[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

My thoughts? David Brin, and anyone else, is just a person. Celebrity status does not give his opinion any more weight than anyone else's opinion. He's entitled to his, I'm entitled to mine, and neither his nor mine is superior. It just is.

I was once a Star Wars fan, back in the days when we had to wait three years for the next part of the story to come out. I had been a Tolkien fan for over 10 years by the time the first SW movie was released, and I had no trouble being a fan of both. By then, I was also an ex-Catholic, and knowing that Tolkien was a devout Catholic in no way troubled me. Again, he had his point of view, and I had mine. I had also been a science fiction and fantasy fan for a good long time. The secular humanist movement had always been strong in SF fandom, but I and most of my fan friends weren't a part of it (I may no longer be a Catholic, but I still believe in God). The "humanist" vs. "religious" argument has striking similarities to another argument in SF fandom, that of "books" vs. "media." To make a long story short, when Star Wars came along and made SF acceptable to the mainstream audience, some of the more vocal and eminent pre-Star Wars SF fans, feeling threatened by the massive influx of fans of science fiction movies and TV shows, began to decry all "media" SF as inferior to "book" SF. It had a profound effect on the fan community, and as someone who at the time was on both sides of it, I can say from sad experience that it got pretty ugly.

The issue of secular humanism vs. religious belief in SF may well have a similar history. When the internet came into the picture as part of the SF community, I think something was unsettled in what some people saw as the status quo. Time was, there were SF fans of all kinds of beliefs, from very religious to agnostic to atheist, and it was fine so long as nobody was perceived as pushing their beliefs as the only "right" way the think. I know that I have participated in a number of discussion groups where people's religious beliefs are made quite plain; you see it in screen names and sig files and such all the time. I've even run across people who automatically assume that everyone on a given board is a Christian, just because they seem nice and behave politely. I'm sure that this is sticking in a number of craws in the SF community, and some of those people will feel a need to respond by making their own beliefs equally clear. Almost inevitably, I fear, intolerance rears its ugly head. Just as it did 30 years ago when Star Wars changed the way the world looks at and accepts science fiction and fantasy.

What all this means, at least from my point of view, is that something happened that shook up or irritated the Star Wars fans with a humanist point of view, and they now feel they must defend their position more forcefully (no pun intended). That they are aiming at LotR is not surprising to me, because of the popularity of Jackson's movies. Star Wars was once the preeminent SF movie series, held all the records for attendance, etc. -- and Jackson's LotR came along and changed that. I've seen (and known) a lot of fans of popular works who were profoundly upset when something knocked their favorite from the Number One spot. They react almost angrily, with a vigorous statement of why what they love is and will always be superior, and why "the enemy" is inferior. What strikes me as odd about this particular humanist vs. religious argument is that it sounds like a repeat performance of what happened when the massive popularity of Star Wars shook up the SF community so many years ago. (It also strikes me as odd because part of what I didn't care for about Jackson's version of LotR was that, to me, it felt like he was trying to interpret Tolkien through the lens of secular humanism, downplaying or eliminating virtually all the "religious" aspects in favor of adventure, but that's another discussion entirely.)

When all is said and done, Tolkien's works were intended to be mythology, and by its nature, myth tends to be what some would call religious or spiritual. It's a way of explaining the inexplicable in the world, in nature. I have loved mythology and comparative religion since I was a little kid, and I've found great inspiration in many things I have read and learned. That doesn't mean I have to be a card-carrying believer, so to speak. All just my opinion, for what it's worth.