(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]

I think you've read too much in to my question.

Perhaps I have. But let me explain in a bit more detail. aldabra's comment talked about her loss of faith as a teenager. But your question to her was in terms of her current position. This seems like quite a leap to me for the reasons I set out above. For the avoidance of doubt, I don't think your question was illegitimate or rude, but I thought the leap was worth pointing out.

I happen to be a card carrying, fire breathing, Christian eating, militant atheist.

As I understand it, you lost your faith as an adult. That's quite different, I think, from losing one's faith as a child (or never being a religious believer at all). Since your deconversion was recent, it's likely that your current justification is similar to the reasons for your deconversion: you haven't had time to greatly refashion your worldview. So it would make sense to link them in your case but not in mine, and maybe not in aldabra's. (But she's answered this herself: you should read her comments and not my second-guesses.)