Apparently this email has been making the rounds, because I know of at least two other people who have received it from different sources. The email claims (I have to paraphrase from memory because I deleted the message some time ago) that the movie, based on a series of books by Philip Pullman, contains a watered down version of the books' message, which the email claims is to convert children to atheism. It claims that the books are a rebuttal to C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, which are seen as Christian allegory. It also claims that They (Hollywood? The "Secular Left"? The Atheist's Guild? I don't know who) are releasing the movie at the beginning of December, banking that children will ask for the books for Christmas, wherein the poor impressionable kiddies will get the less watered-down, full-out argument in favor of atheism, which will cause them to be converted.
Honestly, I could care less about the movie, but I was interested in the claim that a series of children's fiction stories would be released in an attempt to evangelize atheism to children. Any fiction author who compromises a narrative for the sake of an agenda isn't going to do very well in the mainstream. (I hope. Maybe that's just me giving people too much credit again.) So I decided to check out what the author had to say. I found this interview, which is long, but interesting from both a spiritual standpoint and a writer's standpoint.
Pullman is quite critical of organized religion, but his priority in writing is to be true to the story.
I’m not making an argument, or preaching a sermon or setting out a political tract: I’m telling a story. And I accept that if I’d had more time to think about it, no doubt I would have put in a good priest here or there, just to show they’re not all horrible.
But there we are. If you’re writing a novel, especially a long story of thirteen hundred pages, there are always going to be things you wish you’d done differently. Artistic perfection is not achievable in anything much over the length of a sonnet.
...I am the servant of the story – the medium in a spiritualist sense, if you like – and it feels as if, unless I tell this story, I will be troubled and pestered and harried by it and worried and fretted until I do something about it.
The second reason I do it is that I enjoy the technical business of putting a story together in a way that excites and gives pleasure to an audience. The third reason is that I need to earn a living – and there is another range of reasons beyond that which might include at some point the desire to make sense of the world and my experience of it and give a sort of narrative account of why things are as they are.
Philip Pullman
http://www.thirdway.org.uk/past/showpage.asp?page=3949
That last part, an author's "desire to make sense of the world and [his/her] experience of it," is what has interested me about every book I've ever read, and every story I've ever written. It bothers me that there are people whose mindsets are so completely stuck, so wedged in the few things they believe and demand are true, that they can only think anyone who questions their beliefs has some kind of organized agenda against them. To me, that says more about the accuser than the accused.
Besides, if anyone's faith is so weak that reading one children's story is going to derail it, did they really have faith in anything to begin with?
