MetricFurlong said:
Therumancer said:
I fail to see where it having Chrisian elements to it should be an issue at all. I find it kind of ironic that when something similar to this comes along with a focus on non-Christian religion or philsophy,
In the case of the Narnia series it wouldn't really be a problem if it was only elements. Up until the Dawn Treader yeah, elements are all there is but afterwards the series takes a very steep dive into preachy territory (and also, by way of the Silver Chair, generally sucking). It's really quite hard to fully convey the problems in The Last Battle to someone who hasn't read it, and to anyone who has read it their impression of it is going to seriously colour their perceptions of the earlier books as they can now see what all those 'christian elements' were leading to. To describe the implications of that book as being unfortuante is a bit of an understatement, considering they include equating Islam to worshipping Satan and the way Susan is explicitly excluded from 'heaven' for the unforgiveable sin of prefering adult life to childhood.
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I don't see how there is anything wrong with any religion having it's own standards on who comes to a good end, and who doesn't. In the end that's the basis of pretty much every religion out there.
As far as Islam being considered akin to Satanism by Christians, the same can be said in reverse. The same can ultimatly be said of pretty much every religion out there, even if they don't use Satan specifically.
The bottom line of a religion is that it's a path to salvation, which may or may not involve the intercession of a higher power (some Eastern philsophies take an approach involving ascension, or becoming your own god). The bottom line is that you follow that set of beliefs, or bad things happen. This could be anything from being stuck in a limbo-like plane of nothingness waiting for a divine being to take you (either to heaven or hell) which will never happen because there is no such being (a belief of Buddhism in brief), to being cast into some form of eternal torment, erased from existance entirely, or reincarnated as a lower form of life from which you must earn your way back up. The idea being that anyone who does not follow that path is by definition wrong, and going to suffer from it. Some religions are more aggressive in trying to benevolently save people though by spreading the word.
Christianity and Islam both take a tact that there is only one truth, and anything besides that truth is wrong. What's more there is a malicious force (The Devil) who tries to steer people away from that truth so they can suffer eternal torment. Any belief other than the one truth is the work of The Devil. As The Devil only needs to distract someone from The Truth to win, he doesn't nessicarly need to lead people into profaning the almighty or doing anything evil. If he can get people to follow other, benevolent seeming religions, or similar religions that have details wrong, he ALSO wins just as much if he turned you into a baby killer.
Viewed that way, it's just like any other religious or cultural story, that deals with the rewarding of those who kept the faith. You also see it in non-religious contexts with stories about people who say remain loyal to an old, missing ruler, despite the terrible cost of doing so, only to see it pay off in the end when he returns to power. Some versions of "Robin Hood" very much have that as a theme and depending on who is telling the story it can be taken as "good, clean English values, as opposed to French decadence".
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At any rate on the subject of Narnia itself, I would point out that you may or may not be correct in what you think. Indeed the end of Narnia deals with those who remained loyal to Aslan travelling on to the true Narnia, where those who did not are banished, however at the same time also understand that it's revealed that everyone in the story is already dead EXCEPT for the one girl who wasn't there because she "no longer believed". Susan wasn't omitted for her beliefs, she's still alive!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Battle