Skip to main content

A Vision of the Real and Unreal


Faith Awakened is Grace Bridges's novel that puts her unique twist on a virtual world. I asked her how her work compares with The Matrix, which is probably the most widely-known story universe featuring virtual reality. She first made it clear to me that she came up with her story idea long before the Matrix ever came out, then she added:

"The Matrix has Neo in the dream world and then he is woken up to reality, where he mostly remains. In Faith Awakened, both stories are told in parallel, alternating and do not meet until the end. 

In the Matrix, the crux of the matter is when Neo takes the red pill, wakes up in the pod and is 'birthed' into the real world. In Faith Awakened, the turning point is when they ENTER virtual reality.

My overarching concept is that God would be even more real to the people inside virtual reality; the spiritual world comes closer perhaps due to a certain level of sensory deprivation. The suits are sensory, but it can't really compare to the real world."

Grace's comment made me realize that Matrix unconsciously assumes that there is no spiritual world. Or rather, it confuses a digital reality existence with a world of the spirit, since Neo's mastery of the digital gives him a power and status that is clearly intended to be Messianic and quasi-spiritual.

What's unique about Grace's concept is her assumption of the reality of the spiritual, so that even if people were disconnected from the physical world around them and thrown into a digital life, even if the spiritual had no place in the programming of digital reality, it would nonetheless intrude upon the "reality" of people receiving all their sensory inputs from an inevitably-less-than-perfect computer system. No matter the programming, they would still perceive a need for God--and further, would perhaps perceive, at times, God Himself.

This begs the question for me of what really is real? How do we know our sensory inputs right now actually are what we think they are? Especially if you rase the issue, as Grace has done in her novel, of memory loss. Perhaps we were something else, knew it, but since have forgotten. Perhaps all of us as human beings need to be reawakened to realize who we really are.

Perhaps the world of the spiritual, treated as imaginary by some, is actually more real than anything else...
Grace's thought-provoking tale is available at the Splashdown Faith Awakened link. And find Grace at:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The AI "Image of the Beast"

Imagining the "Image of the Beast" from the book of Revelation is an AI is not new to me. Thinking that such an image could be an Artificial Intelligence is as least as old as the 1981 Christian apocalyptic film with that title  (which I don't consider a quality production, but it does exist). And I've also found a few Evangelical Christian sites who repeat the same idea (which I won't reference here) and even link it with the notion of technological singularity . However, I do have what may be prove to be some distinctive twists on the notion. First off, while I don't usually quote Scripture on this blog, I'm going to make an exception. Let's examine the Bible reference to "the image of the beast" itself. Revelation 13:14-16 (NKJV): "And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he is granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the...
3 comments
Read more

7 Ways to Deal with the Problem Magic Poses Christian Fantasy Writers

First off, what is the problem with magic for Christians? Or sorcery? Or witchcraft? (Are all of those things even the same?) An entire book could be written on this topic (perhaps I'll do that someday) but to keep this as brief as possible, the short reason this is a problem is the Bible has nothing good to say about the practice of magic (neither does extra-Biblical Christian tradition). No translation of Scripture will record the 12 Disciples watching Jesus walk on the water and say, "Wow, that was magical!" Nor is the mana falling from heaven in Israel's wilderness wanderings described as some kind of powerful spell that Moses used, nor even is his rod described as "magic," even though Moses had the power granted to him by God to turn it into a serpent at whatever time he chose. No, the Bible describes events like these as "miracles," or "signs," or "wonders." On the other hand, when the Bible talks about "mag...
17 comments
Read more

Story Combat Realism Part 3. How to Train a Samurai, Spartan, or Knight.

At the end of my last post of this series that deals mainly with the psychological factors of combat, I noted that Spartans, in spite of battlefield courage that implies they are natural-born warriors, were in fact the product of superior training. Note that this kind of highly-trained fighting professional is a different sort of fighter than found in warrior cultures who emphasized battlefield rage. This type of elite training was not just a characteristic of Spartans, it was also true of a number of other renowned warriors from times past, including samurais and knights. To take the last first, the conventional training of a knight began at age 7, when he became a page. Pages served knights in their company, but also learned to ride and fight with wooden swords and blunted lances. They practiced horseback fighting while riding piggy back and were continually exposed to weapons training. At age 14 a page became a squire, who now trained with both wooden and sharpened weapo...
Post a Comment
Read more