Contributed photo
Young Lyra (Dykota Blue Richards) is on a courageous mission in 'The Golden Compass'.

Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter

For many evangelicals and Roman Catholics, the release of The Golden Compass in cinemas last Friday in the United States was not merely the unveiling of another movie, but another blow to theological orthodoxy and an invitation for viewers to embrace atheism.

Phillip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass (on which the movie of the same name is based), and two other works that comprise what he calls His Dark Materials, is a strident atheist. His books, critics argue, seek to rescue people, especially children, from belief in God, or certainly 'excesses' that could result in belief in the Almighty.

While atheism has long been in existence, it has noticeably gained momentum since 2006 with the publication of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon, Sam Harris' Letter To A Christian Nation; Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Hitchens' God Is Not Great, reached number one on the New York Times Best -Sellers' List in its third week after publication. Dawkins' God Delusion, in early December 2006, was number four on the New York Times' Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers' List after nine weeks, on the list. It remained on the list for 51 weeks until September 30, 2007.

Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, in October 2006 entered the New York Times Best Seller' List at number seven. Dennett's Breaking the Spell, though it did not seem to figure as prominently on the New York Times list, was, nevertheless, a best-seller.

The coming of these atheistic volumes has begun a national conversation in the United States and elsewhere. Several newspaper column inches have been devoted in the last two years to the thoughts of these writers.

Analysts speculate that the fervour to produce such anti-God literature is, in part, a direct consequence of the rise of militant Islam since September 11, 2001, when the world changed following a terrorist attack on the United States.

Writing in the January-February 2007 edition of Humanist, a bimonthy magazine of the American Humanist Association which provides articles about secular and religious humanism and social commentary, Fred Edwords, in a column entitled 'The times they are a-changin' said, "This past fall it seemed not a day went by when freethinkers, atheists, secular humanists, and the like weren't mentioned in the mainstream media.

Star-struck teenagers

"With the devotion of star-struck teenagers, all the major U.S. newspapers ran multiple stories and interviews with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, three luminaries who even turned up all together in the pages of Newsweek and Wired magazines, touting their respective books on secular reasoning and the dangers of religion.

"I can remember, back in the late 1960s, that to publish a forthrightly nontheistic book one needed to go through a freethought publisher. Not only would no mainstream U.S. publishing house touch such a work, none of the major vanity houses would accept money from those willing to pay for such publication."

Excerpts of Whistleblower Magazine which were posted on its parent's publication website World Net Daily (September 7, 2007) sought to explore America's new-found fascination with atheism.

The report cites David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus Books, who, in celebrating the success of anti-God best-sellers told the publication, "This is atheism's moment."

The report continued, "In earlier eras, atheists were on the fringes of society, mistrusted by the mainstream. Those few who dared to publicly push their beliefs on society, like Madalyn Murray O'Hair, were widely regarded as malevolent kooks. But today, Hitchens' No. 1 New York Times best-seller, which has dominated the nonfiction charts for months, boldly condemns religion - including Christianity - as "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

'Scarlet Letter' T-shirts

Whistleblower continued, "Americans are infatuated with outright, full-bore atheism. In fact, Dawkins, the Oxford scientist who wrote The God Delusion, is even selling young people 'Scarlet Letter' T-shirts with a giant 'A' - for 'atheist' - on his website (and bumper stickers too). Somehow, atheism - just like homosexuality, which used to be considered shameful and something to hide - is now becoming hip, sophisticated, enlightened, even a badge of honour.

Peter Pullman, The Golden Compass author, according to an article appearing in the New Yorker on December 26, 2005, was asked to address University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, on the subject of religion and education.

He began his address, the New Yorker reported: "I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality'; but I think I can say something about moral education, and I think it has something to do with the way we understand stories."

Pullman told the audience, "We can learn what's good and what's bad, what's generous and unselfish, what's cruel and mean, from fiction." There is no need to consult scripture. As Pullman once put it in a newspaper column, "Thou shalt not might reach the head, but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart."

In his trilogy which forms His Dark Materials - The Golden Compass (originally called Northern Lights in the United Kingdom), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass have as their main character, a young girl, Lyra Belacqua, who becomes enmeshed in an epic struggle against a nefarious church known as the Magisterium. Interestingly, the person who leads the Magisterium in the movie has a not slight resemblance to Pope Benedict XVI.

Dr. R. Albert Mohler, a leading conservative, evangelical cultural critic, on his website, seeks to lay bare his own sense of the danger posed by the movie and the books of Pullman.

Fall is reversed

He said, "The entire premise of the trilogy is that Lyra is the child foretold by prophecy who will reverse the curse of the Fall and free humanity from the lie of original sin. Whereas in Christian theology it is Jesus Christ who reverses the curse through His work of atonement on the Cross, Pullman presents his own theology of sorts in which the Fall is reversed through the defiance of these children. As Pullman insists, Eve and Adam were right to eat the forbidden fruit and God was a tyrant to forbid them the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil."

Pullman once told an interviewer that "every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him." Peter Hitchens, a conservative British columnist, published an article about Pullman entitled "This Is the Most Dangerous Author in Britain," in which he called him the writer "the atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed."

The direct attack on Christianity and God is toned down in The Golden Compass movie. Though in the real world, the Magisterium is the authoritative leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. In Pullman's world it represents Christianity as a whole.

Pullman who in newspaper interviews, expressed disdain for C.S. Lewis, has designed His Dark Materials as a response to that author's Chronicles of Narnia.

Already, churches and Christian groups have issued red alerts to the coming of The Golden Compass. The December 11, 2007 edition of LifeSiteNews.com reported that "The Archbishops of Baltimore and New Orleans can be added to the growing number of U.S. Catholic bishops expressing public opposition to the anti-Christian, anti-religion film The Golden Compas. New Orleans Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes warned that the film is based on the His Dark Materials books by Philip Pullman, books which the archbishop said, "surreptitiously lead children to atheism and pose a special threat to Christianity."

Archbishop Hughes warns, moreover, that the subtlety with which the books and film promote anti-Christianity may be a greater danger than a more frontal attack. "The kingdom of Satan is at war with the Kingdom of God," he said.

"His weapons are violence and deceit. In some ways, violence is easier to fight against. It is more obvious and more abhorrent, even though we have a great deal of difficulty in containing it today. Deceit, however, is subtler and more subversive. It fosters rebellion through half-truths."

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