Talk:Faith of Our Fathers (short story)/Archive 1

Untitled

Hmm. This is one of the most challenging and distubing stories in the small sub-genre of religious science fiction, and deserves a more thorough article, particularly since Dick himself relates it to his loss of faith, and that it also prefigures his later religious epiphany.

What does it mean to say the God of "Faith of our Fathers" is "evil"? Dick implies strongly in the story that the Leader is revealed to be either God or, at the very least a demiurge, rather than simply some alien creature. The horrific theme of this story questions our assumption that an all-powerful, all-knowing being would have our best interests at heart. This is what the story is about; using the word "evil" here trivialises the doubt and fear and moral concerns that are at the heart of this story.

Dick would later revisit this theme in Rautavaara's Case, where the God of the aliens in that story is not God the shepherd, but God the top predator, and the aliens are horrified by the, to them blasphemous, sacrament of the eucharist. Dick has the aliens say:

"They drink the blood of their God; they eat his flesh; that way they become immortal. To them, there is no scandal in this. They find it perfectly natural. Yet to us it is dreadful. That the worshiper should eat and drink its God? Awful to us; awful indeed. A disgrace and a shame-an abomination. The higher should always prey on the lower; the God should consume the worshiper."

-- The Anome 09:53, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

Quote citation

If anyone has a copy to hand, that quote (about offending many people) is included in one of the collections of short stories published in the UK (I understand different publications exist in the US) where relevant quotes are published at the end of the book. My copy is a few weeks away from me at present, can someone else cite in the mean time? I'll look it up when I get back to my parents, but don't delete it in the meantime Alastairward 11:50, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Carrére's book ISN'T a biography

I Am Alive and You Are Dead is not a biography of Dick, it's a novel where Dick is the protagonist, and mixes huge doses of fiction with facts. The real bio is Sutin's Divine Invasions. I'm going to delete that part of the entry which mentions Carrére's book as a bio. --93.40.136.91 (talk) 20:32, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Sources and inspirations

I think this is an apt section for this story's article but believe it needs a lot of improvement and references. The story was written for Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology which I'm surprised to see is not mentioned and I think both the foreword and afterward to the story vary in orginal publication of book and later publications. I think a statement in the original book publication that the story was written under the influence of LSD was the main, if not only, subject of change in later comments. Don't have references at hand to add something on this in article section now. In Dangerous Visions which was an anthology of original stories written for this "theme" anthology the introductions were by Ellison and the afterwards by the authors. This has been critically commented on as one of a relatively small number of stories in the anthology that lived up to the requested/stated nature of stories for Dangerous Visions (roughly, breaking taboos of SF genre). This is a PKD story with comment by the author about the story written to accompany the first publication in a rather special context, there aren't many of his short stories with comparable commentary. Refrigerator Heaven (talk) 12:50, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Overlong quote

The second quote, starting "I don't advocate any of the ideas in Faith Of Our Fathers;" seems excessively long to me: it might make sense in an article called Religious views of Philip K. Dick or a subsection of Dick's own article to the same effect: but it's far too long for this article. -- The Anome (talk) 19:29, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't agree with that, it's not too long and should be featured in this article. But I agree that it's inappropiate in the section "Plot" - thansk for changing that. --Fixuture (talk) 20:14, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

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