Trivial?

The very fact that Philip Pullman does not find the "great questions" in Tolkien sheds some light on the nature of contemporary atheism. The central themes of the "The Lord of the Rings" are the necessity of death, the passing of beauty so that it can be saved, the renounciation of power for the sake of love. That these are RELIGIOUS questions is simply inconceivable from Pullman's standpoint, since religion is not associated with the experience of beauty and love but with moralistic power. People like him can only think of salvation in juridical, not onthological terms. In other words, they are Protestant atheists. They rebel against the God of late European Christianity, but it is still the only one they can imagine.