(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

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

The gnostics believed something along these lines. Confronted with the paradox of a perfectly good God but a flawed world they posited a second being, a demiurge, who created the world, but not being God, was unable or unwilling to do a better job. In some conceptions of gnosticism, the demiurge is a lesser being or servant of God; in others it is coequal and positively evil.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's interesting! Separating "creating the world" and "being good".

Speaking of history, I know I tend to see movements away from traditional religion as steps towards abandoning religion entirely -- that thinking God may not intervene in the world, or may not be both powerful and good, or should be worshipped as you see fit, or exists in a theistic way but doesn't necessarily fulfil all the things people say of him. Which is mainly just my perspective, but that there seems to be some truth in that somewhere or other, both as a historical trend and in individual progressions...?

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yes, that seems like a better solution than the general modern Christian hand wavey answers.

I want a deity loyalty card where every time someone says "God works in mysterious ways", "You wouldn't expect to understand how God does things", and the like I get a stamp. When I have enough stamps I can get them redeemed for something appropriate (Bibles / Korans / Cute Christian Girls / Eternal Salvation?)