It has become a rule, some sort of law of the popular culture upon which any open-minded human worth her soul can rely with utter and perfect clarity.
It goes like this: If there is a piece of art, a TV show, a column, a book, a movie, a blog, a movement, a wine bottle or sexual position that somehow deeply threatens the various ultraconservative sects of Christian-blasted America to the point where their pale, dour representatives demand boycotts and distribute angry pamphlets to try to stop people from experiencing said hunk of culture because of how negatively it portrays their seething, condemnatory God, well, it's time to break out the Champagne. Or buy that book. Or get very, very naked. Or all of the above.
So it is with the first movie made from Philip Pullman's astonishing "His Dark Materials" trilogy, "The Golden Compass," a complex, mystically gorgeous, spiritually dense, big-budget fantasy epic so far removed from the cute wizardry of Harry Potter and the thin, childish, monochromatic Christian morality of, say, "The Chronicles of Narnia," that it might as well be a Coen brothers movie. On acid.
...
The nefarious thing the books aim to kill is religious authority. It's about the destruction of dogma. It's about power, about who wants to control and manipulate life on Earth, about the blind, ignorant, even violent adherence to insidiously narrow codes of thought, belief, behavior, sex, desire and love.
This, of course, is the God of organized religion. This is the false deity that promotes numb groupthink, inhibits growth and abhors the feminine divine (perhaps the books' most beautiful, inspiring theme), the same paranoid, dreadful God that votes for George W. Bush because he will smite the icky gays and protect us from vile pagans and Buddhists and Muslims and feminists and frumpy genius atheist British writers. If humanity is to flourish, to get over its addiction to war and guilt and fear, this is the false God that should - that must - die.
Amen.
Read more.
It goes like this: If there is a piece of art, a TV show, a column, a book, a movie, a blog, a movement, a wine bottle or sexual position that somehow deeply threatens the various ultraconservative sects of Christian-blasted America to the point where their pale, dour representatives demand boycotts and distribute angry pamphlets to try to stop people from experiencing said hunk of culture because of how negatively it portrays their seething, condemnatory God, well, it's time to break out the Champagne. Or buy that book. Or get very, very naked. Or all of the above.
So it is with the first movie made from Philip Pullman's astonishing "His Dark Materials" trilogy, "The Golden Compass," a complex, mystically gorgeous, spiritually dense, big-budget fantasy epic so far removed from the cute wizardry of Harry Potter and the thin, childish, monochromatic Christian morality of, say, "The Chronicles of Narnia," that it might as well be a Coen brothers movie. On acid.
...
The nefarious thing the books aim to kill is religious authority. It's about the destruction of dogma. It's about power, about who wants to control and manipulate life on Earth, about the blind, ignorant, even violent adherence to insidiously narrow codes of thought, belief, behavior, sex, desire and love.
This, of course, is the God of organized religion. This is the false deity that promotes numb groupthink, inhibits growth and abhors the feminine divine (perhaps the books' most beautiful, inspiring theme), the same paranoid, dreadful God that votes for George W. Bush because he will smite the icky gays and protect us from vile pagans and Buddhists and Muslims and feminists and frumpy genius atheist British writers. If humanity is to flourish, to get over its addiction to war and guilt and fear, this is the false God that should - that must - die.
Amen.
Read more.
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