It must come with the name that Revere has to sound the warning — we’ve got anti-god/anti-religion movies available now, and more on the way. I’m a little surprised that movies that preach moral responsibility (don’t torture people, don’t imprison them without trial, don’t ship them off to countries that will torture them), sympathy and tolerance (gay people feel love and suffering, too) are considered anti-Christian, but if that’s the way they want it, that’s fine with me.
I’m also a little puzzled why they would find a documentary like Jesus Camp anti-Christian. It simply describes the activities that go on in a kids’ camp dedicated to religious indoctrination. Shouldn’t they instead be condemning hysterical dogma as practiced in that camp, rather than the movie that merely reveals it?
The one movie mentioned that I’m looking forward to seeing is The Golden Compass, even though I hear they may have toned down the anti-religious sentiment that’s present in the book. There is a little misconception there, though: the book condemns an institution dedicated to preserving dogma and that willingly sacrifices individuals to achieve its aims, and it is associated with religion, but it isn’t quite as flamingly anti-religion as some of the critics portray it, and I’m beginning to suspect that many of the religious fanatics who hate Pullman’s books haven’t actually read them.
I mainly want to see it because I like the polar bears and witches, myself.
Being a former devout Disneyterian, give me talking warrior polar bears and you own me … for up to two hours.
You don’t need to suspect; here the blogger wrote that “I won’t give the Pullman a dime of revenue toward’s the books, or the movie to see for myself”. She will, however, be sending Bill Donohue some ducats for the booklet that the Catholic League is hawking. I left a comment suggesting politely that she consult her local public library, or perhaps that she go to a local bookstore, sit in their cafe and read the books there. It has (surprise!) not made it through moderation. (Note also the obligatory whining that Pullman should have made his church look more Muslim, or Jewish, or anything but Christian. What a damned wallbanger.)
Narnia didn’t turn me into a Christian; I can’t imagine HDM turning a committed Christian into an atheist. Heck, the moral only becomes anvilicious at the end of the third book, when Mary Malone tells her backstory. This wouldn’t even be an issue if people weren’t so damned scared of atheism in this country.
Also, speaking of positive portrayals of atheists in the media, I just rewatched Hot Fuzz a few days ago. Bill Donohue must have missed that one.
I guess the truth is anti-Christian.
I am wary of the movie due to the removal of the religious aspect. It was a large part of the books and I have no idea how they are going to pull this off without it. When I first heard about it, my immediate reaction was disgust and anger that Pullman has to censor his work for our poor little frail religious population… but obviously he was willing to do it.
But that is just _exactly_ the sort of institution that Bill Donohue of the Catholic League is concerned with protecting.
Indeed. I thought Pullman portrayed God as a very sympathetic character.
Oh, and thanks to Northern Lights, I can recommend Tokay – as long as it isn’t poisoned.
Bob
Now, now. Please do remember that the first book used weasel words. It’s quite plausible that Donohue and his ilk are incapable of perceiving metaphor or pastiche, and that the book is simply adapted as-is. It’s not until at least the second book (possibly the third) that it’s made explicit that our Church is analogous to their Magisterium, and that the Authority is Yahweh.
You mean to say that “reality has a well-known anti-christian bias?”
R. Selkirk’s point at #5 is also why Jesus Camp is attacked: because it shows an institution trying to preserve itself at all costs and fundies know how goofy it makes them look.
Given the reaction by certain groups to books/movies like the Golden Compass, I think we need a new rating system. Instead of using explicit or violent content, we base it on how many right wing nutjobs hate it, sort of the “well, if it pisses off that guy, it must be good” effect. I’ve never cared about the Grand Theft Auto series, but if the next game had a warning sticker “James Dobson sez this game is evil” sticker on it I would seriously consider buying it.
There is a chain email going around that is mentioned on Snopes, which is rather ironic. It claims that the movie’s anti-religious themes are dumbed down with the Nefarious Intent of getting children hooked on the series. Then the parents will buy the omnibus, only to have their children’s souls forcibly removed once they reach the middle of the third book. So its a lose-lose situation for ticket sales to a lot of Christians.
The other books in the trilogy have a much more explicit anti-religious feel. But of course you are right: they haven’t read the books. They seldom read anything, not even the Bible…
I’ve been wondering if this Golden Compass movie isn’t actually just a plan to make some money off the first, least controversial book in the trilogy, and ignore the other two. It can be read mostly as an adventure story without the more controversial content in the second and (especially) third book.
According to the Wiki article, the studio and producers haven’t greenlighted the sequels yet. They say they want to see if the first one makes money. But they don’t have a lot of time to waste with a 12-year old lead actor. Kids change pretty quickly in appearance at that age, and the events in the three books don’t span more than a few months (IIRC).
So I guess I’m just a little skeptical, and I think they might be making this as a one-shot moneymaker. I hope not… it would be nice to see a gutsy adaptation of that third book. But I’m not holding my breath.
Oh yeah, one more thing…. the director said this (according to the Wiki):
IIRC, the last scene in the first book is where Lord Asriel announces his intentions, and you start to get a clear picture of what the overall theme and central conflict is. So they’re really kicking that can down the road, and this becomes even more of just a pure adventure film.
Since you brought up Jesus Camp, I have to say that it was a fantastic movie and it shook me to the core. Not because of it’s expose’ of a growing number of crackpot zealots admittedly working to indoctrinate our youth (I knew about that sadness already), but because the rest of the supposedly moderate religious America puts up with it on the belief that having faith is best no matter how it is manifested. “Moderate” christians almost certainly agree with the people depicted in the film on some subconscious level since they themselves have been indoctrinated to some degree their whole life, and no one likes to admit that they were raised poorly!
DS
drunkensci.blogspot.com
RE Jesuscamp.
I recall reading that the people in the movie itself (save the pastor at the megachurch who hammed it up for the camera) were somewhat puzzled by the interest that was taken in the actions that they saw as normal (laying on of hands, speaking in tongues etc, training up a generation of children who will lay down their lives for the cause.) And that makes sense, it is just like everyday stuff for them.
So… what’s the problem! The filmmakers just made film about it, not our problem that they come off looking like the fanatics that they are.
I guess I have to go back and give the golden compass a second chance, as I only got 1/4 way through before I gave up reading it. I think I was getting ready to defend, so maybe my judgment was off.
the same reason scientology objects to documentaries about xenu, brainwashing, etc. it looks utterly scandalous, if true. and it is. as for the first part, i’m afraid that “christian” no longer means “stuff christ would approve of.”
Nutmeg: (#15)
as a former fundamentalist, i must say i was actually underwhelmed by jesus camp. why? nothing surprised me, in the least. i was expecting something that would be downright painful to watch, having been involved in churches like this. nope — just cold emotional detachment. i think the problem is that the filmmakers just assumed that simply showing this stuff would be sufficient, without the need for much commentary. and it’s really not — this shit is normal for a good portion of americans. and they all sat around going “so?”
at the end of it, there was so much more i could have said.
This reminds me of when the last Star Wars movie came out a few years ago. At that time many were claiming that it had a deliberate anti- Bush/ Republican message to it in its portrayal of Palpatine and how the Empire comes to be. However, any Star Wars fan could tell you that the real thrust was a portrayal of how fascist regimes come about, as Lucas has stated many times that the Nazi party was a major influence on his concept of the Empire. Personally, I found it telling that one could watch the movie and come to the conclusion that a fictitious and stereotypical fascist leader was a stand- in for a real life president (this is not to say that I find Bush to be a fascist, just that many of his actions, ideas and beliefs resemble fascism and should at least be cause for alarm). If people are so easily seeing a real life religious organization in a fictitious evil authoritarian religious institution portrayed in a book, maybe they should be looking a little closer at the real life institution and worry less about the fabricated one.
At the risk of assuming content of a movie I’ve never seen nor even heard of:
“Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains” is anti-christian????
I suppose as anti-christian is synonymous with “explicitly left-wing, anti-American, anti-Christian ” .Sheesh.
===
Actually, I thought “The Golden Compass” had meta-physical overtones that I found a bit disturbing. (Daemons, despite their names, are manifestations of souls. Mucking about with coins in crypts make ghosts edgy. University and research has a church-like hierarchy and orthodoxy. “Dust” has an ambiguous physical/meta-physical existence.) They weren’t overt, as they were in the Narnia Chronicles say, but they were there in much the same as the are in many of Madeliene L’Engle’s (“Wrinkle in Time” is an exception) works which always made me a little uneasy. (Monks and Jesuits may be well educated and humanitarean but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t find them profoundly creepy when I was an eleven-year old fantasy obsessed atheist.)
I suppose the hard-core fundi-nuts object to witches, souls taking on animal forms, and theistic-based “natural history” (as opposed to religion and intellectualism being fundimentally opposed) anti-christian. But by that reasoning the Narnia chronicles are “anti-christian”. Most christians I knew (and I’m not talking about the touchy-feely god is what you perceive s/he to be new-age christians) who aren’t brain-dead fundies find these metaphysical themes in an implicit Christian physical/meta-physical reality.
It wasn’t until the second and third book that I realized he was using these themes to his anti-religious means.
#13
Wow! Before then the metaphysical elements (daemons, witches, dust, but especially daemons) which were presented
rather existentially had left me a bit uneasy and worrying that these books may be kinda christi-symphy. Up to this point the story is utterly innocuous.
What does he mean a better ending? The book ends with a bridge between worlds. What could be a better ending than that? Better beginning for the second movie? Maybe. The book begins in a different world (presumably ours) from the point of view of another protagonist. If they carry through with this, the last three chapters of the previous book is a lousy beginning. But movies series are loathe to change style midway so this is probably a good way to tie the second book into the framework of the first. But really, this just smacks of “let’s put off the contriversial anti-church stuff as long as possible and see if this will fly”. Cowards.
I had some second thoughts about whether shifting the last chapters of Golden Compass into the second film (if there ever is one), is a cop-out or not.
Maybe it does make sense on a “big Hollywood movie” level. The second book starts fairly slowly, and there isn’t much action and dramatic tension until about the middle of the book (if I’m remembering this right). If the second book starts with the last action bits in Golden Compass before the opening of the doorway between worlds, and the emotional crisis that goes along with it, then it’s a much bigger, whiz-bang opening for the second film. Hollywood likes big opening scenes in a big-budget film, and the second book doesn’t supply that.
So, I dunno… maybe it’s justified from the Hollywood perspective, when millions in production cost are at stake. I’m still suspicious that they’re just avoiding the central themes, to see how badly they get kicked around by the fundies for doing this adaptation at all. I guess we’ll soon see how it pans out.
Ack!… make that, “If the second film starts with the last action bits…”
So Golden Compass criticizes orthodox and organized religion? Wow, what a novel concept. It isn’t like the orthodox and organized religion hasn’t been criticized since the 17th century.
Ugh. Stupid people amaze me.
I read the first two books of Pullman’s trilogy, never made it to the third. I thought the first spectacularly good; the second fell away distinctly (though I still quite liked some of its imaginative conceits).
Thing is, though I am aware that Pullman, as a human being outside the books, is strongly antireligious, if he wanted to build that into the books, I don’t think he succeeded very well. If nothing else, surely the “theologians” of his Oxford are no theologians but scientists (albeit of a rather steampunky sort).
More to the point, though, only bad books are unable to be read as anything more than propaganda, and The Golden Compass is anything but a bad book. Though Pullman himself does not like them, it’s possible to read and enjoy the Narnia books without accepting their Christian message — or even, to judge by many comments here and elsewhere, without being aware of it, hard as it might be for some one raised in a European or Europeanoid culture to see how anybody could fail to pick up on it. (And for that matter, if you know anything about Lewis, you know that the books that really set his heart racing were very far from Christian.) Surely even Christians (of the non-autolobotomised sort, at least) can read TGC for what it is: a tour de force of imagination?
I read the first two books of Pullman’s trilogy, never made it to the third. I thought the first spectacularly good; the second fell away distinctly (though I still quite liked some of its imaginative conceits).
Thing is, though I am aware that Pullman, as a human being outside the books, is strongly antireligious, if he wanted to build that into the books, I don’t think he succeeded very well. If nothing else, surely the “theologians” of his Oxford are no theologians but scientists (albeit of a rather steampunky sort).
More to the point, though, only bad books are unable to be read as anything more than propaganda, and The Golden Compass is anything but a bad book. Though Pullman himself does not like them, it’s possible to read and enjoy the Narnia books without accepting their Christian message — or even, to judge by many comments here and elsewhere, without being aware of it, hard as it might be for some one raised in a European or Europeanoid culture to see how anybody could fail to pick up on it. (And for that matter, if you know anything about Lewis, you know that the books that really set his heart racing were very far from Christian.) Surely even Christians (of the non-autolobotomised sort, at least) can read TGC for what it is: a tour de force of imagination?
Mrs Tilton (#23), I have a confession concerning the following you said:
I first read the books when I was around 10 and 11 and did not pick up on any religious theme. I understood the themes concerning morality and heroism, but I honestly did not pick up on the Lion beish synonymous with the Christian God. It wasn’t until my senior year when I picked the books up again for a quick read did I pick up the religious connotations of the series.
I only mention this because the notions of the critics are unfounded. Narnia did not plant a seed of religion into me or a strong desire to follow the precepts of a defined God for the sake of entering into a New Heaven. Why would a book which depicts an evil god with vile crinimals as followers plant the seeds of atheism? Poopycock.
What’s funny is the critics assume children are dumb and have a vacuum in their brain which can be easily filled. Shame on those people who underestimate the intelligence of children, particularly their own.
That’s because you didn’t read the last book. That’s where the main theme is fully developed, as an overt battle against “heaven,” and against authoritarianism based on religion.
It’s not that strong a pure atheist perspective, IMO…. lots of woo-woo can be read between the lines about souls, life after death, and sentient dark matter. But as a fantasy aimed at the pre-teen audience, I think it works to advance skepticism in the face of authority based on “revealed” dogma. The very last line in the final book, in particular, fits in very well with the skeptic/humanist/atheist perspective. It will be interesting to see if the backers of a film version have the guts to go there.
Regarding: “I’m also a little puzzled why they would find a documentary like Jesus Camp anti-Christian.”
I am, too. And I don’t think the Christians portrayed in it would consider it anti-Christian. I saw the documentary when it played at a film festival in Washington, D.C., a couple years ago. The two filmmakers — two 30ish women who struck me as characters who’d have been comfortable on the set of Sex in the City — were there, and took questions after the screening. They said they showed the final cut to many of the people who appeared in the film, and their subjects were quite happy with the way it portrayed them.
Mrs. Tilton:
I’d suspect that’s because you didn’t make it through the third book. There are a number of scenes in the third book that are strongly anti-religious, as there are in the first two books, but there are also a few scenes that are anti-God, which I didn’t pick up on in the first couple of books.
I picked up the anti-organized religion bits of the book early in the first book, and those carried on well into the second book. Fairly standard stuff, IMHO. But when I read the third book I was blown away at how baldly the atheism was portrayed in the book, even through the filter of fantasy. The first few books read like “religion is wrong because human beings are imperfect” while the third book had more of a “religion is wrong because everything about it is a LIE – including God” – a much stronger statement.
Like Shawn, I, too, read the Narnia books as a young child and didn’t get any of the religious symbolism in them. I didn’t come from a churchgoing family, so I wouldn’t have had anything to compare them to, really. My best friend and I were atheist little kids and absolutely loved the series to such an extent that I can state definitively that the gateway to Narnia cannot be found anywhere in the houses either of us grew up in, nor was it in our elementary school or my grandmother’s house, or the woods behind my house.
My sister got to meet Phillip Pullman last week. I mean, really meet him, not just see him for a minute at a book signing. She asked me if there was anything I wanted to ask him. I couldn’t come up with anything, but later (too late) I thought of it. I wanted her to tell him that his idea of what happens when you die really helped me and comforted me, more than any other theories I’d ever heard. Because when you think about it, it’s true. When you die, your body returns to the elements and you do become part of everything, and you make the lives of other beings possible. Cheerful, really, I think.
“the book condemns an institution dedicated to preserving dogma and that willingly sacrifices individuals to achieve its aims”
The problem for most people who are anti-religion is that they correctly dislike the institutions and the dogma promoted, yet err when they automatically connect true spirituality which doesn’t do that.
I was thinking something similar myself: the setting and the story are interesting enough that I don’t care what the author’s religious views are.
That, and Nicole Kidman in the preview looked exactly like the image I had of Mrs. Coulter. Lord Asriel had more of a Jürgen Prochnow quality, but I think Daniel Craig can do a decent job.
I agree that Mrs Tilton should really read the third book. In it the protagonists are told to return to their respective worlds and build ‘the republic of heaven on earth’. That is after they allow senile ‘god’ to die and the chief Archangel is dragged down into the endless void. He has shown that even if the deities and angels exist they are not worth worshipping. If that is not a call for an atheist revolution I don’t know what is.
Peter @32,
one day I probably shall get round to reading the last book of the trilogy, though many whose opinions I put stock in have said it doesn’t measure up to the promise of the first.
Still, I’m aware of the plot developments you describe (so no need to feel you’ve shown me any spoilers). And that is pretty much what I meant. Not only are the theologians of Lyra’s alternative universe much more like Victorian physicists than like actual theologians, the “atheist” world that Pullman constructs has a God and archangels. I do take the point about God not being worth worshipping; but that is something very different to atheism! (Indeed, it reminds me more of John Milton than Richard Dawkins.)
Well, it is fantasy, I suppose, and fantasy needs an element of the fantastic. It’s just that I think it succeeds better as fantasy than as an anti-religious tract. That wouldn’t be surprising. Judging by a couple of the comments in this thread, after all, it seems that Lewis’s Narnia books only work as Christian indoctrination if you’re already Christian.
A friend of mine watched the startup messages on one of my computers; and seeing the word “daemon” (spelt that way) appear a few times, mentioned Philip Pullman.
I’m definitely going to have to read some of his books now, even if just to see what all the fundamentalists are on about!
Damn, I tried to post a comment on that link in post #2. Unfortunately, the bastard has moderation turned on, so I’ll never get to see my precious nugget of blasphemy posted =