Pullman's pulling my leg

The man's not anti-God! What he is, is confused between God and the god built in man's image (of course I use the male signifier deliberately! Duh!) and that's the one he doesn't like. Why should he? I sure as heck (this is a Sunday post after all) don't.

I know the subject has been done to death, (what an ingenious way of getting out of providing any sort of analysis myself!) but things started going wrong (Oh very well! IN MY OPINION! Happy now?) around about St Paul. In the face of strong opposition from within the very early, and entirely Judaic church, he took the Word to the gentiles. The man achieved monumental amounts. Christianity had no chance without him, none. No doubting that. BUT. Crucially, the man was writing in the sure and certain knowledge of Christ's return, expecting it in his own lifetime, and that dangerously skewed our patterns of belief. He concentrated entirely on the life to come, and specifically counsels against tampering with existing social structures on the grounds that there just wasn't the time. So instead of newly Christian communities getting to grips with the fundamentals of a life based on the precepts of the Messiah, and the difficult task of actually changing the way they lived their lives, there was an easy option - change absolutely nothing, and profess all. I know, I know, persecutions, terrible martyrdoms in the early days, and then oh goodness gracious me, these very same things meted out to others as soon as the church gained power. In the name of God, but God remade in Man's image. We did, and continue to do, what we want to do. Instead of concentrating on finding out what GOD wants us to do. After all, 'God so loved the world . . ' Loved. The World. This one.

SO. That, I reckon, is the toothless, dribbling entity in Pullman's Clouded Mountain. The God humans made, and in its name made the General Oblation Board, the Consistorial Court and all those other lovely institutions. And I'd like to see it dead too.

While I'm on the subject: Dust. The chain of thought falls apart in Spyglass, when Dust, gushing out of the universe through the human wielding of the Subtle Knife, is demonstrably at the mercy of human action, but that apart, what a great way of thinking about GOD. Not the apex of a hierarchy, which is an inescapable part of the language which confines our thoughts, but a truly all-pervasive presence, which will talk with us so easily if we avail ourselves of it.

And a couple of things I just didn't get. Mary Malone is told she is to play the serpent to Lyra's Eve. But I cannot for the life of me see where. She talks about abandoning her vocation for human love - is that the temptation? But Will and Lyra already love each other, so it can't be that. Also, Eve didn't harrow Hell, Jesus did. So how come it was Lyra released those poor ghosts?

Ah - Jesus. Appears very briefly in the Malone speech just mentioned, and that's it, in the whole trilogy. Pullman doesn't address Redemption at all. His quarrel, flawed as I think it is, is with a God. He doesn't - can't? - take on the real biggie. I'll grant him his atheism when he does that.

What a trudge through this post. Probably because I'm abandoning a Sunday slant, and this will be my last one. It's a bit of a bugger, but I've moved away from envying believers their certainty, to envying non-believers their total lack of angst. Here's a wry chuckle - I'm heavily time-tabled in Sunday School, and we are strapped for teachers, so none of this inner crap can afford to see RL daylight. Still and all, I read somewhere that the Chinese term for 'teacher' can equally well be translated as 'liar-to-children'. So I'm OK.