The Golden Compass

I knew little about The Golden Compass, but then something someone said about it triggered a fading memory, and I grepped my email for "Pullman," the story's author. Here is what I wrote about him two years ago here:

http://www.crlamppost.org/darkside.htm

The same guy, Philip Pullman, also noted (in the Washington Post, Feb 19, 2001, "The Last Word"; an article about how his trilogy for young adults ends in God's death) that in his stories "I'm trying to undermine Christian belief."

So cross Philip Pullman of the list of authors my children might read ...

So let's be clear. The author of The Golden Compass is, in his own exact words, "trying to undermine Christian belief." And he slams C.S. Lews and Narnia in this way:

One of the most vile moments in the whole of children's literature, to my mind, occurs at the end of The Last Battle, when Aslan reveals to the children that "The term is over: the holidays have begun" because "There was a real railway accident. Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used to call it in the Shadowlands - dead." To solve a narrative problem by killing one of your characters is something many authors have done at one time or another. To slaughter the lot of them, and then claim they're better off, is not honest storytelling: it's propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology.

He believes that believing in heaven as I, and millions of others, do is "hating life."

I will not see The Golden Compass. YMMV.