apparently we need to keep saying this

[calimac]

or, it's not only Tolkien I keep going on about

Aslan didn't do anything to Susan. She did it to herself. She doesn't return to Narnia because she doesn't believe in the place any more. Lipstick is not the cause of her (self-)banishment but a symptom of her disease. She's a teenager who wants to be all Grown-Up and Fashionable, and retaining appreciation of her childhood loves and fancies doesn't fit in with her "mature" self-image. Real maturity, as Polly says, would embrace at least a fond recollection of what one enjoyed in childhood.

(the generating irritant)

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Closed minds.

[chorale.livejournal.com]

BC so clearly doesn't get the books.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I was stuck by #7, "When he kills all of Susan's family at once." That's a classic case of not accepting the author's premise.

If you grant the assumption of the series that Aslan is actually an incarnation of God, then killing people's entire families at once is something that Aslan does all the time. It probably happens every day, in the primary world, and theists believe that what happens in the primary world is God's will. This isn't strange or foreign to people who know the scriptures—it's all there in Job.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I quit the Tolkien bitnet list was weariness at dealing with one prolific poster whose claims of holes in Tolkien's subcreation were actually beefs with the Christian God. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to complaints against the Christian concept of God, but they're out of place in discussions of Tolkien's subcreation, where for purposes of discussion you have to accept that Tolkien believed it.

[incandescens]

Agreed. Thank you.

[yumiyoshi.livejournal.com]

Right there with you! The whole thing nearly made my eyes fall out, I was rolling them so hard. (Found this post via flemmings, btw.)