Apparently the small-screen adaptation of famous atheist Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is pretty unwatchable, because absolutely nothing happens of any consequence to anybody:

HBO’s latest fantasy offering is an adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s infamous His Dark Materials trilogy. The adaptation fails for the same reason that the preceding film adaption was a travesty: the source material is boring.

With his steampunk adventure centered on Lyra, a young girl who navigates alternate realities, Pullman was trying to write an anti-clerical equivalent of Tolkien or CS Lewis’ Narnia books. But whereas those authors had deep spiritual and intellectual wells to draw upon Pullman has only atheism.

Ideologically based fiction always fails on some level. Tolkien and Lewis’ fiction was not based on ideology but rather faith and a rich understanding of what culture means and does. Faith can be ideological, but theirs was not. Rather their faith was a dynamic reality in both their lives. But atheistic ideology is literally based on nothing.

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Atheism is still far from the norm in the West, but certain elite segments have been too willing for too long to treat it as brave. It might be brave to be an atheist in Smalltown, Arkansas or Afghanistan, but it’s not brave or interesting in the cultural setting that Pullman introduced his novels. The basic tenets of his worldview, that religion is oppressive and animalistic individuality is the highest form of human expression, are extremely common. If this is all Pullman’s atheism has to offer then His Dark Materials is just standard bourgeois dogma about what it means to be happy. 

There are only two compelling atheistic narratives – the horrifically existential and the happy nihilist. The former is best exemplified by HP Lovecraft and the latter by Douglas Adams. Both are based in the brutal truth that if atheism is an accurate depiction of the world, then nothing really means anything. Lovecraftian writers use this to create stories that drive us mad with their creeping cosmic dread, while the Adamses of the world make us laugh through the sheer absurdity of their observations. Both use atheism to get at fundamentally human realities.

Writers like Pullman are incapable of this level of honesty and so their stories always fail, ironically enough, to be meaningful or interesting. They don’t have the courage to admit that if they’re right, life means absolutely nothing at all. If all there is is this gigantic universe, then our pathetic little lives are just tiny meaningless blips. Pullman wants to paint atheism as heroic, but the fantasy worlds he created are duller than dust. This was made shockingly clear in the horribly conceived first episode of His Dark Materials.

I (vaguely) remember watching The Golden Compass, or at least I think that is what it was called, starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Nicole Kidman, and the voice of legendary faggot Sir Ian McKellen as that giant talking polar bear. (The man himself might be as queer as a three-dollar bill, but he gets major props for his superb portrayal of Gandalf from the LOTR trilogy. Which, as Any Fule Kno, was AMAZEBALLS.)

That must have been well over 10 years ago. To this day, I cannot for the life of me understand what the point of that film was.

And the reason why is simple. The entire plot of The Golden Compass, both the book and the film, and of the rest of Mr. Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy, was to criticise the Catholic Church by creating a ridiculously inept pastiche of it in the form of “The Magisterium”.

Back when I watched that film, I still called myself an atheist. I’d been in the USA for a couple of years by that point, and my views were beginning to change, very slowly. It would be a few more years before I would read the book that served to utterly destroy my cocksure faith in atheist arguments about the arrogant superiority of the rational mind – that book being, of course, The Irrational Atheist by our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH).

Even back then, I could still understand, as an atheist, just how bad the writing was in the movie. I never bothered to read the book, so I have no idea whether it was just a bad adaptation of the source material, but judging by the evidence, I’m not missing much.

The basic reason why books like Mr. Pullman’s fail to make any real impact is because atheism rejects the numinous and the supernatural. In so doing, it rejects the very things that both elevate and terrify our souls and spirits. Atheism in its most extreme forms denies even the existence of the soul and focuses completely on the material world instead.

The problem is that the material world is dark, dank, smoky, grimy, miserable, brutal, squalid, disease-filled, and depressing. It is not a world in which most of us particularly like to live. That is why the spiritual world is so important – because it gives us hope for something better, and also provides us with something far, far worse so that we can be terrified of it and be grateful for what we already have.

Atheists counter that their insistence on dealing only with the here and the now makes them more rational, tolerant, humane, and decent – but the moment that you actually go to the trouble of pointing out the logical contradictions and absurdities of their philosophy, and show them that their secular humanistic creed results in them valuing human life less than their religious counterparts, they go quite berserk.

And nothing sets an atheist off quite like being reminded that it was faithless, godless regimes that murdered, starved, brutalised, beat, shot, burned, bombed, and otherwise destroyed the lives of upwards of 100 MILLION people over the 20th Century. As far as they are concerned, No True Atheist would ever do such a thing.

Atheism is a dead end because it has nothing to offer. It cannot answer the problem of the existence of evil in this world. It cannot explain why evil has power, and how that power can be contained and even destroyed. It cannot provide hope for a better future.

The only ways out of atheism are, as noted above, through the horrifically existential or the happily absurd.

If you choose the former, as an atheist, then you will be forced to contend that there are forces in this world that are not of this world, which regard us humans as anything from nuisances to be ignored, to outright pests to be exterminated. That is precisely how H. P. Lovecraft imagined and executed his masterpieces of horror fiction, and anyone who has read The Call of Cthulhu can attest to just how effective that paradigm can be in evoking a sense of supernatural terror.

The same applies for The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, which is a book that makes no mention whatsoever of gods of any kind but instead plonks the reader straight into a world teeming with truly deadly and terrifying supernatural horrors that can unhinge a man’s mind instantly.

But here the atheist runs into a bit of a pickle. You see, if an atheist were to read Lovecraft’s work – whether it be the Cthulhu Mythos, or relatively standalone stories like At the Mountains of Madness, one of my very favourite works of his – he would still be confronted with the very uncomfortable realisation that there are entities that exist both in and outside of the material Universe that are, for all intents and purposes, gods.

Some of those gods are malevolent in the extreme toward humanity. Some are relatively benign. But not one of them holds any particular goodwill toward Mankind, and worshiping those same gods is almost always a surefire path to destruction.

So the ideologically pure atheist must, if he is honest with himself, reject this “horrifically existential” mode of thought, and is either reduced to treating everything as basically one giant joke, or sharply criticising faith and religion in place of actually doing anything useful with his life.

If he treats it all as a joke, then he is effectively doing what the Buddhists do in ignoring the state of the world and trying to maintain a sense of detachment and unreality from it all. It is not coincidental that many, if not most, atheists share a strong affinity for Buddhist and Hindu teachings and philosophies. The notion that everything around us is maya, an illusion, allows them to concoct all sorts of increasingly fanciful and absurd theories about what is really out there.

The atheist is able to convince himself, with literally no way to prove his theory, that we inhabit but one of an infinite number of multiverses, and that every decision that we make on a daily basis splits off and creates new alternate realities and paradigms, and that this Universe that we inhabit is simply one contained in a sort of quantum “foam” of seething bubbling multiverses, all blinking into and out of existence in ways that the human brain has no power whatsoever to understand.

If that is so, then perhaps it might be useful from time to time to put that idea to the test. Only problem is that we literally cannot do so – there is nothing to test.

And if the atheist turns away from treating it all as a giant joke, and instead resorts simply to criticising others for believing in silly things like faith and religion, then he must by definition constantly stay on the attack, because he is part of a tiny minority of people who are willfully blind to the spiritual and the Godly.

But here the atheist again runs into a serious problem.

In order to attack those people that he perceives as believing in things that he considers nonsensical, he must treat them as inferior beings. To do this, he has to ignore the fact that humans are capable of both great good and terrible evil, and concentrate only on the evil that men do. He must therefore reduce men to caricatures without depth or complexity, who act in autonomic fashion along rigourously programmed patterns of behaviour.

Because the atheist does not believe in gods, or in God – cannot even conceive of such a thing – he is at the logical extreme reduced to believing that he is merely a meat machine, acting according to preprogrammed biological impulses, with no real free will of his own. That is, assuming that he actually bothers to be logically consistent.

And here we see the truly great and intractable problem with atheism: it leads to precisely NOTHING.

The endpoint of atheism is nihilism. If we are merely preprogrammed machines existing in an insanely vast multiverse where our every decision both creates and destroys realities, then there is no ultimate purpose to anything – not to our existence, not to our capacity to love or hate or create or destroy, not to our ability to bring new life into this world, not to our ability to make our mark upon the world through our deeds.

Nothing has any point. Nothing has a purpose. Nothing is worth pursuing.

It is all so BORING.

THAT is why atheists keep failing miserably to create truly great and wonderful works of literature. Their entire philosophy is one of absolute and utter boredom.

Consider two of the more memorable works over the past century or so by those that largely reject the concept of gods in general and God in particular.

Let’s start with Ayn Rand, author of legendary books such as The Fountainhead and, of course, every pretentious philosophy student’s wet dream, Atlas Shrugged. I have read both books. I found them to be quite brilliant in some ways.

The first third of Atlas Shrugged, for example, is easily one of the greatest books ever written, because it describes human emotions and dynamics in a truly brilliant way, and creates interesting and sympathetic characters and powerful stories. But the remaining two-thirds are an absolute snoozer, because those same characters then become complete caricatures, acting in wooden and predictable ways as if they are robots.

Ayn Rand was an unrepentant atheist and her fiction reflected this fact. There was no higher purpose to existence other than… well, to exist. There were superior and inferior beings, and superiority was assessed through cold rationality and remorseless logic. The highest acts of human existence were not to be enjoyed or marveled at. Food was not meant to be delicious but was merely functional. Procreative sex, which is the very best and most wonderful kind of physical intimacy that we as humans have available to us, was not something to be happy about, but was instead something to be done grimly and robotically in pursuit of “higher truths”.

Or consider George R. R. Martin, author of the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. Assuming that he ever gets around to finishing that series, which seems rather unlikely given the clown car crash that was the final season of the TV adaptation and the fact that it has been 7 whole years since he released A Dance of Dragons and thereby completely jumped the shark by creating a 1,200-page doorstopper of a book that went precisely nowhere, it is really quite difficult to see how he is going to stick the landing.

The entire series is one long and pointless exercise in excruciatingly grim elaborations of the dark side of human nature. There is nothing uplifting about it. There is no hope. There is no sense of a titanic battle between good and evil. There are only honourable and decent men who get killed off because they are good and decent, and the wretched, broken, tragically flawed, and profoundly disgusting rest who scramble to acquire whatever power and coin that they can, while they can. Oh, and there are dragons in it.

Contrast this with the works of writers like Tolkien or Jack Vance or John C. Wright or others.

J. R. R. Tolkien, in particular, was not a great writer. He was a professor of languages whose meandering storytelling style was very much an acquired taste. In all of my years of reading, I have yet to come across another fiction book that spends so much time trying to explain the tangled origins of various languages and spends so little time on somewhat consequential matters like, oh, I dunno, a coherent plot.

And yet, Tolkien’s work is revered as the ultimate standard of fantasy fiction, while everyone else who has ever tried to top his work, has failed.

Why is that?

Because Tolkien knew and understood that men need hope.

Men need to believe in something bigger and better than ourselves, something that can heal us and redeem us and uplift us. The blind and foolish materialism of someone like Philip Pullman cannot do this; in fact, all that Mr. Pullman can do is criticise that which he plainly does not understand, for his depiction of the Magisterium as darkly secretive, oppressive, and anti-scientific, is simply ridiculous given the actual history of the Catholic Church.

(That the Mother Church is in fact all of these things today is not because of faith in God the Father of Jesus Christ, but in spite of it. The Vatican turned away from the majestic light of God’s Truth a long time ago. The broken and corrupted institution that we see today is a direct result of that folly.)

And the best kinds of stories are the ones that provide us with hope of a better world, where a man who believes in that which is objectively right, good, and decent, can face evil in all of its horror and fury, and still triumph in the end.

Atheists can’t do this because they don’t have an objective standard for judging evil that is separate from faith and religion. They can’t create one on their own, because it is impossible to create an objective standard of evil based on rules made by men, since that which is evil to one set of men is not evil to another set. Indeed, it is nearly impossible for an atheist even to define evil.

No such problem awaits for the man of faith, especially the Christian.

To us, as Christians, that which is evil is simply defined as that which is in opposition to the will of God.

We believe that God is all-good, all-merciful, and willing to forgive all that we do, if only we allow Him into our hearts. By definition, therefore, that which opposes the will of the Lord, is evil.

For us, defining evil is easy. Identifying it is even easier. And figuring out how to beat it is easiest of all. We just have to be willing to stand firm in the face of evil and tell the truth in kindness, with the sword of justice and the armour of faith to sustain us.

That is why stories that feature epic struggles between good and evil are great fun to read and very memorable to boot.

If you are interested in such stories, well, there is no shortage of them. On the fantasy side, there is The Arts of Dark and Light series written by our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH). On the sci-fi side, try The Saga of the Nano Templar by Jon Del Arroz, or the new Deus Vult Wastelanders series by Adam Smith. I’ve been digging into those and I’m really enjoying them.

If you don’t want religion forced upon you in any way, then give LTC Tom Kratman’s Carrera series a go and see what war is like from the point of view of an author who has seen it, studied it, understands it, and knows how to fight it. LTC Kratman is a devout Catholic who has a particular penchant for crucifixion, and understands both the strengths and weaknesses of Western civilisation and its enemies.

Atheism fails at pretty much everything it touches simply because its entire basic premise is absurd. You cannot separate the physical from the spiritual. It is simply not possible. Men have souls, and we are ensouled for a reason. We almost certainly do not fully understand why – we see the world through a glass darkly, after all – but the fact that we have them in the first place, indicates that we were meant to use them, and it seems only prudent and proper to elevate and enlighten our souls in any way that we can.

If nothing else, it will stop us from being bored to death by preachy message-fiction that tries, and fails miserably, to offer anything but pointless, aimless, grinding nihilism.