Man, I forgot about ol’ Mark Morford — whom I used to link to a lot — until this commentary on The Golden Compass got linked on Metafilter. Though it’s not really a commentary on the film— it’s a excellent commentary on Bill Donahue urging all good Christians to boycott the film.
It goes like this: If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is truly threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit. Don’t you agree?
I was glad to hear that people were outraged— it means that the director is staying at least a little close to the excellent source material, with all its anti-dogmatic themes.
Sadly, the outrage is mostly because the movies might inspire people to read the much-less-subtle books. Boo. Bring on the Catholic-bashing on the silver screen.
Man, all these protests make me want to read the books again. Somehow I don’t remember much about killing god or any mention of Churches in the books…all I remember are the animals! Yay animals! And some weird Adam/Eve scene that didn’t seem to have any interesting animals.
Clearly need to re-read….maybe this time I’ll be mature enough to understand the atheist propaganda parts.
Comment by gobble — December 1, 2007 @ 9:14 am
One can only hope
Comment by Patrick — December 1, 2007 @ 9:56 am