The Golden Compass (some thoughts)

The vitriol surrounding the next installment in the atheistic euangellion (after Dawkins’ books, his series, not to mention Hitchens and Onfray), the Golden Compass, is surely the sweetest thing to hit the producers’ ears since Nicole Kidman signed on to star in the project.

This is the movie version of Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights, part of the Dark Materials trilogy.
In the Sydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum from the 1st of December (I’ve been a little busy!), Pullman is quoted as saying, ”My story resolved itself into an account of the necessity of growing up and a refusal to lament the loss of innocence.”

That is, he pictures a world, which, when considered from a Religious point-of-view, is full of naughty people, who have discovered how much fun life is, with the church chasing them around and telling them to stop it. He traces this back, as I take it from his comments, to Adam and Eve in Eden listening to the serpent, who actually knew that God was a big kill-joy.

However, respectfully, I think he may be a little skew-if.
Eating of the tree of knowledge gave us not the choice of knowledge as against innocence, but the choice of doing bad as against good, i.e. what we were able to do with our knowledge.

For God isn’t against pleasure, against life. In fact, we are told “taste, and see that the LORD is good.” (Psalm 34:8)

God wants us to use our knowledge for good.

An obvious example is what we do with radioactivity – we can use it for medicine, to save lives, or alternatively we can bomb the heck out of one another, or at least threaten to, and in the process assemble enough weaponry to destroy the world many times over.


Perhaps Pullman has been hanging out with the Amish?

I say this because it’s logically implausible for the many Christian scientists, authors, futurists to not be condemned as stepping out of the orthodoxy of Ludditism.


I worry Pullman read until the third page of the Bible and never kept going, never saw the problem, the outworking of original sin.
And if that’s the case, then he obviously is unaware of God’s solution to the problem of mankind’s rebellion against him.


So sure, see the film – it sounds sort of interesting – but please know that the paper-doll this film sets up to assasinate, bears no relationship to the God of Wonders who created the universe, sustaining it by his word, and who is worthy of all glory, honour and praise.