"My hope is that the movie will bomb, and Hollywood will have to go back to less alluring efforts to corrupt the young."

One thing about being a reflexive and tribal anti-anti-Catholic is that it seems to keep one on the side of true humanity and reason.

Hence, Tom Smith writes about the real problem with the atheistic agit-prop in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (in theatres everywhere!) - it's a fascist fable.

Fascist in the sense of the Nazi scheme of supplanting Christianity with pagan nature fables and the occult. Smith writes:

I think his invocation of fascist themes and memes is probably unconscious. It is just that similar jobs tend to call forth similar tools. The European fascists generally and the Nazis in particular very much wanted to cut off the influence and ultimately destroy the Judeo-Christian God and the Church in particular. They had political reasons for wanting this, but also ideological and (weirdly) religious reasons. Not all of the Nazis were devotes of the occult, but many of them were, and the ones who were not very much understood the importance and power of building a fascist mythos which could motivate and inspire people. To put together their ideology, the Nazis pulled out of the great cesspool of European ideas a lot of nasty things that would have been much better left alone, but among them was the idea that Christianity, which they saw as nothing more than a kind of Judaism, severed people from their inner Nature spirit, their pagan, let's run through the woods naked sort of thing. When Pullman has the Church taking children to camps to sever them from their daemons -- their animal- embodied-soul-mates that every whole person in his alternative universe has -- he is just parroting in kid lit form the old canard you could have picked up in a hundred disreputable places in Bavaria or Vienna in the 1930's.

Smith's point about the occult in Pullman is interesting in light of Umberto Eco's observations that I posted yesterday:

The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.

Read Smith's post. It has some gems including a nod to G.K. Chesterton and this keen observation:

Catholics used to complain that anti-Catholicism was the Antisemitism of the intellectuals, but this was before the intellectuals went back to antisemitism.

Sad, but true.