Phooey on Aslan
And then there’s the Narnia thing.
Icky icky ick.
What Pullman particularly objects to about the Narnia series, as it comes to a climax in The Last Battle, is that the children are killed and go to heaven. ” ‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’ “
Yeah okay – sorry, I’m with Pullman here. I hate that medieval (literally medieval) ‘this world is crap boring shadowlands and “heaven” is all joy tralala’ idea. I hate the idea of a modern children’s story that tells them being alive is like being at school and being dead is holidays, that life is the dream and being dead is waking up. What does that give you? Well, at the outermost edge, it gives you people who are so eager to get there that they kill themselves to do it, and so deluded about what is ‘good’ and what their putative deity wants that they do it by killing as many other people as possible. Not just tube-exploders and semi-airplane pilots, either – also the child soldiers in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war: they were given plastic keys and told they were the keys to Paradise, and sent off to be killed. And only slightly removed from the outermost edge, it gives you all the monster raving loonies who believe in the ‘Rapture’ and get pleasure in contemplating the future torture of most human beings on the planet – which means you get morally disgusting human beings. And then you get a lot of people who just waste the lives they do have by failing to appreciate the real world.
Furthermore, to be morally mature will involve acknowledging that reality and living in relation to God, the ground of our being and the goal of our longing. There are different concepts of reality, and following on from that different understandings of what it is to be morally mature. For the atheist, moral maturity must involve rejecting religion. For the religious believer, it must involve acknowledging the supreme reality from whom we draw our being.
That sounds grand, doesn’t it. But it’s just windy nonsense dressed up. What’s morally mature about that?
I find myself in a curious situation with this case. I devoured all the Narnia books when I was six or seven, enjoying them enormously. At the very first reading I picked up on all the religious content, both general and specific. I was a conscious atheist already then, though I was not permitted to give that fact full expression. The Christian message bothered me a little, but I enjoyed them as narratives and probably felt a little smug that I appeared to be the only one in my age group who had really cottoned onto what Lewis was trying to do. Obviously I was a little further then than I am now from more philosophical understanding. I agree that there’s plenty of windy nonsense in what Harries writes. In trying to put my finger on what I find troubling, I think it boils down to this: we deal so often at B&W with the approach in which the religious want to have it both ways, trying to pretend they don’t expect the bible to be taken 100% literally when they’re defending themselves against the evidence that that’s how they teach it. Here we have a case of a kind of fairy tale, which doesn’t directly claim to be more, even though we now know that Lewis intended it to create a mental template in his young readers which would easily accept Christian teachings later in life. I suppose my question here really is: how do we deal with the disturbing phenomenon that the religious and conservative forces are jumping on the bandwagon of this fantasy for their own ends, without ourselves becoming the side that tries to censor? The best answer I can come up with myself is to “teach the controversy,” because unlike ID vs evolution, there is a controversy here. It is, of course, very unfortunate that the target audience are children at a vulnerable stage of development.
My sixty two y/o father recently gave me Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” along with a note saying he knows that I’m a “devout atheist” since he, like Lewis, was once so as well.
Talk about immature! Confusing a lack of belief in the xtian god with a total lack of belief in any probability of ANY gods just shows how simple-minded these folk can be.
I love my Dad but NOT just cuz he’s my father. It’s because, since I knocked his front tooth 20 years ago (he followed by “loosening” me jaw,) he has realized that I am a human being and not just some miserable extension of his own miserable person. He TRIES to communicate with me honestly but simply can’t do so with himself much less anyone else.
History will show CS Lewis, regardless (of course) of how entertaining I too found Narnia when I’s a youth, to be an illogical mental gymnast whose ideas had little grounding in empirical reality. I guess I wish I didn’t love me pops. Then I wouldn’t feel so bad that he is so like Lewis and other “intelligent” nutters.
I was forced to read that Narnia crap and also the Hobbit crap when I was in parochial high school twenty years ago. The sad thing is people really get emotionally attached to the stuff. I always feel bad when someone wants to know what I think of C.S. Lewis or Tolkien. I feel that if I tell them it’s Christian nonsense, or even that it’s not to my taste, they will take it as an insult, as if I told them that their beloved dog was ugly and evil. Honestly, the scariest thing in all this is that the media giants have now realized there is a “christian market” and they will use their awesome sophistical powers to nourish that market and expand it.
What with the media giants realizing there is a christian market, and ten whining Christians being able to get Sainsbury’s to take ‘Jerry Springer the Opera’ DVDs off the shelf – we’re all doomed.
Yes, doomed! BWAHAHAHAA!!
“For the atheist, moral maturity must involve rejecting religion. ” Nope. I’m pretty sure rejecting religion happens at the beginning for many of us atheists; ‘moral maturity’ came about thirty years after that for me, and encompassed a whole lot more than these smarmy sanctimonious kitten-farts can possibly gather. Good strike there, OB.
I first read the Narnia books when i was young enough and ignorant enough about religion not to pick up on any of the Christian messages. I loved the first four books, but even at age six, i didn’t like climax in Silver Chair or Last Battle.
Realisign the books contained these religious messages did take away much of my enjoyment of them. But i still remember how much i loved them when i was little.
However, on the Pullman quote, while i agree with Pullman in this case, i’m not altogether with his theology as set out in the third book of the Dark Materials trilogy.
–IP
Can any rational person hear about a suicide bombing and not assume that the bomber is another religious nut who believes that s/he is going to magically reappear in another world? Religious ideas can truly be dangerous.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120605I.shtm
I came onto the Narnia series a bit late, at 12, and I liked it, not the least because I didn’t pick up on the religious baggage at all, having been only lightly indoctrinated. I did find the end of the last one creepy and confusing. But oddly enough, it was right about then that I became an atheist…Not all of us were able to reject religion right at the start, but hey, better late than never.
Actually I always thought that stone table was kind of neat. Baynes’ illos might have made fans of a lot of kids. But if I was doing a Narnia movie, it’d have to have Aslan meeting Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear.
Never could get into the Narnia books, or Winnie the Pooh, but I do feel a bit uncomfortable at being so fond of Wind in the Willows. Class ridden, reactionary, but ain’t Toad a treat?
I don’t really know why, but while I devoured the seven C.S. Lewis books, I never got into Tolkien at all. My older brother read “The Hobbit” and raved about it, but I don’t think he got further with Tolkien either. After a few pages, I gave up because it simply didn’t grab me. I’ve never tried again and the only film I’ve seen is the old Ralph Bakshi adaptation, because I was curious about the animation technique that was based on live action. And I have enjoyed Peter Jackson’s other work, especially “Forgotten Silver.” I think my introduction to Lewis was through a children’s radio adaptation of the first one, but that shouldn’t account for the difference; it’s not as if I weren’t a bookworm. I was, in the worst possible way.
I was never even aware of Narnia as a kid – I somehow missed it, along with all of Ransome’s books. I wonder what I would have thought of Narnia. (I was a big ol’ bookworm too, but I somehow just never knew about either.)
Funny – I don’t feel much discomfort about Wind in the Willows – even though it’s not only class-ridden, it’s also all-male. But the very similar all-maleness of Tolkien irritates me enormously. Go figure.
Well, it’s not, really. Ophelia needs to thank the Greeks for the shadowlands ideology. It’s not medieval. It’s Platonic.
It could be both, after all.
Nevertheless, the medieval one is different from the Platonic – more morbid for one thing. All those mementi mori sitting around.