By asking the alethiometer for advice on her journey, about what she must do and likewise avoid, Lyra is communing with???even praying to???God for guidance.
if you look at eastern religions you will find as with Hinduism and Buhddism that you find your inner truth on your own you also rely for justification on truths ad=bout society. In Christianity God is who provides you with peace and who guides you down the path of true righteousness. In John 14 Jesus speaks saying, " I am the Way the Truth and the Life..." With the aliethometer she is not praying she is finding the truths and lies in her world through the Golden Compass not through God. She is rely on the Compass for guidance. you could say that the Golden compass is a god not God.
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Reluctant Theologian
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Without Dust, the creatures and humans of "His Dark Materials" would not know virtue: truth, courage and how to pursue what is good and just. Lyra's alethiometer, (the golden compass) is a device that tells truths (alethia is Greek for truth). It gets its power from Dust. By asking the alethiometer for advice on her journey, about what she must do and likewise avoid, Lyra is communing with—even praying to—God for guidance. The alethiometer is one source by which Lyra learns to be brave, to follow what is true and good even if it leads her to undertake tasks that are difficult and in which she must even defy the powerful and the powerfully corrupt.
In the universe of "His Dark Materials," we would not have salvation without virtue, without souls and bodies and ghosts. But for Pullman, it is not only creation and all its creatures that need to be saved by God. It is God as Dust, it is She Herself who needs salvation. As Lyra and Will strive to affirm the goodness of bodies and the right to cultivate a relationship with one's soul, as they shepherd ghosts into their exquisite afterlife, they face the most difficult task of all: saving Dust from the villains and technologies that threaten it, so that created life and all the universe can flourish and glory in Dust for all time.
"His Dark Materials" is a resounding call to open ourselves up to the underdogs of Christian theology—the feminists, the liberation theologians, the eco-minded, and the young lay theologians immersed in the messy work of what Christianity has to say to the poor, the disenfranchised, the women, the children, the earth—to all those groups without a voice, without a language or even images that speak to their circumstances. Like the battle to remove a corrupt, secret-keeping Authority in "The Amber Spyglass," "His Dark Materials" is a theological advocate of a sort, for those theologians who find our voices marginalized, and our theologies silenced in the face of the many powers that be in the Christian tradition today.
Donna Freitas is a visiting assistant professor of religion at Boston University. She is the coauthor, with Jason King, of "Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman's Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials," and author of the forthcoming "Sex and the Soul" from Oxford University Press.
© 2007
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