I got one of those emails recently warning of this awful movie coming out that will damage me and my children permanently and seriously!!
The Golden Compass is a children's fantasy novel by an atheist and the characters kill god at the end. I looked it up on imdb.com, and no mention of killing god whatsoever. Hmmmm.
So I head into my 5th grade son's parent-teacher conference with his homeroom teacher who is also the reading teacher and a very liberal Southern Baptist. She laughed when I asked about the book and told her about the frantic email warning. She loaned me the book from the 5th grade library, and then emailed me the next week to share that she had just received her first email warning about the evils of fantasy literature, which apparently some people cannot identify correctly.
Having just finished The Position by Meg Wolitzer (a great read about a family whose parents wrote a groundbreaking book about sex), I am ready for another fiction read. My non-fiction task is currently a book recommended by Phil Lund - The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. This one will take a while for me to plow through.
check out for yourself the imdb info on the movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385752/
The content of the email (from my fundamentalist sister-in-law) and the snopes comments are at:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/compass.asp
Heaven forbid we teach people to discern fact from fiction and make decisions for themselves. SIGH
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2 comments:
Spoiler Warning: Yeah, the main characters in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy do "God" in. But 1) They didn't mean to. This is not deicide, it's godslaughter. 2) They never knew that they did, which makes me wonder just how many times a day we "kill God" without knowing it. 3) God was in such a fragile state just about anything could have done him in. Lastly, the death of God is such a minor point in the story that if you blink, you will miss it. What's the danger of the book? It's that it is existentialist children's fantasy literature. It teaches that your choices are what you are responsible for and what matters in the world(s). Far more dangerous for adults than children, if yo ask me.
what, the KILL God in that book? oh no!
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