God Is Dead
I had the Nietzche is Dead shirt. I think I got it from Signals, which was that public radio merch catalogue that occasionally hit my parents' house. I may still even have the shirt somewhere.

It's pretty much true. Nietzsche is certainly dead. Whether or not God is around to say so smugly, I didn't question at the time. Having had a few extra years to think about it, I've decided it would be a pretty mean-spirited god who would jump up and down on Nietzsche's grave and rejoice in the limitations which said god was not subject to.

I was reading Andrew's quick discussion of the controversy surrounding Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass. It was the second such discussion I'd read recently. (Brandon Sanderson's recent take was here.) I quite enjoyed reading these takes, because while both of them may reflect a certain amount of spirituality on the part of their writers, they don't feel that the books take away from their own spirituality, but rather cause them to think and deepen it. Whatever personal faith or beliefs they have is not so small that a book like this would derail it.

(I'm reminded of Teresa once saying on Making Light that there was a certain type of evangelical who believed more in Satan's power than God's, because they would always go on and on about how activity X, Y, or Z would corrupt even the most faithful in a matter of minutes. Jack Chick is the exemplar of this particular type. In his books, as soon as Satan wants you, it's a matter of a few minutes with the Dungeons and Dragons, the likker, or listening to evolution being taught in the classroom, and WHAM! before you know it, you get killed in a car accident/plane crash/AIDS from all the homosexual sex and it's time for the weenie roast in Hell.)



The quote that keeps getting bandied about in the online email "warnings" is "My books are about killing God." I don't know the full context of the email. Every time I try to look it up, I basically keep ending up on sites where people are discussing Teh Evil Books. I don't disbelieve the quote, but I'd like to see the context.

Because I read the books. (Back in 2002ish, I think.) And while I don't recall the full details of the end or how Lyra and Will go about ending their god's reign, I do remember that the god creature of their world was Not Nice. He was authoritarian, distant, uncaring, rigid, and corrupt. His followers were on a mission to sever humanity from free will. He was, in short, not a god worth worshipping. And Lyra and Will realising that the Kingdom of Heaven is revolving around a flawed King instead work to set up the Republic of Heaven.¹

(BTW, this is not a new idea. I don't recall the full details, but Piers Anthony's And Eternity ends with the replacement of a god figure as well. And large parts of Pullman's opus are hailing Milton's Paradise Lost as their progenitor.)

But then it occurs to me, the entire New Testament is about the death of God, and the coming of a new and better way. It's not just that Jesus died on the cross, but that his teachings contravene a LOT of what came before. There is a God of the Old Testament, and while we're supposed to believe that Jesus is his son, the major theological thrusts of the Old Testament teachings are as oil and water to many of the teachings in the New Testament. The god of the OT is not a god of forgiveness. He's a jealous god. A vengeful god. And let's not forget, a racist god. And Jesus's springing out of the tomb makes him and his teachings ascendant over that god.

The death of God that Nietzsche spoke of wasn't literal. (I want to check this....I need to go read the full text sometime--maybe I'll snag Also Sprach Zarathustra from Project Gutenberg for my XO.) But from what I can recall, the death of God is a point where man rethinks his faith and the foundations of that faith. The rethinking of these foundations is a sort of death. Deep waters you've never known or experienced. The deeper moral compass may still lie beneath, but perhaps it doesn't owe its providence to the gods you've known from before. Just as the teachings of Jesus may have killed, in some respects, the god of the Old Testament.

Maybe Phillip Pullman killed a god in his stories, but the things that are ascendant at the end of the story are love, equality, and free will. God may have died, but what died with him? A petty bureaucratic view of spirituality? A corrupt and selfish king? A malicious view of humanity? Terrible rigid gripping fears?

You can pass through the deepest darkness of death and nihilism and come out the other side, believing not necessarily in tin gods, but in the wonderful potential for human life.

I'll probably have more to say on this later, but in the mean time, it's exciting some other interesting ideas regarding the Stag-verse. So I've gotta go write.

¹ And that part made a lot of sense to me. What's the point of an afterlife where we're constantly infantilised by worship rituals? Why wouldn't you want to spend your afterlife creating and making the ginormous universe a better place, instead of worship worship worship. The one part of the LDS theology that appealed to me most was the idea that as children of god we would grow up and mature INTO gods. We would become the adult form of god. Except then I had it beaten into my skull that Godhood was for the Boys, and we womenfolk wouldn't be involved in the creating except by making spirit children and being subservient to our menfolk. Screw that. (And then GBH even said to Larry King that he didn't know if we really teach that any more. The people turning into gods thing, I mean. When the leader of your erst-while church waffles on your favouritest point of doctrine, things get dicey.)