A New Children’s Movie Based on the Claim that God Is Evil. Here’s a “heads up” about an upcoming film that is being marketed to kids called The Golden Compass. The Golden Compass is based on an explicitly anti-Christian trilogy of novels called His Dark Materials.
Greg Easterbrook on espn.go.com describes the novels this way:
Regarding the “Golden Compass” volumes, in them God is a central character — but is actively evil, obsessed with causing people to suffer. The plotline of the books is that Christianity is a complete fraud and the source of all that is wrong with society; the final “Golden Compass” volume concerns a desperate attempt by the heroic children to kill God and obliterate every trace of Christianity from several universes. I found Pullman’s arguments against Christianity puerile — like recent anti-Christian books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the “Golden Compass” volumes resort to the cheap subterfuge of cataloging everything bad about religion while pretending belief has no positive qualities. Pullman, Dawkins and Harris are anti-faith jihadis: they don’t just want to argue against the many faults of Christianity, they want faith forbidden.
In other words, His Dark Materials is the “anti-Narnia.”
Baby Vocabulary Dept. A study suggests that it’s better to talk to your babies than show them a video. Who knew? Reuters:
“The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos, and there is some suggestion of harm,” [researcher Frederick Zimmerman] said in a statement.
Advice on Signs at Church. “Design and implement your church signs like they are highway signs.” That’s the advice of Kent Shaffer at ChurchRelevance.com. Shaffer quotes from Why We Buy
Every church is a collection of zones, and you’ve got to map them out before you can place a single sign. …[W]alk around, asking yourself with every step: What will visitors be doing here? Where will their eyes be focused when they stand here? And what will they be thinking about over there? Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for all others. Putting a sign that requires twelve seconds to read in a place where visitors spend four seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.
Will Your Faith Get You Through? That depends on what you put your faith in. Melinda at str.org writes, “We want a reliable company to back up our insurance policy, and we need a realiable Person to back up our faith in Him. Faith is only good as what is backing it up.”
Study: Cohabitation Correlates With Depression. Joe Carter points to a recent study on cohabitation before marriage that finds that “compared with peers who had not cohabited prior to marriage, individuals who had cohabited reported higher levels of depression and the level of depression also rose with the length of cohabitation.”
