Stop it. Just stop it.

Here’s what CNN says about The Golden Compass:

Culture: A star-studded, big-budget fantasy film released for Christmastime features religion as the villain. Hollywood is collaborating with a militant atheist British children’s book author to indoctrinate children.

Gregg Easterbrook (you already know to expect drooling idiocy) babbles without comprehension. Bill Donohue, of course, thinks it is a plot to corrupt children.

Get real. This movie isn’t going to convert anyone to atheism. It’s a fantasy story. It’s got witches and talking bears in it. It’s going to generate about as many new atheists as Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy generated converts to worship of Eru and the Ainur. It has the nicely appreciated sop to secular interest that the author is an atheist who has no respect for Christian mythology, but this is not a propaganda film — it’s entertainment. If your child’s beliefs can be shattered by a CGI polar bear on a movie screen, you’ve got bigger problems than this one film.

I’m going to go see The Golden Compass this weekend. If it’s a philosophical tract rather than an adventure story, I’m not going to enjoy it much.

And those of you who are upset that religion is one of the villains in this movie — get used to it. Religion is a villain in real life, too.

The Golden Compass is carrying a heavy burden here

I’m very much looking forward to the opening of The Golden Compass at the end of this week — and we’re even getting the premiere here in little ol’ Morris. I’m having mixed feelings about the way it’s getting enlisted in the culture wars, though. It’s a fantasy movie, and it’s ultimately going to succeed or fail on its merits as entertainment, not its ideology.

Still, I have to like the attitude in this Mark Morford column.

It’s this: If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit. Don’t you agree?

The movie is a pawn in the War Against Religion, whether we like it or not. It better not suck.

A brief history of Futurama

The lesson is that you should never, ever give a network executive control of your fate.

Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama’s undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen’s brave new world. “The network’s attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear,” Groening says. “They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn’t like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor.”

How can you not like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor? Obviously, Groening and Co. should have just sent the execs a two hour preview clip of HypnoToad, and gone ahead and done whatever they wanted.

At least the good news is that Futurama is coming back for one more year.

Wake up, everyone!

A few little videos by way of the marvelous Kevin Hayden:

  • Ladies, did you know that you are just like a cardboard box? We’re supposed to treat you delicately and with respect, just in case you’ve got something in your uterus. If you’ve had a hysterectomy or you’re menstruating, though, and we know the box is empty, well, we don’t have to worry about you so much.

  • Guys, did you know that you are followed everywhere by a mob of enthusiastic, hyperactive sperm? I love how both sexes can be objectified by the functions of our gonads.

  • I’ve shown the video for this one before, but I’m going to do it again just because I love the New York Dolls and this will put you in a happy mood for a Monday morning. Here are the New York Dolls performing “Dance Like a Monkey” live:

Judgment Day liveblogging

The new PBS documentary on the Dover trial, Judgment Day (optimistically reviewed by NCSE! The Discovery Institute in frantic denial!) starts here in the midwest in about a half hour. I’ve got my diet coke, I think I’ll pop some popcorn, and maybe I’ll take a stab at liveblogging the show. Let’s hope it’s lively!

Feel free to chime in with comments as we go.

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One if by theater, two if by DVD

It must come with the name that Revere has to sound the warning — we’ve got anti-god/anti-religion movies available now, and more on the way. I’m a little surprised that movies that preach moral responsibility (don’t torture people, don’t imprison them without trial, don’t ship them off to countries that will torture them), sympathy and tolerance (gay people feel love and suffering, too) are considered anti-Christian, but if that’s the way they want it, that’s fine with me.

I’m also a little puzzled why they would find a documentary like Jesus Camp anti-Christian. It simply describes the activities that go on in a kids’ camp dedicated to religious indoctrination. Shouldn’t they instead be condemning hysterical dogma as practiced in that camp, rather than the movie that merely reveals it?

The one movie mentioned that I’m looking forward to seeing is The Golden Compass, even though I hear they may have toned down the anti-religious sentiment that’s present in the book. There is a little misconception there, though: the book condemns an institution dedicated to preserving dogma and that willingly sacrifices individuals to achieve its aims, and it is associated with religion, but it isn’t quite as flamingly anti-religion as some of the critics portray it, and I’m beginning to suspect that many of the religious fanatics who hate Pullman’s books haven’t actually read them.

I mainly want to see it because I like the polar bears and witches, myself.