The record is written to benefit the authoritarian and deceitful ‘Church’ to come. Christ records what Jesus says and does – or ought to have said and done – with help from an elusive ‘stranger’ and an ‘informant’ among the apostles. The standoffish younger brother becomes the tempter in the desert and betrays Jesus in Gethsemane. Mary gives birth to twins, the elder ‘Jesus’ and the younger ‘Christ’. In outline, the Pullman narrative is as follows. This matters, since Pullman’s book would have held little interest in the absence of the New Testament. O’Collins’ main and telling criticism is that Pullman’s fiction does not sufficiently respect the history or the texts involved. As Gerry O’Collins SJ points out in his short, clear and well-informed rebuttal, Philip Pullman’s Jesus, Pullman has moved into historical fiction. But whereas Pullman’s delightful trilogy, His Dark Materials, is set in contemporary and imaginary worlds, his latest story, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, is set in the time and place of the New Testament. This feature has been much discussed (see for example, Hugh Rayment-Pickard, The Devil’s Account. Some of Philip Pullman’s extensive children’s literature, much beloved by many adults, is explicitly atheist and anti-Church.
This moral tone is not exactly original, but it gives contemporary atheism a fresh cultural momentum. ‘Church’, due mainly to a disregard for truth and an inability to respect humankind, is itself an immoral institution. Consequently Christian belief is also immoral.
The Jesus story is a story which provides us with no sufficient reasons to believe it is more than just a story. Since there is no good reason to believe in anything ‘more’ it is immoral to believe in God. Contemporary atheism has a notable moral tone which goes something like this: The universe is what it is and does and nothing more.
0 kommentar(er)
