‘Bout fuckin’ time! 
Yeah. Pullman himself may be an atheist, but there’s nothing particularly pro-atheist (as opposed to anti-religious) about the worldview presented in the books… in fact I’d say it’s positively spiritual.
Wow, as a Christian I didn’t get that much spirituality out of those books at all. I too read this OP in a You mean Richard Simmons is gay??? sort of way. (No offense, Cal.)
But as a Christian I didn’t find the anti-religiousity offensive so much as tedious. The evil god of Pullman’s creation is not my God and I seriously doubt anyone read the series for the theology. I just found all the religion-bashing boring, and what did offend me was the complete depravity of the central evil act he imagined. I prefer my books depravity-free.
Because real world Christians believe that they serve a God, and the God they serve is evil or incompetent; at least by my standards and apparently this author’s. A being doesn’t need to be real to be evil, after all; any number of fictional villains are exceedingly evil.
Also, as quoted, the author doesn’t consider it necessary for a “Theocracy” to even claim to have a god, much less for the god in question to be real. Serve a God, real or imagined; serve someone who doesn’t actually believe a word of the religion but is using it as a tool; serve a communist style officially nontheistic “theology”; all the same from the author’s perspective, apparently.
Actually, it makes it pretty easy.
Believer : “How do you know there isn’t a God ?”
Atheist : “Because he’s DEAD. Now I KNOW there isn’t a God. Mwahahahaha !”
I do find the last book of the trilogy (and Pullman himself) to be very tiresome.
But I still must see the movie because - panserbjørne.
Yes, but it still doesn’t make sense. Christians don’t worship an evil god because the evil god made them evil in god’s image, they worship and evil god because they invented an evil god in man’s image.
It’s like writing an anti-Nazi book, and have the explanation for why Nazis were so bad turn out to be alien mind-control slugs that took over the entire population of Germany and made them do evil things. But that lets humans off the hook! Hitler didn’t hypnotize the Germans by mind control ray, they didn’t commit evil because God appeared to them and literally told them to kill the Jews. They did it themselves.
The book blames bad religion on evil spirits, rather than bad people. And that’s just dumb, not to mention offensive, because there is no such thing as evil spirits.
I’m kind of interested in how they’re going to deal with the anti-Christian themes in the films. For the first book, and maybe the second, they can just get by with blaming the Magesterium as an evil theocracy (and that’s what the trailers imply), but how will they explain away the bit about killing God and the evil Metatron?
The series wasn’t nearly as Anti-Christian as The Devil’s Apocrypha or To Reign in Hell .
Well, no, but they aren’t making those into children’s movies, either. There are many, many anti-Christian books out there. They just aren’t usually picked up.
I am another who about fell out of my chair when I saw they were making these movies: it’s not just that they are anti-Christian in any sort of abstract, philosophical sense, or a comedic sense, or even in a crusading, morally indignant sense. The conclusion of the trilogy drips with contempt not just for religion, but for God himself. Silly stupid sad people following a silly stupid sad god.
I am as secular as they come, so it’s no skin off my back. But I can’t see the third movie playing in Alabama.
Yeah. Me and the other half dozen atheists in the state need to turn out in force for this movie and show our support!
They are both good books, and at least To Reign in Hell would make a good movie.
They come to mind (To Reign in Hell specifically) because I think there was Brust influence in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy.
I can’t see them making a third movie, because all the poor Christians would be so terrorized, and you know we don’t want to persecute those Christians.
*and he is a silly, sad god. IMO of course.
edit: Also, I’m not entirely sure the movies are aimed for kids. The main character is a little girl, but the books certainly weren’t aimed at kids, and I can’t see them doing a good movie version that is.
I’d be willing to bet that the enemy isn’t explicitly god in the third film.
Actually, since they’ll have to change it around to make it less blatantly anti-religion anways and given what a mess the third book was, it’s possible changing the plot for a third movie might actually improve the story.
I found the first two mildly anti-religious (possibly because I already knew Pullman’s views when I read them), and the third one very anti-religious. I liked the first two. I thought the third got out of hand- too much random stuff, not enough space, and he gets more didactic and less storyteller.
The first movie looks good, but (agreeing with many other folks in this thread) I can’t imagine what The Amber Spyglass is going to look like as a movie.
Achren writes:
Yeah – I was acknowledging that, in case you missed it.
I just re-read the series for the third or fourth time in preparation for the movie coming out, and I’m trying to figure out what you’re referring to. Could you please enlighten me? (Perhaps you could use a spoiler box for the sake of those who haven’t read the books.)
Sure.
The idea of causing the eternal death of children through the forcible removal and extinguishment of their souls.
It’s one of the most horrible depraved ideas anyone has ever come up with, IMO.
Don’t really see the books as “anti-religious”, quite the opposite - in the books, most of the central aspects of religion are in fact true. There are souls, angels, an afterlife exists, etc.
Certainly the all-controlling Church is depicted as evil. And the creator-deity is depicted as senile, and his regent as a psycho - but that is just guardan-variety Gnosticism. 
So if this series flops, I guess we can forget about the Hyperion/Endymion series ever getting made, huh?
Well it’s not depicted as a good thing in the books. It’s the evil people who do that. A story doesn’t really work if the baddies aren’t really bad.
Anyway, if you think that’s depraved you should try reading the Bible sometime.
Ah, I see. But, as I understand it, the separating of the child from his daemon didn’t cause eternal death, but just turned the person into a docile, uncreative zombie. The excision of Roger and his daemon caused his physical death, but some part of him “survived” it and went to the land of the dead. The land of the dead was filled with everyone who had died, not just those separated from their daemons, and there seemed to be no distinctions made between them. I think you’d call the Roger that Lyra meets in the land of the dead his soul or ghost, and his love for Lyra, and certainty that she’d find him, led him to remain more “alive” than most other people there.
I don’t think we’re supposed to take Pullman’s daemons as being exactly equivalent to the “soul” as it is portrayed by many religions. The daemon is a part of a whole human being, a part that gives him/her a spark of life/creativity/fire. Although that sounds similar to the way the soul is spoken of in our world, I don’t think the daemon has all the freight that the Christian concept of soul (as one example) carries.
But this may explain why I couldn’t see the depravity that so concerned you, since I don’t believe in “souls.” I understood the horror that excision is supposed to entail in Pullman’s world, but it doesn’t have any analog for me in the real world. Call me depraved or soulless, I guess.