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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 10:26 pm (UTC)Going back, though, to then: then was when the Reagan administration was welcoming AIDS as God's cure for homosexuality. It seems bizarre to me now that anyone would take that seriously, but friends of mine did, and the people running the world did (and they're the same people who are running the world now).
It's basically Pascal's wager in reverse, if the God in question is going to send you to Hell for not participating in preposterousness. There's a lot of pure horror in the world, and in the Old Testament, and in the New too when read in that light. I found it a paralysing amount of horror. *If* it's true, you can either correctly believe it and be paralysed or falsely deny it and do what you can against obviously hopeless odds. I wasn't strong enough to believe it without being paralysed. I do consciously choose not to go there again, but it's not lightly chosen.