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Πέμπτη 5 Μαΐου 2011

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There’s More on the Other Side of Religion

ασποσπασμα:
''Bernard Schweizer, a literature professor at Long Island University, doesn’t think so. A strong aversion to God, a phenomenon he came across in his studies, does not mean disbelief: God hatred actually relies on deep faith. Schweizer coined the term misotheism for it, something that brings us to an important point about his book, that claims to be “the untold history of misotheism”: hating God is an idea so unfamiliar to most that, even if it’s right in their faces, most readers will overlook it – especially when they lack the proper term for it. Having named it, Schweizer distinguished three groups: agonistic misotheists (whose hatred is a struggle), absolutists (who relish theirs), and political misotheists (who are mostly against organized religion but have a very personal hatred of God).
Hatred of God is usually likened to atheism, but how could an atheist hate a fictional character? The author became fascinated by this paradox while reading Rebecca West, the British travel writer, and Philip Pullman, most famous for his fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Schweizer finds their works filled with hatred of God, well-hidden in what he calls “the make-belief potential” of literature and its fictional characters. In an essay titled ‘The New God,’ West writes that “the one clear motive in his mysterious ways was his hatred of the common man,” and in several of her works of fiction, protagonists casually, yet brutally refer to God as “cruel”, “a master criminal,” and likened to “Eastern tyrants.” Pullman’s hatred, less obvious in the realm of fantasy, can be seen in the actions of his characters who “act on the belief that God is not a champion of mankind but rather its enemy, since his laws are designed to curtual human sensuality, freedom, and creativity.” The strength and consistency of the hatred that pervades their writing, Schweizer finds, could only make sense when the writers actually believe in divinity’s existence, but no longer believe in its inherent goodness.
In Hating God, Schweizer reviews the roots of this hatred, presenting a colorful history of misotheism that includes people from Epicurus to Nietzsche. He then specifically analyzes hatred’s role in the work of West and Pullman, as well as four others. They wrote blasphemy in verse (poet Algernon Swinburne) or called God a racist (Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston), put him on trial (Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel) and plotted his ultimate destruction (playwright Peter Shaffer). With examples abundantly varied and often so explicit, the reader can’t help but share Schweizer’s surprise at history’s oversight of misotheism.
One question that arises is whether or not misotheism warrants this much attention. Might we not be exaggerating its prevalence, now that we have a term for it, and spot it in places where it doesn’t really exist? Also, whereas the distinction between atheism and misotheism is quite clear for modern authors, the overview of misotheism’s older history is less convincing. Especially for authors who lived in a time when atheism was not an option, one wonders if they would have been misotheists today, or would actually have opted for a complete denial of God’s existence and become atheists? For a modern author to admit to being an atheist – at least in Western literature, the focus of Schweizer’s analysis – is hardly as big of a deal as it once was. For now, however, studying misotheism presents us with a fascinating new discussion, and Schweizer’s book functions as the start of that debate.''
 

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