The Writing-style of Edom and sinful Nineveh

I mentioned yesterday that I'd started reading Phillip Pullmans' "Northern Lights". It's somewhat unusual for me in that I knew something about the author before I started reading- that is, his strong views on religion.

Looking at the matter more closely, though, a suprising number of my influences are secularist.

The first Richard Dawkins book I read was The Selfish Gene, and you might be suprised to know that before I got to the appendix of that book I didn't know that the author is one of Britians' most widely-known atheists. I've gone on to read the majority of his books, and I have to include him high on any list of my role-models for the clarity of his explanations and his application of the scientific method.

Though I hadn't read Dawkins at that point, I remember talking about the scientific approach to problems in my interview for Oxford. His methods are exactly what I was talking about, but I was thinking of Lucretius- a Roman poet who advocated Epicurianism, the naturalistic humanism of the ancient world.

In those cases, the secularist aspect is made pretty explicit. Consequently, all have been subject to petitions for removal from a library system in some part or other of the US. However, I should say that this is also true of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The petition, which may have been a hoax, quoted 'satanic overtones' in the story of talking animals in a fantastical land. For those of you who don't know, the author of the book was a certain C.S. Lewis, one of the most popular Christian evangelists in the last century. That satanic talking lion was meant to be a thinly veiled allegory for Jesus. I suppose that no-one's good enough for some people.

But I digress.

What I'm really talking about are the artists, musicians and writiers I'd been enjoying for years before discovering their religious views.

Terry Pratchett has long been my favourite fiction author. He is a member of the British Humanist Association. True, I knew that he wrote Small Gods, which turns on the conniving of a totilitarian church-state, but it could equally have been written by any believer with a shred of huamnity and a history book. Small Gods, incidentally, is considered recomended reading in the Asatru community because of the theory of polytheism it contains.

But I digress. Again.

Tycho (AKA Jerry Holins), writer at Penny Arcade, Carrington Vanston, and Scott Kurtz of PvP fame have all mentioned, with varying degrees of caution, their secularist worldviews. Brian Clevinger, my favourite internet artist, bewailed the 2004 election as a triumph for the "medievally religious".

Isaac Asimov, the late great science-fiction author whose stories were prominent in my childhood, was a self-declared atheist.

My favourite band is, and has been for several years, R.E.M.
Today, and this was the impetus for this post, I found that at least two members have desribed themselves as atheists.

Now, the majority of those people do not use their work to discuss religion. With the arguable exception of Lucretius, none of them have it's discussion as their primary message. A number regard it as an intensely personal matter, so that I'd probably never know their views were it not for the white-hot heat of the celebrity spotlight. (In fact, Brian's from Florida and REM are from Georgia, so I'd prepared myself to learn that they were at least low-intensity fundamentalists. But I digress. Uh, thrice.)

This is a strange pattern, and I find it intruiging. Taking the number of people who write "None" under "Religion" in surveys, atheists and secularists are about 25% of Britons, 15% of Americans, and 40% of Scientists. The market share on my attention and thought is clearly skewed. The question is, why?

The most unsettling possibility is that I hold my secular views in part because of the influence of those I respect and read. I don't think this is true, though that makes the possibility that it is all the more insidious. This is what you might call a 'challenge' to my self-determination and independance of thought. Those, for me, are as close as I can get to the idea of a soul. I want to keep them secure.

The explanation that seems more likely, and is infinitely more palatable, is that I've put the cart before the horse there: that I'm reading secular authors because their views match mine, not the inverse. As I said before, though, I only recently found out that this was the case. On the other hand I can't confess to being suprised. Are there hints of atheism that can be detected in a work of art? Are there stylistic methods that betray a lack of belief in God? Maybe I enjoyed their work so much because I could sympathise more fully with their zeitgeist, their worldplan. You might answer that last question with "Yes, Nathan, they never mention Jesus". And that, I suppose, leads to the question my housemate once asked me. Is it possible to be "Christian" and an "Author" without becoming known as "a Christian Author"?

A lot to think about. But challenge, like it says in christmas crackers, is the key to growth.

Music: "creep" by Radiohead- possibly the finest use of the mutter in music, and not suitable for operatic rendition, damnit.