The case of God Be Gone etal.
I ran across a blog called GodBeGone.
Looking at the writing there I drew an immediate comparison to the recent controversy over the Golden Compass movie.
Fr. Martin Fox pegged the objections to the movie in his article: Golden Compass author: ‘My books are about killing God.’
In it he says
Parents can’t always keep up with popular culture—”and when a movie is promoted as a fun adventure, featuring children riding enchanted polar bears, all in time for the Christmas season, what’s not to like?
Unfortunately, the film’s makers have an agenda. The film is based on the works of author Phil Pullman, who has written a series of entertaining stories called “His Dark Materials.” In his own words: “‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,’ says Pullman. ‘Mr. Lewis [C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia] would think I was doing the devil’s work'” (from the Washington Post, Feb. 19, 2001). And, “I’ve been surprised by how little criticism I’ve got. Harry Potter’s been taking all the flak…. Meanwhile, I’ve been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God” (from the Sydney Morning Herald, Dec. 13, 2003)…
I read a review of the Golden Compass in The Atlantic, aptly titled How Hollywood Saved God.
That’s true in that Hollywood watered it down so as to make it meaningless.
Substitute any characters in the movie – plug Saint Francis in here or Bing Crosby in there, and we’d all be singing White Christmas as we process to church with little animals at our side.
Mr. Pullman got ripped off big time. Hollywood took his book and turned it into a movie that was 99% fluff and little substance. So much for the strength of his convictions standing before the all powerful Hollywood money machine.
What I was most struck by as I read through the Atlantic review and the GodBeGone blog was the lack of reasoned argument and scholastic integrity from the “there is no God” folks.
…and isn’t that it.
I fully agree with people’s right to believe or disbelieve as they see fit. I am confident enough that Jesus Christ and the Holy Church can stand up in any reasoned argument, but these folks rarely bother with reasoned argument.
Mr. Pullman is just repeating a mantra made up by someone else. He’s offering his literary skills as a mouth piece for that mantra without any real study of the points-of-view involved
Any debate or discussion that relies on unstudied diatribes (Mr. Pullman going off on the crusades, witch hunts, blah blah) and the repetition of accusations as a substitute for reasoned argument or scholastic integrity is meaningless. In the GodBeGone blog you find repeated shots at God through the improper use of the English language (let’s not capitalize Jesus or Christianity or anything else we find silly because, well that’ll get ’em).
Consider the historical parallels.
If we repeatedly accuse a group of folks of all sorts of bad things, supporting such with horrible literature, twisted history, and bad scholarship, and we use language in such a way as to make them inhuman (don’t capitalize their names – they’re not human anyway), don’t we set them up for inhumane treatment, concentration camps?
Scholarship takes more than sound bites. It takes more than blog entries. It takes time, study, an understanding of the core beliefs of your opponent, unadulterated by fluff and histrionics.
As the Young Fogey might point out, tolerant conservatism does not demand that you believe what I believe, nor does it force my beliefs upon you. It does demand that we be gentlemen about the process and that you respect my rights equally, including my right to be treated humanely and to profess my beliefs.
So have at it. Tell me how wrong I am.
Thanks for this entry, the positive mention/link and the new, super-readable format/template!
I’ve never read the books but Clive Barker’s novel Imajica (the only one of his books I’ve read) was similar and I almost saw the film last week. As a relatively well-catechised adult who loved the Narnia books as a kid I was curious how an apostate or non-Christian would rubbish them, an intellectual exercise that if well-done the thoroughly Roman Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien would have enjoyed immensely. He never forgave C.S. Lewis for Narnia – he thought it was a dumbed-down, preachy ripoff of ‘Lord of the Rings’. This looked well-made based on the ads for it.
Anyway I saved my money and found better things to do, and I understand this flopped.
Like those other big nothings The Last Temptation of Christ and the stupider Da Vinci Code Christians getting into a state only gives them free advertising.