Thirith on 4/11/2007 at 19:37
Okay, got the context now. Well, if he'd based it on Islam, I could imagine it wouldn't have been published. Not in this day and age, and not after The Satanic Verses. And Judaism is a different case, because in theory the god of Judaism is the Christian god too. It's once you get into the (important) details that there are differences.
Uncia on 4/11/2007 at 19:47
What about if he had made the religion up? What if there was no religion to start with- would the books prove that Pullman is pushing the agenda that all government is evil?
Thirith on 4/11/2007 at 20:52
Quote Posted by Uncia
What about if he had made the religion up? What if there was no religion to start with- would the books prove that Pullman is pushing the agenda that all government is evil?
It all depends on how he would have done it, clearly. But that sort of question doesn't really get this discussion anywhere. If you disagree, fine, no problem, but if you're actually interested in discussing this, then I'd ask you to address my points that Pullman doesn't present any redeeming features in religion, that the death of God is basically a triumph in the book (it means that the good guys win the war), that the one character who has a religious background is shown to be much better off for becoming an atheist, that the characters who actually seem to believe are either presented as evil, misguided or ignorant. I believe those to be facts, so I fail to see much of a point in discussing questions along the lines of "What if Pullman had done this, that or the other?" because he didn't. You could just as well ask: "What if Melville hadn't written about a whaler and an obssessed captain and a white whale?"
Uncia on 4/11/2007 at 21:45
All righty. As far as I see it, Pullman does nothing to really note religion itself as being harmful- the Ministry is a corrupt group, running the country and using religion as an excuse to enforce its position. In itself, this is as anti-religious as history books. If you look at non-Ministry followers of faith, ie, most of the humans in Lyra's world, including the theologians she grew up with, they're perfectly normal people.
As far as religious deities themselves go, it's the same as with the Ministry; all the good elements were either killed or exiled, with the current guy running the show being anything but someone to aspire to. To call fighting that anti-religious is akin to calling someone who killed a psychotic killer in self defense a murderer- completely and utterly missing the point. Heck, they don't even kill God, he dies in an accident. The kids are trying to help him, not knowing that it would harm him, and never realizing what he is.
The triumph of the book is the kids growing up and acting as adults, trying to right the mistakes of the past. Killing Metatron is merely a stepping stone to allow them that, since he'd kill them otherwise in his persuit of power. Lord Asriel's republic remains little more than his dream, as it could never exist, and humanity in all worlds continues believing whatever they believed so far, except without having to worry about Metatron suddenly killing them all because he's decided they weren't faithful enough.
Molly wasn't really presented as having lost faith as much as having realized that her becoming a nun was simply her running away from life. It's only suspect because of the rest of the book, and I'll admit to being a little irked by this myself, but hey.
She's far from being the only good religious character in the book though, but I've covered that in the first paragraph.
And finally, the point I was making was that this is fiction. And in itself, writing about an evil version of God is as much an attack on it as Stargate is an attack on ancient Egyptian religion. Now of course there's bias, and the contents itself can easily turn into strawman and projection and all that crap, but simply using "see, they're fighting religion" is a piss-poor argument of something being anti-religios.
tl;dr: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
Scots Taffer on 4/11/2007 at 23:48
Just got to say, this (
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,305487,00.html) article is hilarious, the best part is where religious groups get offended by the movie adaptation watering down the offensive parts and the athiest groups/fans of the book get offended by the movie playing it safe and not wanting to get canned in god-fearing america by being about killing god.
Put both camps in a rocket and fire them to THE FUCKING MOON.
fett on 5/11/2007 at 00:07
Quote Posted by Thirith
Yes, the religion in the book is one of blind, zealous fundamentalism, but that's the only sort of religion Pullman's fiction acknowledges as existing.
Making him a blind, zealous, fundamentlist himself, just one that's sitting in the other camp.
Quote Posted by Thirith
And if you look at Molly Malone's story in book 3, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that a large part of that spells out pretty clearly: "The only good faith is lapsed faith." She's perhaps the main character that Pullman uses as a soapbox, as far as I'm concerned; through her, he is pretty much saying that he understands people wanting or needing religion as a crutch, but that this crutch is in effect based on ignorance and/or self-delusion.
I would argue that he even
created the Malone character to use as his soapbox. It was at this point I started wondering where the plot went, and what happened to the great characters in the first book. Malone is a one dimensional hand-puppet at best, and it's very clear why when you read interviews with Pullman about his atheist views. It's really a shame because he seems to have something intelligent to say, but his method just turns me off big time.
I think something we're overlooking here is the basic Fundamentalist view of history: Yes religious people have done horribly evil and malicious things in the name of God, but they weren't TRUE believers [like us] :angel: So when an author uses fictionalized characters to get at the heart of what religion is usually about (control, manipulation, guilt, money, sex, power), it really unnerves the Pat Robertson types. Probably because deep down, they know he's on to something, but they don't want to be painted that way whether it's the historic reality or not. They truly believe that things are different now *because of them and their true devotion to a true god*, and that if it had been *them* in the Dark Ages [the TRUE believers] all those bad things wouldn't have happened. Pullman calls bullshit, he just doesn't do it in a very creative or engaging way IMO.
Uncia on 5/11/2007 at 07:42
When you say not engaging, you're talking about the first book? Huh.
Thirith on 5/11/2007 at 07:52
Quote Posted by Uncia
All righty. As far as I see it, Pullman does nothing to really note religion itself as being harmful- the Ministry is a corrupt group, running the country and using religion as an excuse to enforce its position. In itself, this is as anti-religious as history books. If you look at non-Ministry followers of faith, ie, most of the humans in Lyra's world, including the theologians she grew up with, they're perfectly normal people.
It's been a year or so since I last read the book, but I don't remember this, to be honest. I remember people who were good and who happened to be mislead by religion. I remember the common folk being basically good but misguided by faith, their religious leanings being shown as founded in ignorance. And the people Lyra grew up with are scientists much more than theologians - it's simply that practically everything in Pullman's world is controlled to some extent by religion, but I don't think it's being very accurate calling the academics at Jordan College religious in any deep sense.
Quote:
And finally, the point I was making was that this is
fiction. And in itself, writing about an evil version of God is as much an attack on it as Stargate is an attack on ancient Egyptian religion. Now of course there's bias, and the contents itself can easily turn into strawman and projection and all that crap, but simply using "see, they're fighting religion" is a piss-poor argument of something being anti-religios.
tl;dr: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
And this is where we disagree, the main reason being that I think Pullman's ideological leanings get in the way of the fiction from book 2 onward. Much of the time he's subtle, his characters interesting, but then he gets to the atheist saint Molly or to one of the reptilian priest characters, and I feel he's no longer telling the story: he's editorialising. (It's not just Christians who see Pullman as injecting an atheist agenda into the books, it's atheists.) And frankly, Uncia, if a large part of reviews (in literary magazines, not in Christian/Fundamentalist publications) as well as Pullman himself in interviews remark on the strong, consistent anti-religious streak in interviews (Pullman said a number of times that he wanted the books to be the counterpart to the Narnia books, and that he saw himself as an anti-C.S.Lewis), then I think there's at least a possibility that you're seeing a cigar where there's actually something very different.
Uncia on 5/11/2007 at 08:42
The theologians in Lyra's world were like monks of our past- that is, seekers and keepers of knowledge, to better understand God's creation. They'd likely be more pragmatic simply because they had reasonable levels of independence in their research, but if the study of Dust is any indication it was ultimately still there to serve God.
Also, kindly link me to those interviews, I'd be interested to read them. The ones I had simply voiced his dislike of Lewis' work because it presented life as being second rate, with death as a release to something better. I suspect that him being the anti-CSLewis / HDM being the anti-Narnia is just another memetic nonsense.
Quote:
Many of the commentators in the media have seen you as a conscious antidote to C S Lewis, seeking to do for a moral atheism what he did for Christianity.Yeah, well, it's largely nonsense, of course.
(...)
But I must come back to what you were saying about Lewis. I don't think he did set out to evangelise. How many children do we know who have read the Narnia books and didn't realise they were about Christianity? If he was trying to evangelise, he would have made it jolly clear that Narnia was... He wrote those books at great speed and under great emotional pressure, and I'm inclined to think this began with that famous debate when the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe carved chunks out of him.
Thirith on 5/11/2007 at 09:19
Quote Posted by Uncia
The theologians in Lyra's world were like monks of our past- that is, seekers and keepers of knowledge, to better understand God's creation. They'd likely be more pragmatic simply because they had reasonable levels of independence in their research, but if the study of Dust is any indication it was ultimately still there to serve God.
As I said, it's been a while since I last read the books, so I'd have to go back to them. The academics were mostly in the first book, which I'd say has least of a problem with polemics getting in the way of the story. If it was only for Northern Lights, I'd be in full agreement with you, actually; I simply think it's no longer that accurate for The Subtle Knife, and it's definitely not an accurate assessment of The Amber Spyglass. As far as I'm concerned, if the latter isn't clearly, and polemically, anti-religion, then C.S. Lewis' works aren't Christian allegory. (Having said that, though, I could imagine children reading His Dark Materials and missing that aspect of the book, much like children missed the Aslan=ChristOMGLOL thing Lewis has going. My problem with Pullman isn't that he's misleading children INTO HELL AND ETERNAL TORMENT, FOREVER AMEN!, it's that he betrays the story too much to his ideological leanings.)
Quote:
Also, kindly link me to those interviews, I'd be interested to read them. The ones I had simply voiced his dislike of Lewis' work because it presented life as being second rate, with death as a release to something better. I suspect that him being the anti-CSLewis / HDM being the anti-Narnia is just another memetic nonsense.
I'll see whether I can find them. They were in German-language publications, so I might not be able to track them down again, seeing how many of them only have archives for paying customers, and there may be (minor) problems with things becoming distorted somewhat in translation. I'll see what I can find, though. It's possible that you're right, and I'm getting things mixed up in my memory.
