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Originally Posted by Aiwendil
Lalwende wrote:
I'm afraid I'm having a hard time seeing things from this point of view. Your description, it seems to me, might be applied to the God of the Old Testament (and to Pullman's Authority before he became feeble), but it doesn't seem to fit Eru. Eru and Yahweh, as literary characters in their respective stories, are portrayed quite differently. Eru does no smiting, lays down now jealous commandments against idols, does not select a 'chosen people' whose foes are disfavoured. Eru actually does very little after creating Ea. He gives life to the Dwarves (surely the act of loving god), he advises Manwe from time to time, and then he destroys Numenor. Now certainly that last act could be seen as vengeful, and called into question (it is of course on par with the Judeo-Christian God's deluge). I believe there was a thread on that a while back. But it's a single incident (not even in the 'Silmarillion proper'), and hardly seems to merit your sweeping characterization.
Insofar as the charge is 'cold and disinterested' (which is altogether a different thing from petty and bad-tempered), I will agree with you. But this is 'problem of evil' territory. Anyone who posits an omnipotent God is going to have to make him or her either petty and malicious or cold and distant, as it is certainly a fact that bad things happen to good people. If you are going to take Pullman's Dust as his true, loving and merciful, God (which I think is inevitable) then doesn't the charge of 'cold and distant' apply to it as well? Though I suppose the Dust is different, as it is explicitly (and emphatically) not omnipotent.
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You've answered my issue in that second paragraph right away!
It's Eru's very omnipotence which causes the issue. He creates everything, including Melkor, free will and the whole caboodle - therefore Eru must logically also create the potential for evil if nothing can exist without his having created it.
Even laying this aside he also has the power not to call the world into being after Melkor has interjected his themes. But he still does it. He also destroys Numenor as has been discussed many a time. He leaves dealing with Melkor to his servants, does nothing himself. He creates two races which simply cannot live alongside each other without coming into conflict because their very natures are incompatible.
And I actually don't think Tolkien had any problem with this Omnipotent thing himself - it would certainly make sense coming from the mind of a man who had to reconcile devout belief in the Catholic God with being in the very heart of the unimaginable (because it
is unimaginable to any of us) slaughter of the trenches. This may or may not have been his particular view of his own God that he painted in Eru - but we don't know that for sure, we can only guess.
Whatever, I've never much liked Eru. He's a very negative figure and doesn't inspire me...but then did Tolkien intend him to do that? I think not - we have ordinary people like Frodo and Sam for that purpose.
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Originally Posted by davem
The weakness of HDM for me is that he makes the 'Magisterium' so OTT in its totalitarian hatred & desire for dominance that we end up in Python territory
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That's why people in our society getting so worked up about HDM having caused them 'offence' puzzle me. The Magisterium is a literary creation, at worst an analogy of things in our own world, and so drawn colourfully. We know that in the main, religions in our own world, setting aside those extremists of all creeds who use them as big sticks to beat people with, are not so extreme, so if someone is upset about their own religion being examined in the form of this one particular analogy, does that mean it is indeed one of the extreme ones?
Pullman himself has no issue with belief where it does not hurt people, and that's fair enough, surely that's what anyone should believe? His beef is with abusive and restrictive religions - he shows what they have done to God in his books. Interestingly, revealingly, the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks every school child should read His Dark Materials.
And remember, Pullman did not write a tragic story in the way Tolkien did. In Tolkien's world, there is only the Long Defeat and one day, maybe, an end to the world. In Pullman's Universe/s, Lyra comes to save the day/s!