Gregg Easterbrook from ESPN Takes Down the Golden Compass

I love reading a good sports columnist and I have enjoyed reading Gregg Easterbrook from ESPN a number of times.  I guess I'm just going to have to make sure I faithfully read all of his columns now as he seems to segue from sports to philosophy to religion to cinema and so on.  Who knew that Immanuel Kant was interested in football, and "claimed the analytic-synthetic distinction obviates a priori reasoning on the blitz."  I didn't but Gregg sure did. 

Not only that, but you have to check out the way he takes on Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, along with Phillip Pullman, Hollywood and the Golden Compass book/movie franchise in this column. 

HT- Further Up & Further In.

I've included an excerpt after the jump.

Publishers Slam Religion; Hollywood Cozies Up: Because we have a president who is ostentatiously religious -- as an active Christian, I really wish George W. Bush and other politicians would bear in mind that the First Amendment mandates separation of church and state -- there has been a fad for God-is-a-fraud books. But you can't prove God does not exist any more than you can prove God does! (See Kant's football column.) Recent anti-religion best-sellers by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens read like Middle Ages papal bulls, pronouncing a new orthodoxy in which everything about faith is bad, none of religion's good points and virtues are permitted to be mentioned, and godlessness is the new God you must obey! TMQ pal Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic just had a wonderful line about this: "Religion may confer a preposterous cosmic significance upon the individual, but atheism is the true friend of egotism." It is one thing to suppose there is no divine power, the universe coming into being solely through natural forces; this might turn out to be correct. It's quite another to suppose God is impossible -- that nothing can possibly exist that is greater than a 21st-century pundit with a book to sell. Pretty egotistical, huh?

 

Meanwhile, TMQ asked in August whether the three Golden Compass books would carry their very strong anti-Christian view onto the silver screen -- the first big-budget installment opens this week. In the Golden Compass trilogy, God is both a fraud (a space alien pretending to be divine!) and the source of every evil in the universe; Christianity is "a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all"; God has created not heaven but hell and sends all souls, even those of the righteous, to hell; Christian churches are run by corrupt power-mad conspirators whose goal is to abolish pleasure in life; the quest of the astonishingly competent English schoolgirl who is the trilogy's heroine is to locate ancient magical objects that will allow her to kill God and free the world from religion.

 

So TMQ wondered whether this anti-Christian worldview would make it into the movies. Hanna Rosin reports in the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly that every trace of religion has been removed from the first Golden Compass flick. God is never mentioned, and the Bad Guys -- who in the books are priests of the Magisterium -- are just generic smirking guys in black robes whose organizational affiliation is never explained. This seems to me an outrageous cop-out. I thought Philip Pullman's Golden Compass books wildly overstated the case against religion, using the harebrained pretense that if faith disappeared, Earth would instantly become a paradise. But anti-religion views are perfectly valid and deserve to be aired; why shouldn't moviegoers get to see a big-budget attack on Christianity? This would be the honest way to film the Golden Compass books.

 

Should the film series make it to the end of the trilogy, producers will face a real challenge. In the third volume, "The Amber Spyglass," much of the action occurs in hell, where the innocent are being eternally tormented -- the astonishingly competent English schoolgirl leads a commando raid into hell, with the goal of releasing souls to oblivion. In the third book, there's also a phony cloud nine, run by the malevolent false God; a key character is an evil, sex-obsessed archangel whose mission, assigned by God, is to spread human misery; the action builds up to the good characters physically killing God. How is Hollywood going to pretend that has nothing to do with religion?

Comments

[kyle.]

when i read this on espn.com, i was certainly surprised to find the most direct criticism of "the golden compass" there. easterbrook has a good take on the issue; i'll even ignore my disagreement with him on the "separation of church and state" mention and his occasional global warming rants because he's got a lot of insight most of the time.

[Agkistrodon]

"But you can't prove God does not exist any more than you can prove God does!"

This is, of course, standard theist nonsense. Easterbrook is obviously unaware of the requirement of evidence (at least) for any claim. Did he never take the simplest college course that involved reasoning skills? The claim that God exists is clearly exactly the same that the claim that there are blue horses with yellow eyes on the planet Blyxylplynx in the Andromeda Galaxy. You cannot prove that there aren't. Further, it can be claimed that these blue horses are in control of the laws of the universe and even that they created the universe and Easterbrook cannot prove it wrong. It can be claimed that these horses are in fact the gods of all religions and it cannot be proved wrong. I can claim that the planets do not go around the sun and I can provide evidence for it with both theoretical and observational evidence. It is up to others to refute my claim by providing evidence that I am wrong. No one can do that because the planets DO set up a gravitational relationship with the sun that results in all of them going around a point called the barycenter. The relationship causes the sun to wobble slightly and observations indicate that it does wobble. Neither Easterbrook nor anyone else has presented any evidence for the existence of any god whatsoever. To say that we cannot prove that a god does not exist is nothing more than "NYAH-NYAH-NE-NAH-NAH" we hear on third grade playgrounds.

"Recent anti-religion best-sellers by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens read like Middle Ages papal bulls, pronouncing a new orthodoxy in which everything about faith is bad, none of religion's good points and virtues are permitted to be mentioned, and godlessness is the new God you must obey!"

Middle Ages papal bulls? Absurd. They read as well reasoned arguments replete with examples. They do NOT make the claim that "everything about faith is bad." Easterbrook is a liar. How does that fit in with God ordained morality? They point to specific instances where religious people do good things but (and Hitchens especially points out this) they do nothing more than nontheistic people could and have done. Do you think that everyone who helped out after Katrina did so because some little guy in the sky told him to? No!! I know atheists who went to Louisiana and Mississippi and physically helped and I know more who contributed money. I spent three days in eastern North Carolina helping after Hurricane Floyd. Another thing they point out is that the notion that it was religion that put an end to slavery is a wildly overblown claim. It was humanists of all beliefs who did it while most of the religious either supported it or ignored the issue. If religion had such an antislavery virtue, why wasn't EVERY Christian against it? It's a wash.

Where do these authors say anything about obeying godlessness? What could that possibly mean? It certainly demonstrates Easterbrook's complete failure to (1) read the books and (2) understand that you cannot obey a vacuity. If there's no god, how can you obey godlessness?

As far as Wilsetier's statement is concerned, exactly where did any of the authors say that gods were "impossible." The closest statement of the kind is Dawkins's point that a god is IMPROBABLE! That's not the same as impossible. And NO! It's not egotistical to say so.

As for "His Dark Materials," first, it's FICTION! Second, many Christian churches ARE run by "corrupt power-mad conspirators whose goal is to abolish pleasure in life." Third, it is anti-religious, not just anti-Christian. All religions do exactly the same thing at one time or another if they get the control to allow them to.

The bottomline here is that Easterbrook and all the other apologists who speak against the people who wrote these much needed books are nothing more than propagandists and religious dupes.

[Abraham Sangha]

Agkistrodon, what is your evidence supporting your claim regarding "the requirement of evidence (at least) for any claim"? Furthermore, it should be noted that Easterbrook usually has worthy commentary about football that spills into science, sociology, and morality although he seems to be an open theist.