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Most of the ex-Christians* I've spoken to abandoned or modified their faith(s) for more deep-seated, complicated reasons...
...and for every story like that, I can produce somebody who's told me "I stopped believing in God when I grew up and started thinking for myself," or "I gave up on God: about the same time I gave up on the Easter Bunny." Your mileage may vary and all that.
We may be, as you say, talking in circles.
It seems to me that we may have an underlying difference of interpretation of Pullman's worldview: do you take his worldview to be essentially gnostic—that is, assuming the existence of the Divine, who can be experienced directly through knowledge—or atheistic? In other words, is the work merely anti-Church, or anti-God?
From your remarks, you seem to read him as the former, whereas I tend to see him as the latter: my interpretation is colored, perhaps, from interviews I've read with Pullman where he is outspoken about his own atheism in a way that I found smug and off-putting—in the soundbite version, anyway...
When did you realise that Christianity didn’t convince you? And what was it that gave the game away?
It was the usual questioning that takes place in adolescence. It began to seem impossible to reconcile the creation story with the scientific account. It became increasingly implausible that life continued after the body died. The claims of some religions – the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, the infallibility of the Pope – seemed to me such howling nonsense…
(The rest of that interview is very very good, by the way, and the full conversation reveals that Pullman's thinking is far more multi-faceted and systematic than the soundbite suggests: but although it leaves me feeling slightly more charitable toward the man the work, I'm also exasperated with some of the unexamined assumptions from which Pullman is operating: the man's got some huge blind spots.)
The biggest problem I have with Pullman's view on religion, specifically his rejection thereof—as presented in the books, anyway (more on that in a second)—though it's apparent from the interview that these is that it seems to be based on this neurotic need to understand everything, an unwillingness to surrender and accept a little mystery. This fellow argues it better than I can.
In light of this I find it curious that the books should take such cheap shots, such an obvious straw man approach, when Pullman's own attitudes are far more interesting and complex, and far more full of possibilities.
In any case, I thought that The Amber Spyglass had deeper problems than all that—and they were strcutural flaws, rather than ideological: ultimately it was defeated by its own ambitions—there was simply too much. After the superbly controlled world-building of the first two books, introducing new concepts and playing through their changes, gradually and incrementally widening the scope and the cast of characters, the last book introduced at fistfuls of new concepts willy-nilly—at least four alien species, a host of alternate worlds, dozens of new characters and ideas—and didn't work them through as I would've liked. The pacing was fucked, and a lot of moments that should have been climactic (the death of The Authority, for instance) fell terribly flat.
Am spent now. |
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