J.K. Rowling comments more extensively about Christian imagery in Harry Potter.
Some of this she's said before but some of it's new. In particular she comments about the tombstone quotes and the books' epigraphs. Also:
"The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot," she revealed. "On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it's something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that's very obvious within the books."
And:
For her part, Rowling said she's proud to be on numerous banned-book lists. As for the protests of some believers? Well, she doesn't take them as gospel.
"I go to church myself," she declared. "I don't take any responsibility for the lunatic fringes of my own religion."
[via Get Religion]
(I just can't help chuckling when I recall all the dire fundamentalist warnings about the Satanism of Harry Potter. Or the gleeful secularist claims about Harry Potter's implicit atheism. And now MTV, corrupter of America's youth, is setting the record straight. Ah, sweet, sweet irony.)
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Sturgeon on science & religion
SF Gospel has an interesting quotation from an essay Theodore Sturgeon wrote on science and religion, in 1964. Here's a snippet:
Man's hands are God's work; the work of man's hands is God's work. (I spoke—and speak—for myself, of course.) .... The recurring suggestion that there's some sort of Armageddon going on between Science and Religion is, I think, a straw man for bigots. That Science has at one time or another dealt certain kinds of Religion a heavy blow, I do not argue. I do believe, however, that what received the blow was this or that set of fixed convictions, and not Religion itself. And I think that the idea that Science and Religion must of necessity be opposed to one another is a throwback at least to the 19th Century—perhaps farther—and that to engage in this battle any more is equivalent to, and as quaint as, re-fighting the War of the Roses...
I know personally a good many scientists. Being people, they present a cross-section of convictions and attitudes quite as varied as those of any people. In the area of religion, I have met scientists far more devout than I could ever want to be. I've met unmoved, habitual, Sunday-best churchgoers, backslid Orthodoxers; agnostics, atheists, and people who just don't care one way or another.
There is no secret sect of guys with test-tubes out to destroy the temples. There are more anti-religionists outside Science than in it... and if God thinks about this at all, He probably feels that He made a cosmos quite roomy enough to contain them all."
Read more here!
Sturgeon was a great author, and I'm a big fan of his work (particularly his short stories), which displays a fine mixture of intelligence and compassion.
His father was a Methodist minister, but as an adult Sturgeon doesn't seem to have belonged to any sort of clearly defined religion or irreligion. One site says he was a vocal atheist, while Adherents, which normally gets its facts straight, has him down as "Christian (denomination unknown)." I've also seen him described as a Taoist. He could be quite critical of organized religion. My sense, from reading his work, is that he blended some Taoist ideas with some Christian ideas, while remaining wary of any set creed.
Man's hands are God's work; the work of man's hands is God's work. (I spoke—and speak—for myself, of course.) .... The recurring suggestion that there's some sort of Armageddon going on between Science and Religion is, I think, a straw man for bigots. That Science has at one time or another dealt certain kinds of Religion a heavy blow, I do not argue. I do believe, however, that what received the blow was this or that set of fixed convictions, and not Religion itself. And I think that the idea that Science and Religion must of necessity be opposed to one another is a throwback at least to the 19th Century—perhaps farther—and that to engage in this battle any more is equivalent to, and as quaint as, re-fighting the War of the Roses...
I know personally a good many scientists. Being people, they present a cross-section of convictions and attitudes quite as varied as those of any people. In the area of religion, I have met scientists far more devout than I could ever want to be. I've met unmoved, habitual, Sunday-best churchgoers, backslid Orthodoxers; agnostics, atheists, and people who just don't care one way or another.
There is no secret sect of guys with test-tubes out to destroy the temples. There are more anti-religionists outside Science than in it... and if God thinks about this at all, He probably feels that He made a cosmos quite roomy enough to contain them all."
Read more here!
Sturgeon was a great author, and I'm a big fan of his work (particularly his short stories), which displays a fine mixture of intelligence and compassion.
His father was a Methodist minister, but as an adult Sturgeon doesn't seem to have belonged to any sort of clearly defined religion or irreligion. One site says he was a vocal atheist, while Adherents, which normally gets its facts straight, has him down as "Christian (denomination unknown)." I've also seen him described as a Taoist. He could be quite critical of organized religion. My sense, from reading his work, is that he blended some Taoist ideas with some Christian ideas, while remaining wary of any set creed.
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