The ominous e-mail from his wife's LDS Relief Society in Provo bothered author Brandon Sanderson.
"Here's a movie you will want to skip," it said, urging Mormons to stay away from "The Golden Compass," a film due out Dec. 7 based on a novel by Philip Pullman. The e-mail claimed because Pullman is an atheist, he uses his fiction to subtly promote anti-God beliefs.
That same urgent warning circulated among LDS groups from Delta to Bountiful and through Utah's Catholic community.
"I feel this information about this movie is too important for you not to know about it," Kevin Prusse, principal of Bountiful's Muir Park Elementary School, wrote in an e-mail to parents.
Pullman's objective is to "bash Catholicism and promote atheism," said an item in the newsletter of Salt Lake City's Madeleine Choir School. "Pullman represents the new face of atheism: It is aggressive, dogmatic and unrelenting. It is also fueled by crusading hatred of all religions, but most especially the Catholic religion."
The ruckus began months ago with the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York City.
Spokeswoman Kiera McCaffrey said the League understands "the film has removed most of the anti-religion, anti-Christian and specifically anti-Catholic elements. But the problem remains: Kids see the film and like it, then parents will think the trilogy would be a great Christmas gift."
In Pullman's books, the oppressive regime is church "authorities," she said. "They kidnap children, murder children, torture children, and perform cruel experiments on children. One character, an ex-nun, says religion is 'nothing but a very convincing mistake.' In the end, the children release into the atmosphere an old, deformed wizened angel who claims to be God. They've rid the world of this oppressive force that is religion."
The League urges people to boycott the film, but Provo's Sanderson won't be joining.
"I don't care if you go see the movie or not, that's your right," he said. "But I draw the line when you try to stop other people from seeing it or reading the books. The ideas should be available."
"Golden Compass," is the first in Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. The books have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, and Pullman clearly has his defenders.
The trilogy may be the first fantasy series "founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment rather than upon tribal and mythic yearnings for kings, gods, and supermen," wrote Laura Miller in a 2005 New Yorker profile.
Though Sanderson doesn't agree with Pullman's world view, he admires his writing.
"He's created a sincere world in which the cosmology is very different from other fantasies," he said. "There are characters fighting totalitarian religious regimes, angels and figures who claim to be God but whose actions obviously are not seeking the best for mankind. It is brilliant."
Coincidentally, the destructive nature of censorship is the theme of Sanderson's playful new book, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians.
It begins with this sentence: "So there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias about to be sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil librarians.''
"I feel that information is power. If you can control information, you can control people," Sanderson said. "In this book, the librarians control what books people read and what they can study. There are actually two more continents in the ocean, but they've kept it all secret. They covered up the true history of the world by controlling the books."
That's why Sanderson is such a passionate opponent of boycotts. "I do not believe the correct response to different ideas is to censor or boycott them. This makes it seem like the ideas are a threat to our own ideas. Are your beliefs so weak that they cannot stand to listen to someone offering a different opinion?" he wrote in an essay on his Web site, brandonsanderson.com.
"I would find it a shame if people were to boycott and remove my books from schools because I speak of worlds where it's implied that there IS a deity," Sanderson wrote. "My goal would be to let my books and [Pullman]'s books sit on the shelves beside one another, and allow the people who read them to see both opinions and make their own decisions."
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* PEGGY FLETCHER STACK can be contacted at pstack@sltrib.com or 801-257-8725. _________________ http://www.ColleenHammond.com
Joined: 15 Feb 2006 Posts: 1758 Location: Louisiana
Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2007 3:02 am Post subject:
Quote:
"I don't care if you go see the movie or not, that's your right," he said. "But I draw the line when you try to stop other people from seeing it or reading the books. The ideas should be available."
If this guy isn't as rabidly opposed to "hate speech" laws as he is to censorship, he's a huge hypocrite. I would guess that he also supports alcohol and tobacco ads targeted at children, just as this movie is. Meanwhile, I think I'll add Brandon Sanderson's books to my boycott list, and I might just go ahead and boycott anyone who's opposed to boycotts in general. His assertion that censorship is necessarily a bad thing is simply ridiculous, and I'm sure that there's much better stuff out there to read anyway, such as my 8-year old neice's school assignments.
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