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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14301 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Good post I mostly agree with, but just an aside:

Sometimes atheists read and appreciate them as well, and with all appropriate grace and charity, while I'm glad that others read them too, I don't think they make as much sense for atheists. The Christianity is too foundational - too much of Lewis and Tolkien's writing is impregnated with faith - for them to make sense otherwise.

Something a lot of Christians forget is that many atheists are either former Christians themselves, or have had enough exposure to Christianity that they understand it even if they don't agree with it. We are perfectly capable of reading Lewis and Tolkien and "getting" what they are saying about God and faith and morality.

It's possible this is more true of Americans than Brits, as my impression is that while religion is a pretty weak force in the UK, even among those who still believe, in the US even atheists probably have regular exposure to sincere, hardcore believers. If you grew up in an atheist home and never went to church at all, maybe your only impression of Christianity is a kind of sneering disdain for the god-botherers. But most Americans, at least until the current generation, probably had parents who at least took them to church occasionally. The idea that atheists find religion alien and unfathomable (and that all atheists are militant sneerers) is not true across the board.

I don't know what Pratchett's childhood was like, but he was born in 1948 so he probably didn't grow up atheist. I think you are right that he clearly became one, of the "angry at God not existing" variety.

Well, mainly just for the reason I said. I think it doesn't work because it's a straw-man. Nobody believes that justice comes in atoms, or mercy in molecules. Things that aren't elemental particles are not lies, or any less worthy of being valued or loved. Death's rebuttal of people who believe in justice does not land, and because I know Pratchett was a brilliant author and extremely capable fantasist, I believe that Pratchett could have come up with a metaphor that worked. It is not beyond his imagination to make the same point in a more artful way. After all, most of his other books make the same point, often more successfully.

Yes, it's a straw man in that of course justice doesn't exist in physical particles, and neither Death, nor the author using him as a mouthpiece, thought people did think of justice that way. His point, whether you agree with it or not, is that a lot of people believe in justice and mercy and goodness as intangible but very real metaphysical forces in the world, manifested by divine powers (God, for Christians, obviously). And he's pushing back against that, saying no, these things only exist in our heads, they only exist to the degree that we create them. The metaphor was perfectly coherent to say what the author was trying to say: there is no Just World, there is no deity who is going to make sure that good and bad people get their just rewards in the end. Justice is only what we make of it.

Perhaps it is you, only able to conceive of atheism as nihilism or an angry reaction against religion, who finds it difficult to comprehend the speech from an atheist author's point of view.

I certainly don't think it's an absence of imagination on my part - I was an atheist as a younger man, after all. I don't mean to generalise that all atheists feel the same, nor was I suggesting that atheists have no intellectual knowledge of Christianity.

Nonetheless I do think it's fair to say that ideological or religious alignment/difference with a text affects the way one receives it, and therefore that atheists and Christians will respond to authors like Lewis or Tolkien differently. In the same way I'm conscious that my own reaction to Pratchett is different and conditioned by my own background. I am speculating a bit about atheist responses to him, with what I hope is empathy born of my own experience of atheism, but nonetheless I am in a different position now. To the extent that I appreciate Pratchett today (and I'm not actually a huge fan), there is a level of imagination involved, putting myself in the position of someone for whom the world seems very different to the way it seems to me. The same thing, mutatis mutandis, for ex-Christian appreciators of the Christian authors.

There's probably another effortpost to be written one day about the atheist appreciators of Tolkien specifically. That is for another day, though.

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