[On Philip Pullman]
Should parents allow their children to read his God-undermining books? Secular forces will say "yes." Some liberal pseudo-Christians may actually say "yes" as well. Christians with common sense will instead say, "Don't hand your kids to the lions!" He is an "admitted" lion who wants to divest your kids of all faith in the Christian God. Don't let his "fable-framed," "Satanic" Trilogy get even close to your kids. God demands that we protect our kids from types such as Pullman, and we have the duty to follow His expectations.
28 comments
"God demands that we protect our kids from types such as Pullman"
As with any cult, they demand one not investigate or believe anyone who has investigated beyond what information the cult wants one to have.
Universally enforced ignorance is ultimately impossible, simply because somebody must learn a concept before they can decide to prohibit anyone else from learning it, and any group that adopts such a policy cannot help but make hypocrites of its leaders (and, indeed, counterexamples of the alleged dangers of exposure, since people who pronounce material they are familiar with to be too morally or spiritually damaging to be safely handled by their followers invariably never consider themselves sufficiently so damaged as to no longer be suitable leaders)
In any case, it's been said many times before and will be said many times again until it finally sinks in: if your beliefs, and those you shoehorn into your kids' heads, cannot survive exposure to other beliefs or concepts then they are entirely worthless and fully deserve to be displaced by something more robust.
Personally, I think God demands we think for ourselves and explore lots of different ideas. Then if you do choose faith, it's done thoughtfully, fully understanding there are contradictions and that it needs to maturely approached in order to allow you to acknowledge other paradigms and to sit comfortably alongside science in the modern world.
Blind faith just means you stumble about until eventually fall down a metaphorical manhole.
I have to admit ignorance here and say I don't know who Philip Pullman is. However, since the fundies don't like him, I'll bet he's a pretty decent and good person, and probably pretty intelligent. But I doubt he's tried to fool people into thinking he's a lion.
God doesn't say any such thing, how could he? There's no such thing as God.
Belief is a stupid thing. You are stupid.
To be a tither-payer is absolutely stupid.
To be an evangHELLical is absolutely filthy.
The bible is not to be interpreted literally.
The bible is a poor source of morals and ethics.
@Brain_In_A_Jar: 100% agreed.
But "The Dark Materials" is lame anyway. I don't see how it could undermine anybody's faith.
I've got mixed feelings about His Dark Materials. On the whole, I like it, and find its tone, ethics and general approach to life reasonably palatable, not to mention its creativity, though the pacing of the first book seemed to drag at times. Towards the end, however, it seems to show a certain depressive fatalism that I'd normally expect more from religiously minded authors - Tolkien, in particular, springs to mind. I should point out that I also like Tolkien, but it's sometimes frustrating when one of his characters cannot seem to do something obvious and simple because he's constrained by some terrible oath taken by his hundredth ancestor, or something along those lines - of course, this is simply the nature of Tolkien's world and one must accept and engage with it on its own terms in order to enjoy the work, which I do, but, just occasionally, an awareness of how ludicrous such an immaterial, supernatural constraint would be in the real world does float perilously close to the surface of consciousness.
Somebody wrote into the papers complaining about the showing of Pullmans other series (yes, he has written more (Sally Lockhart)) on tv. That has no or few anti-christian qualities, but they complained about it, probably because they had only heard of the Dark Materials ones and hadn't bothered to watch or find out about the Sally Lockhart mysteries.
I like the Dark materials trilogy, but it's the only set of childrens books he wrote that are blatantly anti-religion.
By the way.... Micheal.... You should be fine letting your children see the Golden Compass film. They removed anything which could be viewed as discrimination, and thus destroyed the book. But there are no references to god.
More complaining about books one doesn't know about. Here's what happens in the end (fundies often claim that the characters "kill God"):
It's actually an angel--Metatron, the regent--posing as God. He's keeping the "real" one in a cage of sorts, and the main characters let the real one back out, not knowing that that's what they're doing. He disperses into the air with kind of a nod and wink, and some of the other main characters push the false one into a bottomless pit to fall forever.
I'm a Christian, and I actually really enjoyed the "His Dark Materials" series. I may disagree with some of it's philosophical standpoints, but it's a darn good story, and I would recommend it for many older kids out there.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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