Salon's Miller Misses the Boat About Catholic and Christian Reaction to Movie
Salon's Laura Miller wrote an LA Times' piece attacking an e-mail to Catholics and other Christians about the spiritual dangers of "The Golden Compass" movie for children. She accused the e-mail authors and the Catholic League of breathless, unsophisticated fear-mongering.
The movie is based on a book by the (agnostic, atheist, or Deicidist?) Philip Pullman who has said his books are about "killing God." Pullman apparently meant persuading children to kill God in their own hearts and minds. The bonus at the movie's website? Your child can learn how to meet his or her 'personal demon.' "Isn't that special?" to quote an 80's SNL expert on the topic.
It's the unique atheist who believes in demon spirits. Perhaps Pullman does not despise C.S. Lewis for his Narnia trilogy as much as for his "Screwtape Letters" in which Lewis fleshes out a view of how personal demons work on human beings according to Christian theology. The end of "Screwtape Letters" is sobering in light of atheist fundamentalism and its aims.
Miller's indignant thrust was that many Catholics overreacted to Pullman's trilogy "His Dark Materials." Not really. Those who hunted Salman Rushdie overreacted. Those who want to kill a teacher in Sudan are overreacting. The Crusaders overreacted. History records much overreacting, meaning first reacting instead of responding, and then overdoing that.
Not so with the Catholics Miller derides. They are using their First Amendment rights to respond civilly to an agenda shared by men like Pullman and Richard Dawkins who are put in general circulation while Christian authors are placed in their own sections. Perhaps different bookstores behave differently.
When atheist writers from the U.K. manage some level of bestseller status in the U.S. and then take anti-civil libertarian positions toward religious persons in the U.K., why shouldn't Americans be concerned?
In the U.S., people of faith have quadruple protection under the Bill of Rights and its interpretive U.S. Supreme Court decisions. There are good reasons for this, one of which is that some groups in religious cultures that are persecuted tend to strike back eventually. For Christians, the human tendency to disregard the imitation of Christ and rely on physical might to defend the faith has been recorded since Peter drew a sword at Gethsemane. And betrayal of the holy has been part of the unglamorous yet honest story from the start.
To stop the cycle of persecution among religious peoples by secular or other religious peoples, and also the cycles of violence we still see in places without a legally enforced Bill of Rights, the founding fathers arranged for four key freedoms: from establishment, of religious exercise, of speech, of religious speech and of religious association.
The faithful in this Pullman affair have responded to actual, blasphemous attacks and deeply offensive barbs about their faith by Mr. Pullman. Ms. Miller doesn't deny these were said, yet she biases herself by minimizing their importance.
Think: atheists can forbid their children from going to churches, church camps, and shut the door on religious solicitation. However, Christian parents who can’t afford private schools or who cannot home school face truancy laws enforcing attendance at schools in which anti-Christian doctrines, rules and sometimes administrative bias are routinely shoved in their faces (not that recent figures on US students’ competitiveness in math and science support the efficacy of that approach).
Less biased journalists captured Pullman's words and alerted readers to his agenda for children in "His Dark Materials." The agenda was to get children to renounce God. It is the same agenda the Soviets had for Russian children of religious parents sent to gulags. The Soviets used force and here, dump trucks of money go into the atheist fundamentalist evangelism that is itself a non-falsifiable hypocritical idea.
Stalinists shaved the kids' heads and put them in re-education camps to learn to hate religion, and if necessary, their parents if they wouldn't renounce Christ. Pullman has reportedly spoken of bringing a child-character to kill a "senile God" representing the God of Christians.
Pullman blames a "senile" God because Pullman resents God's morality for His unwillingness to force that morality on humankind. In the same breath he would likely argue against Theists using government to force morality on citizens. In Pullman's world, God is responsible for human evil because God should have prevented it by force if necessary, or should have created human beings to be morally fullproof. Such a god would be a great totalitarian or remote controller. Such a god, in the minds of many, is already used to justify sin and crime.
Ms. Miller wishes to hide the implications of Pullman's beliefs by modifying them with the views of a fringe Catholic theologian (whose theology she agrees with) and contrasting these with the Catholic theology of God implied in the response to the movie. The theologian she enlists seems to think that Pullman's intent was merely to kill the paternal God and replace it with one that "fits our age." So we see Miller has a favored theology in her spin.
Unless it is true that maleness caused the Inquisition and or the excesses in the Crusades, blaming the paternality of God for the excesses of politically impassioned partisans and killing Him for it puts gender hatred of the Taliban into a symbolic reversal. And it is not liberal (or feminist) merely because it sounds feminist.
