Certain Remarks on Religion in Science Fiction
by John Boardman |
If you are not interested in professional or amateur science fiction or fantasy writing which is “atheistic” you are going to be reading remarkably little. Of the writers with a markedly Christian orientation in their works, C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Anthony Boucher are all dead, Roger Elwood is inactive, and Walter M. Miller, Jr., is one or the other, I don't know which. For the rest of the field, you have: Robert A. Heinlein, whose Valentine Michael Smith in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is a parody on the mysterious birth, controversial ministry, martyrdom, and subsequent eating of the body of a certain Jesus of Nazareth. Isaac Asimov, an acknowledged agnostic, who has published a thoroughly rationalistic ASIMOV'S GUIDE TO THE BIBLE. L. Sprague de Camp, another acknowledged agnostic, about half of whose villains are religious fanatics. Philip Jose Farmer, whose classic THE LOVERS has as villains a hierarchical and oppressive church, and as heroes people in revolt against it. Andrew Offut, whose EVIL IS LIVE SPELLED BACKWARDS is an updating of Heinlein's “If This Goes On…” (also published as REVOLT IN 2100)—and both of them anti-religious revolts against an oppressive hierarchical church. Gordon Dickson, in whose Dorsai series the villainous Friendlies are, for all practical purposes, fanatical Fundamentalist Protestants. Jack Vance, whose BLUE WORLD has yet another plot of agnostic hero against an order of hypocritical, lying, villainous priests. Mike Moorcock, whose ECCE HOMO takes a bisexual, time-traveling 20th Century Jew into the time of Jesus, with results that you would probably consider both obscene and blasphemous. The book is, from a technical literary sense, probably the best thing that this generally mediocre writer has ever done. You will find more of the same in fandom. There are a few witches, or Pagans, or whatever they are calling themselves these days. Not even RISFIP seems to have taken religion overly seriously, to judge from the demand for “censorship” of the Bible. They could, however, make a case. There are Solomon's love letters, and the 23rd chapter of Ezekial, both of which get pretty explicit. And towards the end of 1 Samuel, there is the final farewell between David and Jonathan. There's a lot of hugging and weeping, and then in the King James translation comes a passage rendered as “David exceeded.” The original Hebrew is “David higdil”, which means, “David was enlarged.” Yeah. There is a good reason why atheism is so wide-spread among science fiction writers and fans. Science fiction fandom is, basically, science fiction. Anyone who knows enough science to write science fiction is going to know all about the historic conflicts with religion—in every one of which science has had the victory. (Who, worth listening to, will today endorse the arguments of the enemies of Galileo or Darwin? Living viruses have been created in the laboratory from non-living matter; before this happened religionists said it was impossible and blasphemous, but now they have simply shut up about it.) Now that genetic research is going on, this same crowd is trying to quote Leviticus 19:19 against it. But it is not working. In times past, Christians could invoke the power of the state against those who did not worship God as they did, or at all. Then social ostracism was employed. Now, neither has any force or effect. We will never again see a John Badby burned at the stake for denying that communion wafers are alive, or a Giordano Bruno suffer the same fate for claiming that the Earth goes around the Sun. No accredited university or school will ever again fire a Scopes, or boast that it does not permit the teaching of evolution. Where once you relied on force to maintain and spread Christianity, you are now restricted to persuasion—and it isn't working. I don't believe you will be really happy reading science fiction if you are seriously having anti-atheistic views.
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