I am currently listening to various YouTube essays on LOTR lore. I have read most of the books and watched the films multiple times. Now it is entertaining to listen to summaries about deeper lore from people who also read The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, and have researched various other writings by Tolkien himself.
I find it fascinating how deep the lore he has invented for his world is, and I totally respect the amount of work he put into it. He did create a great piece of literature that I like and undoubtedly will read again.
But I never read The Silmarillion. I tried twice, and I could not get thru the first chapter. It read like the Bible, albeit more coherent.
And that is the thing baffling me the most about Tolkien. He was sufficiently self-aware to notice that what he writes sounds like a religious text, yet not so to realize what it implies. He essentially wrote a creation myth that is more logical, more internally consistent, and in much better prose than the Bible, yet he remained a devout Catholic for his whole life.
I have never believed in any God, god, or supernatural being, or superstition. Not really, really believed, although there were times when I tried, and there certainly were times – and still are – when I would much wish for a benevolent and kind omnipotent being who would intervene on behalf of those in need, me included. It would be nice if I could pray for good weather, for example. But deep down, I always recognized this as an irrational desire disconnected from reality. The only thing that religion more broadly, and prayer and various superstitions (knock on wood) in particular, do is give a comforting illusion of hope and control when there is none.
Thus, I fundamentally lack the understanding those atheists have, who had an epiphany during their life and lost their faith. I never had faith; therefore, I cannot empathise with those who do. I never had an epiphany losing my faith; therefore, I lack personal knowledge of how that happens.
But if I had to guess one way such an epiphany could happen, it would be a direct, detailed confrontation with the human ability to create fictional deities and spin intricate stories about gods out of the fabric of imagination and legend. And Tolkien had such a confrontation as detailed as it gets. Yet he remained a believer in the Virgin Birth and the whole convoluted, contradictory, and downright nonsensical and idiotic mess that is Christianity as a whole and Roman Catholicism in particular.
He is proof that highly intelligent and informed people can believe in objectively proven bullshit. I have struggled to understand that reality my whole life.
I agree exactly!
I was raised Catholic but I stopped believing in my mid-teens.
I never saw it as an epiphany, I saw it as part of growing up.
I’m still baffled by adults who are devout anything.
chigau @2: I never believed (once I started thinking about the stuff I heard in church and Sunday school, around age 10). But as time went on, I knew there were really smart people who did believe. Some of them even talked about their beliefs, without proselytizing. I didn’t get it, but I eventually realized I didn’t have to. “there’s nowt as queer as folk”, as the Northern English saying goes. Shit, there are people who don’t recognize Robert Fripp as a genius. Can you imagine?
I’m as baffled by atheists who say, in effect, “I’m an atheist so every right-thinking person should be” as I am by theists who support Creationism or oppressing anyone who differs from them.
I think it took me six tries to really get The Silmarillion, but it’s definitely been one of my favourite books ever since. And yes, it’s by far the best creation myth I’ve ever read.
He certainly was a queer old bugger. (In the British sense!)
In a weird coincidence I just finished watching the Hobbit and LotR movies. I also managed to read the Silmarillion, but I have a fascination with mythology and folk tales.
As someone who was raised as a Christian, but is now an athiest, I believe that the hard part isn’t figuring out what you believe is false. The hard part is worrying about what friends and relatives will think, about leaving a community. Fortunately, for me, the community aspect wasn’t particularly strong. I can imagine that for people whose whole set of friends and family, whose support network, are bound up in the faith it can be an incredibly difficult process of disentangling yourself. That’s the real challenge of leaving a religion (or any other belief system for that matter).
I have often wondered about this very subject myself. It takes a whole lot of special pleading to acknowledge that religions are fake, to the point where you create your own fake religion, complete with one God (Eru Iluvatar), a bunch of sub-gods (Valar) and angels (Maia), and a fantastic story about how the world came to be (and it is THE World…the Ages of Middle-Earth Tolkien “documented” are actually meant to be an earlier incarnation of OUR world)…but make an exception for the religion that belongs to you. And yet, that’s what a large percentage of religious people believe (minus the part about inventing a fake religion themselves, obviously). They can read a myth from another faith and see it as a nice (or not-so-nice) fictional story, but read one from their own, and see it as literal Truth, something that actually happened as described, to real people, on a real Earth (I will ignore the metaphorically-true people, because it’s kind of hard to know what they ACTUALLY believe…I’m not sure THEY even know what they believe).
From what I’ve read, I peg Tolkien as one of the “so crazy it can’t be fabricated” nutcases. To him, the Christian doctrine was so unbelievably perfect, and thus so improbable that it could only be Truth, passed on by divine revelation. I guess there’s something to be said for a lifetime of indoctrination!
I could be wrong, but I tend to think that most people who are religious believers are believers for primarily emotional reasons, rather than logical/rational ones. In a sense, whether their beliefs make rational sense or are completely consistent is irrelevant to them -- the important thing is that they feel right to them. They might rationalize their beliefs if questioned about why they hold them, but emotion is the primary motivation for holding them.