Atheist author backtracking?

LEFT: Golden Compass author Philip Pullman with lemur RIGHT: Movie poster

If you're like me, you've gotten the Golden Compass e-mail delineating the upcoming movie's solidly anti-Christian stance. I'm not particularly alarmed by this, since atheists come and go all the time and do their darnedest to somehow besmirch religion hard enough to break us all free of its surly bonds.

And, in true self-centered fashion, it appears that Philip Pullman (author of the books on which the movie is based) may be re-thinking his motive of "killing God." Not because of some new stab of conscience or even an awakening awareness of the presence of God in his life.

No, it's the money.

On the "Today" show on Friday, Pullman denied to Al Roker that his books are anti-religious. "As for the atheism," he adds, "it doesn’t matter to me whether people believe in God or not, so I’m not promoting anything of that sort," he wrote in response to a question...

Hmmm... according to the above-linked NYMag article, Pullman himself declared four years ago that his books were much more subversive than Harry Potter, because his books were about "killing God."

Sounds to me like the guys at the movie studio called him up, having been made aware of these earlier statements, and read him the writing on the wall.

Maybe all of those guys are also getting the e-mail I got, and are now getting the runnies over the thought of the movie bombing out at the critical Christmastime crunch because all the right-wing loonies know what it's about and won't plunk down the $ to take their kids to it.

Whatever. It doesn't sound like a terribly original movie, and I wasn't that interested in seeing it or taking the kids to it anyway. This just guarantees we won't even be bothering to rent the DVD somewhere in the future. Blech.

Whaddya bet me this idiotic flick goes the way of The Last Temptation of Christ and becomes completely irrelevant, inane, and unwatched? I actually caught some of that movie on HBO once, years after it was released, and I thought it was bizarre and unwatchable. If you wanted to make money on a movie about Jesus, you'd market it to people who were actually interested in Jesus. That'd be Christians, and they're all going to be disgusted by that movie. The people who don't care about Jesus aren't going to be particularly enthralled about going to see a movie about him anyway.