Irregular Books

If you’ve ever been on a church email list, or know somebody who has been, you’ve probably gotten one of the messages warning you about The Golden Compass - a fantasy book written for young adults that has been made into a movie which will be shown in cinemas starting next week. These emails claim that The Golden Compass has been cleverly designed to seduce children to become “militant” atheists (though the book is not written for children, but teenagers and adults). Some members of Gathers have copied and pasted parts of this forwarded email, and published them as articles here.

Let’s think about what this email claims. If reading The Golden Compass really has the power to transform people into transform teenagers into atheists, then how come there hasn’t been a dramatic increase in the number of young atheists in the time since The Golden Compass has been published?

It’s been ten years since The Golden Compass was published, and in that time, millions of people have read The Golden Compass. Are there that many more atheists on Earth now than there were before?

If not, then it seems to me that the Catholic League and its email campaign about the spiritual dangers of The Golden Compass are nothing but hype.

People who get the email warnings of imminent religious catastrophe as a result of this one book need to stop allowing themselves to be whipped into a frenzy, and think logically about the claims being made in that email for just a second.

Let’s base our concerns in reality, not in propaganda campaigns that depend upon forwarded emails.