on Philip Pullman

I thought the name sounded familiar and when I googled him I immediately remembered him because I read "the Golden Compass" in my children's lit class a few years ago. I remember him particularly because I gave a very impassioned speech to my peers expressing my distaste for Pullman and his book. I enjoyed the first part of his book and I thought it was a creative story and I particularly liked the notion of the daemon that he had in it. Then I got the second half of his book and began to really dislike it, mainly based on his apparent misunderstanding of Christianity. As a Christian, I am accumstomed to a constant barrage of disparaging remarks and negative ideas about Christianity, in books, newspapers, magazines, movies, etc., so I took Pullman's attack on Christianity in stride. However, my religous disagreement with him is not the main reason I disliked the book. I didn't like the book for several reasons. 1) I thought his interjection of religous ideas was very abrupt. I felt like he started writing his book and then halfway through he realized that the popularity of C.S. Lewis's books had alot to do with their religious undertones, so then he decided to throw in some religion to try to drum up sales. I don't think I'm far off considering there's no moral/religous inkling in the first at least half of the book and after that he jsut throws it in there. So basically I just thought it was poor writing. 2) I don't think people should try to disprove/attack things that they don't fully understand, or in their argument they should at least offer up a sufficient replacement for the thing they are arguing against. Pullman does neither in his book. I don't think he fully understands Christianity even though Wikipedia tells me he is an associate of the National Secular Society which you'd think would warrant an understanding of religion since the foundation truly only exists to dispute the religions it is against. If he had an understanding of Christianity, specifically the Christian view of sin, he wouldn't say that original sin is the source of knowledge like he does in his book. The tree that many people associate with original sin is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Pullman and others simply shorten this to knowledge and therein lies his problem. The Bible never says there was not knowledge before original sin, only that humans did not know the difference between good and evil. This is mainly because there actually was no evil in the world yet. After original sin there was evil and therefore Adam and Eve were able to distinguish between the two. If Pullman is "undermining the basis of Christian belief" like he claims, is it too much to ask for him to offer a sufficient belief system in its stead? Ok, so original sin is actually good because it gave us knowledge, then what gives us pain and suffering? death? Since he's an atheist he will presumably say those are just part of life, which is fine, but since his book is critiquing Christianity not just promoting atheism he should have to contest all points of Christianity, not just one. I haven't read the other books in the series and perhaps I should but these are questions that I had just from reading the first, and from what Ive heard from other people, he doesn't answer them in the other two books.

I don't write a critique about Homer or Ovid or Bablylonian mythology because I don't fully understand it. Pullman makes this mistake in his books by misunderstanding the myth he was writing about. I think he did it just to stir up some controversy, boost his sales and maybe get people to talk about him. I've just written for half an hour on him so i guess he succeeded in that respect.