In an interview a few years back with The Sun magazine, atheist bigwig Sam Harris had this to say about the comparable (de)merits of religion and rape:
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.
You can read the whole interview starting here.
And some people wonder why so many atheists have broken with Harris and the rest of the Old School New Atheist Boys Club to start Atheism Plus.
EDITED TO ADD: Hadn’t noticed that the interview was from 2006, so maybe this is old news to a lot of atheists. Still horrible.
First thing in the morning I usually don’t want to eat at all, but if for some reason I’m particularly hungry (had an early dinner the night before, etc) then it’s starches all the way. My favorite breakfast food is congee (protein toppings are cool, but I wouldn’t want them to be the bulk of my meal).
So speaking of bacon, my husband has heartburn. What should I make for dinner?
It’s funny, we were talking about The Last Battle over supper last week. It’s a very flawed book, in ways that are hard to work out. The biggest problem is that it’s an odd splice of non-catholic theology, to a longer catholic allegory. The other problem is that it breaks both of them.
Falconer: I find “A Wind in the Door” to be the least of them. I was probably at the perfect age to read “A Swiftly Tilting Planet”, and being interested in The Twins was able to make the bridge.
@ katz
Something starchy and bland, I’d suggest. Anything fatty or spicy will probably just make it worse.
Anyone here read Colleen McCullough? I love her series on the Roman empire.
Does Denny’s still have the maple bacon sundae? One of my friends ordered that once while I stared at the menu in disbelief.
Well, I guess that sometimes ice cream can come with peanuts as a topping, and those are salty too, so…
Nope, still disgusting.
Does anyone actually like The Last Battle?
I mean, I loved the Narnia books as a kid, but even then I loathed The Last Battle, because it basically says, “Hey, you know that allegory we’ve been working through this whole series, but which, as a kid, you could reasonably tune out and just enjoy a pretty entertaining story about magic and talking animals and stuff? Well, it’s time to BEAT YOU OVER THE FUCKING HEAD WITH IT. JESUS JESUS JESUS. ASLAN IS JESUS. Did you know that Aslan is Jesus? Because he’s Jesus! JESUS JESUS JESUS.
Also, if you like being pretty and stuff, you’re a whore and Jesus is very sad about it, but you’re totally going to hell and will never see your family again! Also also, all the characters you cared about are dead! But it’s okay, because JESUS JESUS JESUS.”
No, nobody liked it.
I didn’t really like the Narnia books at all once I started paying attention to more en than the magic and talking animals in them. I may have been a christian at the time, but just because it was an extended allegory about my religion didn’t mean I was going to overlook the flaws of the series.
“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” was the strongest book. Everything after was like a trip downhill.
So… bacon. Is this a good time to mention that I have two buckets full of čvarci in my fridge made by my boyfriend’s mom and they’re awesome in the morning? 😛 And I should probably not talk about all the awesome bacony stuff we have here, and if I ever move, which I wish to, that’s probably one of the rare few things I’ll miss about this area.
Bacon. And kefir. Nomnomnom.
I really disliked The Last Battle firstly for killing everyone off, and second for Aslan turning into JC at the end. It wasn’t even the Christian reference, it was simply that I liked animals one hella lot better than humans, and Aslan not being a lion any more sucked. First time I encountered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was when it was read to us in grade three. I remember the first mentions of Aslan being the King, and thinking (like the Pevensies did) of a human king. Then when he turned out to be a lion – wow! And Lewis had to go and bork it at the end of the stories.
I think my favourites in the series were The Horse and his Boy and The Magician’s Nephew. A big part of that was how Pauline Baynes’s illustrations had developed; they were much finer by the later books. I absolutely loved the Charn sequence and the room of images; it prompted a whole fantasy world of my own in my teens.
Charn rocked, but The Magician’s Nephew suffered from one of the problems with The Last Battle that often gets overshadowed by all the issues with theology.
Putting bookends on an entire world is just a bad idea from a literary standpoint. Much of the excitement of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (for me) was the feeling that doors to Narnia could be anywhere and that these adventures could happen to anyone (especially any child). The more open-ended the series, the better this works, but that last two books start putting it into a box and rigidly defining who’s been to Narnia and why.
That’s interesting. I’ve never thought about the series from a literary point of view – more just the stories in themselves with an overlay of “gah, nothing like heavy-handed allegory”. Perhaps the message was more important to Lewis than the series as a story? Just guessing there, I haven’t read terribly much about him or the series’ creation.
No, they actually weren’t originally intended as allegories at all, the way I heard it (and books 2-5 have rather little allegorical content in any case). The allegory obviously takes a steep upward turn in the last two books, but there’s a general degradation of quality by that point.
And that’s a common thread you’ll notice through all the series that have been mentioned here–His Dark Materials, Dragonriders of Pern, The Enchanted Forest–as they progress, the flaws become more pronounced (His Dark Materials becomes more of an author tract, Pern becomes rapier, etc) and they often lose the tone and intangible feel that made them so appealing in the first place.
Part of the problem is that an established series can be very lucrative, so there’s pressure on authors to just keep churning out books. Quality tends to suffer.
I like bacon. I like streaky/side bacon. I like the, “back bacon” referred to as, “canadian”. I like Irish Bacon, I like “pea meal” (which is real canadian bacon). I like Speck (austrian is best, but German and Italian are good).
I like bacon. I like it with lots of things, but not with everything. I like having a flitch in the house and carving off a slice or two to fry up. I like it crisper than not, but a clean bit of fat on it is also tasty.
I like to cook with bacon grease. It gets hot well, imparts nice overnotes. is good for crispy things, etc.
I like bacon, I cannot lie.
I could never get into the Narnia books, even as a kid. It wasn’t due to the heavy-handed allegories either, I just wasn’t engaged by Lewis’s writing or characters at all. I forced my way through the series up to the end of The Horse and His Boy, and then I stopped trying. From what I know of The Last Battle, I don’t think it’s worth trying to continue.
His Dark Materials, on the other hand, I loved the first book, so it was especially disappointing when I got to the next two and everything I liked about the first was completely overshadowed. And the second two wouldn’t stop beating me over the head with allegory either.
Fuck, do not get me started on the “His Dark Materials” series. I loved the first book, but by the end of the series– which I forced myself to read to out of some belief that the author would pull it all together and it’d make sense and be awesome again– I felt completely outraged and betrayed, and the part where it turned into another Narnia-eqsue, smack you over the head with it while screaming, “D’ya get it? Huh? Huh?, Did you see what I did there? Damn this is deep shit, it is super deep and you should love it considering I sacrificed the story and characters for the message”-experience was only part of it. The story it turned out to be, and the way it ended was not anything like the narrative that the first book had seemed so much to promise.
@Kittehs: The tone of The Last Battle was off. It felt like The End, and I didn’t like it. And the one thing that has stuck with me (I forgot about the donkey dressed up as Aslan and the ape … king? priest?) is how ROCKS FALL EVERYBODY DIES except for Susan, who’s into boys and we can’t be having with that.
I guess I really didn’t tell a lie, because Horse HAS got Lucy in it, very briefly, at the end, and I liked it when I read it. The whole you’re-a-heathen-but-that’s-okay-if-you-convert-I’ll-marry-you undertones flew right past me. I was more caught up on SURPRISE TWINS.
I can see that. The children are very much British public school kids in the 40s, so they don’t have much that lends itself to a universal experience. Hell, the first book starts with a bunch of evacuees during the Blitz. Blitz survivors are a very small group, all things considered.
All you other munchers can’t deny
Oh, and I tried The Golden Compass after the movie came out and all the Good Christian Peoples of America were fanning themselves and fainting theatrically. Couldn’t get into it.
I watched the Golden Compass when it came out in theaters. All I can say is that by the time I could get into the movie it was almost the end. Well, I say end, but really it came across as being stuck halfway to the exciting bit
@pillowinhell
SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK
Gung’f orpnhfr Ybeq Nfevry xvyyf Ebtre ng gur raq bs gur svefg obbx. Gurl’er abg tbvat gb chg fbzrguvat yvxr gung va n xvq’f zbivr.
Though considering they planned to adapt the whole series, I don’t know how they planned to skip that part entirely.
@Molly Moon
Vafgrnq bs qlvat, Ebtre ‘snvagf’, zhpu yvxr va Cbxrzba. Hasbeghangryl, gurer ner ab Cbxrzba pragerf va gur Nepgvp fb gurl pna’g erivir uvz.
[/bad person]
I was heavily into Narnia as a kid. I mostly didn’t even mind The Last Battle, although I was very disappointed that Lewis decided to demolish the place at the end of it. For a kid who would have given anything to visit Narnia and have an adventure that would allow me to escape my problems for a while and give me the tools to solve them once I got back, it was a serious hit to the fantasy to discover that the world hadn’t existed even in its fantasy universe since the Fifties.
And you know, even with the heavy allegory, the Narnia books manage to be basically good stories in their own right. Aslan is Jesus, but he doesn’t have to be – he could be any benevolent deity. Certainly the whole “I accept all good people as my worshippers; it doesn’t matter what name they use” thing in TLB wasn’t like anything I had heard in church, but was very much what I imagined a genuinely good god would hold as policy.
And then there’s His Dark Materials, written from the beginning with the intention of being the “anti-Narnia,” and boy does it show. The first book enthralled me – a world where people’s souls manifest as talking companion animals? I AM SO THERE – but in the second and third ones, everything took a backseat to THE MESSAGE. Also by the end of the third one, he was throwing in so many different races and concepts that it was like he had accidentally sent the publisher his notebook where he jots down ideas for future novels.
So while I occasionally re-read Narnia to this day, I won’t ever touch HDM again.