Atrios is right, this is pretty amusing:
“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.
Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.
In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.
“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.
If Aleya had been keeping up with blogs, she would have been less surprised at Huckabee’s reading level.
@The Almighty Bob
You avoid my central point. I said:
You ignore the my comments on “That Hideous Strength” , which is the central thrust of my argument, completely in your response. You also miss the real point about H. G. Wells. In the book a character, who is obviously based on H. G. Wells, is brutally killed together with a large number of other people by a rampage of wild animals, which which is gloated on as divine intervention and divine justice.
I find that pathetic, immoral and ultimately evil to kill off in literary way your intellectual opponents. It suggest that Lewis might be prepared to do it in a literal way if he had the power. It gives rise to visions of Christian fascists running concentration camps and gulags like the Nazi’s and the Soviet state capitalists, a vision that might not be too distant in the US especially if Huckabee ends up president.
The fact that Lewis was originally an atheist who converted to Christianity in his thirties is irrelevant. His views and work in later life indicate that he degenerated into the kind of religious reactionary that provides the ideology of todays Christian right. I do not think that all or even a majority of Christians fall into this category, Martin Luther King, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Lord Soper and indeed many of the clergy of the Anglican (Episcopalian) Church (Lewis’s own church) prove otherwise.
Finally on the point of pedantic trivia yes you are right Pullman’s trilogy is correctly called the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, a reference to “Paradise Lost”. However the retitling of “Northern Lights” to the “Golden Compass” by the book’s North American publishers appears to be the result of accidental confusion rather than the typical US cultural industry’s desire to rename everything to make it more accessible to middle America. Pullman doesn’t seem to be too concerned about it. I used the title here because the book I read as the first part of the trilogy, here in Canada, was entitled the “Golden Compass”.
I mentioned Pullman’s trilogy because not only has it been regarded as a sort of anti-Narnia given Pullman’s expressed views on Lewis but it is a lot better written than Lewis’s children’s fantasies.
I said:
I omitted to point out that Pullman’s allusion is not only to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” but also to the dark matter of modern cosmology. A point that may be of interest to readers of Cosmic Variance.
John Baez quoting Huckabee (#6)reminded me the Czech politburo members discussing in 70s problem of the country’s economy falling behing in technology – and one comrade was arguing: “There is no need to hurry with licensing these half-conductors from West – why not wait few more years and we can then buy the full conductors from them”. (In czech semiconductors is literaly translated as “half-conductors”)
I’m t’other side of the Atlantic. The re-titling of everything gets to one significantly eventually; this being the most egregious example recently, it tends to draw most of my bile. Sorry you were standing in the way.
I avoided your points about “That Hideous Strength” for a good reason; I haven’t read it. Therefore anything I said on it would be valueless at best.
‘Burning in effigy’ an enemy in your art is not restricted to C.S. Lewis – see ‘Minos’ in Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgement”, or pretty much the entirety of Dante’s “Inferno”. Maybe the example you use is especially horrific; I wouldn’t know (previous point). But Dante was downright sadistic, so I doubt it.
My main reson for pulling you up was the smugness in the “However I think it shows the deep peronality difference between an atheist humanist like myself and a certain sort of dangerous religious reactionary,” rather than to attack Pullman or defend Lewis.
We atheists may be better than everyone else, but it is unkind – not to say gauche – to rub their noses in it. (“,)
@The Almighty Bob, you said:
Not exactly, perhaps the best comment on that is from George Orwell’s review of “That Hideous Strength”
However Orwell, incisive as he was, does not see through to the fully reactionary nature of Lewis’s work. Lewis’s mixing of the mythic pagan elements with the mythic Christian, in his fictional works, on the one hand and and a hatred of modernity on the other gives rise to the same sort of “muck and mysticism” that powered the Nazi’s ideological appeal.
This appeal is ideally suited to an Anglo-Saxon milieu and easily crosses the Atlantic to the US where it is already being incorporated into the armoury of the religious right. As in the hyping of the movie version of “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” by them.
Ah. We’re having two different arguments.
I’m not as fussed as you about fundamentalist Christians, really – they’re less of an issue over here. What I am trying to do is what we keep telling all religious moderates to do; be vocal moderates, and don’t let the fundamentalists be your public image. I find there’s little more ugly than a fundamentalist atheist, because they claim to know better (witness Richard Dawkins) so I chip in when I can.
(And yes, atheism is a religious belief. The rational reaction to the question of the existence of God is T.H. Huxley’s agnosticism).
There are quotes referring to wisdom from the mouths of babes, but right now no one needs a quote or a verse or a parable!
Here exists the real thing, dwelling among us. We are indeed a lucky people. Our children can see through the veneer of calloused adults who assume a less than realistic knowledge of, well, knowledge.
Merry Christmas, little girl!
No it’s not .
Atheism – means not a theist. A theist is someone who believes in a personal god. An atheist is therefore someone who doesn’t believe in a personal god . On this basis even a deist is a form of atheist. She is after all a deist not a theist.
It is quite possible that that we and the entire universe are an emulation on a higher level computational system. Such a computational system could be considered as possessing some if not all the attributes attributed to god. This is purely an hypothesis, it would require scientific evidence in its favour to raise it to the level of requiring even qualified belief.
So there is no difference between atheism and agnosticism. Huxley merely introduced a new and confusing name for it. Agnostic means not a gnostic and Huxley even said:
Which is confusing as any mainstream Christian is by this definition an agnostic. They not are not Gnostics and would be against the currently reborn trendiness of Gnosticism as put forward in in the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix movies or on another level by the academic high-priestess of Gnosticism Elaine Paigels (widow of physicist Heinz Paigels). Indeed the ultra neo-Platonism of many modern physicists could be considered almost Gnostic. I don’t think this is what Huxley really meant
On the other hand when he says:
He is merely stating he is an atheist – he has no evidence to believe in a personal god.
@The Almighty Bob
They are even less of an issue here than in Britain, at least in Canada we don’t have millionaires putting up part of the money (most of the funding coming from the state) to create so-called “City Academies” that are out of democratic control and are used to sneak in creationism by the back door. The country has indeed continued in its precipitous social, cultural and political decline since I left it twenty years ago.
It has not been helped by Bliar’s religiosity. I was a member of the old Labour Party when we were there to fight Thatcherism not to promote it as “New Labour” does. However the point is that when in Britain, as now here in Canada, you have a government who thinks its prime function is to ensure that it acts as a satrap of the USian empire, the political influence of the religious right in the US is important as you will be dragged along behind. This is particularly important when we understand that many of them believe we are in “end times” and wish to bring about Armageddon.
You’re using the dictionary definition of atheist, I’m using the observational: most of the atheists one comes across categorically state there is no God. There is no evidence to support that claim; therefore not a supportable statement, therefore an opinion or belief.
All of which supports my claim that the English language is stupid. (“,)
That ‘end times’ belief is kinda worying when they’ve got their thumb hovering over the ‘Apocalypse’ button, isn’t it?
And any “Old Labour” hack gets respect. The bastards have slightly butchered it, haven’t they?
Blair’s religion is a problem with the creationism thing – though now, thank fuck, there’s a fairly hard-headed realist (well, kinda…) in the office, it’ll stop. Maybe. Hopefully. <Insert weael word here>.
(Irish, so an external observer-ish).
Perhaps someday I’ll learn to type…
that should be ” < Insert weasel word here > “.
Saying that Dr Seuss is his favorite author isn’t a statement of stupidity to me. I have no way to determine what Huckabee’s intentions were, I am not a Republican, and I’m quite sure I won’t vote for him if he is nominated. However, some of Dr Seuss’s work does have good messages that I agree with and that tackle some real issues in contemporary society (i.e. The Lorax — conservation vs economy, The Butter-Battle — message of peace, etc.). And, of course, outside of the pseudonym as Theodore Giesel he did produce some work for adults, if you still think that literature has to be “adult” to be relevant.
Bottom line, don’t try to pick apart sound bytes — we do too much of that in our political system, when most of the time a soundbyte is so vague and uninformative that several interpretations are possible, and a lot of people buy the media interpretation wholesale. (I personally like Dean’s “scream” — but then I was liking Dean before that, so I was more disposed to interpret it as positive enthusiasm.) What we need to do is have some substantial debates that can help people figure out what the candidates actually believe and get a clear idea on what they’ll actually DO.
chemicalscum, as an aside, you write,
“Now the Golden Compass trilogy, that’s a good read for adult as well as for children with lots of thought provoking ideas.”
The Dark Materials trilogy is typical of Pullman. When you read his other books, you see that the central conflict in virtually every book he has written involves parental abuse or neglect of their child. Because he keeps returning to work on that single topic, his ideas should be considered in light of the probability that the author is attempting to cope with unresolved personal trauma.
Almighty bob, if asked, I will say that I don’t believe there is a god. However, what I don’t bother saying each time is that that is based on the fact, that like the evidence for fairies, pink unicorns or orbiting teapots etc, there is none for god/s, therefore the possibility of there being a god/s is so infinitesimally small that it can be discounted. Of course, if anyone ever produced any significant genuine evidence for the existence of any of the above then I, and all atheist I know, would consider that evidence and decide accordingly. See the difference? Someone who believes based on faith will not do that while someone who believes or makes a decision based on the evidence, or lack of, will change their position if appropriate. I.e. to call atheism a belief is simply a cop out that religites use to make them feel at least the intellectual equal to atheists by trying to drag atheist down to their level of irrationality. To repeat a now common saying, atheism is a belief like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
@John Phillips, FCD
Interestingly enough this is a theme common to most fairy tales. The fact that Pullman’s father died in an air crash when he was only seven may also be a contributory factor to certain plot themes. A quick look through the synopses of his other work indicates that the loss or absence of a father though a common theme is not always present.
I only read the Golden Compass a few months ago after hearing of the controversy the filming of a version the work was causing amongst overly sensitive Christians.
I was at first dubious about reading a book for thirteen year old girls, as I do not generally read children’s’ fiction, but the ideas behind the trilogy seemed interesting enough to try reading the first volume. It became an unstoppable read and I quickly worked my way through the complete trilogy. In my opinion the prose is far superior to that of Lewis and has the advantage of lacking of the racist and sexist ideology that creeps into Lewis’s work. I would recommend it to anyone for adult reading as well as for children.
Correction my post above is a reply to jorge not to John Phillips, FCD. I’m getting sloppy with my copy and pasting.
Sorry folks.