When we see the Harkonnens in Dune, their evil feels familiar.

It’s as if the recognition of a malevolent force in the world is something intertwined with our very souls.

I remember the scripture in Genesis saying:

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

“You will not certainly die…”"

The issue of recognising of what is good and what is evil is actually nuanced and difficult as we see Eve and Adam struggle with this. Along those lines of discussing the nature of good and evil it is also a mistake to place them as opposites. I’d like to explore that topic of how good is itself something to be dwelt and mediatated upon because it is connected to reality Himself. However I will leave that topic to another day.

Back to Dune… it does seem like an unwritten rule in modern culture: you don’t mix Christianity and science fiction (I guess i broke that in making this video and run the risk of upsetting people who enjoy Dune without someone using it as an analogy).

I’m thinking of how J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout believer, famously engaged in a long-standing conversation with C.S. Lewis where he posited that Christianity was the "one true myth”. I like that conversation because it shows that Tolken understood Lewis and how he needed to hear a wholistic picture of why the stories of old stood out for C S Lewis and how they connected to the narrative of scripture. For these authors, faith wasn't an ideology to be forced upon a story; it was the very bedrock from which their epic worlds were built.

Thank you for reading the brief summary I wrote, the small portion of scripture and of course for watching this video.

-Jonathan