How do you justify spending time in fantasy?

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As a function of time spent and divine submission, I see an argument that no fantasy of any kind is ever permissible, that we should focus on the reality God created, including helping improve each others’ lives, rather than try to escape this reality by engaging in our own false realities, which we call “fiction”. Time spent reading Tolkien or CS Lewis or playing Minecraft or another single-player game is time one didn’t spend helping one’s neighbor, time not spent appreciating the nature God has made or the real lives people lived here on Earth.

Indeed, this is part of the Church’s condemnation of pornography; the Catechism summarizes:
2354 Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials.
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That bolded sentence has no other purpose than to list a negative aspect of pornography. The author – which I understand to be a council of bishops, or even every bishop worldwide! – clearly has made the assumption that ‘being immersed in the illusion of a fantasy world’ is bad.

How, then, do we arrive at the moral conclusion that it’s okay to spend time on fantasy (e.g. reading books or playing single-player video games), time spent not helping others, time spent not engaging in the reality that God made for us?
 
Great question!!

I think heaven is reality. The beatific vision where we will be with God and see as he sees. That is reality. Everything else is heading towards or away from that reality. Even when we are headed into God’s reality, we often flag and imagine we find rest and happiness in fantasies. It is possible for God to use the little fantasies to inspire or teach if their content isn’t inherently bad. I think this is particularly true for good literature, music and art. Mostly though we are just wasting time in worthless things. Pornography is bad because it combines desecration of the physical with destruction of the spiritual. It is not merely worthless and distracting you from God it disfigures you and separates you completely from reality.

I think it is part of our fallen nature to justify our distractions and fantasies and addictions, by saying we need them because we get tired or weak . I think it is true that we do need them until God grants us a great enough share of his life that we have no reality but his.
 
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I enjoy reading fantasy novels and watching sci fi movies…but I know for myself there’s a cutoff point.
Everyone’s mind is different and I know for myself how I could get a bit to drawn into the story,spend extra time dwelling on say a dream within a dream with in a dream within a dream.
Sometimes there are novels that I may be reading and somehow I’m alerted to an underlying feeling of possible occult,I recheck the author and find there are oddities about their beliefs.
Having a healthy imagination is wonderful and a gift.
 
Fictional stories often contain things like beauty and philosophy, which make us better for having experienced them. It teaches us lessons that we can carry in real life, and prompts internal reflection.
 
I would be a very different person if I hadn’t watched Star Wars and Star Trek as a kid, or read Dune and Lord of the Rings. For one, I wouldn’t now be trying to write a fictional series of novels about the Second Coming from a Catholic Perspective. If I do it well, I imagine that some of my readers will dig deeper into the Catholic faith, which is such an integral part of human history. Also, a Catholic perspective is long overdue. The internet is full of information about Protestant views of Revelation, but they don’t qualify it as Protestant. I suspect there are a lot of Catholics who erroneously believe in the Rapture.
 
I refuse to consider our God-given imagination as anything other than a gift. Like all of our gifts, they can be used for good or evil. Every human invention started out as a bit of fantasy. Every goal we strive towards starts with a spark of imagination and the way it makes us feel to consider possibilities. If fantasy becomes obsession, or fantasy is of something negative, that’s where you get into problems.

I would think of fantasy as a bit like the Sabbath. It’s a rest from work in the real world.
 
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Everybody needs rest and recreation. That’s what fantasy / fiction / gaming etc. is.

I’d say it would be sinful to not get as much rest and recreation as you need!
 
All religious orders have periods of recreation. Every single one.
 
Tolkien made a good Catholic defence of Fantasy in his essay “On Faerie Stories”.
 
“It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world.” Context Is all important here. Pornography creates a fantasy world from which many cannot escape. Their lives are filled with unrealistic expectations of partners, sexuality, and healthy relationships - thus a living, psychological fantasy. Pornography and disorded use of sexuality are frequently the two sides of the same coin. Reading fiction, playing video games does not normally entail the same thing (I would guess in the vast majority of circumstances).

Reading a work of fiction can often bring about spiritual and emotional benefits. The Screwtape Letters is a work of ‘fantasy’ but points to a very real truth. Equally the novel, Ruth, by Gaskell can show how we can easily become hypocrites in a religious fervour to condemn others.

Jesus taught in parables - some of them so fantastical that they are comical (surely one would notice a wooden plank in one’s eye?) - the appeal to the imagination ingrains spiritual truths.

God has given us creative minds - just look at the world’s greatest cathedrals and musical pieces for evidence of this - let’s use the gift given to us.
 
I am very much against all board games., except for Clue of course I was thinking of going on a crusade.
 
Sinner! Amend your ways. Professor Plum did it in the library with a lead pipe. Everyone knows that.
 
Ethereality,

Think. Without fantasy/imagination we wouldn’t have great art or great literature or great buildings–including our beautiful cathedrals. Our minds would shrink into nothingness.
We wouldn’t survive as a species without the ability to create, to imagine. Our minds were created to fantasize.

Could you imagine yourself without imagination? I couldn’t. I wouldn’t even try!
 
I don’t think that Homer, Geoffry Chaucer, Gustave Flaubert, Will Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Cervantes, Solzhenitsyn, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, John Milton, C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, G.K. Chesterton, or Jerry Spinelli need to apologize for writing fiction.

(I didn’t include many SF or fantasy authors but they don’t need to apologize either.)
 
Recreation with each other is different from single-player games by oneself…
 
Fantasy and imagination are different things. There is a difference between imagining scenarios that have no connection and no bearing on reality, and imagining reality or scenarios rooted in reality, supplementing reason.
 
Sadly you’ve just barely missed the point – didactic fiction that teaches about reality (what most or all of them wrote) is different from fantasy that has no moral lesson and no connection to reality.
 
The original post seems to equivocate about fantasy in general or sexual fantasy in particular.

We are commanded to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. So, we have to be in control of ourselves, even our mind. But, that doesn’t say that we can even possibly avoid daydreaming or brainstorming, etc.

Books on Jewish spirituality are much more opinionated about this, that we should be reading and contemplating God’s word regularly. Catholic authors will say that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside – that people want and will to sin.

My assessment is that we should EXPECT and ANTICIPATE and BE READY to deal with temptations, even of the mind. Recall how St Paul tells us about spiritual warfare – to take up the sword of truth and the helmet of salvation, etc. The devil is warring against us, goes about like a roaring lion, seeking to devour.

Psalm 1, the first few verses tells us even who to avoid – those who do evil and those who do not believe.

The worst fantasy is about us sinning in any way. I think there are good fantasies, but we have to be on guard for the bad ones. If you are starving, you are going to fantasize about food. I don’t think you can help doing that.
 
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