Fear of fiction
The Golden Compass is the film adaptation of the first story in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Since Pullman is an athiest, controversy has inevitably followed, with various Christian groups in the US misleadingly describing the film as a “stealth atheism campaign” and demanding that their followers boycott the film.
President of the Catholic League, wannabe Irishman, Bill Donohoe has - in a demonstration of paranoia not seen since Elizabeth: The Golden Age was released - has gone so far as to describe the film as “bait” to lure youths to Pullman’s novels where they will be influenced by the author’s “pernicious atheist agenda.”
But Pullman told Newsweek he is a story-teller whose only agenda is “to get you to turn the page.”
“To regard it as this Donohue man has said — that I’m a militant atheist, and my intention is to convert people — how the hell does he know that? Why don’t we trust readers? Why don’t we trust filmgoers?” Pullman said. “Oh, it causes me to shake my head with sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world.”
Or, as PZ Myers puts it:
It’s just a book and a movie, and it doesn’t compel the reader to like it — and we could say that about any of the overtly atheist books that have been published lately. Maybe Donohue should save the outrage for the day we have tax-exempt Pullman reading rooms, or when Pullman is required reading in science classes, or when politicians are elected on the basis of their attractiveness to Kingmaker Philip Pullman and his lobbying group, Fantasy for the Family.
And it is just a film, one that happens to be based on a book. A piece of fiction based on a piece of fiction that no-one with any sense of reality is going to confuse for anything other than a piece of fiction. So what is it that all these outraged Christians are afraid of?
Tuesday 27 Nov 2007 | Paul | New and Upcoming Films, Religion
