(urth) Religious writers and audiences

[brunians at brunians.org]

Atheists don't believe in God, so there's a gap.

They normally try to fit themselves into the gap.

So of course they get to order the World.

And the World stubbornly insists upon remaining as it is.

.


> Do people feel similarly betrayed by Doestoevsky?
>
> Again, I find it bizarre.  I can't imagine thinking to myself "How dare
> Author X have different views than me!"  I can imagine thinking "Well, I
> don't choose to spend time on this," but not a sense of betrayal per se.
>
> On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 7:58 PM, David Stockhoff
> <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:
>
>> The comparison is a personally interesting one. Perhaps the difference
>> is
>> largely one of timing. I too felt somewhat betrayed by Lewis; I
>> encountered
>> Narnia not long after Middle-Earth, around second and third grade.
>> Wolfe I discovered much later, and while I'm still waiting for the Great
>> Atheist Novel, I don't feel betrayed at all. And Rand was clearly insane
>> from the beginning.
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 4
>> Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 16:53:02 -0400
>>
>> From: John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>
>> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>> Subject: Re: (urth) Religious writers and audiences
>> Message-ID:
>>        <AANLkTinjYKw22zcNqAXleQGE49YCYlD9jhZRTChMEgF5 at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>>
>>
>> Personally I find the "betrayal" narrative bizarre whenever I hear it.
>> Secular writers and religious writers alike "color" their fiction to
>> reflect
>> their political, moral and/or metaphyiscal beliefs, yet one very rarely
>> encounters this "betrayal" storyline outside of discussion of certain
>> Christian genre writers.  I guess in the right-wing fringe media we hear
>> about evil homosexual/pagan agendas hidden in works, but no one takes
>> that
>> stuff seriously.
>>
>> I might ascribe this to the generally liberal or progressive attitudes
>> of
>> most literary critics, academics, and, plausibly, much of the educated
>> reading class in the United States.  But that doesn't really wash in my
>> experience.  I know countless people, many of liberal predispositions,
>> who
>> have read and allegedly enjoyed The Fountainhead--and Rand is far
>> preachier
>> than Lewis, Wolfe, or even Card.  And Neil Gaiman has written about his
>> feelings of betrayal as to Lewis's religiousity, but never expressed
>> similar
>> feelings toward, for example, Kipling's imperialism.
>>
>> I think the problem (if there is a unique problem here and not just soft
>> bigotry against religion in general or a particular religion) must be
>> the
>> perceived deception.  The idea that Lewis might be planting ideas and
>> images
>> surreptiously in one's head that would act to soften one's views towards
>> traditional Christianity can be conceived of nefariously.
>>
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