The Many Adventures of a Thede

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I did. I really like having family just a train-ride-over-the-river away. Because while most people spend their late adolescence to young adulthood trying to get as far away from their families as possible (including me), there are days when the only place you want to be is with your family. Thanksgiving is one of those days. This is the second year I've spent the holiday in New Jersey, but the gathering was slightly larger this year. The usual suspects were there: my Aunt Janice, cousins Anne Kelly, Katie, and Tom, Anne's husband Brian, and her kids Julia and Theo. But in addition to the family, we also had Brian's dad and step-mom, Katie's boyfriend, and my boyfriend in attendance. The more, the merrier, I say. I'm used to fairly large gatherings when it comes to family get-togethers. We had a GREAT dinner, good wine, and took in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving with Julia.

After dinner with the family, Bo and I headed back into the city in time for dessert at our friends James and Natalie's Thanksgiving at their place. We were both pretty much in a food coma already by the time we got there, but we hung out with everyone and had fun. Now, where as we had watched the family classic Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving with the family, we watched the just-as-much-of-a-classic Thanksgiving episode of South Park with the friends. A good time was had by all.

Yesterday I finished reading The Golden Compass, the first book in the series His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I really enjoyed it. With the film version of this book hitting theaters in a few weeks, the campaign of people who have never read the book speaking out against the book is mounting. Now, I have only read the first in the series, so I've yet to reach the conclusion and therefore I've yet to find out what the author is ultimately trying to say with these books. However, I have completed the first book, and I just don't think any parallel between the religion of this world and the world that resides in this book can be drawn. To do so would be like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Unlike C.S. Lewis' Narnia books in which the parallels to Bible stories and Christian ideals are blatantly obvious, the so-called atheist propaganda in these books is not so easy to decipher, if it exists at all.

But if we are forced to draw parallels here is the only one I can find so far: The church in these books is corrupt. But the church in this world or any other was created by man and is not necessarily indicative of the nature of the God it is supposed to be representing. I would liken the actions of the church in The Golden Compass to the witch trials and witch executions that were conducted by the church of this world up until the 1600s, perhaps longer. Would anyone deny that these happenings were barbaric at best? Even Christians, who align themselves with those same churches today? But, of course, Christians would say, "We live in a different time. It's not the same church." To which I would reply, "Precisely!" The church in Pullman's books might as well be the church of the 1600s. It has nothing to do with present-day Christianity.

But the best argument I have for anyone allowing their children to read the book or see the film is that there is no possible way any child would come close to peeling back the layers of this story to find any kind of propaganda, atheist or otherwise. I had a difficult time understanding the book myself. I actually read a passage aloud to Bo to which his only reply was, "This is a children's book?" And this is a Shakespeare actor, friends. Unless your ten-year-old has a literature degree from Harvard, he's probably just going to see a movie about boats and polar bears and a little girl and a hot air balloon. And if he can actually make it through the book, he'd find the same.