(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

[atreic.livejournal.com]

"God exists, but is evil" is not an atheist belief (I'm sorry if this is stating the obvious, but your post came across as confused over this) although it is a belief that some people have (including me, at times)

I don't think you're right about the message being "God doesn't exist because he's a bastard", or that the message is confusing. I see Northern Lights as a story about "There was a universe with a bad god, the bad god was defeated, then they had to work out how to live in a universe with no god"*. This is a perfectly coherant story, (f'rexample, it makes sense if you replace "god" with "king"). And as a story, it works - it makes people think about "just because there's a god, is he good and should we follow him" and also "if there is no god, how should we choose to live"

Err, I'm not sure if this comment says much beyond "I don't understand what you think the flaw is".

*Well, it's not quite true, because "god" in the books is just useless and forgotten, it is the structure around god that is bad.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Narnia could be described as partly carrying the message "God *does* exist because he's nice," and does it very well indeed.
Huh? That seems to make even less logical sense than the atheist converse, and I can't see the logically-minded Lewis going for it. Maybe I'm missing some intervening steps?
Besides, Aslan isn't nice. Refusing to turn up when people want him to, and sneaking up behind people riding horses and clawing the skin off their back.

[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.

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

It has never in any way occurred to me to consider His Dark Materials to be an atheist argument. I accept that I may be somewhat unusual in seeing it as a liberal argument, but the imagery used is fairly irrelevant to what's actually happening. It's anti-clerical and anti-authoritarian, with the enemy being organized religion, not anti-deistic. Indeed, it turns out that the existence of God* is irrelevant to the entire plot, which is not a struggle between God and Man but simply a revolt against an (Angelic) oppressor - and Asriel seems to know this.


*God does not, in fact, exist in His Dark Materials. The Authority did not, at least according to the various Angels who talk about it, create the Universe.

[aldabra]

Mmm, that's me. Fundamentalism hit my school when I was but fourteen or so, and I was damned if I was going to believe in that God. It's really psychically painful believing in a God who's going to damn you for not agreeing with him, so I don't do it any more. So fundamentally I'm an atheist because if God exists then everything is too horrible to think about (and you'd have to behave as if he didn't anyway).