Our fourth installment of interviews by Keith Goldman feels a bit like Stephen Hawking interviewing Albert Einstein, with the added danger that a pair of dice somewhere may come up snake eyes and the universe will implode. Take it away, Keith!
This week I bring you perhaps the quintessential LEGO-nerd who is famous around the world and has been interviewed more often than any other AFOL.
I’m talking about the hobby’s one true rock star, who is all at once: builder, author, musician, actor, artist, raconteur, scoundrel, low-guy, philistine and the unofficial spiritual leader of our mannkinder flock: The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith.
I hung out with the critically acclaimed author of The Brick Testament series on Mount Golgotha, a rock cliff west of Herod’s Gate and just beyond the Old City of Jerusalem’s northern wall, overlooking the Garden Tomb. We drank Al-Sharq beer and talked about the Papal bull of 1493 (and the Treaty of Torsedillas), transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation, and the revelation that there were two “Roys” in “Seigfried and Roy.”
We also talked about LEGO.
The Bible
Keith Goldman: Why do you hate Jesus? Isn’t it time you dropped this act of yours and testify before your LEGO brethren that Jesus IS LORD!?
Brendan Powell Smith: Hate is not the right word, but it is fair to say I am uncomfortable with any human or supernatural figure who believes that most of humanity deserves to be tortured eternally. And while I find it dismaying that so many of my brethren, LEGO and otherwise, profess fealty to as abominable a character as Yahweh the God of the Bible and his son/actually-the-same-person-somehow Jesus, that in itself is not enough to make me hate them either. I’m a pretty mellow guy, and my hatred is not easily aroused. (Sorry.)
KG: Give me a misunderstood biblical figure (either by you or by the populace), and have you ever come across a figure who’s struggle you identified with? No, I don’t mean J.C., we all have a little bit of martyr in us.
BPS: My pick would have to be Satan. Most people’s conception of Satan is that he’s to blame for all the world’s evils, and that he’s a vicious and cruel tormentor. But the Bible itself does not seem to support this view.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about how the Bible presents Satan is that throughout 99.9% of the Old Testament, there’s simply no mention of Satan at all.
When we finally meet Satan in the book of Job, he is presented as one of several “sons of God” in heaven, who converses in a friendly manner with God, and faithfully carries out his wishes. The only other significant Old Testament mention of him is when Satan incites King David to take a census, for which God punishes David by killing 70,000 people. The odd thing though is that this story in 1 Chronicles is a rewrite of the same story told in 2 Samuel, where in the original it is God himself who tell David to take the census, and then kills 70,000 people to punish David for faithfully obeying his command.
We get no other info about Satan until we get to the New Testament, where suddenly we discover that he’s been granted dominion over the entire Earth. Apparently the Bible’s got plenty of room to include page after page of boring geneology lists and arcane rules for animal sacrifice rituals, but there just wasn’t room for an explanation of when, how, or why Yahweh put Satan in charge of Earth.
Satan gets the most attention in the book of Revelation where he is a multi-headed red dragon who tries to devour a child who is destined up to rule all nations with an iron rod, then is attacked in Heaven and thrown to Earth.
Once there he provides the people of Earth with an alternative figure of worship and battles on the side of the people of Earth against the invading army of Heaven. As a result he gets tossed in the Abyss for 1,000 years, then for no apparent reason is set free again. Finally he ends up thrown into Hell to be tortured in flames for eternity (along with most human being who have ever lived).
So I see Satan as pretty badly misunderstood. His reputation for cruelty and viciousness seems to pale in comparison to some of the supposed “good guys” of the Bible like Moses, Joshua, King David, Jesus, and Yahweh. I guess I relate to Satan because he’s one of the few figures in the Bible who refuses to worship a cruel and unjust God despite the fact that (or perhaps because of the fact that) God damns rebels like him to eternal torture.
More of Keith’s interview with Brendan after the jump: (more…)
