Golden Compass....

Ok, I'm intrigued by the new movie coming out The Golden Compass. I've been having converstations with a couple people who are either watching the movie or reading the book and have brought up the conservative's condemnation of the books/movies, from a standpoint of how ludacris it is that they have a problem with the story. Not being familiar with the books, movie or the author i've done a little investigating.




Author: Philip Pullman



First to explain the conflict (from my understanding) certain conservatives have a problem with the series called "His Dark Materials", the first book/movie being "The Golden Compass", saying that the author, Philip Pullman wrote it agains the church and it is filled with anti-God anti-Christian rhetoric. I've also heard that it was written as the antithesis of The Chronicles of Narnia.





I have just gotten the first book and will read that before I make comments on what is or isn't in it. I have also gone on Philip Pulman's website and clicked on a couple links with interesting interviews. Here are a couple exerpts...


(Interviewer) PTC: How would you characterize your own beliefs? Atheistic, agnostic, materialist, etc.? A friend of mine who is both an atheist and a committed materialist told me she didn't understand why His Dark Materials was being touted as an "atheist" trilogy, because the Dust seemed very "spiritual" and "mystical" and unnecessary to her. Tony Watkins has also written that the Dust makes the books more "dualist" than materialist. Do you think there is something "spiritual" about your books, and does this coincide with anything "spiritual" in your own outlook, or are people perhaps reading too much into a handy and very effective plot device? If your own views are more at the materialistic end of things, why do you think your books have pointed in a seemingly opposite direction?


(Philip Pullman) PP: Deep waters here. Those who are committed materialists (as I claim to be myself) have to account for the existence of consciousness, or else, like the behaviourists such as Watson and Skinner, deny that it exists at all. There are various ways of explaining consciousness, many of which seem to take the line that it's an emergent phenomenon that only begins to exist when a sufficient degree of complexity is achieved. Another way of dealing with the question is to assume that consciousness, like mass, is a normal and universal property of matter (this is known as panpsychism), so that human beings, dogs, carrots, stones, and atoms are all conscious, though in different degrees. This is the line I take myself, in the company of poets such as Wordsworth and Blake.As for 'spirit', 'spiritual', 'spirituality' - these are words I never use, because I can see nothing real that seems to correspond with them: they have no meaning. I would never begin to talk of a person's spiritual life, or refer to someone's profound spirituality, or anything of that sort, because it doesn't make sense to me. When other people talk about spirituality I can see nothing in it, in reality, except a sense of vague uplift combined at one end with genuine goodness and modesty, and at the other with self-righteousness and pride. That's what they're displaying. That's what seems to be on offer when they interact with the world. And to my mind it's easier, clearer, and more truthful just to talk about the goodness and modesty, or about the self-righteousness and pride, without going into the other stuff at all. So the good qualities that the word 'spiritual' implies can be perfectly well covered, and more honestly covered, it seems to me, by other positive words, and we don't need 'spiritual' at all. But in fact my reaction to the word 'spiritual' is even a little more strongly felt than that; I even feel a slight revulsion. I'm thinking of those portraits of saints and martyrs by painters of the Baroque period and the Counter-Reformation: horrible grubby-looking old men with rotten teeth wearing dark dusty robes and gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour, or beautiful young women in sumptuous clothes with wide eyes and parted lips gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour, or martyrs having the flesh ripped from their bones as they gaze upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour - gazing at the Virgin Mary, or a vision of the Cross, or something else that's hovering in the air just above them. And you know that what they're seeing isn't really there; that if you were there in front of them, you wouldn't see the Virgin sitting on a little cloud six feet above the floor; all you'd see would be the rotten teeth or the sumptuous clothes or the torn flesh and the expression of fanatical fervour. They're seeing things. They're deluded, in fact.So the word 'spiritual', for me, has overtones that are entirely negative. It seems to me that whenever anyone uses the word, it's a sign that either they're deluding themselves, or they're pulling the wool over the eyes of others. And when I hear it, or see it in print, my reaction is one of immediate scepticism.


(skipped a bit...)


PTC: Hmmm, could you tease this out a bit more? I can understand Dust as a metaphor within a work of literature, but in what sense is God a metaphor? (I assume both you and Dawkins are referring to God as he is perceived in the real world and not in a work of fiction -- and certainly the people Dawkins takes issue with would see God as more than metaphorical.)





PP: I don't expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that's what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all - savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection - for David, for example. But he's not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won't find them in the phone book.




In regards to Narnia....


PP: Simply that I was asked to judge the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, and it was on the shortlist.As for Narnia - I've expressed my detestation for that series on several occasions and at length, so I won't say very much about it here, except to note something that some commentators miss when lumping Lewis and Tolkien together, which is this: that Tolkien was a Catholic, for whom the basic issues of life were not in question, because the Church had all the answers. So nowhere in 'The Lord of the Rings' is there a moment's doubt about those big questions. No-one is in any doubt about what's good or bad; everyone knows where the good is, and what to do about the bad. Enormous as it is, TLOTR is consequently trivial. Narnia, on the other hand, is the work of a Protestant - and an Ulster Protestant at that, for whom the individual interaction with the Bible and with God was a matter of daily struggle and endless moral questioning. That's the Protestant tradition. So in Narnia the big questions are urgent and compelling and vital: is there a God? Who is it? How can I recognise him? What must I do to be good? I profoundly disagree with the answers that Lewis offers - in fact, as I say, I detest them - but Narnia is a work of serious religious engagement in a way that TLOTR could never be.




Ok, so that was a long exerpt, but i think that it's good for us to know where he's coming from and what the motivations are behind what he writes. I will post some more thoughts when i'm done with the books but for now I want to hear your thoughts....


again, here is the total interview
http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/philip-pullman-extended-e-mail.html