It’s called faith, stupid!

Frodology has been the unfair victim of heckles and hounding by many ‘scientists’ recently, and unfairly so. I say ‘scientists’ because, really, they’re just corrupting atheist dogs. Everyone knows you can’t have science without faith. It’s like a monkey without a hat: it just doesn’t make sense.

And what is the message of these ‘scientists’? They arrogantly say that we Frodologists are foolish for worshipping Frodo, praise Him, and there’s no ‘evidence’ of a greater ‘Frodo’ ‘pulling our strings’ and deciding our fate. They talk of atheist concepts of ‘proof’. Typical: in the middle of metaphysical discussions of such enormous import, morally debased atheists get distracted by questions of booze and its alcohol content.

They tell us that the onus is on us to prove to them there is a Frodo, praise Him, and without it they refuse to pay the membership fee. They talk of concepts of ontology, and having looked that word up in the dictionary, I can promise you that the study of birds has nothing to do with faith. Merely wily atheist diversionary tactics!

Other doubters and detractors argue Frodo’s metaphysical person cannot be extant and active in the physical world as He would require a physical form Himself. They say that He ceased to have that function when He breathed His hallowed last, expired, and returned to the soil as nothing more than carbon atoms. But how could that be, when carbon and atoms are such recent inventions? You can’t be made of carbon if you don’t know what it is, just as you can’t live a virtuous life if you haven’t been thoroughly schooled in what it is.

And still others doubt that He existed in the first place, cursed be their eternal souls! They say He is a fictional character who only made His way onto paper due to the inspired handiwork of a man named Tolkien. J. Tolkien, specifically. Well, John Tolkien. That is, John R.R. Tolkien. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Excuse me. They argue that the Word of Frodo was only put to paper centuries after Frodo lived; that the few physical remnants of his life are not verifiably from his epoch at all and are evidence of little beyond the fact that wood existed in the era from which they do date; and that His story is eminently implausible.

The golden nugget of truth from which all Frodologists can take succor in the face of such trying (but ultimately misguided) arguments is that it is written in a book. Nay, three books. Readers are at this point invited to remember accurately that childhood lesson to believe everything they read. Frodo was and is real because a New York Times bestseller says so. It’s the same principle behind dragons. Dragons exist because there are pictures and stories of them. No one contests that. And more than that, it’s not just written in a book, but The Book. Take a moment to appreciate how Truth and Rightness are imbued and conveyed by capital letters. It’s why everyone believed Hitler: those Germans are just crazy for capitals!

But even more significantly, it’s called faith. Why does it need proving when it’s something you can just believe in? I don’t need scientists to prove to me Frodo’s existence or lack of. My faith is that special kind of super belief that escapes the terrestrial bonds of simple pretending and enters that fuzzy gray area in which things are spawned into existence by the mere supposition of their possibility. It’s a concept metaphysicians like to call Occam’s New and Improved Electric Razor, in which the truth is not manacled to the tediously tiresome simplest solution, but allowed to take flight under the soaring wings of boundless improbability.

Ergo, Frodo exists. QED.

By way of disclaimer, the author would like to note that he received special dispensation from Frodo’s Supreme Agent on Earth to discuss the above controversial issues in an open forum. Broaching such subjects without authority is heresy and just cause for excommunication. Or execution. I forget which.

Interested readers may also contact the author for more information about the Fiction for Faith Campaign, the goal of which is to get The Lord of the Rings moved from the fiction section at Barnes & Noble to the faith shelf. To make room for it in its new home and fill the corresponding empty space on the fiction shelf, the Campaign is also lobbying to get the Bible moved in the opposite direction.