The Top 18 Things I Would Do If I Ever Became an Evil Angel Overlord in His Dark Materials

Greetings.

Jewish date:  28 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Toledhoth).

Today’s holiday:  Thirty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Support the Breast Cancer EARLY Act! - The Petition Site”.

Today’s topic:  The last nine chapters of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman and the trilogy as a whole.

WARNING:  SPOILING WITHOUT SHAME OR REGRET.

Having completed reading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, I have concluded that the author concentrates on depicting Christianity as evil to such an extent that he is careless in other aspects of creating a story.  As such, there are a number of serious problems with no evident solution.  Some of these are difficulties in the way Metatron, a megalomaniacal angel who has taken the reins of power, behaves.  To point these out, I have been inspired to compose this list:

The Top 18 Things I Would Do If I Ever Became an Evil Angel Overlord in His Dark Materials:

1. I will not take 300 years off my age.  It does not impress anyone.
2. I will have an official representative in every world and will not tolerate the sort of illogic and incompetence demonstrated by the Magisterium of Lyra Belacqua’s world.  I will not tolerate my servants creating public relations nightmares through torture and experimentation which no ethical review board would ever approve.  Neither will I tolerate infighting.  I may be evil, but I can do without power-hungry megalomaniacs as servants.
3. I will have a thoroughly modernized spy network present in all worlds so my enemies cannot do anything behind my back.
4. I will keep up-to-date on all prophecies, and I will act on them early and often.  I will not give twerps, such as Lyra Belacqua, a chance to become dangerous.
5. I will take possession of all items which are a potential danger to me, such as the Subtle Knife, and not allow them to remain in mortal hands any longer than absolutely necessary.
6. I will have a well-funded research and development program so I can smite my enemies with superweapons they have never even dreamed of and have no defense against.  This includes finding new ways to kill rebel angels.
7. I will not doom the dead to a miserable existence in the dark being insulted by harpies.  The idea of suckers rotting there is amusing, but if word ever gets back to the living about it, all mortals will realize they have no reason to obey me since they will end up in the same place no matter what they do.  Therefore there will be a real Heaven and a real Hell, and whoever obeys me will go to Heaven and those who disobey me will go to Hell.  And I will make sure everyone knows about this to put the fear of me in them.
8. The waiting area to take the dead to the afterlife will have a staff of friendly angels who will return home living people who reach there by accident.  This makes for good public relations.
9. The boatman who takes the dead to the afterlife will be armed and given standing orders to kill immediately anyone still living demanding to go to Heaven or Hell and take their soul straight to Hell.
10. Given that Lord Asriel’s plan is to wait for me to attack him and that I am immortal and he is not, I will not attack him but rather will wait for him and the rest of the mortal contingent of his forces to die.  A few decades is nothing for a being several thousand years old.
11. I will have the Magisterium of Lyra Belacqua’s world deliver up to me everything they can find of Lord Asriel’s.  That way, if Lord Asriel gives even the slightest hint that he will attack, if possible I will take advantage of Pullman’s misinterpretation of quantum entanglement and blow Lord Asriel and everyone in his fortress straight to Hell without ever having to get anywhere near him.
12. If Lord Asriel gives me even the slightest hint that he will attack and I cannot obtain anything I can use to blow him up through quantum entanglement, I will land the Clouded Mounted on top of his fortress and press it down, literally crushing the opposition.
13. I will not trust Mrs. Coulter under any circumstances.  Her heart is full of deceit and lies, and while she may be exceedingly desirable, there are myriads of women out there who are just as desirable who have no desire to kill me.
14. If for any reason I do go off with Mrs. Coulter, under no circumstances will I go off with her alone.  Rather, I will take a dozen heavily armed and well-trained troops with me so I have a fighting chance of dealing with whatever she has planned.
15. I will not send off a small number of unarmed angels to hide the Authority.  I have the Clouded Mountain, a massive fortress.  If Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry want to kill him, they will have to penetrate the Clouded Mountain, which will be staffed by heavily armed and well-trained angels with standing orders to shoot on sight all mortals who do not have a valid pass.
16. I will strike down and send straight to Hell all beings who make use of any device powered by rebel angels, e.g., an alethiometer or Mary Malone’s device to talk to Dust.
17. I will strike down and send straight to Hell all people who suddenly decide there is no God for absolutely no reason, e.g., Mary Malone.
18. I will strike down and send straight to Hell Father Gomez for his idiotic idea that the mulefa moving about on seedpod wheels is evil, Satanic, and against the will of God.  Nowhere in the Christian Bible is there any such sentiment, and in fact Ezekiel 1, which includes a description of the four-wheeled Divine Chariot, should be proof enough that moving around on wheels has Divine sanction.  I will take credit for the idea of wheeled creatures and bask in the approval of everyone finding them cool.

Note:  My apologies to Jack Butler and Peter Anspach.  Some material here on Mrs. Coulter sounds a lot like material on the latter’s evil overlord list.

Image of theologically incompetent atheist author Philip Pullman via Wikipedia

Philip Pullman keeps the theological train wreck plowing a path of destruction until the very end.  Metatron walks into an obvious trap, lured by Mrs. Coulter, and she and Lord Asriel have a Darth Vader moment and redeem their sorry selves by fighting him and dragging him down into the Abyss.  Lyra Belacqua/Silvertongue and Will Parry accidentally kill the Authority by opening his crystal capsule in and attempt to save his life; he literally falls apart and is blown away.  What happens to Metatron and the Authority, of course, does not even vaguely resemble anything that could possibly happen to the God of Christianity.  Mary Malone “plays the Serpent” by sending Lyra and Will off on their own to look for their missing dæmons; the adventure turns into a picnic/date.  They definitely end up falling in love, kissing, and cuddling, with implications of sexual intercourse.  (I cannot make this up.  I would not dare make up anyone doing it that young.)  This apparently has the beneficial effects helping healing the worlds, but as the Fall goes, it is lame and untenable.  There is no disobedience of any direct order from the Deity not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, nor does Mary ever suggest violation of a such a direct order.  Nor is making love mentioned in the original story as prohibited.  The botched equation of angels = consciousness = Dust/dark matter = original sin is never resolved.  The utter stupidity of Mary Malone and Father Gomez has already been mentioned in my list.  The reward of the dead remains to go happily(!) on to oblivion.  The Magisterium never rises above the vaguest resemblance of actual Christianity.  And very importantly, the ultimate source of prophecy is never revealed.  In short, religion in His Dark Materials is a poor reflection of religion in real life.  Final theological grade for the trilogy:  F, with a strong recommendation that Philip Pullman be banned from theology until he recants and stops making up paranoid fantasies.

I would also like to note that His Dark Materials is supposed to be the atheistic answer to The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis.  It is not.  The Chronicles of Narnia is a set of seven books in which the characters and situations are used to discuss and present Christian ideas.  There is no atheism-bashing in Narnia.  His Dark Materials, on the other hand, is full of religion-bashing.  Furthermore, The Chronicles of Narnia is actually set in a Christian world, e.g., Aslan is Jesus and Tash is Satan.  His Dark Materials, however, is not truly set in an atheist world; it is set in a world run according to militant atheist conceptions of Christianity, only rigged so that divine beings can be killed.  By focusing on the alleged perversity of a transparently fraudulent Christianity, Pullman utterly fails to show us what beauty there may be to atheism or show us that Christianity is wrong.  While The Chronicles of Narnia can be easily read as “just a story”, ignoring the Christianity, His Dark Materials is so filled with hate that reading it purely as entertainment is difficult, to the point where I was glad that at the end young lovers Will and Lyra would be separated forever.  The great atheist story may yet be out there, but His Dark Materials is not it.

Also:  More commentary on His Dark Materials is available at “His Dark Materials - Television Tropes & Idioms” and “The Golden Compass:  Agenda Unmasked”.

Next up:  I made a decision to write a review of the Matrix Trilogy after His Dark Materials, so I am in for some serious self-torment very soon.  There are a few items associated with His Dark Materials which I may review (almost certainly negatively) at a later date, though I have to get my hands on copies first.

Peace.

Aaron

Don’t hire Lord Asriel or Metatron to run your war

Greetings.

Jewish date:  26 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Ḥayye-Sarah).

Today’s holidays:  Saint Day of Frances Xavier Cabrini (Roman Catholicism), Feast of Osiris (Thelema).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Save BioGems: Take Action: Save Yellowstone's Beloved Wolves” and “Earthjustice: Take Action: Taking the Wrong Path on Protecting Right Whales”.

Image of incompetent warlord Lord Asriel (depicted by Daniel Craig) via Wikipedia

Topic 1:  Chapters 26-29 of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman.  I was wrong about the quantum entanglement bomb being an irrelevant incident.  Pullman may be incompetent when it comes to theology and physics, but he at least has talent in writing fiction.  Dead shaman John Parry instructs Will to amputate the hair from Lyra’s head from where Mrs. Coulter snipped away a lock and stuff that hair  into another world.  He does so, and the explosion reportedly damages the entire structure of worlds, though we have yet to see the full effects of this yet.  Will also cuts a hole into another world to let ghosts commit suicide, which they gleefully do.  (Apparently the concept of an afterlife which doesn’t suck to the point of self-delusion or suicidal behavior has escaped Pullman.  “It’s a wonderful thing to go into oblivion” is not a good message to put in a children’s book either.)

Meanwhile, Mary Malone has an out-of-body experience, Magisterium assassin Father Gomez is still on the loose and an implied threat to Mary, and Metatron attacks Lord Asriel’s fortress.  Keep in mind that Pullman has the Authority reportedly senile and Metatron being an insane megalomanic holding the real reigns of power.  As I have noted already, attacking Lord Asriel is a bad idea.  Since Lord Asriel plans on letting his enemies come to him and attack him (with no plan B ever mentioned), all the Authority and Metatron have to do is stay away from Lord Asriel’s fortress and let the mortal contingent of the rebellion die of old age.  If Lord Asriel does get tired of waiting and goes to the Authority and Metatron, then the rebels will be out in the open without an imposing fortress for them to hide inside of.  Instead, Metatron takes the Authority’s mobile headquarters, the Clouded Mountain, AKA the Chariot (an Ezekiel reference) to Lord Asriel’s fortress and attacks.  The fighting so far has not had much of impact on either side.  However, the dæmons of Lyra, Will, and their Gallivespian friends have shown up at Lord Asriel’s fortress, and where I left off reading, Lyra, Will, and the Gallivespians were trying to get through the carnage in an effort to reunite with their dæmons.

Also:  Come to think of it, Pullman has gone out of his way to make Metatron doubly incompetent at fighting a war.  Barring just staying away from Lord Asriel, Metatron could easily land the Clouded Mountain on top of Lord Asriel’s fortress and press it down, literally crushing the rebellion out of existence.  This avoids those messy, time-consuming battles which Pullman seems intent on dragging us through and sends a message to everyone who hears about it that rebelling against the Authority and Metatron is a fatally bad idea.

Topic 2:  “Sudden jihad, or inordinate stress at Fort Hood?”:  Daniel Pipes notes that the Fort Hood incident is not the only one in which a Muslim attacked non-Muslims in the West.  A long list of examples going back to 1990 is included, including explanations given at the time which sound more like excuses than actual reasons.  Noted is a popular aversion to blame any violence on Islam, regardless of what the violent offender actually practiced or claimed.

Topic 3:  Just to end on something a bit upbeat:  “The anti-swine flu holy water dispenser”.  Someone invented an automatic dispenser of holy water which, like automatic paper towel and soap dispensers, knows when someone’s hands are in the right place to receive holy water.  This eliminates the need for contact between a font and the worshipper, thus eliminating a route of contagious disease transmission.  This is a good example of something sensible religious people, whatever religion they follow, need to do:  take into account how our universe actually works in religious practice.  Remember:  there is (probably) no religion in which sharing harmful germs is a virtue.

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

Aaron

2012, a senseless plot thread, and a lame Gospel film

Greetings.

Jewish date:  25 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Ḥayye-Sarah).

Today’s holidays:  Birth of Baha’u’llah (Bahá’í Faith), Saint Day of Josaphat (Roman Catholicism).

Note:  One month until Ḥanukkah.  Time to start reading up on the relevant laws.

Worthy causes of the day:  “Restore Coastal Louisiana - The Petition Site”, “End Gender Discrimination in Health Insurance Coverage - The Petition Site”, and “Big Insurance Kills”.

Topic 1:  “2012: The End Of The World?”  I am not the only out there analyzing bad religious ideas.  This chart gives a nice summation of the purported disaster on December 21, 2012, both what the believers and skeptics claim.

Image via Wikipedia

Topic 2:  Chapters 24-25 of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman.  Pullman leaves Lyra and Will in the land of the dead and tells us about the further adventures of Mrs. Coulter instead.  Mrs. Coulter has decided to play Lord Asriel and the Magisterium off each other and be in favor with whoever wins in the end.  Having stolen an intention craft from Lord Asriel, she proceeds to the Consistorial Court in Geneva, where she is promptly taken into custody.  (She ran off with Lyra at the end of The Subtle Knife, not liking the idea of her daughter being killed.  The Magisterium is therefore collectively unhappy with her.)  This episode quickly goes downhill, with Mrs. Coulter suggesting to the President of the Consistorial Court that the Authority has gone senile and that it may be merciful for Will to use the subtle knife to euthanize him.  (Obvious bad idea.)  This plot thread goes further downhill with the President via proxy stealing some of Lyra’s hair from a locket Mrs. Coulter wears around her neck.  Through use of a process which demonstrates that Pullman fundamentally misunderstands the nature of quantum entanglement, the President hopes to use Lyra’s hair to make Lyra explode.  This gives Mrs. Coulter an opportunity to play the hero and the Magisterium an opportunity to look evil.  Needless to say, Mrs. Coulter is successful in stopping this evil scheme, as there are still 13 chapters to go, and she ends up in Lord Asriel’s hands again at the end.  Theology grade for these chapters:  F.  Physics rating for these chapters:  F.  Plot rating for these chapters:  F, as the scheme is unbelievable and could easily be removed without affecting the rest of the story.  Probability that Pullman will redeem himself before the end of the trilogy:  trivially small.

Topic 3:  Seeing that I have started working on the New Testament in the original Greek, I decided it was appropriate to start watching this pile of Gospel-based films I have accumulated.  As such, last night I watched Godspell, which puts the action in New York City during the 1970s.  On the bright side, the cast does a lot of creative dramatization of the parables and teachings of Jesus, interspersed with songs.  On the down side, there is no serious attempt at understanding anything Jesus had to say or making any of the action actually make sense in 1970s New York.  For almost all of the film, Jesus and his disciples wander around the city, without encountering anyone else, doing their dramatization and singing.  There is a Last Supper at the end, with Jesus making the proper Jewish blessings over maṣṣah and wine(!), but that ends with a whimper with the crucifixion being the arrival of police cars—but no police—and Jesus and the disciples putting themselves up against a chain-link fence.  The film ends with the disciples carrying off the body of Jesus, without any explanation why he is dead (or unresponsive) or a resurrection.  That’s it.  Next to no plot.  Things are further confused by having John the Baptist and Judas Iscariot being the same person and having no motive whatsoever for betraying Jesus.  In short, this film is so lame that it makes Jesus Christ Superstar look good by comparison.

Peace.

Aaron

V is for “vacancies”

Greetings.

Jewish date:  24 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Ḥayye-Sarah).

Today’s holiday:  Saint Day of Martin of Tours (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “ColorOfChange.org:  Murdoch: Make a choice”.

Topic 1:  “CBC Promotes False Barrier Analogy”.  The PR jihad against Israel goes on, and this article talks about why it makes no sense to compare Israel’s anti-terrorism barrier to the Berlin Wall.  Also in jihad-related sloppy thinking, the Dry Bones cartoon “Face It” deals with the reluctance of many to acknowledge that the Fort Hood shootings were an Islamic terrorist attack, despite the evidence that it is.

Topic 2:  Given some criticism I received on my review of the pilot episode of the new V last week, I think I need to clarify my position on the series.  The plot and characters are not necessarily bad.  For all we know, the writers may have even avoided two major blunders of the original V:  the Vs eat humans, in which case their operation is much more complex than they really need it to be to accomplish this, and there is a human-V mating which produces live offspring, which in real life is almost certainly impossible.  The real problem is that there are huge gaps in the story, the “vacancies” of this post’s title.  While we have some idea what some of the main characters are thinking, we have practically no idea why most of the people in this series believe and act the way they do.  Much of the time, it is not even clear what the Vs are doing other than secretly plotting against humanity.  Without much of a background, it is very hard to appreciate the show as a whole.  If the new V survives past the four episodes planned to be shown this year, I hope they will make an episode dedicated not to moving the plot along but telling us what humans in general are thinking and what the Vs are doing on Earth which makes humans love or hate them; this could be done plausibly in the form of a documentary hosted by reporter character Chad Decker, who already has reported on the Vs.

The latest episode, “There Is No Normal Anymore”, does not introduce any new theological ideas.  It does, however, deal with the moral issue of trust.  FBI agent Erica Evans and Father Jack Landry, who were present in the last episode at a resistance meeting which was infiltrated and attacked by the Vs, are naturally unsure whom they can trust.  There is evidence that Vs have been on Earth for decades, disguised as humans, and knowing who is really human and who is a V without more physical examination than most people would casually submit to is impossible.  This leads to questions of when to hide information or lie.  What they ultimately decide they must keep doing, despite the unanswered trust and deception questions, is to get to the bottom of what the Vs are really up to.

Image via Wikipedia

Topic 3:  Chapters 20-23 of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman.  Chapter 20 deals with Mary Malone, still in the world of the melufa, turning her crude optical device to see Dust into a more proper spyglass and ascending to the tops of the wheel seedpod trees to see why they are slowly dying.  Apparently currents of Dust in the sky have changed and are no longer raining much Dust down on the wheel seedpod tree flowers to fertilize them.  Don’t ask me to explain the physics of this; it makes no sense to me.


Meanwhile, Lyra, Will, and two elf-like beings known as Gallivespians, following Lyra’s death, reach the shore of a river, where they meet the boatman who takes people to the land of the dead proper.  They all go, but in the process, they have to leave their dæmons behind.  This is a huge blunder on Pullman’s part.  The dæmon is supposed to be the soul, and if that is not what goes to the land of the dead, what does?  Furthermore, Lyra and company really do not act differently when they go on to the land of the dead; they just feel horrible.  In any case, the land of the dead itself is as dark and dreary as the waiting area, only it is fenced in and guarded by harpies, who do little more than be insulting.  (Notice the ancient Greek religion theme going on here.)  With the help of Will’s knife, Lyra and company get past the front gate, only to find more of the dark bleakness, inhabited by the physically insubstantial dead, who do little more than sit around quietly and get insulted by the harpies, who know all the bad things everyone has done in life.  Despite promises that the Authority will reward and punish the dead, there is only punishment by the harpies in this domain.  It is so bad that Lyra and Will plot to let the dead out into another world—and even though the result will be oblivion for the escapees, most of the dead prefer it to remaining in the land of the dead.  None of this sounds particularly like the Christian afterlife, so chalk up another demerit to Pullman.


Peace.

Aaron

Lyra Silvertongue is going to Hell

Greetings.

Jewish date:  23 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Ḥayye-Sarah).

Today’s holidays:  Saint Day of Leo the Great (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy causes of the day:  “IBR Message Center | UANI:  Send a United Message:  Sign the petition and urge these companies to stop doing business with the Iranian regime by sending them a message today” and “Take Action | UANI:  Message to the Los Angeles MTA on Light Rail Contract”.

Topic 1:  Chapters 14-19 of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman.  The theology and story get more and more bizarre.  It is revealed that Lord Asriel does not plan on invading Heaven; he is amassing a great army and supplies and waiting for Heaven to attack him at his fortress.  This plan has the fatal flaw that if the Authority never attacks, Lord Asriel can never win.  Presumably the Authority is not a moron—he has been smart enough to be able to retain power for thousands of years—so Lord Asriel had better have a plan B in just in case his plan A would result in him dying of old age before the Authority attacks.


Meanwhile, Mary Malone, ex-nun and physicist, has found herself in another world populated by wheeled creatures known as the mulefa (singular:  zanif, and please, do not ask me why, because I have no clue).  The thing about the mulefa having wheels is plausible because the wheels are not actually parts of their bodies but rather rather seedpods of a tree they have a symbiotic relationship with; use of seedpods as wheels, mounted on the mulefa’s horny axles, is aided by an oil exuded by the seedpods.  Where Pullman gets flaky about the mulefa is that seedpod oil enables the mulefa to see Dust.  The mulefa even have a metaphorical story about a snake introducing the mulefa to the use of seedpods as wheels, which considering that seedpods are fruit should be ringing a few bells about now.  Why oil, which does not have unusual properties with regard to interacting with anything, should be useful for seeing Dust, is not explained, though considering the physics (and theology) of this trilogy is half-baked from the start, I should not be surprised at all.  Mary manages to use seedpod oil to make an optical device that lets her see Dust herself.


There is no way I can omit mentioning what happens to Lyra and Will, the heroes of the story.  They decide to take a trip to the land of the dead.  So far they have only reached the waiting area where the living who accidentally reach that world must wait to die, but what Pullman comes up with so far makes even the bureaucratic afterlife of Beetle Juice seem like sheer ecstasy.  The land of the dead is a dark, dreary place.  The dead must cross a river to the afterlife.  (Shades of Charon and the river Styx).  The living who make it to the land of the dead must wait until they die.  They are neither allowed to return to the world they came from nor provided for, so the waiting area is a squalid refugee camp where the living can remain for decades.  It is also revealed that everyone has a death, a being which follows him/her around and eventually takes him/her across the river to the afterlife.  (Shades of Hermes or the Grim Reaper, only personalized.)  Deaths usually remain out of one’s sight, but in the waiting area some people are on good terms with their deaths and see them constantly.  At the end of chapter 19, Lyra convinces her death to take her and her companions over the river while still alive.  You will have to wait till I read further to find out what happens next, though given Pullman’s attitudes, the afterlife being anything other than hellish would be shocking.  However, this particular journey has a rather mythological feel to it.  I might argue for connections with the journeys of Heracles (Hercules) and Orpheus into the realm of Hades, though considering Pullman’s hatred of Christianity, Lyra may be reflecting Jesus.  Lyra is supposed to be the new Ḥawwah (Eve); this may reflect a title given to Jesus in the New Testament:  “the new Adam”.  Like Jesus, Lyra is supposed to be a figure of salvation, the subject of prophecy, and someone dangerous to the establishment.  Just as Jesus was the product of adultery (Mary was married to Joseph, not the Holy Spirit), so too Lyra is the product of adultery.  And now, just as Jesus died and purportedly rose from the dead, Lyra has gone to the land of the dead and probably will return.  We will see how far the parallels play out.


Topic 2:  “The British Dare to Determine Who is a Jew”.  This article by Rav Shmuely Boteach complains about a recent court ruling in the UK which tries to dictate to a Jewish day school who is a Jew.  Do note that religions frequently have membership criteria, and among them one will never find the opinion of a government.  Considering the source of authority for religious membership criteria are not subject to government regulation, e.g., they are dictated by a deity beyond the reach of human jurisdiction, no government can reasonably expect a government ruling on religious membership criteria to ever be followed.  This is nothing less than a violation of freedom of religion.  The claim that Jewish membership criteria are racist is particularly ill-founded.  One is Jewish if one’s mother was Jewish at the time of one’s birth or if one converts.  Racial background is irrelevant to these criteria, as humans of any race may convert, and the maternal line descendants of said people are considered Jewish in perpetuity.


Topic 3:  “Start Worrying (1994)”:  This Dry Bones cartoon is prescient to the recent Fort Hood attack by a Muslim in the name of Islam in the United States.  


Peace.

Aaron

I did not do preemptive penance for this post

Greetings.

Jewish date:  21 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Ḥayye-Sarah).

Today’s holidays:  Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Synaxis of the Archangels (Greek Orthodox Christianity).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Establish Presidential War Powers Commission - The Petition Site” and “MoveOn.org Political Action: No Reward for Blocking Health Care”.

Today’s topic:  Chapters 3-13 of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman.  The theology of this imaginary multiverse keeps getting further and further away from Christianity.  Standard Christian theology depicts God as consisting of three persons:  the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  This is not something obscure or esoteric; this is something well-known.  So far there has not been no hint of a Trinity, Jesus, the Crucifixion, or the Gospels.  The only distinctively Christian idea which gets any real play is original sin, and that Pullman completely botches.  Positive aspects of Christianity, such as salvation, grace, and forgiveness, are conveniently ignored, as these might paint the Magisterium/Church in a positive light.

What Pullman comes up with for a theology is very un-Christian.  As noted previously, the Authority is not a true god, but rather an angel pretending to be a god.  The Authority has retired from personal involvement in the worlds, and he has retired to a “crystal chamber” to concentrate on philosophy and left the administration to the angel Metatron, who is seeking to crack down on misbehavior in every world.  Metatron is transparently based on the angel of Jewish and Christian tradition Miṭṭaṭron, sometimes identified as “the lesser YHWH”, as having formerly been Ḥanokh (Enoch), and has being YHWH’s right-hand man (so to speak).  This two-tiered hierarchy of the Authority and Metatron strikes me as perhaps a bit Gnostic, but this may be reading into the text something which was never there.

As far as behavior is concerned, Pullman also invented the perversely illogical doctrine of preemptive absolution, which is that one can do penance in advance for sins one has not yet committed.  The dramatic reason for this is so Pullman can have the Church rationalize trying to kill Lyra.  This doctrine may be a warped version of indulgence.  But while an indulgence is meant to be a gift from the Church, preemptive absolution for a sin never negates the fact that a sin is being done deliberately.  This perverts the notion of penance.  Penance is supposed to be about feeling bad about doing something wrong and trying to get beyond repeating it.  Doing penance with the intention of doing the sin in the future is a contradiction.  I am not aware of the Roman Catholic Church ever practicing or condoning such hypocrisy.

Also:  According to Pullman, angels can be killed.  And they can be gay.  This sounds nothing like angels in Judaism or Christianity.  There is also an afterlife, but it seems to be a dreary, boring place, neither the Christian Heaven nor Hell.

Peace.

Aaron

P.S.:  Somehow I am expecting that when the Authority finally appears on-screen that he will form a Trinity with two hand puppets, but even this is may be expecting too much from Pullman.

A god no one believes in

Greetings.

Jewish date:  19 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Wayyera’).

Today’s holiday:  Friday of the Thirty-First Week of Ordinary Time.

Worthy causes of the day:  “Take Action: Keep up the heat | Save Darfur”, “We Need Generic Drugs: Ask these Senators to Fight « Public Option Please”, “AARP - Health Action Now!:  Tell the House: Pass the health reform bill!”, “We deserve an up-or-down vote!”, “Joe Lieberman must go.”, and “Take Action: Ask the Obama Administration to save Coal River Mountain”.

Image via Wikipedia

Topic 1:  Chapters 1 and 2 of The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman.  I have heard it claimed that an atheist once visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe and told him, “I don’t believe in God.”  The Lubavitcher Rebbe replied, “The God you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in Him either.”  This story may well be apocryphal, but it reflects Pullman’s depiction of religion both in general and the specifics.  Will Parry, searching for Lyra Silvertongue, meets two angels, Balthamos and later Baruch.  From them he learns about the Authority/God.  Angels, in His Dark Materials, are consciousness itself.  They came into being when matter first tried to understand itself.  The Authority, rather than being a creator, is the first angel that ever existed, and he has made himself out to be a true god and imposes his will on everything else.  This, frankly, is unlike the god of any real religion known to me.  The nearest I know of would be the Demiurge of Gnosticism, an evil being who falsely claims to be the true god.  However, the Demiurge, unlike the Authority, is the creator of the material world, and above and beyond him there is a genuine, immortal, ultimate deity.  As far as I can tell, the Authority is a kind of god no one believes in.  This is yet another failure of Pullman to depict religion realistically in a long list of such failures, and I have no hope that things will get any better in this series.

Topic 2:  There is a good chance I am going to get complained to if I do not mention the Fort Hood incident yesterday, even though I do not want to.  I burned out long ago on the violence committed all over this planet in the name of Islam, and I do not expect such violence to end anytime soon.  Islamic violence started after Muḥammad was forced out of Mecca.  He had had little success in convincing anyone he was a prophet (due to complete lack of evidence) or converting people to his new religion.  His message changed when he reached Medina from one of peace and harmony to one of intolerance and conquest.  It was at this point that Islam really took off, with people converting because they did not want to get beaten up or killed by Muḥammad and his thugs.  Muḥammad conquered much of the Arabian Peninsula in his lifetime, and after his death Muslims soon went on to conquer a swath of land stretching all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, converting many and using violence and terror to subdue the rest.  Subject peoples (dhimmis) had to live under harsh restrictions.  Though theoretically protected if they followed the rules Muslims set for them, in practice even an unfounded accusation of misbehavior could be enough to give Muslims an excuse to commit acts of violence against or murder them.  To this day, Muslims regularly use violence against those who do not agree with them.  Muḥammad set the precedent, and Muslims have to deal with it one way or another.  Last I heard it was not clear why the suspect in the Fort Hood shootings, Major Nidal M. Hasan—a Muslim, opened fire and killed and wounded on his fellow soldiers, but he reportedly was horrified by the idea of having to go to Iraq and was feeling a lot of stress because of it.  Given the precent and the fact that he was extremely upset, for all I can tell he may have simply decided that killing non-Muslims was as an effective and religiously correct way of dealing with his problem as any other.

Articles on the incident:  “Rampage kills 12, wounds 31” and “Troubling portrait emerges of Fort Hood suspect”.

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

Aaron

Does Mrs. Coulter belong in children’s books?

Greetings.

Jewish date:  18 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Wayyera’).

Today’s holiday:  Thursday of the Thirty-First Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism).

Image via Wikipedia

Topic 1:  The last chapter of The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman.  Theologically new is the shaman John Parry’s revelation that the Subtle Knife is the only thing that can kill the Authority/God.  Again, I repeat, Pullman has set this series on track for a theological train-wreck.  If the Authority accurately reflects the God of Christianity, then if anyone kills Him, Pullman screws up by having something impossible happen; do note that “immortal” means by definition “impossible to be killed”.  If, on the other hand, the Authority is a sufficiently low being that He can be killed, then He is not a good reflection of the God of Christianity, which makes His defeat a failure compared to the actual goal that Pullman seems to be trying to accomplish.  Either way, Pullman loses.

Also, we find out that the rebel angels have been working behind the scenes to move the plot along in order that they may kill the Authority.  Sounds rather like the Christian Satan; doesn’t it?

It is also revealed that the witches have a prophecy that Lyra is supposed to be the new Ḥawwah (Eve).  Mrs. Coulter decides (through completely opaque reasoning processes) that she will have to destroy Lyra to prevent another Fall.  If this is a reflection of any prophecy or reasoning in any real religion, I would be very interested in knowing.

I would also like to raise my concern about the content of this series so far.  This is allegedly a series of children’s books.  Yet Pullman seems to delight in content which people frequently complain is inappropriate for children.  There are (in no particular order):

Image of inappropriate-for-children’s-books character Mrs. Coulter (portrayed by Nichole Kidman) via Wikipedia

• Graphic violence, including blood, loss of body parts, and death.
• Accidental homicide.
• Murder.
• Mention of castration and genital mutilation.  (I really cannot make this up.  Nor would I want to.)
• Mention of trepanation, including skulls of the dead with holes in them.
• Illicit unions, sometimes resulting in offspring.  (Thank you, Mrs. Coulter, Lord Asriel, and the entire witch community.)
• Seduction.  (Thank you, again, Mrs. Coulter.)
• Poisoning.  (Ditto.)
• Turning people into zombies or zombie-like beings.  (Probably ditto.)
• Torture.  (Definitely ditto.)

Yes, I am well aware that children cannot and should not be sheltered from everything bad in the world, but Pullman has been going out of his way to put all this stuff in, whether or not it is really necessary for the plot.  E.g., mention of castration and genital mutilation only serves to make the Church/Magisterium look bad.  It has nothing to actually do with the plot and does not affect any characters who appear on-screen; if it were removed, the story would be unaffected.  And again, I note that the Church/Magisterium, which is behind a lot of this awful stuff, is an overblown, antireligious stereotype of a church and does not reflect well any real church today.  If Pullman is trying to show us how wonderful atheists are, he is doing a horrible job.

Up next:  The Amber Spyglass, the concluding book of His Dark Materials.

Topic 2:  It is time again for another Eastwick review.  (I watch this show and strain the theology out so you neither have to nor want to.)  Roxanne, famous for her visionary dreams, sees her dead boyfriend Chad in one.  He tells her to follow the signs, setting her off on a quest leading from a hammer to a T-shirt to a CD he recorded just for her.  There are various uses of magical power, ranging from telekinesis to healing.  More notably, Darryl, the character who may really be Satan, gets into Palpatine mode again while fire-walking and lectures Roxanne on the curse of ’Adham (Adam) and Ḥawwah, which he claims to be self-awareness and all the emotions which make life fun.  (Apparently he has not read Genesis 3:16-19.)  It also looks increasingly like Darryl periodically visits Eastwick and causes trouble.  Two older characters, Eleanor and Bun, are about to discuss the situation, and Eleanor claims they are going to have to kill Darryl again, implying that they have done it at least once before.

Topic 3:  “Discovering Jewish Terror” and “Video: Meet the Foreign Press: Are They Objective?”  These articles look at Orwellian misuse of terminology and double standards in how Israel is treated in the media.  (And yes, this is a chronic problem.)

Peace.

Aaron

V is for “vile”

Greetings.

Jewish date:  17 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Wayyera’).

Worthy cause of the day:

Topic 1:  Chapter 14 of The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman.  We are told that the Specters, barely visible creatures which haunt the world in which Lyra Silvertongue and Will Parry met and attack adults, eat Dust.  I have no clue why Pullman put such things in his trilogy, expect maybe as an obstacle to be overcome.  Furthermore, the shaman John Parry/Dr. Grumman, makes use of his powers to create a storm and destroy enemy zeppelins.  This should not be a surprise, since in this trilogy witches also have real powers.  Also like witches, John Parry’s dæmon can go much further away from him than a normal human’s can.

Topic 2:  Last night I watched the pilot episode of  V (new series)—I enjoy science-fiction, including tearing it to shreds when it stinks—and the title of this post should give you a good idea what I think of what I saw.  It came off more as the Cliff notes to a whole season rather than a pilot.  Rather than dealing with how humanity reacts to first contact with an extraterrestrial race at a slow pace, the alien ships arrived, the aliens’ leader Anna introduced herself and her people (the Visitors), promising friendship and advanced technology in exchange for water and some minerals, and then suddenly the plot skips three weeks for no apparent reason and all suspension of disbelief is shredded by psychologically unrealistic writing as too many revelations happen too fast.

What I did not expect was for this travesty to have theological and epistemological aspects, which start with 29 cities on Earth shaking due to approaching Visitor spaceships (shaking added for drama, not physical plausibility).  In a (presumably Roman Catholic) church, a priest grabs some ritual items and runs out of the way of a falling sculpture of Jesus on the Cross.  This is arguably symbolic of the crisis of faith which this priest has three weeks later; he does not understand how to harmonize the existence of the Visitors with Christianity.  Why he feels this and why a crisisless colleague disagrees are never explained.  And it should be noted that in real life the crisis should not occur at all; the Vatican sees no problem with the existence of extraterrestrials, though it is not clear on whether they necessarily suffer from original sin.  Clearly the writers did not do their homework on this issue.  Furthermore, the church is packed with worshippers right after the three week gap.  How the arrival of the Visitors inspired so many people to turn to the Church is not explained.

Bad writing extends to beyond religion.  Humans come off as either pro-Visitor or anti-Visitor, with little in the way of exceptions.  The only thing allegedly good the Visitors bring are some “miraculous” cures and “hope”.  The bad things which the Visitors do are in secret, such as telling a reporter not to say anything to make the Visitors look bad when interviewing Anna or attacking people at a resistance meeting.  Most humans in either faction have little to say about why they believe what they do.  Even outright bad reasons would be better than this.

In short, this pilot dramatically, theologically, and epistemologically sucks.  The writing is so bad that even the dreadful Matrix Trilogy looks like poetry by comparison.

Peace, and please join me in praying that the network executives come to their senses and cancel V.

Aaron

Judgement without respect for facts and overpriced education

Greetings.

Jewish date:  16 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Wayyera’).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Tell Obama: No pesticide lobbyist nominees” and “Demand the Public Option! - The Petition Site”.

Topic 1:  Chapter 13 of The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman.  A lot of the “good” characters have formed a war council and are sharing information.  Lord Asriel’s extensive preparations for his war against the Authority (God) are related.  There is also complaining by the witches about the horrible things done by the Church/Magisterium in the name of the Authority, followed by an amazing inference:  that the Authority is Himself a horrible being.  This is not justified.  It is true that in real life that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches have done some truly horrible things, such as the Spanish Inquisition.  However, it would be unjustified to assume that everything the Churches have done is actually justified by Christianity.  For Christians, the model for behavior is Jesus of Nazareth as depicted in the Gospels.  For all Jesus’s bluster about how everyone who did not follow him were going to pay for it, Jesus was not an advocate of violence or cruelty.  He advocated extreme pacifism, this whole business of turning the other cheek, and he lived it.  He could have easily escaped being crucified, but instead he practically walked into the Romans’ hands and let them torture and kill him.  Pinning the sins of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches on Jesus would make no sense whatsoever.  Likewise, pinning the sins of the Magisterium on the Authority, without even bothering to ask what the Authority’s moral views are, is illogical and unjustified.

Topic 2:  “Terror Arrests and the 'Misunderstood' Religion”.  This article complains about efforts to whitewash Islam and dissociate it from everything and anything bad, such as terrorism.  The mistake is akin to that in the previous topic:  just as it makes no sense to judge God based on crimes he never espoused, it makes no sense to judge Muslims by a version of Islam that does not exist.  The difference between the two is that it is atheists who are trying to create the illusion of Divine criminality where it does not exist, while it is Muslims trying to create the illusion of a version of Islam which does not exist.

Topic 3:  “Government Funding is the only Future for Jewish Day Schools”.  On a different note from the previous two topics:  Rav Boteach notes the economically perilous state of Jewish education in the USA today.  It is so expensive that even Rav Boteach, a public figure with many bestselling books and a TV show, someone who presumably is raking in money, is barely paying for it for his children.  If he finds it hard, how much more so the less financially gifted!  Even if one does not accept his argument that the government should pay for the secular part of education at private schools, he notes that (at least in New Jersey, where he lives) educating students in public schools costs more than in private school.  As such, giving parents the option to send their children to a private school could save the state money.

Peace.

Aaron

Is Philip Pullman a LaVeyan Satanist?

Greetings.

Jewish date:  15 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Wayyera’).

Today’s holidays:  Yerov‘am ben Nevaṭ Day, All Souls Day (Western Christianity), the Days of the Dead (Hispanic Roman Catholicism).

Topic 1:  Today is a holiday instituted by Yerov‘am ben Nevaṭ, the first king of the ten northern tribes after the split of Israel away from Judah. His story is told in 1 Kings 11:26-14:20, with today’s holiday mentioned in 1 Kings 12:25-33, where he set up two golden calves for people to worship, thereby syncretizing Judaism with Canaanite paganism.  Considering that YHWH shows nothing but disgust for Canaanite paganism in the Hebrew Bible, this is a monstrously illogical and stupid thing to do on Yerov‘am’s part.  Yerov‘am is not remembered fondly.

Image via Wikipedia

Topic 2:  Chapters 10-12 of The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman.  Dr. Mary Malone, physicist and former nun, has followed Lyra’s suggestion and rigged her device which detects dark matter/Dust to be able to communicate with it.  The results are surprising.  Dark matter/Dust is actually rebellious angels (as in the Fall of Satan) who intervened in human evolution for the sake of vengeance.  And they want Mary to help them by finding Lyra and Will and “play the Serpent”.  Consider also that Dust also makes the alethiometer work, Lyra and by extension Will are also working for rebel angels.  All the good characters in play (including witches and the shaman John Parry) are lining up on the side against God, and all the evil characters are lining up on the side for God.  The major exception to this rule seems to be Lord Asriel, who does not seem to be particularly good, but he has not allied himself with the Church/Magisterium either.  For a trilogy which is supposed to be atheistic, there is an anomalously large amount of religion-related stuff going on.  Considering the symbolism, perhaps it is better to treat His Dark Materials as being not as atheistic but rather in the spirit of LaVeyan Satanism.  LaVeyan Satanism is a form of Christianity-hating atheism which in its basic literature, e.g., The Satanic Bible, revels in speaking as if Satan and other supernatural beings associated with evil really exist and are triumphant over God.  Intuition suggests that Pullman may be working along these lines in fiction.  We will see whether the rest of the trilogy is consistent with this hypothesis…


Topic 3:  “Internet believers: Pastors open online churches”.  Nothing wrong here.  I just think this is an interesting approach.  One of the things Christians are supposed to do is spread the Gospel, and it makes plenty of sense for pastors to try all sorts of approaches.


Peace.

Aaron

Militant atheist clichés, redefinition, and Israel in 1595

Greetings.

Jewish date:  14 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Wayyera’).

Today’s holidays:  The Days of the Dead (Hispanic Roman Catholicism), All Saints’ Day (Western Christianity). Feast of All Saints of the True Church (Thelema).

Worthy causes of the day:  “ACT for America:    We Call for a Formal Investigation
of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)”, “Release the Torture Memo Report”, “Help the Poor Deal with the Effects of Climate Change”, and “Take Action: Help permanently protect Americas Wildest Grassland”.

Topic 1:  Barry has noted that now, right after Halloween, would be a good time to go out and buy costumes for Purim.

Image via Wikipedia

Topic 2:  Chapters 5 through 9 of The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman.  A lot of this material is dedicated to progressing the plot (centered around a villain who has escaped from Lyra’s world) and the mechanics of inter-universe travel using a special knife (the “subtle knife” of the title of this book) which can cut holes between worlds.  Also showing up are:


A) Shamans among the Eskimos, more in mention that actually showing on-screen.  Their initiation requires going through a door into the “spirit world”.  Some never come back.


B) The Church in Lyra’s world keeping a close watch on scientific research, even censoring the results.  (Figures in a book written by a militant atheist.)


C) Horrible, barely visible monsters known as Specters which only attack adults.  They are viewed by some as Divine punishment for some sin.  (Also figures in a book written by a militant atheist; they like painting deities as mean and vengeful.)


D) Angels, otherwise known as bene elim (a genuine Hebrew term for angels) and Watchers.  They are seen in the form of winged, naked humans, largely due to the expectations of the witch who sees them, and they are working with Lord Asriel.  Lord Asriel, you will remember, is working towards killing God.  Reference is made to a rebellion of angels against God (think the fall of Satan) and angels breeding with humans.  The angels also have their own way to travel between worlds.  I am not clear what Pullman is planning with the angels, but intuition suggests a perverse version of Christian notions of angels.


E) The notion that Lyra/Pantalaimon and Will have destinies.


I am still not impressed with Pullman’s work, but after Pullman’s decision to have Lord Asriel working to kill God, there is little he can hope to do to redeem himself anyway.


Topic 3:  “The Goldstone Report - Using Terminology in Service of Deception”.  This article slams the misuse of the term “Palestinian”, noting how the term has actually been used historically.  Essentially the modern use of the term is a fabrication used to help fight the Israeli-Arab War.  Previously the term was geographical and when referring to humans only referred to Jews.  It was not applied to Muslims/Arabs until 1967.  Related to this is the article “Jews dominated the Holy Land in 1695”, which discusses a travelogue by Adriaan Reland, who visited Israel in 1695 and found a lot of Jews and extremely few Muslims/Arabs.


Peace, and start planning for Purim.

Aaron

Dust, double standards, and good deeds

Greetings.

Jewish date:  12 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Lekh-Lekha).

Today’s holiday:  Friday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism).

Topic 1:  Chapters 3 and 4 of The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman.  The nature of Dust is explored by having the alethiometer lead Lyra to a physicist.  It is revealed that Dust is dark matter.  Dust/dark matter is conscious, and it is attracted to consciousness and the products of conscious thought, e.g., tools and other artifacts.  Dust/dark matter is not only responsible for the working of the alethiometer, but the Yì Jīng (I Ching) as well.  These claims suffer from two obvious problems:  1) Humans are conscious well before puberty.  Therefore one should expect that children well before puberty ought to be attracting Dust.  2) The world this conversation takes place in is supposed to be ours.  However, the Yì Jīng does not work in our world.  I am not impressed.

Topic 2:  Another crop of articles on the Israeli-Arab War:  “Dare to dream of a rebuilt Temple”, “CNN Waters Down the Israeli Response” and “Goldstone Report in the Clouds”.  Note the use of double standards to attack Jews and Israel and defend Muslims and the so-called “Palestinians”.

Topic 3:  “Clean Smell Promotes Good Deeds”.  I cannot make this up.

Shabbath shalom.

Aaron

Pullman stabs himself with The Subtle Knife

Greetings.

Jewish date:  11 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Lekh-Lekha).

Today’s holidays:  Thursday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Take Action: Sign the petition to President Obama | Save Darfur”.

Topic 1:  I have now read chapter 2 of The Subtle Knife (Book 2 of His Dark Materials) by Philip Pullman, and Pullman sets himself up for disaster.  The setting shifts back to the world Lyra started in.  Serafina Pekkala, a witch, discovers a lot of Church officials and Mrs. Coulter in a room together, plotting their next move.  They have already lost Lyra and an alethiometer (a divination device, the “Golden Compass” of The Golden Compass), and they are using their alethiometer and torturing a witch who thought with Lyra in an effort to get more information.  Lyra is the central character of prophesies, and they are very upset to have lost track of her and are trying to get hold of her again.  After euthanizing the tortured witch, Serafina goes on to investigate further consult and turn up other dirt on the Church and Lord Asriel.  It turns out that Lord Asriel has taken upon himself to do something amazingly ambitious and audacious:  he hopes to kill the Authority, the god of the Church/Magisterium.  This is the point where Pullman (figuratively) stabs himself, because he sets up a situation in which he cannot win.  If the Authority is an accurate reflection of the Christian Trinity, then this is impossible.  The Trinity is supposed to be immortal; therefore by definition there is nothing any human could possibly do to kill Him/Them.  Thus if Lord Asriel or any other human character kills an immaterial Authority, Pullman has him do something impossible.  On the other hand, if the Authority is sufficiently low a being so as to be killable, Pullman is attacking a god which does not reflect the one that Christians actually believe in.  Either way, Pullman loses.

Topic 2:  It is time again for another update of the latest episode of Eastwick, this time “Bonfire and Betrayal”, a Halloween episode, with references to witch burnings.  (Who did not see that coming?)  There is more of the tension between predestination versus free will in Roxanne’s visions, with attempts to prevent a foreseen death.  There is the disgraced pastor going insane and trying to murder Joanna.  (This feels cliché, or at least soap operaish.  Actually, the whole show feels soap operaish.)  There are more magic powers.  Nothing spectacular.

Peace.

Aaron

The Subtle Knife, sleight of hand, and Scientology

Greetings.

Jewish date:  10 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Lekh-Lekha).

Today’s holiday:  Feast Day of Theodor Reuss (Thelema).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Take off Walmart's health care "mask"”, “End So-Called Pre-Existing Conditions!”, and “Health care reform is around the corner”.

Topic 1:  Last night I read chapter 1 of The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman.  Not really much new theologically so far.  Lyra Silvertongue (she has adopted a new last name) and her dæmon/soul Pantalaimon have so far retained physically separate form.  Naturally she finds unusual that the only other person she has met so far, the runaway boy Will Parry, does not have an external dæmon; she concludes that he carries his dæmon inside.  Will, unlike Lyra, managed to reach the universe of their meeting via a barely visible gateway whose origin has not yet been disclosed.

Somewhat off the topics I have discussed previously, so far Pullman’s protagonists have come from broken homes.  Lyra, the product of an adulterous union, was fought over between the neglectful Lord Asriel and the power-hungry psychopath Marisa Coulter.  Will’s father has long been absent, and his mother is mentally ill.  This tendency may simply be to create drama, but intuition suggests there may be something else to it as well.

Topic 2:  “The Obsession With Israel”.

This video asks the question of why there is so much focus on the alleged crimes of Israel when there is so much real, preventable suffering happening.  Perhaps the point is something akin to distraction techniques used by magicians:  to keep the focus off the real, preventable suffering, especially when perpetrated by the enemies of Israel.

Topic 3:  “French Branch of Scientology Convicted of Fraud”.  All those who did not see this eventually happening, stand on your head.

Peace.

Aaron

Philip Pullman fails theology!

Greetings.

Jewish date:  9 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Lekh-Lekha).

Today’s holiday:  Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “No triggers for a public option. Tell Congress now.”

Image of Philip Pullman via Wikipedia

Topic 1:  Last night I finished The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman, and a great secret of this story is finally revealed in chapter 21.

WARNING:  SERIOUS SPOILERS AHEAD.

The plot of this book focuses on two mysteries:  a weakly-interacting elementary particle known as “Dust” and the kidnapping of children.  Dust starts accumulating in children around puberty, a time when their dæmons loose the ability to change shape.  The Church has decided that Dust is evidence of (the purely Christian concept of) original sin.  Keep in mind, class, that original sin is sinfulness inherited from ’Adham (Adam) and Ḥawwah (Eve) due to their violating the prohibition of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; since it is something people are supposed to be born with, something acquired at puberty is probably not whatever physical manifestation it has.

To get around this obvious problem, Pullman rewrites his world’s version of Genesis 3:2-7 to give ’Adham and Ḥawwah dæmons which change shape.  The Snake promises that if they (’Adham and Ḥawwah) eat the forbidden fruit, their dæmons will take on their true forms.  Only when they eat of the fruit do their dæmons take on fixed forms and do they realize they are different from the rest of the animal kingdom, which do not have dæmons.  This still does nothing to get around the mismatch between Dust acquisition and original sin.  Pullman also introduces novel interpretations of a phrase from Genesis 3:19, “for you are dirt and to dirt you will return”:  “thou shalt be subject to dust”—hence the name of the particle—and that somehow this phrase is supposed to indicate that YHWH (God)’s nature is somehow to be partly sinful.  Neither of these new interpretations is tenable in the original Hebrew—and I will (figuratively, not literally) grind into the dirt the face of anyone ignorant enough to dare claim otherwise.  Pullman is simply jamming Scripture into a vague semblance of a useful form in order to be able to make the Church rationalize doing something awful.

As I have mentioned previously, the point of kidnapping children is to perform on them intercission, the separation of body and dæmon/soul.  Not one, but two reasons for intercission are given.  The first, which villain #1, Mrs. Coulter, is supposed to intend, is to keep children from being affected by Dust and thus save them from original sin.  No reason whatsoever is given to believe this should work, and nothing is reported on whether it works.  In fact, it makes no sense to have severed children wander around away from the facility if this is really what they want to do; such children should be retained in order to measure whether they collect Dust or not.  The other reason, which the heroine Lyra deduces that villain #2, Lord Asriel, intends, is to release the energy of the bond holding body and dæmon together.  Lord Asriel actually does this, using the energy to power a contraption to enable traveling to another world.

In summary:  I am not impressed.  Rather than show us the truth or beauty of atheism (whatever that may be), Pullman has invented a Christian world embodying what he hates about Christianity.  He hates the Roman Catholic Church.  He hates John Calvin.  He hates the past abuses of the Church.  But Pullman has gone farther than that.  He has rewritten and reinterpreted Scripture, and he has invented new crimes for the Church to perform and lame rationalizations for those crimes.  In effect, he is preaching against a Church which has never existed.  This is disappointingly in line with the other works of the militant atheism movement which I have read, the only improvement being that his writing is readable.  If he is trying to build a case against Christianity or religion in general, the fabrications invalidate it.  If he is trying to build a case for atheism, he has made no case at all.

Next up:  Book 2:  The Subtle Knife.  I hope it does not prove as big a disappointment.

Topic 2:  By now you probably should have heard of claims of the Mayan calendar running out or a rogue planet swinging by Earth in 2012, causing horrific disaster.  In response to this, I feel it is appropriate to note some materials debunking such claims:  “Apocalypse 2012? The Truth About the End of the World” and “Doomsday 2012, the Planet Nibiru, and Cosmophobia”.  I also dug up a relevant list:  “The millennium and end-of-the-world predictions”.  Due note that the end of the World has been predicted numerous times, and all times which have passed so far has proven wrong.  Given the shaky evidence on which the 2012 claims are based (to put it politely), there is no reason to believe things will be any different this time.

Peace.

Aaron

The Golden Compass and Da‘ath Torah

Greetings.

Jewish date:  7 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Lekh-Lekha).

Today’s holidays:  Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of Gerard Encausse and Feast of Karl Johannes Germer  (Thelema).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Change We Can Believe In” and “Reject Torture and Support the Closure of Guantanamo Bay!”  Also relevant is Names of the Dead.

Topic 1:  Chapters 16-20 of The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman.  Pullman’s notion of the soul gets even stranger.  Mrs. Coulter, the primary antagonist, temporarily has heroes Lyra and Pantalaimon in her clutches, and she gives some explanation of what the point of intercission (separation of human and dæmon) is supposed to be.  Allegedly at puberty the dæmon gives the human bad ideas and thoughts, and intercission, cutting the bond between human and dæmon, prevents this.  This suggests that the dæmon includes the libido.  This is further confused by Mrs. Coulter’s contention that the severed dæmon can be kept as a sort of pet and Lyra’s suspicion this is the actual situation of some of the staff of the General Oblation facility; this does not seem to correspond well to what happens in real life when someone is subjected to surgery which may greatly impact libido.  There is also a bear who is interested in acquiring a dæmon of his own in an effort to become more humanlike and even be baptized by the Church.  I really hope Pullman clears up these difficulties, because so far his conception of the soul is very confusing.

Topic 2:  “Interview with Professor Lawrence Kaplan”.  This interview deals with da‘ath Torah, a(n Orthodox) Jewish view which in its extreme form holds by blind faith in rabbinical authority—even beyond Jewish law—especially blind faith in the authority of specific rabbis.  Such a view is very controversial and arguably very recent.

Peace.

Aaron

Parashath Noaḥ and The Golden Compass

Greetings.

Jewish date:  5 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Noaḥ).

Topic 1:  In the interest of staying topical, I would like to note that I have done two reviews relevant to this week’s parashah:  one for Evan Almighty and another for the horrifically bad made-for-television movie Noah’s Ark.

Topic 2:  Chapters 14 and 15 of The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman.  In these plot-intensive chapters, the heroine Lyra Belacqua and her dæmon Pantalaimon reach the facility where the General Oblation Board is holding the missing children.  The children are kept in fairly comfortable conditions and regularly measured for a much mentioned microscopic particle known as “Dust” which is somehow connected with other worlds.  Lyra and Pantalaimon get to play heroes by rescuing a number of dæmons which have been separated from their children for purposes which still have to be explained, and they plan on breaking the captive children and their dæmons from the facility.  Severed dæmons could be a reflection of the concept of ghosts.  What any of the rest of this has to do with religion as conceived or practiced by real people is still up in the air.

Shabbath shalom.

Aaron

Inspiration and The Golden Compass

Greetings.

Jewish date:  3 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Noaḥ).

Today’s holiday:  Wednesday of the Twenty-Ninth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “MoveOn.org Civic Action: Stay off FOX” and “Save the Internet: Take Action!:  FCC: Stand Firm for Net Neutrality”.

Topic 1:  “Rabbis - the ultimate life coaches”:  Rav Boteach in his latest article complains about rabbis becoming spiritually irrelevant, relegated to announcing page numbers at services and making rulings on ritual matters.  He is correct that there is a lot of practical wisdom in Judaism (e.g., Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Pirqe ’Avoth, not to mention a host of colorful characters to draw upon).  Since rabbis are supposed to be conduits of Jewish tradition, it makes plenty of sense that they should be doing a lot of the inspiring, too.  Remember, people:  religion is not just about rituals.  It encompasses all of life.

Topic 2:  Chapter 13 of The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman.  The more I read of this trilogy, the less I think Mr. Pullman has a clue of what the soul is.  We see more of the previously mentioned “intercissed” child, i.e., now dæmonless.  The boy is clearly traumatized, and he does not survive very long, but his mind is still present.  Even stranger is the case of the armored bears.  The bears make their armor, yet the armor is their soul.  Clearly Mr. Pullman does not identify soul with mind, but so far he has not made it clear what “soul” means to him.

Peace.

Aaron

The cross, censorship, and The Golden Compass

Greetings.

Jewish date:  2 Marḥeshwan 5770 (Parashath Noaḥ).

Today’s holidays:  Birth of the Báb (Bahá’í Faith), Feast Day of Sir Richard Francis Burton (Thelema).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Keep Children Safe When They're at Child Care”.

Topic 1:  “Supreme Court debates cross”:  Seventy-five years ago, a cross was set up in memory of US soldiers killed in World War I on public land in the Mojave National Preserve.  Presumably this was done with the noblest of intentions, but considering that the cross is a specifically Christian symbol, there is naturally a valid issue of separation of church and state.  For some reason Justice Antonin Scalia does not understand or refuses to understand something which should be so obvious.

Topic 2:  “The American Library Association’s Stealth Jihad Against Free Speech”:  There is an irony in censoring someone in a celebration of Banned Book Week.

Topic 3:  I have now read chapter 12 of The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, book 1), and I am crying foul.  We finally learn what the devious, dastardly thing the Church is doing to the kidnapped children is:  intercission, which severing a human from his/her dæmon.  Why anyone would want to do such a thing is not yet revealed; I presume that Pullman will reveal that later.  But the results of intercission are inaccurate.  Intercission does not leave the human part of the victim unable to function.  In real life, a human without a soul is brain dead and may only be considered alive by technicality.  For all a human is is contained within the brain; if it were not so, then brain damage would never affect behavior and memory.  The idea of intercised children wandering around and some even surviving is therefore at best based on a bad interpretation of the soul.

Peace.

Aaron