the golden compass - to ban or not to ban? Part 2

so, the debate continues on - to ban or not to ban the movie? why ban the movie when the books on which the movie is based are not banned? if the movie is deemed 'offensive', so are the books. the books have achieved a huge fan following, with one critic comparing the trilogy to the Lord of the Rings and the Narnia Chronicles. one even called pullman the 'last of the great fictional writers of the 20th century'. concenring his style and writing, i would definitely agree.

as i mentioned in my earlier post, if christians are offended by the movie (or by the books), they can always practise self-censorship (just as they did with the harry potter series). let us not be like Garfield (one of my favourite cartoons) who when he couldn't sleep at night woke up poor Jon and said, 'If I can't sleep, neither can you!'

in my opinion a better way to respond is to talk with our children about the form of 'atheism' found in the book (as charged by many Christians). actually, it is not even 'atheism' in the trilogy. if pullman was pushing his atheistic agenda, why bother to talk about God, the church etc? he could have abandoned them completely and write his triology purely on a materialistic or secularist level. the fact that he still uses these themes can bring another debate - was pullman trying to discredit the institutional church and her beliefs in God? i prefer the latter view, as i think pullmann was trying to put across his reaction. ok, maybe he had a bad childhood epxerience with the church or something happened that caused him to look down upon the church. that's his view, we can accept that. it is true that the institutional church through the ages has committed many 'gross abuses'.

so, let us talk about pullmann's 'reaction' with our children. they are never too young to understand important topics like these. my 2 children are 'critics' of the church in their own right - they know when a pastor on the pulpit is not 'preaching the word' or 'when the action of a local church is not a christian one' etc. after all, they are PKs (pastor's kids) all their life. they can tell me when pullmann is trying to pull a fast one on the church in his trilogy. when they cannot understand some other things like the meaning of the Oblation Board, here is an opportunity to explain to them the meaning of the word 'oblation' and how pullmann is trying to connect it with the hideous experiments on the children in the artic.

even if our children are too young to understand all these things, we can always tell them that the triology is basically fiction (although based on many actual facts. i find pullmann's description of oxford city in lyra's universe a very accurate description of Oxford as it really is, having spent a considerable amount of time living there in the last 6 years. the description of the part of the city called jericho and the river isis brings back memories since the place where i studied called OCMS is near jericho). the triology may be based on the idea of a multiverse or parallel universes which co-exist with one another, things which we cannot 'prove' anyway. ideas like travelling through diferent universes still remain on the fiction level. or the fanciful idea that our daemons can be outside us and talk with us and change shape at will!