Day 34 – 52 Books in 52 Weeks

I finished Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist last night. As I mentioned yesterday, I thought it was a very predictable story. I wasn’t disappointed. You could easily predict what was going to happen next. Very boring.

Coelho continued his New Age theme of all things are of the same soul (Soul of the World), that inanimate objects can talk to you, and are part of you and so on. He even says, on page 131, “… all people who are happy have God within them.” If you’ve read your Bible, you know that only those who have professed Jesus Christ as Savior have God within them (in the form of the Holy Spirit). Besides being theologically incorrect, does it mean that if you’re sad one day that God has left you?

I’ve mentioned in my posts about Hitler’s Mein Kampf that he firmly believed in the indoctrination of children with the things he felt was important for them to know so that they would grow up serving his purpose. On the same page as the above quote, Coelho speaks of the same thing, “We speak of them only to children” (meaning using omens to find treasures).

Throughout the book he speaks of omens and luck… and this coming from a supposed Christian? Then he pulls from our good friend Charles Darwin on page 137, “Everything in the universe evolved.”

Argh!

If Coelho was trying to use allegory, as C.S. Lewis had done in the Chronicles of Narnia, he failed miserably. Lewis knew the Scripture and never distorted it in his story. Coelho uses Scripture, but uses it to fit his story – which goes against the Scriptures. As I said in earlier posts, if he had simply being telling a story, fine… well, not really because it’s just trying to push his New Age beliefs onto the “broad masses” as Hitler would call them. But still, a story is a story. To say that you are a Christian and that this story is in line with that Christianity, is not only wrong, it is quite frankly, immoral. That’s outright lying.

Near the end of the story, he had to put that final nail in the coffin. He writes, “The boy reached through to the Soul of the World, and saw that it was a part of the Soul of God. And he saw that the Soul of God was his own soul.”

As a Christian, I could never presume to have the Soul of God.

Enough of that… it angers me just to think about it. Onto more fun stuff.

I read more in Krakatoa by Simon Winchester. I couldn’t understand why he spent the first two chapters discussing the rivalry between the Dutch and the Portuguese in finding/exploiting a trade route to Java and Sumatra for peppercorns (and a few other spices). I wanted to read about explosions!

But Winchester was setting up the context on how this eruption was so well recorded. Because of the rivalry and trouble with the “natives” and others who eventually saw the importance of this route, naval logs, military logs and so on were meticulously kept. It also turned the area into a bustling area – where scientists and others came to learn what they could of this area.

Due to all of these circumstances, Krakatoa became the first “recorded volcanic throat clearing.” It’s good to have the background info – it really does help set the stage. I can’t wait to read more!

Happy reading!