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Originally Posted by Lush
Quoi?
Could you expand on that please?
Because at this point, I'm not sure that I agree. Lyra's father was not particularly superstitious, as I recall, and he was a very ruthless man.
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I should have put superstition in quotes. I was referring to the way that Pullman presents religion & its manifestation, the Church, as corrupting, & it is corrupting not because humans are fallen & so everything they create will have an element of 'fallenness' in it, but because 'God' & the Angelic hierarchies are corrupt.
As to whether Lyra & the other children are 'innocent' - I'd say they absolutely are. They are neither Good nor Evil. They have not yet eaten of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil, hence all their actions are morally neutral (& thus morally worthless). Lyra can't be condemned for the bad she does or praised for the good she does, because she herself is not doing either 'good' or 'bad' things. She mostly just 'does' things for the sake fo doing them. Hence her declaration at the end of the story that she now has to start actually doing things for a reason - helping others, studying, building a better world.
Point is, in Pullman's world people are born morally 'neutral' (ie 'unfalllen') & have to discover for themselves what is Good & what is Bad. But first they have to liberate themselves from the 'superstition' of religious belief, because in Pullman's view all religion is corrupting.
Now, as I said. That may be absolutely correct. And if Pullman was writing a novel about a self-contained secondary world (which M-e is, for all Tolkien's statements about it being set in a hiistorical period of our world) that would be fine & we could leave it there. However, Pullman sets his novel partly in our world, & so is making statements about the religions (principally Christianity) & the God of our world. So, he is throwing his hat into the ring. If he makes statements about the way our world works, about a religio-philosophical system which has shaped the Western World (for good or ill) he should be able to back them up.
In the interview which Squatter linked to earlier Pullman states:
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Jesus, like many of the founders of great religions, was a moral genius, and he set out a number of things very clearly in the Gospels which if we all lived by them we’d all do much better. What a pity the Church doesn’t listen to him!
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Now, first of all, to say that the Church doesn't listen to Jesus is idiotic as well as untrue. The main point though is that Pullman never states anywhere (as far as I know) what, in his opinion, Jesus was actually 'setting out'. As Lewis pointed out you can't take that easy option of saying Jesus was a nice guy who taught his followers to be nice guys. Yes, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies & perform acts of charity, but he also told his followers he was the Son of God, & that he would die to save them from Hell.
Point being, Pullman's view of Christianity is as simplistic as his view of fantasy. Its all very well to claim in that same interview 'I say a lot of things just to be provocative.' but you have to be able to back up 'provocative' statements, or be prepared to come clean & state 'I was lying', or 'I made it up so you'd pay attention to me'.