I thought I would bring a few quotes in to this thread.
this one is right off of his website.
"I don't know whether there's a God or not. Nobody does, no matter what they say. I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away.
Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them."
this was in an interview with Dave Weich.
"Dave: Either way, you're hardly the first author of children's books to present ideas that aren't universally accepted. For instance, you made some comments in previous interviews about C.S. Lewis and the perspective his narrator brings to those stories. You singled out a scene in Prince Caspian when the narrator is picking on a little girl with fat legs.
Pullman: He does. But I think it makes a big difference if you read those books as a kid. I read them when I'd already grown up, and I thought they were loathsome, full of bullying and sneering, propaganda, basically, on behalf of a religion whose main creed seemed to be to despise and hate people unlike yourself. Whatever Christianity says, I don't think it's that. "
and another interview.
"Perhaps. I'm pretty skeptical, though. I think we're far too superstitious on the whole. As for disgraceful betrayals of wisdom such as the pretense that there is something called "creation science" and we ought to give it equal time in schools with proper science --- I'm ashamed to belong to a human race that is so sunk in abject ignorance and willful stupidity. "
another interview
"But when you look at organised religion of whatever sort – whether it's Christianity in all its variants, or whether it's Islam or some forms of extreme Hinduism – wherever you see organised religion and priesthoods and power, you see cruelty and tyranny and repression. It's almost a universal law. "
"Narnia has always seemed to me to be marked by a hatred of the physical world. When I bring this up, people say, oh no, what nonsense! He loved his beer, loved laughter and smoking a pipe, and the companionship of his friends and so on. And so he might have done. But that didn't prevent perhaps his unconscious mind from saying something quite different in the form of a story. I'm by no means alone in attacking Lewis on these grounds."
he doesn't seem to relate his writing to Tolkien's.
"What I'm doing is utterly different," he says. "Tolkien would have deplored it."
and obviously not C.S. lewis' writings.
"So, too, would have another famous Oxford fantasy writer, C.S. Lewis, a devout Christian whose children's series "The Chronicles of Narnia" exemplified his religious convictions. "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief," says Pullman. "Mr. Lewis would think I was doing the Devil's work."
I have not read the books and I can't say exactly how they are. But Phillip Pullman does not seem like an author who writes books I would want to read.
