with his mother before), then told them to go do that--and they came back wanting to play again, and the kid who was going to be their DM moved to California when Bruce gave his parents a job. So I wound up running an even bigger group--I think we may have had thirty in my livingroom/diningroom some weekends, although four were my own sons, and in maybe 1988 it caught the attention of the other famous DM in the county, Ed Jones, and soon we were playing in each other's games--entirely different games, as mine was famed for being extremely close to the book and his for being extremely freeform (roll the dice and the referee decides what he want to have happen).
Ed was working on something he called "Multiverse" and needed someone with a good head for rules to help give it structure. He had a lot of parts of it already, some of which did not work, some of which were extremely sketchy, some of which were cuneiform. In 1992 I became involved in co-authoring it, putting a lot of things in that it needed, making a lot of parts work, cutting out things that never were going to work, and at the last moment changing the name to "Multiverser" to avoid a trademark conflict with Moorcock (and then deciding that it really was a better name, because the game was about the characters, not the places). Ed dropped out of the process coming into the home stretch, so I managed to publish the thing and began trying to promote it without him (a lot of pitfalls and problems there). To help get attention, I threw a lot of stuff on web sites on the Internet, including a bunch of D&D stuff I had lying around, a series on time travel, and my Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons Addict article I had started back at the radio station and never managed to get published.
Jim Aubuchon read that and invited me to join the Christian Gamers Guild. I'm not a joiner; I thanked him and ignored it. Then someone who bought the game said he'd mentioned it on the CGG e-groups list, and Charlie Heckman said terrible things about how it was all plagiarized, so I had to sign up for the list to answer the charges, which had already been resolved before I got there. So I was now a member, and known as author of a game. From there I was sort of asked, sort of railroaded, into heading an ill-fated game review group, and then told that since I was chairman of one of the committees I had to be on the board, and then the VP (Mike Harvey, I think?)and the President (Jim) both resigned, the chaplain (Rodney) decided that made him President, and he appointed me interim chaplain, and I was re-elected to that position repeated from what must have been 1998 through the present. Since I had the job, I figured I ought to do something with it, and became one of the leading RPG apologists kind of by default.
I still write the time travel stuff, and the little money I make comes mostly from that, although I also get paid for some political stuff (and I really hate politics, but since I have a Juris Doctore I get asked about it all the time).

And that's more than you wanted to know, I'm sure. Who's next?

I think part of the "problem" is that most "human" religions are humanocentric, and Christianity is in that sense the most egregious: it is about The God becoming human to save particularly humans, along with the rest of the universe in some way that it not clarified. The problem arises because of the now fairly accepted dogma in science, that there must be uncounted intelligent species scattered among the galaxies, and therefore what happens here on earth cannot possibly have universal significance.

I disagree. I read just recently that there is what we might call a "fudge factor" in the formula. One of the factors is the probability that life would occur given the conditions for life, which in the popular formula is given as almost certain, but for which there is no evidence and according to one theorist might be almost negligible. I think the probability of other intelligent life in the galaxy is extremely low, not extremely high. If I am right, it is still possible that we are the only sentient mortal beings in the universe.

Even if I am wrong, though, that does not mean that we are not "center stage", the place where the most important events in the universe are happening. That would only mean that we have the message the aliens need, not the other way around. How they get the message is not entirely clear to me; but then, I don't know that they exist so it is not yet a problem.

Saying that humanity is God's primary concern is only limiting if we know as a fact that there is anyone else in the universe requiring His attention. In a sense, the notion that God would have created millions of rather similar intelligent creatures in different galaxies makes Him less interesting, not more; I'm inclined to think that whatever is out there is very different from sentient life, simply because an infinite God cannot express Himself once in all of time and space, so "encore" is the one thing He is least likely to do.

There are popular authors who do this; there are also popular authors who take a different view--it might be argued whether C. S. Lewis counts (his Space Trilogy is science fiction from before the "space age"), but Ray Bradbury certainly does. I remember one episode of Bablyon 5 that handled the question of human religion versus alien religions in a quite interesting manner, displaying the diversity of human beliefs against the rather monolithic belief systems of each of the alien cultures.

But then the question is whether you are asking whether that is a fair assessment of science fiction or a fair assessment of human religions.