Lullabee
But, whatever. If Pullman is saying nonsense about killing God, he's a nut. How the heck would you do that?
If you believe, as Pullman does, that God is a cultural construct then you (metaphorically) kill it by helping guide your culture to a point where it ceases to employ that construct.
The idea of a Flat Earth, for example, is still around in the sense that everyone gets the idea, kids believe it for a bit and we remember its historical adoption. But the idea's dead in the sense that it no longer has any cultural value. Nobody subscribes to it and nobody uses it for anything. To 'kill' God in this sense would be to reduce the idea of God to the same status.
Lullabee
In the last book in His Dark Materials, he does have God sort of die. But it sort of seems symbolic-- Lyra saw this feeble old man stuck in some sort of sedan chair, thought he looked kind of miserable, and since he was so ancient, he just blew away when she let him out. And it turned out he was God, but for ages, he's been powerless, the angels have been in charge of everything. Basically saying that Christianity doesn't really represent what it says it does, it's just people bossing each other around under the guise of religion. So either be done with God altogether or actually take him seriously...
Oooh...that's an interesting reading.
A lot of people who want to 'de-radicalise' the books enough to make them a little safter seize on the fact that the 'God' figure in the novels (Pullman calls him 'the Ancient of Days' if I remember right) isn't really in power and that he isn't the Creator anyway. That's certainly the approach of the Head of the Anglican Church, who's a massive fan of the books.
I'm not so sure though. As you say, it's all symbolic, and I think the intended symbolism reads differently. Making 'God' an impotent old wretch and stressing that he didn't create the universe isn't a way of letting 'the real God' off the hook, it's a way of symboloising that he thinks the very idea of God is past it's prime and outdated, and symbolising that he thinks God is an idea people had, rather than that the universe was an idea God had.
The problem with talking about any of this is that there're three levels of ontology here, and they all overlap. There's the Idea of God, the Person of God and the Character of God. The Person of God isn't really in play since Pullma doesn't think he exists. So we've just got the Character of God and the Idea of God, and the relationship between them which is, like you said, symbollic.
But if it was symbolising the more consiliatory and comfortable "either be done with God altogether or actually take him seriously" message then what would be the effect of taking him seriously within this symbollic framework? If you bypass the Church and the Angels and direct your worship directly at the Ancient of Days...then you're directing it at a senile fraud.
His Dark Materials is a complicated series that allows for a lot of different readings. But I don't think it offers any comfortable or safe interpretations.
