Can atheists appreciate/understand Lord of the Ring?

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

I'm not an atheist, but I don't assign myself to any religious dimension. I have more than slightly paganistic tedencies....

Good lord! G55 eats Christian babies!

Just when you think you know someone, they get all pagan on you.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Good lord! G55 eats Christian babies!

They're best stewed with some spices and vegetables, if you have some at hand. The whole trick is not to put too much pepper.




EDIT: well, crap, I've just wasted my 6000th post on this joke. After WEEKS of making sure I don't miss the anniversary. Blargh!

EDIT2: On a second thought, what better way to spend an anniversary post?

[IxnaY AintsaY]

I'm a devout agnostic, and I'll admit that the dependence of LoTR's plot on miracles, faith, and divine inspiration bothers me somewhat. But the work has enough other themes that I understand better or more intuitively that the whole still resonates.

Whether I understand "the depth" of it as well as I would if were a person of faith, I have no idea. But I'd guess one might as well ask similar questions with regards to having "scholarly credentials in philology", or "experience fighting in World War I", or "a West Midlands English middle-class background circa the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

Jeeze, it's some kind of miracle any of us understands the book in the slightest.

[demnation]

Originally Posted by IxnaY AintsaY

I'm a devout agnostic, and I'll admit that the dependence of LoTR's plot on miracles, faith, and divine inspiration bothers me somewhat. But the work has enough other themes that I understand better or more intuitively that the whole still resonates.

Whether I understand "the depth" of it as well as I would if were a person of faith, I have no idea. But I'd guess one might as well ask similar questions with regards to having "scholarly credentials in philology", or "experience fighting in World War I", or "a West Midlands English middle-class background circa the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

Jeeze, it's some kind of miracle any of us understands the book in the slightest.

I'm also agnostic, but I have to say that I find LOTR to be almost devoid of any faith or divine inspiration, at least in any obvious way. Characters certainly aren't going around praying to the Valar or anything. Miracles.....maybe, but only a few. Unless you were talking about subtext, in which case I would say it's debatable!

[alatar]

I always wanted to read Frank Herbert's Dune while having sand under my feet and some kind of cinnamon nearby.

Which then made me wonder how people read LotR while living no where near a forest. Where I live, we take trees for granted. We also experience all four seasons, so I can imagine climbing Caradhras as well as escaping the Shire.

So surely an atheist can appreciate LotR, but it might feel a bit differently to someone with a more spiritual viewpoint.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by demnation

Characters certainly aren't going around praying to the Valar or anything.

Not as a formal action, no. But I think prayers are indeed present in LOTR.

When attacked by the Witch-king on Weathertop, Frodo cries:

O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!

In The Two Towers, when Faramir's men Mablung and Damrod see the Oliphaunt, we see Damrod saying:

'May the Valar turn him aside! Mûmak! Mûmak!'

The sense of that one, to be fair, might be more akin to a 'Lord help us!' as spoken today; an exited utterance in fear.

However, when facing Shelob alone, Sam resorts to Elbereth again:

Gilthoniel A Elbereth!

And to escape the Watchers at the Tower of Cirith Ungol, Sam again, in desperation, cries:

'Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!'

I think prayers to the Valar, Ilúvatar's governors in Arda, were not uncommon with the Eldar, and apparently not to the Númenóreans in exile either.
At Henneth Annûn, Faramir and his men stand facing west for a moment of silence, as Faramir explains:

'So we always do,' he said as they sat down. 'We look towards Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and ever will be.'

Originally Posted by demnation

Miracles.....maybe, but only a few. Unless you were talking about subtext, in which case I would say it's debatable!

If by 'miracle' you mean something unexpected that accomplishes a great good, I think the book is rife with them. It seems to be a running theme that the players in the story are being directed by something other than their own conscious thoughts and goals, and that Purpose brings good from evil.

[jallanite]

The three examples I found of anti-Tolkien preaching by Christians are rather odd. All three authors claim that they only noticed what they say are discrepancies between what Tolkien’s writing tells and what their religion supposedly teaches recently. This suggests to me that all three writers do not know what their faith officially teaches, or they are deliberately lying.

That the Earth revolves around the Sun, not the reverse, was supposedly first proved by Aristarchus of Samos (c. 270 BCE), but only persisted as a minor theory. Then it was revised by Copernicus and supported and his version first fully published in 1543, the year of his death. Galileo Galliei using the newly invented telescope found that observations of planetary bodies fully supported the Copernican system. Arguments ensued, and Galileo was forced unwillingly to recant his theories by Rome in 1633. The Pope and the Magisterium were in the event shown to be utterly wrong in their condemnation of these theories. But not until 1753 did the Church cease to make fools of themselves by no longer listing any works supporting the then generally accepted Copernican theory in The Index of Forbidden Books. Pope Pius VII approved a decree in 1822 by the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition to allow the printing of Copernican books in Rome.

Since the Galileo fiasco, the Roman Catholic Church has been very careful about making pronouncements on findings of scientists. For what is taught by the Roman Catholic Church, see http://www.catholic.com/tracts/adam-eve-and-evolution or http://americamagazine.org/issue/786...ntal-challenge. The three authors’ insistence that the account of creation in Genesis is to be considered to be complete and to be taken literally is not part of current official Roman Catholic teaching. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholi..._and_evolution .

These authors pounce on Tolkien’s avowed fiction rather than on the numerous purportedly factual writers who have proven that the Earth was created long before 6,000 BCE and have proven the theory of evolution, as much as anything can be proven. The Roman Catholic Church no longer denies this officially. These writers are cranks who are pushing an agenda of Biblical inerrancy which not supported by their own church.

Nor, as one of the authors claims without providing support, is Tolkien’s creation story particularly Gnostic. The author does not bother to indicate which of the many Gnostic texts he finds to be similar to Tolkien’s creation story. I think he is just making this up.

They claim that nothing in the Bible is a myth is a least arguably untrue. These author state that position, but don’t bother to provide support for that position, I presume is because they prefer not to get into the doubts which many Roman Catholic theologians have put forth, as well as those that non-Roman Catholics have put forth. It’s much easier to just pronounce your sources as entirely true without looking at any evidence, and then blame Tolkien for not following completely a creation story which the Roman Catholic church itself no longer officially believes to be necessarily fully true.

[IxnaY AintsaY]

Originally Posted by demnation

I'm also agnostic, but I have to say that I find LOTR to be almost devoid of any faith or divine inspiration, at least in any obvious way.

By divine inspiration, I mean things like Gandalf and Elrond deciding that Merry and Pippin tagging along with the Fellowship was a good idea; or Gandalf again, suspecting Bilbo's ring to be The One and that Sauron would be a-hankering after it, concluding it would be safe enough with an unwitting Hobbit for a couple of decades.

Miracles.....maybe, but only a few. Unless you were talking about subtext, in which case I would say it's debatable!

Hmmm, I'm not sure how sub into the text you have to get. Let's put it this way: counting the history in "The Hobbit", the storyline of LoTR can be seen as bookended by two events. The first is Bilbo blindly putting his hand on the One Ring while lost under the mountains. The second is Gollum biting it from Frodo's hand at what would otherwise have been the moment of his ultimate ruin and the ultimate triumph of Sauron. But as Inziladun said, the tale is rife with miracles.

You know though, "providence" would have been a finer fit to my meaning than "miracles", since I wasn't talking about flashy talking-topiary type stuff.

[jallanite]

The unnamed priest who is responsible for the tirade at http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/201...lkien-was.html had much to say about miracles, but in fact, there is not much done by Moses, Elijah, Elisha, or Jesus in the Bible that could not just as well be called magical or miraculous, if one chose.

Good magicians were commonplace in medieval legends: Menw son of Teirgwaedd in medieval Welsh Arthurian tales, Merlin and Gansguoter in continental Arthurian tales, Maugis of Aigremont in tales of Charlemagne, Arrow-Odd in Norse saga, and numerous others who appear occasionally.

Nor do modern times appear more dangerous than former days when teachers like Eliphas Levi, Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Samuel Liddell MacGregor, and Aleister Crowley were at their height. Wolfgang Smith and Louis de Wohl are indeed odd modern people to be searching for truth. Perhaps the priest wanted to believe what these people wrote just because he wanted to believe it, until he caught them obviously claiming to be dabbling in the occult, which should not have taken much searching. Then he starts his fear-mongering.

The apocryphal book Judith is commonly thought to be unhistorical by Protestants and Roman Catholics alike. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Judith . More importantly most critics believe the Book of Daniel is also unhistorical and was written during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, not during the last days of Babylon and the beginning of the Persian period as it claims. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Daniel . These Biblical books have long been believed to be not history. Information agreeing with this was included in the Roman Cathlic Jerusalem Bible translation, for which J. R. R. Tolkien aided in translating the Book of Jonah. This information can also be found on the web in the conservative Catholic Encyclopedia, originally published in print in 1917. See http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04621b.htm .

The anonymous priest who wrote the Tolkien article either did not know this, which I think unlikely, or is simply neglecting to include anything that disagrees with his claim that the Bible contains no myths. Or perhaps this priest means something odd by myths.

Why this priest goes on and on about Gnosticism I do not know. See http://gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm which contains almost everything known about Gnosticism until the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered 1945. The most coherent account is in chapter XXX. The high God gives birth to a number of beings, and the last of these is named Sophia (Wisdom). She gives birth to Ialdabaoth, the name apparently derived from Aramaic yalᵊd- (‘begetter of’) [s]abaʼōt (‘hosts’). In this heresy Ialdabaoth becomes the Hebrew God, but is rather an evil being. Ialdabaoth subcreates the physical universe and 365 angels. He also creates the human race. In them some of the divine sparks from the original heavenly Father are to be found. Jesus Christ is then sent by the ultimate Father and Sophia to obtain this heavenly matter and return it to heaven.

This does not resemble Tolkien’s imaginings very closely. The Zoroastrian story of the creation of the universe is closer. See http://wisdomlib.org/zoroastrianism/...shn/index.html . The anonymous priest probably is not aware to this story. He wouldn’t like it either, even modified.

[Morthoron]

Hmmm...based on the hereticating rhetoric from various fanatical religious sites presented here in the last several posts, perhaps a better title for this thread should be:

Can Christians appreciate/understand The Lord of the Rings?