Who doesn’t want an armored bear for a friend?
The Christianist temper tantrum over the release of the movie “The Golden Compass”—for the high crime of refusing to play into their lies about god and religion—made me finally get off my ass and read the entire His Dark Materials Trilogy. I’m now doubly amused by the temper tantrum, because the first book, “The Golden Compass”, doesn’t get around to mentioning what you discover in later books, which is that there’s no god-the-creator, just some angel that convinced everyone that he’s god and immediately swung into action creating a submissive population based around ignorance and anxious hatred of sexuality. In fact, the books have a delightful “fuck you” approach to churning out heresies that I appreciated: Satan’s rebellion against god was an act of heroism that failed to save us from our dumb ass selves, “god” lied to you about heaven and instead keeps all the ghosts of the dead locked in hell in a sick bid for power, Eve’s sin in the garden was the true salvation of humanity, and the logical result of that, which is that the church’s interests in controlling erotic love is to make sexuality and love even more fraught and hostile. Divide and conquer, you know. The church’s hostile obsession erotic love also has the secondary effect of rifts in the parent-child bond, which is thoroughly examined here, since the heroine Lyra is supposedly conceived in “sin” and therefore is rejected by her parents. And all these ideas are written out in a way that are completely appropriate for children (at least the ones old enough to read and understand thick books like these), believe it or not, so I tip my hat to Philip Pullman for that handy trick.
The books are incredibly imaginative, so I churned right through them, even when the prose was tepid. Christianists give a lot of lip service to the idea that atheism is dull, uninspired, unimaginative, heartless, and nihilistic, but their temper tantrum reactions to books and movies like His Dark Materials shows that they don’t believe that all. If atheism is so damn unappealing, then it’s not a realistic threat, right? But Pullman manages to use fantasy to detail out what I would suggest is probably the dominant atheist conceptions about the big questions that religion gives easy answers for in its bid to colonize minds—what makes you a person? what happens when you die? is it scary? how did all this get here? Granted, he uses language about souls and stuff for artistic purposes, and that’s a bit confusing, but the device of “daemons”, which are, in Lyra’s world, these animal companions that are basically externalized essences of self, function to convey the idea that souls and spirit and all that religious gobble are metaphors for consciousness that have become all too literal. They are also really neat; I defy anyone to read these books and not wish that they had a daemon. In the third book, a long (overlong, honestly) setpiece where Lyra and her our-dimension friend Will go into the land of the dead and free everyone demonstrates why the atheist idea of what happens to you when you die (you just die, and your ego dissipates and your body decays and rejoins the environment) is not so scary at all to contemplate if you really allow yourself to accept it instead of hiding in egotistical fantasies of eternal life. In one of the most imaginative sections of the third book, Pullman has his scientist character Mary Malone disappear into another world where a diamond-backed elephant/antelope-type animal evolved into the intelligent life instead of primates. And with the fresh eyes of a human being in this world, he carefully shows how even complex civilizations could easily arise out of chance and evolution instead of require a creator.* He makes a fine case that one doesn’t need a god to have an emotionally compelling existence in this world, with a bit of existentialist talk about throwing yourself into the world and into meaningful labor.
Again, the first book doesn’t actually get into the point where he denies the existence of god, so the Christianist temper tantrum over the movie strikes me as mostly a temper tantrum over the criticisms of organized religion in that book that lead up to the atheist turn in the second book. With the church as the bad guys in the first book, it really moves along at a good clip, and when you discover what exactly the church is doing to torture children, you’re built up to the point where it’s quite horrifying. It sets up what ends up being a common theme throughout the three books, about attachment to self and to others and how religion struggles to turn people against themselves and against each other so that we’re weak and stupid and easier to control. While it’s sometimes hard to see, for instance, how Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter would have been much better people if not torn apart by ridiculous religious oppression, that’s clearly the point of their little story arc.
The characters are great, and I was especially impressed with the way that Pullman doesn’t dumb down characterization for children too much. Lyra’s skill at deceit and Will’s skill at fighting were interesting challenges to child audiences, because it raises the question of whether or not a personality trait can easily be classified as bad or good, and suggests instead that we can take ownership over our personalities and decide for ourselves how we use our skills. The armored bears had no philosophical side to them that I cared much about, but were still fucking awesome. Lyra’s neglectful parents are also rendered in a way that it becomes impossible to classify them as good guys or bad guys; the same character traits are brought out when they do good things and when they do evil things.
A lot of good stuff going on in these books, but they still suffered from the tepid prose issue, and some serious bad pacing in the last book. The scenes in the land of the dead could have been cut in half, and the final battle scenes between god’s army and the angelic rebels was pretty hard to follow at points. And the last few chapters, where Pullman realizes that he’s set up this entire theme that can only be resolved by having a 12 and 13-year-old fall madly in love—and how inappropriate it is to leave kids with an ending that implies that you need to treat your first childish love like the most important forevermore—unravel a bit as he both hurries through the unconvincing love scenes and then comes up with a tragic ex machina to separate them so that they can grow up and love other people, too. It’s too bad, because I appreciated the grander idea behind the final scenes, which is that the concept of original sin was not sexualized by accident, but instead was a tool to poison people’s intimate relationships with misogyny and shame , and cripple our collective development into better people. I think that’s a maddeningly important point, and more atheists and critics of Christianity need to explore why true sexual intimacy threatens the church’s power to the point where they have responded by trying to regulate it out of existence—I’m thinking now of even how the most marriage-obsessed Bible-thumping Protestant churches demand during the marriage ceremony that your marriage not be built around love for each other, oh no, but your shared love of god. This made-up entity should always be between you, and of course your marriage should also have the chill introduced to it of male dominance and the survival response of passive aggression. Healthy and delightful! Well, good for the church’s power at least.
*I will say his relentless emphasis on the difference between “people” of any dimensional species and the other animals did grate on me a bit. He seemed overly eager to calm fears that without a god, there’s no difference between us and the animals. I tend to think it’s a good thing for human beings if we open up our eyes and admit that we have more in common with our language-less cousin species than we’re currently comfortable admitting. My cat who is rubbing my ankles as I write this might be far dumber than me and not capable of abstract thought and all that, but I am skeptical of the idea that she’s not self-aware or completely lacking in finer emotions like “angry at her owner for leaving her for 2 and a half days over Christmas”.
143 Responses to “Review: His Dark Materials Trilogy”
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All’s I want is to ride a dinosaur, just like Jesus did.
FYI - Bhutto has been assasinated by bombing in Pakistan . .
re: animal consciousness
re: the Golden Compass
I saw the movie, and it was AWESOME. I didn’t even know there were such blatant anti-religious themes to it unti lafter I saw it — though I did notice that the “bad guys” were all dressed in a way that brought Catholic priests to mind.
I was afraid that ‘tepid prose’ and pacing might be a problem with the literary versions, as it generally is when fictional books try to attack huge concepts with “an agenda.” (Ayn Rand comes to mind…) But after your review, I will add them to my wishlist.
your own personal armored bear
coming to fight your fights
bear who’s there
There has been an interesting series of op eds from the Boston Globe where theologians why love the series explain that it isn’t anti-spirituality, it is anti-hierarchy. The good guys reject that hierarchy, and look for the truth of the world.
Here’s one from Dr. Donna Frietas
Do kids really give two piasters, generally speaking, what the “message” is one way or another? And if they’re old/smart enough to pick up on philosophical themes, aren’t they old/smart enough to engage them? Wouldn’t an intelligent parent of faith — let’s be diplo, kiddies — welcome the opportunity to examine that faith ahem critically with their old/smart enough offspring?
And ain’t Satan fuckin’ cool, with the pitchfork and shit? Seems like he gets all the good lines.
I didn’t think the Dark Materials books were atheistic, but gnostic. The false creator, sometimes called “Ialdaboath” (corruption of Iaweh?), is a common tenet of gnostic sects. The snake in Eden is often seen as the true savior, delivering knowledge, gnosis, to humanity. See Pagels: Gnostic Gospels.
Good review, I’ve read the books and discussed them but hadn’t thought of some of the details you bring up here.
That said, I’d add one additional objection to the third book. It’s a little more specific than in the review, so I’ll throw a spoiler warning just to be safe. The final battle was ultimately pretty dang anti-climatic. Its one thing to have a strawman for a baddy, most everyone does it. It’s another to have him be such a strawman that he literally blows away in the wind.
What I love about the trilogy, apart from armored bears and so forth (which is really a good bit of what I love), is the way Pullman specifies that what the Church considers sin is the knowledge of good and evil (as in the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the Garden of Eden). That is, Dust is bad because it indicates the mental passage into full sentience at adolescence - it is not just sexual maturity that’s to be avoided, but the change to a fully adult brain, as also shown by a daemon’s ceasing to be plastic in form.
That at least is my interpretation. I’m still irritated that Mrs. Coulter loses her edge; I preferred her as the evil sort who is nonetheless reluctant to torture her own child. Lord Asriel is the primary mover and she’s the adjunct, and that just aggravates.
I was disappointed in how Lyra disappears from the books. She was so full of life and it was nifty having a strong girl character.
I could understand giving her a smaller role in the second book in order to introduce Will, but putting her in a coma for such a long time was just awful.
It was like Pullman didn’t know what to do with this strong female character, but he didn’t want to kill her off. So he did the next worst thing and limited her exposure and intellect.
Okay, Amanda, cough up: what would your daemon be? We know you’ve thought about it, just tell us.
Well, I have a different take on the series which is that while he attacks many doctrines of Christianity, he still leaves his characters in a fundamentally spiritual universe. Which has the series adopted by religious humanists, scientific pantheists and new-agers. Pullman isn’t the first person to be bitten by this. Einstein and Dewey both tried to use religious language in secular philosphy only to be misrepresented as admitting a lawgiving god.
While it delights in making strawmen of Christian doctrine and Christian athoritarianism, it’s downright friendly to religious humanist traditions which have already adopted similar metaphorical spins on heaven, hell, the afterlife, evolution, and original sin.
It’s ironic that the movie deemphasized the Church aspect of the Magisterium, but then put them much more in the foreground than the books, to the point of inserting several villain characters whose only purpose was sitting in dark rooms discussing evil plans.
One of the finest young adult series ever written. Even better for the the fact that the “lesson” is shown, and not told. In other words, he doesn’t clobber you over the head, but instead shows you the truth through the power of metaphor. I don’t always agree with everything he has to say, but damn if this isn’t a great series (and, truth be told, one of the more transgressive things to come out of popular culture in a while). Here’s a question: why is it that many of the more difficult cultural premises are only tackled these days in young adult fiction, while “adult” fiction spirals into solipsism?
There has been an interesting series of op eds from the Boston Globe where theologians why love the series explain that it isn’t anti-spirituality, it is anti-hierarchy. The good guys reject that hierarchy, and look for the truth of the world.
Rationalizations to cope with the fact that they enjoy the books but don’t want to really deal with the themes. I mean, they’re children’s books. They hit you over the head with stuff. It’s not subtle. God dies with a whimper when the children open up the crystal case he was in, and they don’t know that they killed “god” and they don’t care either. Hell was set up specifically by god because he desires control, and only oblivion is the real release from suffering. We find ourselves in self-examination and in other people, not in spirits or anything supernatural.
It’s not a subtle series you can read all sorts of interpretations into. There’s a little spiritual shit, but it’s really just an extrapolation of the idea that our physical world is amazing enough if you open your eyes and really look, and you don’t need spiritual nonsense to give your life meaning.
The final battle was ultimately pretty dang anti-climatic. Its one thing to have a strawman for a baddy, most everyone does it. It’s another to have him be such a strawman that he literally blows away in the wind.
I thought that was brilliant and drove home the point—god is nothing. He wasn’t a strawman, he’s the world’s greatest MacGuffin, a bullshit idea wrapped in crystal and cherished and preserved by those who get off on the power of claiming to do his will.
Okay, Amanda, cough up: what would your daemon be? We know you’ve thought about it, just tell us.
I suspect my daemon would be very close to my cat Dusty. A very silly, overactive, overstimulated, and hopefully intelligent cat.
For readers of the books, what do you think your daemon would be?
One note: I don’t agree with Amanda as to the plot point labeled as ex machina (I admit “deus ex machina” would be slightly inappropriate here!), as it’s central to the idea that “we must build the Kingdom of Heaven where we are” - that is, it’s not brought in simply and solely to separate Lyra and Will. The ending is sad, but it’s not suggested that they spend their entire lives pining for each other to the exclusion of making their lives, which is a big plus - their first love is important to them then, stays important in their minds partly because they don’t end up living it, but they don’t let it rule them.
While it delights in making strawmen of Christian doctrine and Christian athoritarianism, it’s downright friendly to religious humanist traditions which have already adopted similar metaphorical spins on heaven, hell, the afterlife, evolution, and original sin.
…And is that a problem? *g*
My and my fellow Pagan friends totally “adopted” the books as being champions of spirituality as opposed to hierarchy, bodily celebration as opposed to asceticism, and sex-positive thought as opposed to sex-fearing thought. Most of the characters seemed to express an agnosticism as regards the hypothetical existence of a “real” God for which the Authority that the Church worshipped was an imposter.
Those of us who follow religions that do not seek to brainwash people or turn them against themselves–that is, those of us who follow religions that don’t actually look like Christianity (*gasp!* there are some! Really!)–found a lot to love here.
Besides! Totem animals, Goddess-worshipping witches, an Orpheic harrowing of Hades–these books are totally Pagan! So there! *g*
…which is to say, readers who identify with the message of the books will tend to see them as champions of whatever identity they give that message. And that’s ok. The message stays the same: think for yourself, celebrate your intellect and your sexuality, don’t treat people like things, don’t treat causes as more important than people.
Re: Caren’s comment, Amanda, I was wondering too what you thought of Lyra’s changing role throughout the series.
And that’s why I run Linux.You’ll pardon this terminal cynic for intervening in the pagan libertarian back-patting, but when I lost my brother to far right white supremacist authoritarianism, I didn’t lose him to Catholicism or Evangelical Christianity, but to paganism (Asatru in particular… and cue all the ‘true’ Asatru people who will demonstrate how neo-nazism and ‘real’ Asatru don’t mesh well together). Laine Lawless from the racist Save Our State offshoot of the Minutemen is a pagan (and a lesbian, not that it is germane to the discussion). And so on. That pagans tend toward a more liberal outlook than ‘traditional’ religion seems to me to be more of a factor of their irrelevancy (from a *political power* perspective) than from something inherent to the religion. Just like Catholics in highly secular nations have had to put a little bit of water in their whine, while Catholics in nations with high church interventionism into state affairs tend to be only one step removed from the Inquisition days. I’m willing to think that if pagans were in power, they wouldn’t be treating us atheistic heathens any better than the Catholic church did.
Amanda: Rationalizations to cope with the fact that they enjoy the books but don’t want to really deal with the themes. I mean, they’re children’s books. They hit you over the head with stuff. It’s not subtle. God dies with a whimper when the children open up the crystal case he was in, and they don’t know that they killed “god” and they don’t care either. Hell was set up specifically by god because he desires control, and only oblivion is the real release from suffering. We find ourselves in self-examination and in other people, not in spirits or anything supernatural.
“Don’t really want to deal with the themes?” or just the problem that all of these are ham-fisted strawmen of a very particular and specific form of Christian fundamentalism? For all as Pullman positiones himself as the anti-Lewis, Lewis himself critiqued the idea of a literal hell. The hell and mind-body dualities he depends don’t fit well within Judaica (the more liberal branches of which are more than comfortable with Moses and the burning bush as a myth.) And his conclusions are entirely compatible with Buddhism in which oblivion is the only release from samsara.
And likewise the entire theme of the old gods getting killed to make way for a new age is hardly new, or particularly secular. The greeks and germanics had their twilight of the gods layed out and Tibetan Buddhism has tracts describing what a god experiences just before his impending death in imaginative detail.
And that’s why I find it to be a weak criticism of religion as a whole, because many faith traditions already entertain these ideas.
There’s a little spiritual shit,
Now that is one heck of a rationalization because the entire series is dripping with it, and we are left in a world with dust, a sort of new-agey conception of body-soul duality, multiple universes and Lyra’s quasi religious faith that there will be a way to meet Will in the future.
And I’ve never really entertained what my daemon would be because pervasive dualism that is central to His Dark Materials is so contrary to the way I view the world, that I’ve never entertained it. The big issue that is central to religion isn’t god. Religions are more than happy to treat god as non-existent, irrelevant, non-personal, mortal, dead, or otherwise out of the picture. It’s dualism and the narrative of His Dark Materials is too strongly loaded with dualism to be a critique of much more than a single fundamentalist vision.
I’m re-reading these books and there’s a lot of great reading in there, but I was also disappointed by the downplaying of Lyra’s character in the later books. The third book also hit a pet peeve of mine, namely dodging a more important philisophical point: Supposing that there were a creator who behaved as oppressively as the Authority does, would you still be right to rebel? A lot of secular humanism and gnosticism often skirt around the problems of God by shifting the terms of the debate rather than confronting it head on.
And yeah, the panserbjorn were awesome.
Amanda: Thanks for the reply!
Anyhow, the blowing away certainly is a powerful metaphor, I just don’t find it true to life. In many ways, the enlightenment, various scientific discoveries, feminism and other movements of excluded groups have all opened that door to the crystal case. Unfortunately, of late, it seems that the worst aspects of religion have been back with a vengeance.
The blowing away works great as an individual and/or coming of age metaphor. Maybe that’s all it was meant to be, realizing that this is bs and moving beyond it. However winning the individual journey isn’t really the same as winning the overall war.
I also tend to think it would have been a lot more fun if he’d gone after Jesus rather than Metatron. I mean Bertrand Russell for one managed it in “Why I’m not a Christian.” Admittedly that’s non-fiction, but he lays the groundwork.
I think if Pullman had done so, he could have been far more effective at making the outright anti-religious point and firmly closed the door on an exclusively anti-hierarchy reading.
That said, it has been a while since I read the books. It good just be that I’m overestimating how pivotal the death of God was to the outcome of the overall battle.
Loved the trilogy–could’nt put the books down and after finishing each one i could’nt wait to start the next one. I saw the movie not knowing the story but because “the news” said it was controversial–seems like a publicity tactic–but once i got into the books i loved how it emphasised independant critical thinking: “Don’t do things just because you are told to, do things that you feel in your heart are the right things to do.”
Typo fix for my last comment: “It good just be”->”It could just be.”
I love these books so much I find it almost impossible to criticize them in any way.
“Don’t really want to deal with the themes?” or just the problem that all of these are ham-fisted strawmen of a very particular and specific form of Christian fundamentalism? For all as Pullman positiones himself as the anti-Lewis, Lewis himself critiqued the idea of a literal hell.
But Pullman isn’t doing a grasping critique of hell based on the incompatibility of a god who supposedly loves and yet tortures. (It’s silly to think that the god who sends tsunamis and the Holocaust wouldn’t also torture you eternally for shits and giggles anyway, I’d think.) The land of the dead sections were pretty straightforward in meaning: The afterlife is a lie created to control people and separate themselves from their true selves. Far better than cast your lot with the hope of eternal life is to face up to your mortality with maturity. And really, the termination of ego isn’t so horrifying if you think about it; you won’t have a you to perceive the horror, so there is no horror.
I don’t think religions grapple with these ideas. I think what happens is that they sharpen and improve rationalizations to survive the onslaught of rationality. An atheist points out that the idea of hell is incompatible with the theology of a loving god, and in order to keep the religion alive, some believers revise their beliefs. “Well, we didn’t mean that part, you know.” The main thing is always prioritizing the survival of the religion itself.
I do think that the spirituality stuff is an unfortunate consequence of the story being fantasy; it gives religious readers something to grab onto in the quest to preserve the religion under the onslaught of rationality. But I don’t think the Dust and all that is actually spiritual, unless the concept of spirituality has been chipped away at until it’s basically meaningless. He goes to great lengths to make it very sci-fi, basically, “This is a physical, natural occurrence that science will probably be able to discover with plenty of research” kind of thing. Once a religious belief has ceded so much territory that you’re talking vaguely about a “spirituality” that is actually spirit-less in that every part of it is physical and natural, I don’t really think it’s very faith-like anymore.
Agreed, Greg. Taking on Jesus instead of an Old Testament character would have been awesome. If Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel had wrestled Jesus into the abyss, I would have been so in love with the books as to clip my objections to some of the clunky writing.
I’ve read the trilogy at least three or four times since I was in high school. I absolutely love it.
Amanda:
The moment when Lyra discovered the severed boy in the ice shed breaks my heart every time.
Actually, that’s just it. The armored bears don’t have a detectable philosophical side at all. One of the running jokes through the book is how impassive Iorek is in the face of all Lyra’s philosophical questions, even though he’s considered the most “thoughtful” of the bears.
Greg Sanders:
Actually, I thought that was the single most profound moment in the whole book.
I particularly liked the part where Mary Malone describes her loss of faith. She talks about it as a wonderful sort of opening, a beautiful thing. We need more postive loss-of-faith narratives.
Also, I would really love to have an armored polar bear for a friend. Or a mulefa. Either one.
Laura:
Mostly because “panserbjørn” is a truly kick-ass word.
Well, and the whole talking-armored-polar-bear thing.
Amanda:
I read an interview (I can’t remember where, but I think it was perhaps linked from his website) where he said that the omission of Jesus was deliberate, and that he’s planning to tackle JC in his next project.
I’m building armor for my cats. It’s not as cool, but still I think will impress visitors.
One of my favorite parts and quite moving in its way was the scene where Lyra meets the bear king. He’s sitting on his throne stroking his doll, which is a surrogate for the daemon he can never have. It says something about the type of person who realizes their own shortcomings but is powerless to change them do to ego, circumstances and the iron clad laws of social conformity. The bear king realizes he’s so far into his own delusion that he has no other choice but to go all the way or loose power, control and in his case, his life.
Oh, and my daemon would probably be my cat, Lucy. Curious but a tad cynical, self possessed and just a wee bit vain.
Dan:
Ah, obviously that moment did a lot for several people, so I think I’ll take back that specific critique as it seems I was being overly subjective. What I was reading for wasn’t the same as what Pullman was writing for. Similarly there’s no reason my reading should be more important than yours or Amanda’s.
That said, I definitely stand by the critique of Metatron and I think Amanda’s alternate ending would have been far more satisfying. Particularly if it made it into the movie.
LauraB: Interesting. If you later can remember where the interview was I’d greatly appreciate a link. I’ll probably try to hunt it down myself when I have a bit more time.
For readers of the books, what do you think your daemon would be?
I’d like to think that my daemon would be cool, but he’d probably be a lot like Rabbit from the original Pooh books.
http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/philip-pullman-extended-e-mail.html
I do, I do! Though I’ll like a giant German Shepherd better.
Well, I guess it’s time for me to read the series, I’ve been interested since hearing about The Golden Compass movie. Before, I got the impression from flist that it’s just an alternative themed Harry Potter-ish thing. …but I have an inkling I’ll like this much better since I’m first and forth most a Buffy fan!
Amanda Marcotte
An atheist points out that the idea of hell is incompatible with the theology of a loving god, and in order to keep the religion alive, some believers revise their beliefs. “Well, we didn’t mean that part, you know.”
I’m confused. Are religious people allowed to revise their beliefs or not? If someone makes a good point, and we refuse to listen to reason, then we’re irrational; if we do listen to reason, then we’re merely “trying to keep the religion alive.” As usual, you’ve got us coming and going.
I think I was reading something similar by Sam Harris this morning…you can pin all of the atrocities committed in the name of God on religion, but if someone does something good and says they were inspired by their faith, then wait–any atheist could have done the same, so it’s just human nature.
This seems less about argument for truth so much as an aggressive attempt to displace one meme with another. Then again, that’s what you would expect from big-name authors. At least Hitchens is funny.
Yuri K.: Thanks!
I think this should be required reading before people begin to talk about religion.
Just sayin’.
Petey, I’m pro religious freedom. I would never suggest that religious people be forbidden from casting around and wasting their time tying themselves in knots trying to accept a certain amount of rational thought while also preserving their religion for fear of what would happen if they just let go. They’re free to do that. I just think it’s silly.
Isn’t there a Second Amendment message here– about our right to arm bears?
[ducks]
Are religious people allowed to revise their beliefs or not? If someone makes a good point, and we refuse to listen to reason, then we’re irrational; if we do listen to reason, then we’re merely “trying to keep the religion alive.”
If you claim to have special access to eternal truths, changing your opinion suggests that you do not in fact have such access. Religion is at base a claim to special access to eternal truths. Shifting theology in the light of new evidence makes sense from the perspective of keeping the theology relevant, but it directly undermines the central claim of religion.
I have no problem with other people holding beliefs that are poorly grounded, or adjusting them in ways that undermine their essential nature. The problem arises when the claim to special access to absolute truth is used to hurt people, which is exactly what is done when religion is used as a basis for public policy.
The official movie website has a quiz where you can find out what your daemon is. Of course that’s according to whoever programmed the quiz, but it’s pretty cool.
http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/
When people don’t like me in high school, just for being different, I settled it by staying the course, and eventually find people different like me, or who didn’t mind the difference. If they don’t like me, they don’t like me, and it’s not worth being upset over it, or faking it to conform.
That was my attitude towards religion as well. If there is a god, and god is good, then by being good, people should go to heaven. If good people are condemned simply for not worshiping an absent god, then well, god isn’t cool, and I want no part of its heaven.
That’s my ‘working conclusion’.
Sadly, The Golden Compass movie was so horrible that casual observers won’t see the second or third movie. I loved the books and I’m introducing my husband to them, but I have no desire to see the sequels when they come out. I felt cheated by the first movie.
Wouldn’t an intelligent parent of faith — let’s be diplo, kiddies — welcome the opportunity to examine that faith ahem critically with their old/smart enough offspring?
Because there’s no way in hell that faith can stand up to intellectually honest skeptical inquiry, and people generally realize it?
Amanda’s review and some of the comments here make me want to read the book. It sounds pretty smart.
However I saw the movie last weekend and thought it was just awful. The dialogue was terrible and it seemed to have a bizarre choppy quality in regards to the plot. But Nicole Kidman was fantastic in it. And I’ll take any excuse to look at Daniel Craig these days.
Ah, once again, those who gots religion telling us uppity atheists how to conduct the discourse.
Personally I’m not interested in always finding common ground with theists. Sorry.
It’s dualism and the narrative of His Dark Materials is too strongly loaded with dualism to be a critique of much more than a single fundamentalist vision.
Which just so happens to be the vision of spirituality like 95% of religious persons hold.
Sure, Pullman’s thesis might not directly bear on your idiosyncratic, corner-case hybrid spirituality. Why would he? There’s even less of you than there are atheists. The simple fact is that the vast majority of religious believers hold some idea of dualism, some idea of a “self” separate from, and more enduring than, the physical body.
Why on Earth would Pullman write a book about religion but focus the arguments against a theoretical non-dualist religion that almost nobody is an actual adherent of?
I loved the books. I more or less agree with Amanda’s criticism, as I also thought the bit in the world of the dead was too drawn out and I was a little annoyed by Lyra’s coma, but it wasn’t enough to sour me on the series. And you do get beat over the head with the anti-authoritarian/religion/hierarchy message.
I’ve tried to get the husband into it, but he’s a slow reader and still working on Harry Potter–maybe when he’s done I can talk him into it. But I’ve got my mom reading them and I got the set for my almost little brother (sort of–he’s not really my brother, but my mom practically raised him until he was 10 and he’s just as good as) for his 12th birthday last month.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, and probably won’t until it comes to video (I have small children and don’t get out much without them–babysitters are expensive and evenings out are very tightly rationed), but I think the casting of Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter was inspired, even if she did make them tone down the movie.
Hm.
God:Metatron::Jesus:Paul.
you think?
At college we had recurring discussions of ‘eigencreatures’, i.e. the information-preserving way to transform yourself into an animal. I was supposedly a koala.
I do think there might be more going on with the armored bears other than being ridiculously awesome. There’s the notion that they craft their own souls through building their armor, though at first that just seems to be a mere reflection of a pretty much static inner nature. And I was also worried that the episode about the bear king kind of signified a hostility to difference. But then the way Iorek defeats the bear king is through deception, through surpassing the confines of a bear’s supposedly essential nature (bearitude? beariosity?) So bears too can change - their path is not pre-determined by their ostensible nature. Which is just one more reason why armored bears are ridiculously awesome.
I thoroughly enjoyed the film, though it could have been better with another half hour to let the let the plot solidify in the surrounding world.
My Internet Thesis: Film is a different medium than Written Word, with completely different requirements on how to make a ‘good’ one. Complaining that they are different media is lazy at best and pan-orthodoxical grumpsterism at worst.
Inverarity
According to the site my daemon is Remis, the Snow Leopard
your profile reveals that you are: modest, inquisitive, sociable, softly spoken, and outgoing
According to the website, my daemon is a chimpanzee.
For the record, Pullman has said that the primary message of the book series is anti-authority, and not specifically anti-religion. He modeled his villains after the Catholic Church because it was an extreme example of arbitrary authority that he was familiar with. (In other words, when somebody starts telling you should do what they say because God says so, that’s your cue to tell them to go to Hell.)
My daemon is an osprey - sweet!
Yeah, but they were very explicitly not just people in bear suits–their society, their way of thinking, was very non-human, very alien. I liked that.I also liked how the Big Bad of the whole megillah certainly wasn’t a creator god, and wasn’t even the creator god’s demiurge–but was, in fact, the demiurge’s demiurge.
Oh, and how the violence wasn’t at all toned down for kids–that was good. It would have been nice if movie-Iorek had torn open his fallen opponent’s chest, split his ribcage and feasted on his still-steaming heart before shouting “BEARS! WHO IS YOUR KING?”, but one can’t have everything.
And while I liked Mary Malone’s exposition at the end, it was terribly anvilicious. Sort of like the author saying that, well, if you didn’t figure it out from the last thousand pages or so, here’s an explanation of why Catholicism sucks.
A crow, like a Scholar’s dæmon.I suppose the series could be taken as an atheist view of the domains traditionally covered by religious dogma… but I’ve been more impressed with various SFnal takes on the eschaton–The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and A Fire Upon the Deep come to mind (and presumably Singularity Sky will fit the bill when I get around to reading it)–the thing is, our modern imagination makes lakes of fire and haloed angels seem positively quaint; traditional spirituality makes as much sense in those settings as witch doctors do in ours today. Not to knock His Dark Materials, but the ground being ascribed to Pullman in that sense is, I think, better-covered elsewhere.
(And to make things really muddled, my current conception of the primary question of spirituality in a materialistic world–what is consciousness, and where does it come from?–owes most of itself to reading Gödel, Escher, Bach in high school.)
Pullman has a great line about his use of religious imagery:
Read the whole New Yorker article, it’s a great read. I read it before I read the trilogy, and I think I owe a great deal of my appreciation for the books to the fact that I interpreted them in light of his comments (particularly about storytelling) in that interview.
The movie site says my daemon is a cute female jackal named Trina
I got a ladybug.
Ah, once again, those who gots religion telling us uppity atheists how to conduct the discourse.
Personally I’m not interested in always finding common ground with theists. Sorry.
of course, Teac. Because growing up surrounded by the rhetoric and constant reference to theism hasn’t left us with ANY knowledge of religion. We need theists to remind us at every turn to REMAIN CIVIL because otherwise we’ll just be confused and rude. and it’s far more important that we be polite and respectful of others beliefs, rather than vigorous in our defense of our right to disbelief.
After all, if we call bullshit on claims that are patently untrue but deeply held and important to the speaker’s self image, that’s just rude. We shouldn’t commit the spiritual equivalent of the guy who points out how hideous and obvious that guy’s hairpiece is. Also, he’s trying to force people to say the rug looks good and have us face social and criminal penalties of we ignore or mock his ugly, ugly toupee.
I mean, if his stupid article from a preachy version of MAD magazine hadn’t told me, I’d never know there are decent human beings who are religious, and even motivated by their faith. I’d think it was all about burning witches and televangelism-ponzi schemes.
On the Lyra thing: I’m actually sympathetic to the issues that led Pullman to write her into a deep sleep (though I find the “I won’t use my toy until you say, Will” crap terrible and much harder to wrap my head around). Implicit to his story is the idea that religion especially guns for women, and with the Eve thing and everything, he ends up accidentally making the case that it’s because women are superior to men in wisdom and in love, or would be if left to our own devices. Well, obviously he’s not trying to say that, so when he had to write an Adam to Lyra’s Eve, he ended up having to downplay Lyra some and give Will important things to do, as if arguing that men are not irrelevant to the story. I don’t want men to be painted as second bananas, either, but it’s kind of hard to avoid if you’re rewriting the Eden story to posit that Eve was actually the salvation of the good in humanity. Within the confines of his own story, it was egalitarian, but in the larger world of fantasy lit, it ended up playing into some common tropes about female passivity.
It also parallels the story of the Garden of Eden. Adam comes onto the scene and there’s a woman, and then there’s not a woman, and she doesn’t come out until she’s cut out of his ribcage. I can see that he’s subtly suggesting that instead the story is that Eves tend to be silenced because they have so much power and will. There were so many parallels to the Eden story—the Satan of the story (Mary Malone) was just like Satan himself, a loyal follower of god who turns sour, for instance—that I figured the sleeping thing was part of it somehow.
I liked that Lyra threw off her patriarchal name and ended up wearing one that she earned (and was an allusion to the gift she inherited from her mother, no less).
But I don’t think the Dust and all that is actually spiritual, unless the concept of spirituality has been chipped away at until it’s basically meaningless. He goes to great lengths to make it very sci-fi
He started out doing that, but he made way too much of Mary Malone’s finding the I Ching ridiculous, like it was a bad thing for her to be skeptical. He cared more in the end about the harmful effects of religion and god-belief than about science or rationality, which is fine, but it’s not like quantum woo is any less irritating than any other form of magical thinking.
I’d think it was all about burning witches and televangelism-ponzi schemes.
It’s not???!!!1!
Back on topic . . .
My profile revealed that I am “assertive, competitive, responsible, modest and solitary.”
Thus, I have been matched with the Tiger Daemon Remis.
Cool.
You’ll pardon this terminal cynic for intervening in the pagan libertarian back-patting, but when I lost my brother to far right white supremacist authoritarianism,
I sympathize with your loss. And I think you nailed it right there with the first part of the sentence.
I didn’t lose him to Catholicism or Evangelical Christianity, but to paganism (Asatru in particular… and cue all the ‘true’ Asatru people who will demonstrate how neo-nazism and ‘real’ Asatru don’t mesh well together).
The more accurate way to say that is that you lost your brother to a killer who was a self-proclaimed pagan, and was assumedly also a racist hatemonger.
Norse pagan archetypes resonate with white racists, I think mostly due to the obvious Germanic (and therefore Nazi by association) connections. It is also a culture that celebrates the warrior, and the racists tend to think in terms of endless cultural warfare. Saying that Asatru or other Norse cultural religions attract racists because those religions are racist is putting the cart before the horse.
Laine Lawless from the racist Save Our State offshoot of the Minutemen is a pagan (and a lesbian, not that it is germane to the discussion). And so on.
So you could just as well blame lesbian culture for your brother’s death as you could Asatru or White racism, yes?
I’m not sure what associations you’re trying to make here.
That pagans tend toward a more liberal outlook than ‘traditional’ religion seems to me to be more of a factor of their irrelevancy (from a *political power* perspective) than from something inherent to the religion.
I disagree. One of the few hallmarks of Paganism is respect for the planet and its ecosystem (as they are expressions of immanent divinity), which is a pretty strong incentive toward liberal politics. There are other aspects too, such as a very Jeffersonian attitude toward religious liberty.
Just like Catholics in highly secular nations have had to put a little bit of water in their whine, while Catholics in nations with high church interventionism into state affairs tend to be only one step removed from the Inquisition days.
Pagans do tend to be cultural libertarians, and that aspect might be partially due to that effect you describe above. But you’re still comparing Pagan apples to Christian oranges.
I’m willing to think that if pagans were in power, they wouldn’t be treating us atheistic heathens any better than the Catholic church did.
That depends on which Pagans. If we’re talking about the kind of self-proclaimed “pagans”, the white supremacist hatemongers that you say killed your brother, I wouldn’t like them in power any more than you would. I think people are simply true to their nature, be it good or evil or something in between (like most of us), rather than believing that *any* religion will make them other than they are.
Re: Your Daemon
I took the test. All I got was a species of Blue-Green Algae that lives in the fur of sloths. Its name is Algernon.
My daemon is a tree louse, and I won’t have any test telling me different.
My Daemon is apparently a white ermine named Athanda.
Working from the assumption that the Daemons we saw only sounded English for being from England, I imagine Athanda probably sounds like Molly Ivins. I’ve always spoken with a little more twang than most St. Louisans, though I could never place why.
I really have to make another stab atreading the trilogy. I t5hink I’ll go see the film tonight.
I’m building armor for my cats. It’s not as cool, but still I think will impress visitors.
Great - that’s the way it ALWAYS starts. And then you start thinking that giving them opposable thumbs of their own is a good idea, and before you know it, you find yourself FIGHTING a desperate RESISTANCE battle against our SADISTIC FELINE OVERLORDS.
I hate it when that happens.
teacAh, once again, those who gots religion telling us uppity atheists how to conduct the discourse.
Only you get to frame the discourse? How wonderful for you.
Or, y’know, ever.>
REFRAME the discourse, Petey. Atheists have NEVER been allowed to FRAME the discourse. We have, and for the foreseeable future will always be on the defensive. If we make an effective attempt at reframing, that is a success in rhetoric on our part and a failure for the theists, and I’m not gonna cry crocodile tears at your poor hurt feefees because the mean atheists have managed to establish their own talking points.
I for one am not going to give a single fucking inch on this until the cliche “no atheists in foxholes” is stricken from the public consciousness. There is NOTHING resembling such a complete dismissal of theistic viewpoints taken so thoroughly seriously by anyone.
Amanda: The land of the dead sections were pretty straightforward in meaning: The afterlife is a lie created to control people and separate themselves from their true selves. Far better than cast your lot with the hope of eternal life is to face up to your mortality with maturity. And really, the termination of ego isn’t so horrifying if you think about it; you won’t have a you to perceive the horror, so there is no horror.
Certainly, but the afterlife he is attacking is pretty much a narrow version the Christian afterlife, and not the Buddhist afterlife which made this very same claim more than 2,000 years ago, and not the resurrection into the grave of pre-Christian Germanic paganism, or the utterly irrelevant afterlife of Judaism.
Which is where I think Pullman is weak. He pokes a sharp stick at three doctrines that are openly questioned by liberal Christians, and utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of religious people in the world.
Challenging authority (after it has been made clear that he’s a figurehead or poseur), original sin and hell, doesn’t make one an atheist, it happens every week at a UU church near you.
Amanda: I don’t think religions grapple with these ideas. I think what happens is that they sharpen and improve rationalizations to survive the onslaught of rationality.
Well I disagree in that this isn’t a particularly modern argument with faith traditions more than 2,000 years old taking positions that are fundamentally in agreement with Pullman here. For that matter, these arguments are not new to Christianity. The Universalist heresy questioning whether all men are damned without Christ dates back to the early Christian Church.
Which is why when I read the books, I didn’t get the sense that Pullman is an atheist, and for that matter, I still don’t think he’s an atheist in the same meaning of the term that I’m an atheist. When I read the books before the movie deal and certainly before reading Pullman’s love-in with Sprong, I thought that he was pulling the same thing with Paradise Lost as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore before him recontextualizing it into what a liberal or neo-pagan spiritual framework.
Amanda: I do think that the spirituality stuff is an unfortunate consequence of the story being fantasy; it gives religious readers something to grab onto in the quest to preserve the religion under the onslaught of rationality.
Well, as a fantasy reader, I soundly disagree that the spiritual elements are required for fantasy to the extent that they appear in His Dark Materials and I certainly disagree with the claim that fantasy must be watered down in order to give the religious a crutch. As a counter-example, Lukyanenko’s Twilight Watch continues his deconstruction of good vs. evil, and much more successfully than Amber Spyglass deconstructs the nature of the magic used by his Others. LeGuin returned to Earthsea to engage in a complete deconstruction of the duality she created in Farthest Shore. Stephen King did it with It. Zelazny did it successfully with both Amber and Lord of Light. Tepper does it in many of her novels. Vonnegut handles it in Slaughterhouse Five by announcing up front that it’s all a literary device for dealing with his grief.
Amanda: But I don’t think the Dust and all that is actually spiritual, unless the concept of spirituality has been chipped away at until it’s basically meaningless.
But that is the fucking problem. Pullman starts off by poking a sharp stick at three straw-men doctrines that are unique to some flavors of Christianity, then for an oncore he dives into the shell game that is trying to make sense of “spirituality” and giving a handwave to trying to give some sort of science fiction verneer to the dualities that he’s established as central to the functioning of his universe.
But in the end, he still ends up with the same problem, his universe does not function without a whopping duality that is slapped over with a bandaid piffle of pseudoscience in order to give the pretense that it’s not really a supernatural universe in which he’s placed his characters.
It’s too little, too late, and furthermore, it seems from interviews that he’s more than comfortable with the ambiguities that make His Dark Materials comfortable reading by religious humanists.
A much better approach to dealing with this whole “spirituality” quicksand is that taken by Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy. Every attempt Adams’s work to assign a “higher purpose” to the universe backfires. Adams makes fun of both the dealer and the player in the shell game of discovering “spirituality.” Pullman wades right into the shell game and tries to pull out a few dollars short.
His Dark Materials is certainly a work that I’d argue is very good, and I’d argue for it over Potter. But it’s profoundly flawed as a work of atheistic apologietics.
(and presumably Singularity Sky will fit the bill when I get around to reading it)
No. The Eschaton is not God - and makes a point of saying so. As far as I know, Stross is not making any religious statement - it’s just a space opera on steroids.
Keep watching for the third in the series, when you might find out what the ReMastered’s Unborn God really is…
re: daemon
That thing took forever to load on my computer, but I got a baboon, I think. It’s a primate with whitish fur and a bare bluish face.
CBrachyrhynchos:
Wow, that entire post is possibly the best criticism I’ve seen of these books, or at least the criticism that speaks most to my own sensibilities. And that’s coming from someone who, like Amanda, responded quite positively overall to the series.
Chet: Which just so happens to be the vision of spirituality like 95% of religious persons hold.
Um, you do know that Christians are, in fact, a world-wide minority?
Unitarian-Universalists reject the notion of hell, Authority, and original sin. I’m an atheist. Which means that I not only reject the religious claims of Christians, but of other faith groups as well.
Cris: Read the whole New Yorker article, it’s a great read. I read it before I read the trilogy, and I think I owe a great deal of my appreciation for the books to the fact that I interpreted them in light of his comments (particularly about storytelling) in that interview.
Yeah, I read that. It reminded me of why I think that Pullman is a great storyteller, he is not a great advocate for much more than a weak religious humanism which tries to milk moral meaning from religious symbols.
For example he describes Adam and Eve as an imaginary number, that lets you describe “all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.” (page 4) A basic problem is that when you appropriate religious iconography in that way the relgious can turn around and appropriate you. And furthermore the entire calculus of Eden myths requires special creation for it to work.
“Dust is, as another character puts it, “a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.”” (page 5) This is exactly the veneer of pseudo-science slapped over his dualism that drove me up the wall. He professes atheism in interviews but writes new-age theosophy in fiction.
Which is fine, I love new-agey fantasy, it’s what keeps me coming back to Gaiman and Moore after all. But don’t take new-agey fantasy and call it great atheistic apalogetics for young adult readers.
karpad: REFRAME the discourse, Petey. Atheists have NEVER been allowed to FRAME the discourse.
That’s a central problem with the novels. Pullman never breaks out of the religious humanist frame he accepted along with his symbols.
Hitch is wrong, this atheist prays for the second coming of Douglas Adams, who at the peak of his popularity had millions of geeks quoting atheist koans at each other.
Only you get to frame the discourse? How wonderful for you.
Sorry, dear sweet Devil - I used the word “conduct” not “frame.” As in: the theists seem to be forever telling us to be all nice and shit and to worry about theists’ delicate fee-fees.
Pfft.
We’re writing here on a thread attached to an avowed atheist’s post about an at-best agnostic work of children’s literature and you jump in to admonish us to think about common ground with theists before “people begin to talk about religion.”
No.
Well, as a fantasy reader, I soundly disagree that the spiritual elements are required for fantasy to the extent that they appear in His Dark Materials and I certainly disagree with the claim that fantasy must be watered down in order to give the religious a crutch. As a counter-example, Lukyanenko’s Twilight Watch continues his deconstruction of good vs. evil, and much more successfully than Amber Spyglass deconstructs the nature of the magic used by his Others. LeGuin returned to Earthsea to engage in a complete deconstruction of the duality she created in Farthest Shore. Stephen King did it with It. Zelazny did it successfully with both Amber and Lord of Light. Tepper does it in many of her novels. Vonnegut handles it in Slaughterhouse Five by announcing up front that it’s all a literary device for dealing with his grief.
Hmm. What’s your opinion on the Traveller in Black?
Joe Max: When I said I lost my brother to white supremacy, I meant that he *became* an Asatru racist. You’re still welcome for your sympathy…
There is nothing inherently progressive, socialist, small-l libertarian or ‘left-wing’ in Green/eco politics. There is plenty of right-wing populism in certain strands of Green philosophy, particularly at the fringes of Deep Green ecology, and after you’ve spent some time in the morass of anarchist politics and interacted with the Primitivists you’ll have a good idea of where the line is drawn between reactionary and progressive in those circles. There are plenty of authoritarians in Green politics as well, plenty of traditionalism, essentialism, and so on. I’ve heard many anti-feminist sentiments from certain deep ecologists (’natural’ gender roles, etc) and pagans, for that matter. Nature can be as much an authoritarian master as the Christian God, when the concept is molded by the proper hands.
Hey! I got Erasmus, a fox.
Cool.
Huh. Somehow I totally screwed up my blockquotes.
togolosh, I don’t mean the “eternal” kinds of truths. Frankly I think every attempt at that kind of explanation is currently a question-begging tautology, regardless of how much explanatory power “science” has or how much fervor theists bring to the table.
I mean more things like…should there be women in the clergy, should gays be accepted, stuff like that. The Church is not a monolith and peoples’ stance on those things changes all the time. There are significant groups of people who do not agree with, say, Amanda’s friend Bill Donahue. She and people who think and act like her alienate the only people who can act as agents of change. This bothers me for some reason.
I didn’t take the time to note the name, but I got a raven. Couldn’t be better.
teac
Only you get to frame the discourse? How wonderful for you.
Sorry, dear sweet Devil - I used the word “conduct” not “frame.” As in: the theists seem to be forever telling us to be all nice and shit and to worry about theists’ delicate fee-fees.
Pfft.
We’re writing here on a thread attached to an avowed atheist’s post about an at-best agnostic work of children’s literature and you jump in to admonish us to think about common ground with theists before “people begin to talk about religion.”
No.
*handface*
You haven’t…actually…read any of the prominent literature on this topic, have you?
So far as I know, all of the shining lights have bemoaned their treatment at the hands of the religionists. If you’re an atheist in this country, you’re screwed. Even as a believer I think that’s fucked up. I wouldn’t imagine you want to commit yourself to the same douchebaggery.
Though, perhaps you’re in the “Well, the religious people blew up our skyscrapers, so we need to blow them up!” crowd. You and Hitchens. At least you’re in good company.
Or, maybe you just want to be left to your little echo chamber. Far be it from me to upset your little intellectual applecart.
I think you’re missing my point. Prime Intellect isn’t God either, and neither are the Powers living in the Transcend. But they’re much better imaginings of “might beyond human kenning” or whatever handwavey excuse for a description gets applied to most classical deities.What I’m trying to get at is that these ideas make Yahweh or whoever look pretty tiny.
For readers of the books, what do you think your daemon would be?
I’ve always figured my daemon would be a fox: clever, sly, morally flexible, but fiercely protective of family.
I took the test 3 times: I got a racoon, a tiger, and a snow leopard. Bollocks, I say: I’m sticking with my imaginary fox. (Although I have to admit, the snow leopard was pretty cool. I also have to admit that I am not remotely cool, and the snow leopard is good for my vanity, but not at all accurate.)
Way to miss the point. Some of the hallmarks of early Christianity were a focus on the equality of all humans, significant roles for women, and a strong focus on helping the poor, along with disdain for worldly wealth. Do any of those things leap to mind when you think of Christianity today? Might that have more to do with the reality of a dogmatic system becoming entrenched and less with airy-fairy mission statements laid down by DFH founders?On religion:
I think folks underestimate liberal religion in this country. While it’s not the size or power of the religious right, it’s not some tiny esoteric group either.
Mainline Protestantism and liberal Catholicism alone represent tens of millions of Americans, what less liberal Judaism and other groups with similar values.
There is no college town or city that does not have a progressive religious group, church, or synagogue. In my town of 20,000 we have three churches that will bless same sex unions. That’s not an odd thing.
Outside of a few isolated rural areas, most folks reading this blog live in communities with churches and religious groupings that look like nothing being described by several folks here.
We have groups like the United Church of Christ, that has 1.2 million members vote in their assembly by over 80% a few years ago to support gay marriage.
I don’t know many secular groups with those numbers. Reform Judaism with similar numbers has done the same. In any election about gay rights, it’s not uncommon for the majority of Roman Catholics to be supportive of equality.
I raise this to say: having folks who share the same values say to you: you’re the enemy, the problem, there is no common cause to be had with you makes no sense.
It doesn’t make sense in terms of developing working majorities in this country that will hopefully move us to a saner direction. And it doesn’t make sense to cut off folks with shared values.
As a gay man and a Christian I get told by many on the right that I’m the enemy. But when it’s folks who claim progressive or liberal credentials saying this, it’s a shame. And not liberal minded.
As a side comment:
“Don’t do things just because you are told to, do things that you feel in your heart are the right things to do.”
What comes into the heart is socially constituted in so many ways that without critical reflection, to follow it could could end up being the same thing as doing things because you are told to.
Judging from your “review,” I’d say the temper tantrum (gosh, you must have learned a new term) was on your part. Not to mention your glowing praise of this series tends to support why Christians would be offended.
If atheism is so damn unappealing, then it’s not a realistic threat, right?
Actually, I had this same question about Pullman’s shrieking. If atheism is the truth and us dumb Christians are just morons, why have to try so hard to convince people there is no God? Seems like atheists–if there weren’t a God–would just ignore the Church and go about their usual business…like inflating their numbers.
Blackbloc, you are going to find jerks in EVERY religion and in atheism too. There is no belief system on earth that is asshole-free. Yes, even atheism - wasn’t Hitchens the one who said women can’t be funny? There’s a heaping helping of misogyny in most strains of right-wing libertarian atheism (Michael Newdow, IIRC, is a MRA as well as atheist activist). Which doesn’t say anything about atheism, or paganism (an umbrella which encompasses MANY different beliefs, btw - a Dianic Wiccan has little to nothing in common with an Asatruar) - it just says that no religion or belief system can claim to be simon-pure. It also argues for the separation of church and state so that no one religion or belief can be used to coerce or command.
Again, with the “natural roles” of men and women - check out Amanda’s “Science for Choads” category and you will find a pantload of secular arguments against women’s equality, and against gays and lesbians as well. If misogynist jerks want to justify their beliefs, they will, and they don’t need religion to do it.
BTW, I enjoyed the movie, and am reading the books (they were a birthday pressie) and enjoying them too. I always thought that the Magisterium stood for authority, not one particular religion. The books are more anti-authoritarian than anti-religion IMO. But then again, I’m just reading them for enjoyment, and not to learn some kind of life lesson.
There’s a really funny episode of “30 Rock” where the female lead of TGS tries to get in good with an inbred prince from Austria. Here’s a scene:
Earlier in the episode he gets her to dance for him, yelling, “Jazz! Charleston!” and she does it all frantically, hoping that she can get his approval so that she gets to be the princess. Obviously, it doesn’t work out.
Why do I bring this up? Because I want sharon to know that exactly no one respects her. We all pity her over here, and the men that’s she’s doing the Charleston for don’t respect her. At best, they’re impressed with themselves for how fast and hard they can make her dance for the fishes they throw in her mouth.
Yes, atheists can be sexist, too. Big difference is that atheism doesn’t formally mandate that sexism is the word of god written down in the holy books, unlike all the major religions. Someone says, “Science says women suck,” and you have recourse to science to demonstrate through the facts that women do not suck. But in religion, if you’re trying to convince yourself that the women submit/Eve ate the apple crap isn’t sexist, it’s through a heavy dose of denial and rationalization.
Sharon,
I imaginae atheists, for the most part, would ignore the church if it returned the favor. You don’t see a lot of atheist writing directed at minority religions because they aren’t currently causing problems for anyone. Christianity, on the other hand, currently has an overwhelming influence in the US, in our culture and in our government. It has never taken a “live and let live” position.
Atheism is correct, but that doesn’t necessarily make it appealing to a lot of people. Christianity, however wrong, is appealing–group acceptance, pat, simplistic answers to complex problems, reinforcement of favored inequalities and prejudices, the promise of an afterlife, etc.
We have to work hard because so many people have been indoctrinated since birth. My two year old niece is just beginning to talk in (mostly) complete sentences, and it is incredibly odd to watch her recite bible verses and prayers my family has taught her, of which she can have no possible understanding. That stuff sticks in most people before thay have a chance to test it for themselves.
Hmm, wasn’t that my point? I was getting annoyed at a pagan’s self-congratulation about how paganism is sooooo anti-authoritarian. And I said that it had more to do with their relationship to power (i.e. the fact they don’t have any) than with their belief system.
So I guess we’re vehemently agreeing with each other.
Um, you do know that Christians are, in fact, a world-wide minority?
I did know that, and I’m confused why you think it’s relevant, since I never mentioned Christianity in my post. It’s an undeniable fact that the vast, vast majority of religious folk belief includes some kind of soul that survives the impermanence of the body. I mean I don’t see how that can be in dispute.
Seems like atheists–if there weren’t a God–would just ignore the Church and go about their usual business…like inflating their numbers.
There’s not a God, Sharon, and that’s exactly what us atheists try to do - get on with our business. The problem are things like the two smoking holes in Manhattan that testify to how you people - the ones with the insanely irrational belief in a magic Sky Fairy - not only won’t leave us alone but are an actual danger to us, yourselves, and others.
If we thought all this God-bother could be safely ignored, we would. But the dangers of faith are real, obvious, and can’t be ignored by rational people.
You haven’t…actually…read any of the prominent literature on this topic, have you?
Petey - you may need to be a tailor to tell the difference between a mantle and a capelet, but you don’t need to be one to see that the emperor has no clothes. The fundamental underpinnings of all the world’s religions are wrong. Past that the specifics of their individual theologies are cruft, no more relevant than memorizing Pokemon.
Whatever the theology, if it’s based on (for example) the existence of God or the historic existence of Jesus Christ, it’s wrong. It’s unconnected to anything verifiable. And it doesn’t take ages of pouring through religious texts to realize that. I don’t have to have played all the way through Pokemon Pearl to know that Pikachu isn’t a real organism, and I don’t have to have memorized a thousand religions’-worth of fan-cruft to know that its no more real, following as it does from premises that have been established to be false.
“The problem are things like the two smoking holes in Manhattan that testify to how you people - the ones with the insanely irrational belief in a magic Sky Fairy - not only won’t leave us alone but are an actual danger to us, yourselves, and others.”
Not only will they not leave the atheists alone, they won’t rest until everyone believes exactly like they do. The current disagreement among the Rethug candidates, regarding whether or not Romney is really a christian, is highly instructive, as is the ongoing disagreements between the Shia and Sunni in the ME, the Hindus vs. Sikhs, Tamils vs. Sinhalese, Catholics vs. Protestants, and almost everybody against the Jews.
The whole history if christianity is a record of dissension among believers, almost from the very moment of christ’s supposed death. God may or may not be jealous, but religions certainly are.
As long as somebody somewhere believes differently, or doesn’t believe at all, they are considered a threat to whoever the dominate religious believers are (no matter how ludicrous the claim is).
In that respect most religions seem to be in practical agreement, even if they pretend otherwise…
Amanda
Feminist theologians who have been working on this subject for 50 some years now are not trying to justify sexist texts. They have sought to find liberatory resources in and outside of the religious tradition to critique and transform their respective religions.
A classic is Phillis Tribble’s Texts of Terror. I raise this to suggest that simply dismissing feminist work done in religion from Carter Heyward to Judith Plaskow from Rosemary Radford Ruether to Elizabeth Johnson with a one liner doesn’t help feminism.
Mike Ess
Your description seems to ignore everything from the development of the World Parliament of Religions back at the end of the 1800s to the local interfaith councils which are part of the life of communities all across the country (and which have for much of this century).
In my little town in southern Illinois we have Mormons and Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, Bahaii and Suffis work together on all sorts of joint projects from a monthly dialogue open to the public to service projects including supporting the only homeless shelter in the region.
Aagin, most folks reading this blog have similar groups and efforts in their communities.
Chet
So what is the major underpinning: God? That leaves out a whole lot of Asian religions. Jesus? Wow, leaves out a whole lot more religions.
If all religion were so disconnected with the world, so irrational as to be absurd they wouldn’t have lasted long. It’s only because they do have potent descriptions and ways of life that help negotiate that world that they have the staying power that they do.
If we are interested in working with ideas, resources developed over several millenia by people around the world versus shutting down ideas that differ from us, in an attempt to learn something maybe it’s worthwhile to learn about these traditions versus simply dismissing them as irrational (meaning different).
I swear some atheists and Christian fundamentalists are equally able to ignore, tune out, make dangerous ideas which differ, languages which differ from their already preconceived notions. It’s become an art.
“Aagin, most folks reading this blog have similar groups and efforts in their communities.”
Typo and clarification: Again most folks who live in cities or college town will discover that in their communities there already exists efforts and groups committed to interfaith dialogue and interfaith work.
teac,
My daemon is a tiger too, his name is Aenad! Though I am (according to this computer algorithm or what have you) assertive, clever, modest, solitary, and shy. Would it be hard to travel with a tiger daemon? Could he carry my bags?
I also hated the “I’ll be submissive and not have fun for you, Will” part of Subtle Knife. Lyra was freakin’ awesome in GC, but her character went downhill in the last 2 books. I think Pullman was overcompensating when he toned down Lyra to make readers like Will. It’s so hard to find female protagonists who can stand on their own that I was disappointed when SK started with Will’s story. One of my professors who’s worked in children’s publishings for decades has said many times that boys will not stay/be interested in a girl protagonist. Hence the creation of Diego in Dora the Explorer. That makes me sad.
The whole underworld part took waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long, and I was so mad at Lyra for leaving Pantalaimon behind. In the end Pullman has a point with this expedition, but at the time I kept thinking that the plot device of protagonist journeys to/through land of the dead to speak to/ask forgiveness of/save a dead friend trite. Ulysses did it, let’s try something new.
I hope people who saw the movie without reading the books will still read them, because I thought the movie sucked. Visually stunning (including David Craig) it was, but not much else. And I imagined Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Coulter, but perhaps she was busy playing Bellatrix..
Chet: I did know that, and I’m confused why you think it’s relevant, since I never mentioned Christianity in my post.
It’s called context, here it is again because you missed it the first time.
I can think of no honest interpretation of that post in which “which” does not refer directly back to the single fundamentalist (and Christian) vision of the quoted passage. So grow up, admit that you made a mistake and move on with it.
Chet: It’s an undeniable fact that the vast, vast majority of religious folk belief includes some kind of soul that survives the impermanence of the body. I mean I don’t see how that can be in dispute.
Certainly, but straw-man of hell that appears in the novels is specific to Christianity. And the alternative in his universe remains that characters still have fucking souls that can be separated from the body. All His Dark Materials ends up doing is arguing for mantles vs. caplets because it’s entire structure depends on a spiritualist framework.
Ohh, and that reminds me of another place where the whole thing fails to be a critique of religion is that the “solution” within the novels is basically a Messiah/Boddhisatava myth with Lyra and Will at the center. So at the end of the series we are still left with an afterlife, a bardo, with this concept that people can slip off into Nirvana.
“In my little town in southern Illinois we have Mormons and Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, Bahaii and Suffis work together on all sorts of joint projects from a monthly dialogue open to the public to service projects including supporting the only homeless shelter in the region.”
Let one or more of the “minority” religions in your little town in southern Illinois suddenly become more influential than they “should” be and I guarantee the relationships among the faiths will become strained.
Proclaiming that you happily allow Mormons and Muslims to live there is cool and all (deflecting charges of bigotry is an added value), but I doubt those feeling of “brotherhood” go deep enough to withstand any serious challenge…
Mike Ess
Though prejudice has a way of making claims about people you don’t know (and yes you don’t know the folks involved in this council) simply because they are part of a certain group. I’m not out to convince you otherwise about my own community. Instead I’d suggest checking out similar groups in your own community. Ya know, get to know folks who are different from you.
Dwight, thanks for letting me know that I’m the REAL bigot. I was wondering how long that would take, and you happily supplied the answer.
“Ya know, get to know folks who are different from you.”
Physician, heal thyself…
Mike Ess
If you feel so convicted so be it. A good solution? Try to learn from other folks (yes even religious folks), work with them, engage people as people and not some category by which you can dismiss them. It won’t be just good for your soul, it’ll help the progressive cause.
Although I’m not exactly down with the dualism aspect of HDM in actuality, in the books I love how he framed it and I particularly love how he emphasized that of the aspects, the daemon, ghost, and body, the body was the *best part*. The angels envy the humans for their physical bodies, for their place in the world of matter and life, and are baffled at the humans behavior in denying themselves the pleasures of their bodies that are such a magnificent blessing. And yet the church emphasizes denial of the body, wishes the children to “remain innocent” to the point of severing them from their daemons and destroying their spirits, and generally inhibit human consciousness to the detriment of all of the worlds everywhere.
That’s a pretty powerful message. Of course, they’re never going to make the movie sequels, because New Line has lost an awful lot of money on The Golden Compass film. But I’m curious as to how they possibly expected to adapt The Amber Spyglass into a film without the religious aspects. That would be, what, five minutes of story left?
“Try to learn from other folks (yes even religious folks), work with them, engage people as people and not some category by which you can dismiss them.”
As you stated above, “…prejudice has a way of making claims about people you don’t know…”, and Dwight, trust me - you don’t know me at all.
The first two decades of my life were saturated with evangelical christianity. Since then I have been exposed to many other forms of religious belief and philosophy.
Please don’t talk down to me and imply that I am ignorant of religion. I am perfectly aware of what it represents, good and bad. And the fact that I choose not to believe is not an indication that I just haven’t been exposed to enough other people and ideas. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite…
Though, perhaps you’re in the “Well, the religious people blew up our skyscrapers, so we need to blow them up!” crowd. You and Hitchens. At least you’re in good company.
You are an odious person.
I think Pullman was overcompensating when he toned down Lyra to make readers like Will.
What really bothered me was the way Lyra kept comparing Will to Iorek. GC Lyra would have remembered that Iorek never threatened to kill her. “He’s a murderer, so I can trust him,” is idiotic beyond words, since Lyra didn’t trust Iorek because he was a murderer.
It’s a shame, since Will is a likable enough character even if he’s not as interesting as Lyra, and he never came off as the kind of kid who would want or appreciate someone else’s being pushed out of the spotlight for his sake.
[lost my italics there on Devil’s quote]
Mike Ess
And you don’t know me as well. Because you seemed certain that religious folks cannot actually work together, want to learn from each other, act out of a deep seated commitment to pluralism and diversity.
I have no doubt about your exposure to evangelicalism. It’s not hard to run into it in our society. And I’m not trying to argue the merits of atheism or theism.
My point was simply this: liberal religious folks exist. We’re not an esoteric small band, but represent a significant number of folks in this country and we share the same values as eloquently expressed on this site.
The frustration is that while some portions of the church are ahead of society when it comes to gay rights, equality, etc. we’re still cast as the enemy by too many seculars.
That is, we can hold the same view about every major issue of the day and yet the moment I identify as a Christian, or go to church I’m no different than the worst of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism.
That move doesn’t make sense in terms of pragmatism in politics. But it also doesn’t speak of a liberal spirit in engaging folks across these boundaries.
:::plays tiniest violin for poor oppressed Dwight:::
Get over it. I mean honestly, if your faith can’t handle atheist criticism then move on about your business. Go about doing good works with those who aren’t tired of hearing about how “we’re” all shooting ourselves in the foot, and how if we’d just do everything your way all would be ice cream and ponies.
And before you paint me as another “meanie” atheist — I’m Wiccan. I am a religious person, a minister of my religion actually. Guess what? I have gained a ton of insight from actually listening to atheist and other perspectives on this blog and many others — their path through this world isn’t mine and shouldn’t have to be.
“In my little town in southern Illinois we have Mormons and Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, Bahaii and Suffis work together on all sorts of joint projects from a monthly dialogue open to the public to service projects including supporting the only homeless shelter in the region.”
I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say the mayor is a good old fashioned Protestant though, am I right? Interfaith hugs and kisses are just peachy, so long as those minority religions mind their place. If a Muslim or a Suffi ran for Mayor, I’m betting your interfaith potluck would turn into a brawl, real quick.
And if our Hypothetical Mayoral Candidate were an atheist, everyone would gang up on him or her. But then, that too would be purely ecumenical, too.
“And you don’t know me as well. Because you seemed certain that religious folks cannot actually work together, want to learn from each other, act out of a deep seated commitment to pluralism and diversity.”
Dwight, there’s at least 10,000-years of human history that shows most of the time various religions do not get along with each other.
“My point was simply this: liberal religious folks exist. We’re not an esoteric small band, but represent a significant number of folks in this country and we share the same values as eloquently expressed on this site.”
If you’re really liberal, great. Then you aren’t the problem. Peace be with you, etc.
There are still a lot of people who are living on the authoritarian end of the religious belief spectrum - I would argue that those people make up the majority of the religiously inclined.
They do not like other religions, and generally do like dissent among the ranks.
They target atheists for scorn (obviously), and dislike other religions too (obviously), but they also target those who are “soft” in their religious belief. That puts you (as a liberal religionist) at risk as well as me.
Sooner or later we will all end up on somebody’s list…
Keith
The interfaith council is a project of local religious communities and has nothing to do with the city or municipal politics. It’s their to facilitate interfaith dialog and to work on common projects together.
And given that we have a humanist who is president of that council, I find it funny how certain folks like you and Mike are in their knowledge about religion and how it’s impossible in their mind for religious folks to actually embrace diversity.
It sounds like this was written precisely to counter Dwight…
It’s called context, here it is again because you missed it the first time.
The context was dualism, and there’s no intellectually honest reading of my posts where that isn’t absolutely clear, so I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.
Let me repeat my point in a way that hopefully you can understand this time - it’s an absolute non-starter to assert that the inclusion of dualism in Pullman’s work relegates it to a “single fundamentalist vision” when it’s abundantly obvious and indisputable that dualism is a key feature in the beliefs of nearly every religious person.
I can think of no honest interpretation of that post in which “which” does not refer directly back to the single fundamentalist (and Christian) vision of the quoted passage.
But that’s my exact point, Cbrach. You’re completely wrong about dualism being limited to one narrow Christianity. That’s nonsense. It’s a feature of nearly every religious person’s religious belief. You’re the one who made the mistake; stop blaming me for your errors.
Certainly, but straw-man of hell that appears in the novels is specific to Christianity.
Hell, also, is a feature of religions beyond Christianity, so your objection continues to make no sense. Christianity was never the context; dualism has been and is. And contrary to your assertion dualism isn’t confined to one narrow “fundamentalist” version of Christianity; rather, it’s our rejection of dualism (for I share it with you) that is the narrow, unpopular vision.
Pullman’s critique of religion is certainly much wider than I think you give him credit for. But the fact that he goes and substitutes The Force or whatever instead makes the critique incomplete. But it’s a more complete critique than seem prepared to admit.
So what is the major underpinning: God?
Supernatural actors interacting beyond natural law according to whim. No, that doesn’t leave out Asian religions.
If all religion were so disconnected with the world, so irrational as to be absurd they wouldn’t have lasted long.
Since the religions you refer to are that disconnected to reality, are that irrational to the point of absurdity, your assertion here is wrong by inspection. Daniel Dennet addresses this argument in his book. Religion is better explained as having survived parasitically, having survived by cultural coercion, than explain as providing any kind of survival benefit or anything. Humans get tapeworms pretty frequently, too, and the prevalence of tapeworms in human intestines isn’t best explained by some imaginary benefit we get from hosting them; it’s explained because tapeworms are parasites who have adapted to live inside of us and defend themselves from our bodies. Similarly, religion defends itself from the reasonable arguments that would dislodge it from a mind.
If we are interested in working with ideas,
I’m interested in working with ideas that are not objectively wrong. You may hold a different opinion, I guess.
The interfaith council is a project of local religious communities and has nothing to do with the city or municipal politics. It’s their to facilitate interfaith dialog and to work on common projects together.
So they’re even more pointless than I thought. Do they have a softball team? Because that would at least be something useful…
Chet, the comparison of religion with tapeworms is deliciously subversive. Religion could be thought of as a sort of “mental tapeworm”. I like it…
Keith
We’re told that religions don’t talk together, then I give evidence that some religious communities do. Then the charge is made that it doesn’t include atheists. Then I give evidence that they did indeed include athiests. Now we’re told that talking together is useless. Hmm.
Mike
I have no doubt about the dangers of the religous right. My sister and her family essentially disowned me because of issues of religion, sexual orientation. So I’ve seen it up close. It’s why I read blogs like this because they are on top of these kinds of issues.
I saw the movie on the opening weekend. And I liked it. Really. Seeing it and, afterwards, reading reviews on blogs including Pandagon, makes me really want to read the books. I have them, but I need to find some time to read them…
As everyone is commenting on the religious aspects of the books/movie, I decided to do something different and write a tongue-in-cheek Ferudian/feminist critique of the movie.
Chet
A mode of life, like a religion, that is utterly at odds with the world couldn’t work, even with your parasite example in that if it was so it couldn’t take hold in the first place. What less adapting itself to a changing world (and given that some of these traditions are many millenia old we can be sure that such changes have taken place).
That doesn’t mean that everything they do and say are legit or appropriate. But it does mean that they have found a way of negotiating the world that makes sense of it, helps to organize life. And the question is: is it worth studying this to see what they got right?
I think of ancestor worship. Suppose you don’t believe in ancestor spirits in some literal realm above the sky (that’s ok, Confucius didn’t either)..why would such a practice develop? What is it’s function? What does it say about us? Maybe there’s something there…about gratitude, a reverence for the past and a world we did not create?
In that, yes I am interested in studying things that some current “memes” of atheism say is verboten, not to be studied but rather to be dismissed as “supersition”. I have a feeling that a lot of collective wisdom (and not just the bunk) is being tossed out in the process.
A mode of life, like a religion, that is utterly at odds with the world couldn’t work, even with your parasite example in that if it was so it couldn’t take hold in the first place.
It can, because obviously it does. They do. The Christian Bible, for instance, couldn’t describe a world more at odds with reality - a world where insects have only 4 legs, where rabbits chew cud, where one boat made of non-existent wood can hold two members of millions of different species from vastly different habitats and food for all (even the carnivores!) for half a year - and yet enthusiasm for the Christian religion seems essentially unchanged since the bad old days.
That’s Christianity but there are examples in all religions, because all religions feature faith-based thinking - belief in things on the basis of no good evidence. What a surprise to find that those things turn out to be wrong.
Tapeworms don’t take up residence in humans because its good for humans, contrary to your argument. They take up residence in humans because its good for tapeworms.
Suppose you don’t believe in ancestor spirits in some literal realm above the sky (that’s ok, Confucius didn’t either)..why would such a practice develop?
Because it’s good for the practice for it to have developed, much as its good for the tapeworms for them to have evolved to live in intestines.
Maybe there’s something there…about gratitude, a reverence for the past and a world we did not create?
I’m not from Asia, yet I have gratitude to those who came before me and left me the world that they did. So clearly exposure to ancestor-worshipping religion or the idea that my ancestors can be prayed to is not necessary to engender that gratitude. Gratitude is good. The idea that the souls of my dead relatives are around to smell the incense is unsupportable faith-based thinking, and it’s wrong.
In that, yes I am interested in studying things that some current “memes” of atheism say is verboten, not to be studied but rather to be dismissed as “supersition”.
But they have been studied. Atheists aren’t telling you to throw them out without study. They’re telling you that the claims of religion have been put to the test - and been rejected by rigorous means of inquiry. Hence, atheism. The stuff you want us to study, though, is completely irrelevant fan-cruft.
Chet: The context was dualism, and there’s no intellectually honest reading of my posts where that isn’t absolutely clear, so I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.
Well, giving you much more benefit of the doubt than you deserve, because there is no intellectually honest reading of my posts where it is not clear that “fundamentalist vision” refers to the specific doctrines of literal hell, Authority, and original sin. But to make it clear:
1: His Dark Materials spends almost all of its rhetorical ammunition on three doctrines that are only relevant within a conservative Christian sphere: a literal hell into which all souls are damned to torment, a literal Authority that mandated moral laws for humans, and original sin.
The statement that Pullman’s specific vision of these three doctrines applies equally to other religious faiths is profoundly ignorant and incorrect. Hell is only marginally a part of Judaism with many doctrines holding that souls live there only 11 months before being returned to god. Buddhist hells are also temporary. The traditional Chinese hell is not a place of torment. And there is no consensus regarding hell in Hinduism. Nope, the hell of HDM is almost certainly a Christian one as filtered through Dante. In fact, the whole setup of souls in limbo waiting for the rapture and resurrection into the flesh is so uniquely Christian, that archaeologists can construct timelines of the adoption of Christianity based on how this changed burial practices. Original sin is even more Christian in its framing.
2: The use of dualistic and spiritualistic elements as central to the universe of HDM support many religious readings of the text. Throughout HDM people have souls, and spiritual beings exist, Pullman’s attempt to hand wave this problem away with dust as self-aware matter is indistinguishable from new-age religious twaddle.
3: And when Pullman says, with all seriousness, that myths like Adam and Eve are morally useful, he’s thrown it all to the religious humanists kit and kaboodle. It’s no wonder that religious humanists love him given how the whole thing hinges on replacing myths of shameful disobedience with myths of spiritual enlightenment. It’s all caplets and mantles.
Perhaps its because I’m an atheist who came out of a liberal Christian tradition, and then some looking around at neo-paganism and American Buddhism but HDM is just so loaded with so much religious humanist bullshit presented with such uncritical earnestness that I can’t take it seriously as an atheistic text.
Chet
I have a feeling that doing a ritual does make most of us more mindful of ancestors, in developing a gratitude than not having them (this is based on the idea that mythic stories and practices arising from them highlights particular values and ways of engaging life then say a propositional claim like “go be grateful” does not have).
In evaluating a tradition, I’m looking at the whole of the Bible, and the whole of the Christian tradition. Does reading Augustine’s Confessions help us orientate ourselves in this world? Or Tillich? Or the practices from baptism and communion in my church? Or dealing with the big themes of the tradition from covenant to sin?
LeGuin returned to Earthsea to engage in a complete deconstruction of the duality she created in Farthest Shore.
I adore the Earthsea series, but especially The Other Wind. One of the many reasons LeGuin rocks my world is her capacity to revisit and criticize her own ideas. It’s interesting to read The Other Wind alongside HDM - I think she does a better job with a similar afterlife. Her take on it is less didactic, gentler, more universal. I cry every time I read it.
I loved Pullman’s trilogy for the most part, but the ending annoyed me too. You could see the author laboring to play out a cool but abstract idea with the characters he had…and it just didn’t work. Experience (vs. innocence) is something you accumulate, not something you suddenly have after one act. And the whole torrid ZOMG-you’re-the-love-of-my-life doesn’t seem like the most realistic outcome of a 13-year-old kiss.
Cbrach, I take your points as written, and it’s a good analysis. But on the other hand we’re talking about a book where a guy starts a war to kill God. It’s a book that’s popular with atheists and not for no reason. As I said it’s not as broad a salvo against religion as something like The God Delusion, but despite the spiritual elements it speaks deeply against substituting faith for inquiry, the mindset that underpins religion.
The fact that it happens in a fantasy universe where matter creates souls etc. doesn’t, to my mind, undermine that point. How could it? It requires faith in our universe to believe in the soul; in Pullman’s, it just requires observation. Dust isn’t woo in HDM because it actually exists in HDM.
I have a feeling that doing a ritual does make most of us more mindful of ancestors, in developing a gratitude than not having them (this is based on the idea that mythic stories and practices arising from them highlights particular values and ways of engaging life then say a propositional claim like “go be grateful” does not have).
So do a ritual, Dwight. But why limit yourself to what religions have to offer if ritual is so important to you? Why is the “burning incense” ritual inherently better than my “think about Uncle Bill when you put on his hand-me-down coat” ritual that I’ve developed to honor my own ancestor? Just because one is the perscribed ritual for all adherents of a specific religion, and mine is just something I made up for myself?
If both meet the need - to put one in mind of reverence for one’s ancestors - why privilege one over the other?
In evaluating a tradition, I’m looking at the whole of the Bible, and the whole of the Christian tradition.
Bully for you, but why restrict yourself to religion when you have imagination?
This is delightful. My daemon is a lion named Pereus: modest, outgoing, dependable, responsible, and assertive.
LOVE IT!
It requires faith in our universe to believe in the soul; in Pullman’s, it just requires observation. Dust isn’t woo in HDM because it actually exists in HDM.
Technically true, but that’s not the most obvious interpretation. If I wrote a parable suggesting that “God” is a pretender but “souls” are real, I would expect people to think I at least found the idea of “souls” interesting or in some way valid. I don’t doubt that Pullman himself is an atheist, and he’s most likely a reasonable, thoughtful skeptic, but insofar as his fictional universe is intended to be symbolic of reality, he’s not sending the same message about “souls” and other woo that he’s unambiguously sending about gods.
Another thing that bothers me: Balthamos says he doesn’t “have anything the Specters want,” but Specters eat Dust, and angels are made of Dust, so what the hell? I could fanwank that they’re made of some allotrope of Dust that Specters can’t digest, but I shouldn’t have to do that.
I don’t doubt that Pullman himself is an atheist, and he’s most likely a reasonable, thoughtful skeptic, but insofar as his fictional universe is intended to be symbolic of reality, he’s not sending the same message about “souls” and other woo that he’s unambiguously sending about gods.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the brilliance of HDM is that he turns the phenomenon of religion on its head. In our world, religion is that which asserts, falsely, the existence of that which is non-existent. In HDM religion is that which denies what exists. But it’s the same faith-based thinking either way.
Lyra and the rest believe in souls because their souls are right there beside them in animal form. They have good evidence for souls. The only people in HDM that are believing things on the basis of no good evidence - that believe in woo - are the people in the Magesterium. I just don’t think HDM sends the message you think it does, the more I think about it. The point of HDM is why you believe, not what you believe in.
Irrelevant and late comment:
I visited a Bushlovin Catholic friend of mine today, and noticed on his kitchen table a copy of a Franciscan magazine called the “St. Anthony Messenger”. Being a masochist, I opened it, and found a picture of Lyra, and a review of the movie.
The review was accurate and neutral. It mentioned Bill Donahue’s “your kids will want to read the books!” trope (without mentioning his name), since many of that magazine’s demographic will have heard it already. And then … the reviewer’s suggestion was to get the books, read them with your kid and talk about the stories.
I was shocked. Shocked!