Religious Practice & Fantasy: Goat's Law

[Olivier Fouquet]

 >So I
 >suppose my own religious beliefs likely predisposes me to nod with 
agreement
 >when reading works by the above authors.

Warning : this post contains spoilers for His Dark Material trilogy.

Olivier
I'll offer myself as a test case for this: I am completely atheist and 
feel particularly weakly connected to my "cultural" religion (i.e 
catholic christianity) yet I must say I perceive a quite strong 
religious subtext in HP (then again I perceive an even stronger sexual 
subtext, so you can judge for yourself if you can trust my eyesight). I 
wouldn't say Pippin examples of nuns, friars and knights are the best 
chosen though (I surmise Pippin chose them rather for brevity of 
exposition than for persuasion). What feels christian for me in HP is 
the pervasive morality: purity of heart against evil (as in PS), trust 
in the ultimate good (here Dumbledore) that saves you from a monstrous 
serpent obeying the orders of the Adversary (as in CoS), 
soul-destroying creatures (as in PoA) against hope...

I would strongly deny that these are obvious moral themes, or 
non-religious moral themes. Take the second one. Some people might feel 
a bit estranged by the idea that unconditional trust in someone is a 
moral behavior. Philip Pullman's His Dark Material is a good example of 
a very moral series that nonetheless takes an opposite stand on these 
issues (this is arguable, but broadly speaking it seems true to me). It 
is a moral story without embodied good and evil (those embodying good 
turn out to be the worst), where hearts and motivations are definitely 
not pure, where unconditional trust in anything is seen as immoral 
while the most moral character turns out to be the Serpent and where 
allowing the souls of dead people to vanish is the ultimate quest of 
the heroes.

So JKR's choices are by no mean obvious and self-evident. Considering 
she describes herself as a religious person, I think it reasonable to 
see religious influences in HP. In a perhaps vain endeavor to reconcile 
Kneasy and Pippin on their dispute about medieval themes and religion, 
I would say that the inclusion of medieval themes (e.g knights or 
unicorns) in any book today will ring religious considering how these 
themes were originally used. I doubt JKR used them mindlessly, without 
at least considering their spiritual significance. However, I side with 
Kneasy when it comes to evaluate objectively the spiritual content of a 
reference to a friar.

I found the Goat's Law very interesting so, as anybody should do when 
finding an idea interesting, I searched for a counter-example. I 
haven't found one, at least in the realm of pure fantasy. I am also 
quite convinced by the rationale underlying the Law. I wonder if Mike 
could expand on the idea that "fantasy fiction is generally written by 
people who care deeply about religious questions. " I have more than a 
passing interest in the sociology of creative arts (how does the 
personal representation of the society affects artistic creation) so 
I'd be glad to read more about this.

Olivier

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