(no subject)

[jack]

One of the thoughts about different aspects of atheist belief is that the natural one is not believing "God exists", but some people do believe something like "If He does exist, He's a bastard."

But it occurred to me, that's basically the point of the Northern Lights trilogy. The central message is "God doesn't exist because he's a bastard". If that sounds confusing, well, exactly, that's why the message the books send seems to be confusing :)

It's not a wrong way to go about it. Narnia could be described as partly carrying the message "God *does* exist because he's nice," and does it very well indeed. Using God's metaphorical absence as a metaphor for his literal absence is a good metaphor -- I can see if the books had clicked for me more, it might be quite exciting, if instead of having no unifying message, atheism was a crusade against an uncaring God and a malicious power-hungry arch-angel. Yay!

For that matter, in some sense, it's a real argument: if you say "If God were running the world, I don't like it," you might get from there to "then He isn't," via "if he's not doing it right, he's not God or not there".

But Pullman's presentation didn't really work for me, and so all the flaws in the presentation continued to bother me.

Contrariwise, sometimes people do over-seize on the second aspect of atheism, especially if they're used to their religion being the default and assume an atheist *is* not someone factually thinking God doesn't exist, but someone morally choosing not to follow Him.

Comments

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Narnia could be described as partly carrying the message "God *does* exist because he's nice," and does it very well indeed.
Huh? That seems to make even less logical sense than the atheist converse, and I can't see the logically-minded Lewis going for it. Maybe I'm missing some intervening steps?
Besides, Aslan isn't nice. Refusing to turn up when people want him to, and sneaking up behind people riding horses and clawing the skin off their back.

[lizzip.livejournal.com]

Besides, Aslan isn't nice. Refusing to turn up when people want him to, and sneaking up behind people riding horses and clawing the skin off their back.

IIRC that's Aslan working in mysterious ways for non-obvious reasons that turn out to be For The Best?

It's a long time since I last read the books, though.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. Maybe cartesiandaemon and I are using different senses of "nice".

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Probably. Not nice as in sweet, inoffensive, cuddly, easy. A big thing with angel and me was the quote "Not a TAME lion". But I was typing quickly and threw that out there with a vague idea of encapsulating "a good thing" and "you love him", but didn't really examine it all.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I may well be off base. I think what I was going for is that Narnia, from a Christian perspective, works on me on at least two levels:

* Presenting a description of how God might intervene in a world, in good, just, mysterious, etc, ways, so I might understand better how He *might* intervene in this one.
* Presenting a description of how God might be that I *want* to believe.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hm, and if you look at it like that, it helps amplify what I was trying to say, maybe that Northern Lights achieved something like:

* An atheistic world we can be emotionally committed to
* But failed to make that a good explanation of how our world works
* And failed to make a world we want to live in (I mean, the Polar Bears are great, but I can do without the Angelic oppression, I'd rather any sense of progress comes from building up from chaos, not overthrowing oppression, however uplifting that is to imagine)