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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 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-05 02:56 pm (UTC)I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The internet is full of stupid people of all colours and stripes.
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Date: 2008-02-05 03:08 pm (UTC)Think of someone who had an emotional shock -- a relative killed in a car accident which destroys your previous faith in God, or becoming religious after a religion helped you cope after. I think neither of those has a real place in a logical argument[1] but certainly influence people to convert in several directions.
[1] The nearest would be not thinking things like that happened to people like you, and it happening making you realise it does. That's possible but not really what's going on imho.
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Date: 2008-02-05 03:19 pm (UTC)When people deconvert because of bad stuff, I think what happening is that these people are raised in nice fluffy CofE households, and so vaguely believe in a nice fluffy god. Then they discover the world is full of Very Bad Things, get distressed, and realise that their nice fluffy god either isn't doing anything, doesn't exist, or isn't really very fluffy after all.
As most of these people did not have a strong faith anyway (just a weak comforting fluffy faith) it goes away when they discover it appears to be incompatible with reality.
It is a logical conclusion for them to draw though. The emotions indicate how upset they are, but it's not that they reject God because of their emotions, it's that the God they thought existed can't realy exist because of All The Bad Stuff.
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Date: 2008-02-05 03:48 pm (UTC)That's a great description and I know what you mean, but what about the other direction? I think someone who *wants* to believe in God is more likly to find more sympathy with other reasons/arguments to do so than someone who doesn't, and vice versa. So that's not the end of the story, but I think how you feel about it, especially on such hard-to-prove questions definitely has an effect -- on how you believe and certainly how you read the books :)
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Date: 2008-02-05 04:06 pm (UTC)There are pay offs (allowed to have sex before marriage, etc) for not believing in the god of the Evangelical Christians too, but if you want the benefits of religion but don't like that God you don't have to be an atheist, there are lots of fluffy religions you can side step in to, or fluffier versions (such as most of the CofE) you can step down / up in to.
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Date: 2008-02-06 12:47 am (UTC)