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So Jim Butcher managed to piss me off.
Mar. 9th, 2008 08:42 amOf course, I still worship the guy.
I went and bought more Dresden Files books thanks to watching the show the other night. I'm on Book 5 now (I believe my order of reading has been: 7,2,3,8,4 and soon 5, 9). Of course, the pissing off relates to religion - can't talk about religion without pissing someone off. I'm able to forgive him a little for defining an agnostic as someone who doesn't commit to the existence of god(s), but his (Harry's, at least) argument seems to boil down to: because there is crazy magic stuff, there must be a god(s) (even if you don't have to side with any.) Any other explanations aren't even considered. So what if you've met an angel? Didn't Harry ever listen to Styx? Maybe the angels are aliens? Maybe they're just massively powerful spiritual entities working on their own?
A lot of anti-god stories are functioning in a gnostic framework, whether they know it or not. An omnipotent god is not something you can kill, therefore it must be fallible and therefore not ultimate. So if you take the ruling deity as an ignorant and/or malevolent demiurge intent on oppressing us, it leaves room for something unknowable beyond that. (Ain, Pleroma, Brahma, Collective Unconscious, whatever.) Which is why I find Philip Pullman and his controversy train so damned funny.
And to me, calling that Beyond Thing "god" is pretty shaky, because I personally include "tends to mess with the world" as part of my definition of god.
Granted, gnosticism is way more complicated than I'm making out. I'm just using the Creator God vs Ultimate God theology it sets up.
I went and bought more Dresden Files books thanks to watching the show the other night. I'm on Book 5 now (I believe my order of reading has been: 7,2,3,8,4 and soon 5, 9). Of course, the pissing off relates to religion - can't talk about religion without pissing someone off. I'm able to forgive him a little for defining an agnostic as someone who doesn't commit to the existence of god(s), but his (Harry's, at least) argument seems to boil down to: because there is crazy magic stuff, there must be a god(s) (even if you don't have to side with any.) Any other explanations aren't even considered. So what if you've met an angel? Didn't Harry ever listen to Styx? Maybe the angels are aliens? Maybe they're just massively powerful spiritual entities working on their own?
A lot of anti-god stories are functioning in a gnostic framework, whether they know it or not. An omnipotent god is not something you can kill, therefore it must be fallible and therefore not ultimate. So if you take the ruling deity as an ignorant and/or malevolent demiurge intent on oppressing us, it leaves room for something unknowable beyond that. (Ain, Pleroma, Brahma, Collective Unconscious, whatever.) Which is why I find Philip Pullman and his controversy train so damned funny.
And to me, calling that Beyond Thing "god" is pretty shaky, because I personally include "tends to mess with the world" as part of my definition of god.
Granted, gnosticism is way more complicated than I'm making out. I'm just using the Creator God vs Ultimate God theology it sets up.
