…memories are not enough to sustain a faith. It was in my teenage years that believing finally became impossible; after I’d learnt a little science, the meaning of creation in six days and conception by means of the Holy Ghost had to be understood metaphorically rather than literally, and once that was done, there was only God himself left. Although I carried on a fairly anguished one-sided conversation with Him for some time, the silence on His part was complete.
Nowadays, I’m as sure as I can be that there is nothing there. I think that matter is quite extraordinary and wonderful and mysterious enough, without adding something called spirit to it; in fact, any talk about the spiritual makes me feel a little uneasy. When I hear such utterances as ”˜I’m spiritual but not religious’, or ”˜So-and-so is a deeply spiritual person’, or even phrases of a thoroughly respectable Platonic kind such as ”˜The eternal reality of a supreme goodness’, I pull back almost physically. I feel not so much puzzlement as vertigo, as if I’m leaning out over a void. There is just nothing there.
Consequently, the immense and complicated structures of Christian theology seem to me like the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy ”“ preposterously elaborated methods of explaining away a mistake. When it was realised that the planets went around the sun, not the Earth, the glorious simplicity of the idea blew away the epicycles like so many cobwebs: everything worked perfectly without them.
And as soon as you realise that God doesn’t exist, the same sort of thing happens to all those doctrines such as atonement, the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, original sin, the Trinity, justification by faith, redemption and so on. Cobwebs, dusty bits of rag, frail scraps of faded cloth: they hide nothing, they decorate nothing and now they mean nothing.
Three interesting aspects of this piece.
1) Isn’t it richly ironic that Pullman proclaims his desire for freedom of interpretation of texts, because he believes in “the democracy of reading” and if there is “one authoritative reading of the text” prescribed by the actual author than there is a “sort of totalitarian silence that descends” — [classic deconstructionism there] — [i]but but but but[/i] . . . when he has [b]Something Really Important To Say[/b] [like — Jesus was just a good man and Christ was the myth] and when he can attempt to do some damage to “the foundation story of the Christian religion” which he loathes, then he’s more than happy to shuck “the democracy of reading” and write a lengthy screed with his authoritative reading of the text spelled out. ; > )
Fun!
2) He goes to some lengths to denounce the whole criteria of “spirit” as opposed to the material, as in: “I think that matter is quite extraordinary and wonderful and mysterious enough, without adding something called spirit to it; in fact, any talk about the spiritual makes me feel a little uneasy.”
And yet, the only way he can explain the Jesus story is to do [i]precisely what he claims to dislike[/i] earlier, which is to spiritualize Jesus and literally “divide him” into two persons, one material, and one containing the bits that Pullman doesn’t like, naturally, as “spiritual” or “mythology.”
3) The final utter silliness of his “question” about whether any prelate would choose to “save” Jesus from what was, actually, Jesus’s mission and choice, which of course Pullman denies, because he split Jesus into two persons. [i]Of course[/i] no *real Christian* prelate would choose to deny Jesus the death on the cross — because then we would not have salvation for our sins. It is only the non-Christians who would deny Jesus’s death, because they deny who Jesus is anyway and what His chosen purpose was.
A cheap transparent device, was that last question, full of the bitterness and also subtle class warfare and anger that Pullman has, I suspect, anyway.
Interesting that he acknowledges the people in his life and things in his life that showed him and “proved” to him that faith could be had of things unseen, but teenage learning of science threw all of that over for him. He seems to be one caught in the sophmoric year of believing the little knowledge learned beyond childhood things is the only truth there is. Many (if not most) of us realize as we mature, that the things we learned as children have a basis that is true, whereas many (if not most) of the things we learned as we got older were (and are) not on solid ground. He seems to be really struggling to continue to deny the truth in his Christian heritage. Perhaps there is a monetary element for publication of his books that is keeping him on this “sophmoric” path.
A good dose of the Holy Spirit would up-end his worldview, but if he is not interested, the Holy Spirit will respect that and Mr. Pullman will miss out on an essential part of reality. It is difficult to review a movie you have never seen, yet many atheists feel up to the task.
Mark Brown
San Angelo, Texas
April 8, 2010
#1 it sounds like you read the book! I’m pleasantly surprised.
“As soon as you realize that God doesn’t exist…” Yes. Well. I can see a little trouble with that premise. Larry