Using the Wrong Compass

Would you let your kids visit a site that offers them their own personal familiar spirit based on a creature of nature and they called it a "daemon?" What if they made a movie about it? What if in the end of the stories it told that the children killed God and did as they chose?

The stories I'm talking about are part of a series called His Dark Materials and the movie is called The Golden Compass. The author, Phillip Pullman set out to literally invert Milton's Paradise Lost by becoming one of those on the side of darkness. He creates a strawman of God by making him a feeble old angel and his church to be the real center of evil power needing to be overthrown.

Although Pullman has taken exception to it, his trilogy is compared as the antithesis to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Pullman levels charges at Lewis, finding him contemptible. Pullman also lumps God with all religions, an error committed by most atheists, and judges the church a corrupt and repressive regime.

New Line Cinema is producing the film, the same that produced The Lord of the Rings trilogy. My admiration for producing such a work based on Tolkien's books is now turned to revulsion for producing Pullman's gnostic daemons. Don't expect me to buy any of New Line's work for a while unless they drop the film.

Pullman's strawman Authority (by any other name) is no match for my very real God Who created the heavens and the earth. The same God who created us gave us brains for seeing through strawmen and for grasping the laws--natural and spiritual--that He created. While Pullman would say that God's laws are repressive and harmful, I have found the opposite to be true. God's laws, like those of any good parent, are to help us avoid injury and stay in fellowship with him and with each other. Anything else is simply fantasy.

Pullman is one of the people that Peter wrote to us about, warning that their claims of special knowledge and real truth are empty and self-destructive. Why have anything to do with them? Know the truth: God made you and He loves you as His child. There is nothing better than to accept His offer of a redeemed, full relationship with Him and eternal life, enjoying that relationship and his creative beauty forever. The Bible is the true golden Compass. It is not any special interpretation of the truth by one man, but a letter written through many hands by the same God. It will be a great day (hopefully not the last day) when Pullman wakes up to that reality.

Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about ‘His glory’s dimunition’? A man can no more diminish God’s glory be refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him…and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God — though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to ‘put on Christ’, to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Tia from HomeschoolBlogger.com wrote about this a few days ago. The comments alone are worth your time.