Hmm. They’re among my favorite books, and I don’t find the stuff about the church to be a problem at all. It’s certainly nowhere near as preachy as, say, Narnia is.
The excision of original sin, bandit,
isn’t happening on Earth, but in another world in which one’s “sin” is physically manifest as a daemon, a familiar, that follows you around. The experiments are attempting to sever the daemon from the child, thereby, in the belief of this particular cult, returning the child to innocence.
I find Pullman’s work to represent a gargantuan imagination. The first appearance of Panzerbjorn left me breathless.
It could totally work. I remember a part (in the third book) where one of the angels talks about the Authority as, yes, just another angel who takes charge and isn’t the Creator. I hope (against hope) they do it that way; without the Church the whole harsh-ascetic-denial vs. embracing-physical-world thing wouldn’t work half as well.
Strange. Could possibly work. I’ll think about reading it, though I have precious little time. Except today, where I just can’t write anymore RPG stuff.
I’d always read daemons as being a representation of people’s souls, not sin. The children severed from their daemons did not sin, but they also exhibited no free will. They became bland and incurious (those that didn’t die of shock). Pullman’s point being, that which makes us human also gives us the capacity to sin.
Has there really been much genuine controversy over Harry Potter?
HDM can be read as an attack on dogmatic or fundamentalist religion instead of just religion in general. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recommended reading of HDM in Religious Education classes, “because it allowed students to clarify what objections were being made to religion.”.
On the other hand, if you read HDM very literally you could come to the conclusion it’s one of the most sustained and vehement attacks on Christianity ever made.
Aagramn, you’re entirely correct. I put the word “sin” in quotes in my spoiler as a nod to this. The underlying philosophy, Pullman’s take on what’s really going on, doesn’t become clear until the end of the third book.
Damn. I was so looking forward to seeing these books get adapted for the big screen. Especially given the story. But if they’re going to take the coward’s way out and remove the elements that make the story so interesting, then it almost certainly won’t be worth seeing.
To Elfkin 477 esp. - Thank you for saying you hated these books. I barely made it through the first one. Friends, other readers, reviewers, all said how great the next two were also, but I just couldn’t find it in me to waste my time with them. I was beginning to think I was the only one anywhere with this opinion.