With ambitious aim against the throne and monarchy of God

[horseling]

When my laptop died the other week, I spent my time reading all three books of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. While it dragged on heaps, I got pretty engrossed in it. A lot of his concepts are quite interesting - like how he has a retelling of biblical history as we know it, and how there are millions of parallel worlds filled

Comments

[stickwriter]

woohoo!

This trilogy was introduced to me by my uncle who regularly takes his children to church. When I next see him, maybe I'll ask whether he would encourage his children to read the likes of this and why.

By the way, I didn't know you un-churched yourself.

[horseling]

Most people I know who've read Philip Pulman all seem to just read the first book, which doesn't explicitly antagonise Christianity as much as the last book... When I finished Northern Lights, I didn't really understand what all the controversy was, until I got to the Amber Spyglass and was like "Oh, riiiight". How did you personally feel about it?

I did keep attending my church up til the time I left Sydney last year but that was solely for the purpose of hanging out with my friends and being part of the community, even though a huge part of me conflicted with their beliefs. I don't intend to go back though.

[stickwriter]

I have yet to re-read it and find out what I think about it now because I finished them in 2002, which, omg, is almsot 10 years ago. This was year 10 - exactly the time I was beginning to realise that maintaining my religious beliefs made no sense and that I disagreed with a lot of the things the Church was teaching. I'm not sure how far I was on the road to non-Christianity then, but I think it might even have been one of the things which helped me come to terms with it and helped to resolve issues, like of loss (eg. the quote you just posted), of connection to other consciousnesses (dust), a reason to live, whether God was necessarily evil or just redundant, and so on.

[kadolygyb]

Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!