This may seem off-topic, but give me time...
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by LmP
Many things that happen today cannot be explained by our natural laws.
|
Indeed. But many things happen today, & always have happened, which cannot be accounted for by Christianity (or by pre-Christian philosophies), because that's not the point of Christianity. As I understand it, Christianity was not meant to be a substitute for science & explain the way the universe works.
As for your example, I have to make the point that, apart from the missionaries' acts of cutting down the trees being a vicious & mean minded act of vandalism (one might even liken it to the behaviour of orcs!) it was not simply designed to show that their God was more powerful than the spirits of the Land the people had 'worshipped' from the first-time, but rather to break the people's
spirit.
Basically, what the 'missionaries' did in 'Dark Age' Europe was no different to what White European's did to the native peoples of Australia & the Americas. You do away with a people's Tradition by shattering their world view, not by peacably offering a superior one. And this can be shown by the fact that as the 'missionaries' power (ie the power of the authoritarian Church) failed those peoples have returned to their old ways. This was simply inevitable because a people's native beliefs & worldview is not the product of rational analysis, only lasting until a 'better' one comes along, but grows out of their relationship/psycho-spiritual with their native Land & the spirits of that Land.
This brings us back to Tolkien's point. The 'emblems of religion' are manifestations of specific cultures & their understanding of the Divine. So, to use the emblems of primary world religions in a secondary world setting would quite simply 'shatter' the secondary 'reality' the author has attempted to create. This is because the peoples of the secondary world would have developed their own traditions which would be unique to them, & not simply some 'disguised' (ie allegorised) version of primary world traditions.
Lewis & Lawhead don't convince (me, at least) in that they do precisely that. Certainly Lawhead's 'Song of Albion' & his 'Arthurian' cycle deliberately twist & misrepresent British Tradition to the extent that only someone with absolutely no knowledge of that Tradition could take them in any way seriously.
Finally, none of the above should be taken as an attack on Christianity as a spiritual path, only on the 'political' church instigated by Constantine.