Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Philip Pullman" in English language version.
he is one of England's most outspoken atheists. ... Opposed to this ideal is "theocracy," which he defined as encompassing everything from Khomeini's Iran to explicitly atheistic states such as Stalin's Soviet Union.
I suppose technically, you'd have to put me down as an agnostic.
At first he asserts, very much in the vein of Dawkins and Hitchens, that faith in one God is itself the source of evil: 'Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him.' Asked about the crimes committed by atheistic totalitarian regimes, Pullman responds that 'they functioned psychologically in exactly the same way,' with their own sacred texts and exalted prophets: 'The fact that they proclaimed that there was no God didn't make any difference: it was a religion, and they acted in the way any totalitarian religious system would.' ... When he finally acknowledges that 'the religions are special cases of the general human tendency to exalt one doctrine above all others,' it comes across less as a reconsideration of his views than as a grudging concession. There are no reports of Pullman's plans to write a sequel to His Dark Materials in which the attempt to build an earthly Republic of Heaven ends in firing squads and gulags.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link). uce.ac.uk. 6 May 2004I suppose technically, you'd have to put me down as an agnostic.