His Dark (and uninformed) Materials

Phillip Pullman is the British author of the "His Dark Materials" fantasy trilogy.  I've read the trilogy, and I must admit that I enjoyed them.  They are well-written and very intriguing books, yet as a Christian I oppose the message of the books.  The premise of the trilogy is basically that God is a senile old tyrant, the angels rebelled under the leadership of the Satan figure, who ends up being the Christ figure--a complete disfiguring of the truth.  In Pullman's books, our "real" good is actually the evil side, and vice versa.  The teenage main characters are on a search for something--something that ends up being fulfilled through sexual self-discovery.  For more information on Pullman and his books, WORLD Magazine covered them well:  Athiesm for Kids,  Very Dark Material and Extraordinarily Common.

 

To put it simply, Phillip Pullman is a religion-hating liberal nutcase.  Following his assertion that President Bush would "fit right in" and "make a perfect villain in [his] epic sagas of good and evil," he says, "[t]he Christian right in America is the mirror image of the Islamic fundamentalists."  It is unfortunate that a man with such a clear lack of moral core and twisted worldview is influencing kids through his well-written fantasy.  It just makes me more thankful that J.K. Rowling's obscenely profitable Harry Potter books are "smuggling the gospel" into the hearts and minds of readers all over the world.