Thinking about religion

[andrewducker]

I'd been thinking about religion and its origins (something which occasionally springs to mind, and was pushed thataway this time by Douglas Adams in one of the essays in Salmon of Doubt). I was, as per usual, writing an LJ entry in my head as a background task.

And then I bumped into this, which obviated any need for me to write anything at all:

I finished reading VALIS by Phillip K. Dick last night (which I neither loved nor hated, despite predictions) and formulated my own theory of myth (which I’m sure has been formulated by others many times over). Western myths, it seems to me, assume the following:

1) Death is scary.

2) The world is horrible and imperfect.

3) Humans are special.

4) Since humans are special and the world is horrible and imperfect, something has clearly Gone Wrong.

5) Someone who isn’t us will fix this.

That’s the 200+ pages of revelation of VALIS, pretty much in a nutshell. Oh, it’s a pretty entertaining time getting there, but that’s the gist of it. In all its talk of pink lasers, rock star messiahs, living information, escape from time, and such, the driving theological/mythological idea is, “Something is Wrong and someone needs to fix it.”

You can find the rest here, if you're interested in VALIS, or the myths people create to make themselves feel better.

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Also, I didn't like the tone of the brief discussion of VALIS in the linked article.

He did not, for example, like that the skeptick became a convert. VALIS is a book, to all intents and purposes, written from the point of view of someone who believes. Would you expect, halfway through the Gospel of Matthew, the writer to add a verse saying "Actually, religion all sucks a bit, doesn't it? God, eh? What a weiner.". VALIS is a book about theology (among many other things), written essentially autobiographically, by someone who believes or is at least exploring their beliefs. It's not fiction, and the writer of that article accepts that, yet some of his complaints sound like he is still treating it as pure fiction.

His treatment of the phrase "million to one" as a literal probability is just irritating too, since it is not (well, not by anyone I've ever met/read things by) used as a literal chance, but as a shorthand for "really really really unlikely"

I'm also aware that someone is probably going to quote Terry Pratchett at me here.