His Dark Materials

I just finished "The Golden Compass", and will probably pick up the next two.I thought it was fun... it's pretty obviously a children's book. The plots are pretty straightforward and it's usually pretty clear who the good and bad guys are. At least, in the first one.I'm finding the subtle (and not-so-subtle) nods to Paradise Lost fun, as well.

Oh, yeah. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't my intent to say that the books were all namby-pamby flowers and ponies or something. There's blood and death.But the plot seemed to be a pretty straightforward travelogue. I guess I had just read the new Harry Potter books, and while those aren't exactly Tolkien, they do have a few more plot wrinkles than The Golden Compass seemed to.Loved it, tho. I'll pick up the next one, for sure.

Yes, there's nothing like a good liberal payback fantasy to put me in a good mood.If you're a regular Sheri S. Tepper reader, I believe I once started a Coffee House topic on her apparent beliefs... we reached a pretty quick impasse because no one but me had apparently read her books. I'd be interested in your input on the questions I raised.

Resurrecting this old thread to say that the wife and I caught a sneak preview of "The Golden Compass", and I enjoyed it. She didn't like that they nerfed the ending (but it is kind of a downer in the book) but I thought it was pretty wicked cool, overall.

There is that part towards the end where, you know, they kill God.I'm just sayin'. I hope they don't take that out of the movies.

Gosh, I guess I really remember it differently. They kill the figure who people are praying to, who's depicted as God by all the religions, who fits that God mold. And it's pretty clear that there's no God that steps up to replace him; all that's left is basically The Force, you know, the interconnectedness of all intelligence in the universes, or whatever.That's essentially "sexy atheism", it's not really any kind of God. The author, you mean? I wonder, if you take this view, if it would even be possible to write a fantasy novel where God doesn't exist. I guess if you're desperate to cram God into every interstitial space, I can't stop you. But the books I read were relentlessly hostile to the very idea of God. They kill God. That's pretty significant, in my view. Not just kill him, but recognize that he's long been impotent and irrelevant, and that the deeper truth is far beyond anything that could even be called God - and yet, so close that it's accessible to every person.That human beings each have the power within them to direct their destiny, and that the destiny of all stems from everybody's individual choices.That's the world of the atheist. I don't see how that can be appropriated by theism.I think I'll go back and re-read the books over Christmas, though.

He was the God that everybody thought was God, and I don't recall anywhere in the book where there's any other God, so that's pretty much God as far as I'm concerned. Robes, long white beard; he fit the description anyway.It's been a few years. I guess I'll see when I read them again.

I don't recall them saying that he was created by the "real God" at all, just that he was the first. And so he pretended to be the one that created all the others, because how would they know? Big cosmic snowjob.I still don't see where that implies that there's a "real God". I assumed the first angel was the first intelligent being to arise throughout the universes, by evolution or whatever. Or by the multiverse's own need to be inhabited by intelligence. I never took Pullman to be saying that there was a real God who was actually the creator. I have no idea if his books support that interpretation or not without re-reading them.By my reading the only God in the multiverses is killed. That he was an imposter doesn't really matter. He was all the God there was. Turned out, everybody was better off without the fucker.

I know that Tolkein did; his Middle Earth was pretty obviously theistic. But I can think of dozens of fantasy novels I've read where people may proclaim a belief in gods, but deities themselves don't appear to be active in the universe. I don't see that destiny mandates the existence of God. In HDM, though, it's people. People do the intervening. Is that God? Or is that just your feeling that there should be a God - should be someone in charge to make sure the "right" things happen - running headlong into the reality of a universe that doesn't seem to have a God in it?I find that the recognition that God doesn't exist makes God pretty easy to understand. When you realize that it's all pretty much just people talking to themselves and needing to see agency in chance, it begins to make a lot of sense. I don't find God incomprehensible at all. Taken as myth it all makes perfect sense.

Don't you think that destiny can simply be a function of who you are, the experiences you've had, and the situations that you find yourself in?Consider the world of the Matrix; Neo certainly has a destiny but there's nothing in the movie to suggest that any divinity but his own nature is responsible for it. People can talk about destiny like it is God, for sure, but I don't see that the presence of destiny as a theme in a work automatically inserts God into that work.I'm not saying you're wrong, I guess, just giving a different perspective. As always it's a pleasure to find out what you think about these things.

The part where they kill God? Just a thought.Not to side with GDR - atheism isn't a faith, it's a lack of faith - but it's really untenable to try to interpret HDM as being compatible with theism. The characters in HDM prove that there's no God. I know it's really easy for moderate theists to read any argument against theism as being against "fundamentalism", but it's a bad habit.I mean it's astounding the degree to which theists can apparently nod their heads all the way through the arguments of atheists and then say "oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't listening. I didn't think you were talking about my beliefs, just fundamentalism." Take a step back, moderates, and realize that the only thing that distinguishes you from the fundamentalists in our eyes is that fundamentalists have the courage of their convictions and you guys don't.

That's who I'm talking about. The God. They break his prison and he dies. Irrelevant. If I put on a Santa Claus mask, sure, I'm an imposter Santa Claus; but the fact that I'm referred to that way doesn't mean that there's a real Santa Claus. It is possible to be a copy of something that never existed in the first place. Regardless, he is the God that everybody is talking about, and they kill him, and he dies. They kill God. Pullman doesn't really leave the interpretation open to their being some greater, better God who steps into replace him. The clear moral of the story is that we're all better off without.It's like you're tap-dancing around the ontological argument. Just because God might be described by some as all-powerful doesn't mean that he is; similarly, just because the God that actually existed wasn't all-powerful doesn't mean that there must have been a meta-God who was.The perfect island doesn't exist, no matter how perfect you imagine it to be. So too the perfect being. That's why the ontological argument fails. Which is what? Why leave it unsaid?So that you can always claim that your specific idea of God hasn't been refuted, because you never actually say what it is?I'm quite familiar with the "God-as-cypher" dodge of so-called moderate theism. It's not going to fly, here. That's not what I mean. What I mean is that Jar and Ray believe in essentially the same religion; it's just that Ray has the courage to follow that religion to it's natural, stupid conclusion; and thus the things he says are so totally stupid. Whereas Jar simply doesn't have a strong enough belief in Christianity to not also inflect it with the worldly, extra-Christian truths that he simply can't close his eyes to. Not when you're an atheist, there's not. Not when you can watch, over and over again, as the so-called moderates close ranks with their fundamentalist co-religionists lest religious belief not be spoken of with all reverence.There's no clear difference. It's just a difference in degree of how seriously they take their beliefs. There's no fundamental difference in the beliefs; there's just a difference in what they're willing to say and do for their beliefs.

I don't see that it was "infused with fundamentalism" any more than a generic religion already is, which is to say quite a bit. The authoritarian impulse is present in all religion, moderate or otherwise. But that's the ontological argument. "God is perfect; if God does not exist that's less perfect than existing; since God is perfect, God must exist."It's nonsense. People in HDM may think that God is all-powerful, but the fact that the only Gods observed were not all-powerful doesn't prove that there must have been another God who was.It simply proves that they were all wrong about God - which they were. And if they were wrong in the book, Pullman seems to be saying, why couldn't the theists in our world be wrong? They both call themselves "Christians", right? Yes, exactly. Since they say they're the same religion, they must be. From what basis would you claim that they're not? From what basis would you claim that one of them must be wrong or lying? Except that he doesn't. Jar tries to walk a line between skepticism and doubt and faith in the God of Christianity and the life of Jesus as described in the Bible.But that's insupportable, except by half-assing it in both directions. A true skeptic believes in neither God nor in taking the life of Jesus at face-value. A true believer doesn't allow skepticism to interfere with his belief in either.Ray is a much more honest Christian than Jar. You don't like Ray, you like Jar, so naturally you object, but it's true. Ray has the courage of his convictions; the courage that leads him to say stupid crap in defense of his religion, regardless of how ridiculous it makes him look. Ray takes his beliefs and runs with them, lets them take him wherever he leads. Jar doesn't have enough courage in either skepticism or faith to follow either to their obvious conclusions. And quite frankly it showed up in his moderating. Oh, "campaigning" my ass. The "campaigning" of moderates has accomplished precisely jack shit for standing in the way of religious oppression. Moderate religionists universally stand in the way of us deploying our greatest weapon against religious oppression - the fact that religions are objectively false. No, instead we have to make back-bending arguments about "respecting faith" and "secular society" and the like, when really the strongest argument against religious oppression is that it's based on things that just aren't true, like "there's a God and he wants you to live in a certain way." I don't see why you can't be an atheist and still have an idea of God. Clearly you have an idea of God in mind that you don't think Pullman argued against.I just find it instructive that you couldn't seem to tell me what that God was supposed to be. It's very convenient. It's like playing Battleship without putting down any of your boats. Oh, God. Not "fundamentalist atheism" again. As if there were any such thing.

Except that I'm not; I'm just someone who doesn't take bullshit reasoning and fallacious arguments at face-value.Kuresu, don't confuse your complete impotence in proving your points with some kind of intractability on my part. I'm perfectly able to be convinced. You just have to marshal enough of an argument to do it, and you haven't, yet. And, yet, when it comes down to hating pagans, and Muslims, and gays, and atheists - that's something they find common ground over. Hell, you can even get Muslims, Christians, and Jews to agree on something in fellowship - as long as that something is "how much we all hate the queers":

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Orthodox Jews, Moslems and Christians have banded together to try to prevent this convergence of gays and lesbians from all over the world for a week of activities in Israel’s capital.

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Believers in Jerusalem have held several citywide prayer meetings regarding the parade, while rabbis and Moslem sheikhs held a mutual news conference decrying the event, including Levin and Arab party Knesset Member Ibrahim Sarsur. At least 45 parliament members signed a petition against the parade.

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“This is the holy land, not the homo land,” Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a moral activist from America, who came to Israel to stir a charge against the parade, told Israel Today. “The militants are as dangerous as Hamas. And they’re every bit as dangerous as Nazis to religious people.”

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Attention Required! | CloudflareIt'd be hilarious if all three of these religions didn't agree that I deserved to die for my beliefs. (Kind of puts a damper on the levity.) Yes. Different flavors, but it's all ice cream. It's all based on the same thing - the perversion called "faith." Did you provide an example of them doing that? I missed it, I guess. I just can't accept that the Bible, for instance, supports a moderate reading. I think a lot of moderate Christians are that way because they don't know what the Bible actually says. The large percentage of them who think the Bible says things like "The Lord helps those who help themselves", for instance, is something I find consistent with the polling that indicates that moderates tend to be a lot less familiar with the Bible than either atheists or fundamentalists.There's a saying - "an atheist is a moderate who started reading the Bible." There's a whole lot in the Bible that contradicts the idea of a "moderate" faith.Read your Bible, Kuresu. On point:

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[38] And John answered him, saying, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us.
[39] But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me.
[40] For he that is not against us is on our part.
[41] For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward.

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"For there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name that can lightly speak evil of me." In other words - people who say they are Christians are Christians. Professing to follow Christ is the sole qualification, regardless of whether or not they the same as other Christians. Forbid them not. Jar and Ray are of the same religion according to the Bible they both read. That they'd both like to kick the other person out is irrelevant. They're members of the same religion. And that, in your view, is a different type of God? I don't see it. Actually, you didn't. You hand-waved it by recursion to other beliefs. You didn't actually explain what, in your view, all those other religions add up to. According to them, sure. According to good sense. Faith is the opposite of doubt. The more doubt you have, the less faith. To have so much doubt that you reject the position in its entirety is clearly the opposite of having faith, because to have faith in something is to believe that it is true, not that it is false.Faith contends that something is true, but enough doubt leads to the opposite conclusion. Doubt is clearly the opposite of faith.

Well I'm pretty sure they're not the same person, Kuresu, but I don't see that as being informative. Sure, they profess different things. But they claim to be the same religion. Their religion says they're of the same religion.From what basis do you conclude that one of them is wrong? And which one is it, Kuresu? Which one is the Christian and which one is the liar? How would you claim to know? Look, I told you what it said. Even (the fictional character) Jesus doesn't believe in second-guessing people's Christianity. From what basis do you? I don't see the significance of the contradictions. I don't think the Bible is true but that it forms the basis of the Christian religion is surely indisputable. No, you didn't. You just said that you added them up. You didn't say what the result was - not in any way that would be helpful to this conversation.You just hand-waved it. That's why I called you on the dodge, because that's what it was. That's the hand-waving I'm talking about. What do you get, though, when you add them up? I'm asking you what you get when you add 2+2, and you're telling me "the sum of 2 and 2" when the answer I'm looking for is "4." It's a dodge because you can't answer the question. What else am I supposed to conclude? I'm talking about doubt and faith, not evidence. Is that specific enough?