So, Chris Weitz is withdrawing all references to God and the church from his adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass.

Considering Pullman’s obvious prejudice against Christianity and his agenda to knock down C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which offends him so, this is something of a surprise.

Now, if only we could get Pullman to revise the books!

This news makes me wonder what will happen if they end up making the entire trilogy into films. After all, the culmination of the whole epic occurs with the … well, I don’t want to spoil anything for readers, but let’s just say that God doesn’t get treated too kindly in the “triumphant conclusion.”

It amazes me that the writer has the audacity to claim that interpreting his books as anti-Christian or anti-religion is just a “misperception.” Come on. When one of your sympathetic characters instructs the others by coming right out and saying that “Christianity is a lie” … well, how ELSE am I supposed to interpret that?

When the last act of the book brings the characters to a re-enactment of the fall in the Garden of Eden, depicting the rebellion against God in the garden as a TRIUMPH instead of a fall, how can they be surprised at the response of those who believe that God is, indeed, an authority worthy of worship rather than a tyrant?