Philip Pullman
and “His Dark Materials” Series, 4 

“Is it not fair to say that a great deal of bad behaviour in the last century was the work of regimes that were atheistic, if not scientific? Wasn’t Nazism, for example, based on a twisted reading of Darwinism?”

“Yes, but they functioned psychologically in exactly the same way. They had a sacred book that provided an explanation of history which so far transcended every other explanation as to be unquestionable. There were the great prophets - Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse- Tung - men so far above the human race that they might as well be exalted as gods. They were treated in just the same way as the Pope. Every word they said, every thing they touched, was holy; their bodies had to be preserved and filed past in reverential silence. The fact that they proclaimed that there was no God didn’t make any difference: it was a religion, and they acted in the way any totalitarian religious system would. Even proportionately.”

“Also, there is, I think, good evidence that the Inquisition burnt far fewer people than the secular French state did.”

“Well, that was very comforting as the flames were licking round your toes… I think the religions are special cases of the general human tendency to exalt one doctrine above all others - whatever it is, whether it’s Marxism, Islam or whatever it is, there is a depressing human tendency to say, ‘We have the truth and we’re going to kill you because you don’t believe in it.’”

“When did you realise that Christianity didn’t convince you? And what was it that gave the game away?”

“It was the usual questioning that takes place in adolescence. It began to seem impossible to reconcile the creation story with the scientific account. It became increasingly implausible that life continued after the body died. The claims of some religions - the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, the infallibility of the Pope - seemed to me such howling nonsense…”

“A lot of people assume from The Amber Spyglass that you must be an atheist.”

“Well, they can assume what they like. Of course, I don’t say, ‘There is no God.’ I say: ‘There is a God, and here he is dying’ - and this is what I was particularly pleased with, as a result of an act of charity. And he goes ‘with a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief.’

“Yes, absolutely. How, by the way, do you react to His statement ‘Unless you become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’?

“He wasn't right all the time…”

It is clear from the evidence presented above that Philip Pullman and the “His Dark Materials” is even more dangerous to Christian children than the Harry Potter books.; not only are God and Christianity ridiculed and shown to be evil, but the heroes of the books are Gnostics, daemons and fallen angels. As Orthodox parents we should not expose our children to these evil works.

“The whole attention of those who have responsibility for the Christian child should be directed to not allowing sin in any way to take possession of him again (i.e. after Baptism), to crushing sin and making it powerless by every means, by arousing and strengthening the child’s orientation toward God.” The Path of Salvation, St Theophan the Recluse.

Contributed by Benjamin W. Waterhouse, Esq, of Newport, Isle of Wight