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Feb. 5th, 2008 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackOne 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.
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.
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Date: 2008-02-05 01:40 pm (UTC)- atheist / deist are definitions around the question of Does God exist?" whereas people who believe "if God exists, he's evil" don't care* whether God exists, because their behaviour is going to be pretty much the same whether they are in a universe with no god, or a universe with a bad god, and they've made their primary decision that they don't live in a universe with a god they have to follow.
So instead of "Does God Exist" being the dividing question, the question is "Should I follow God?" maybe...
*Well, maybe they care a little bit, but it's not The Point
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Date: 2008-02-05 01:44 pm (UTC)* What you say, there, and explain well, that there's two separate questions, is the obvious and mostly correct explanation
* But there's something more going on, the questions are linked in some way, both in real life, and in Pullman.
Maybe :)