Religion shows it’s true colors and Iraqi youth wake up to reality. Maybe there’s hope for the Middle East?

Violence Leaves Young Iraqis Doubting Clerics

BAGHDAD — After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.

Hahaha, this was pretty funny, even though it probably wasn’t intended to be.

Let us bow our heads in thanks for atheists

The re-awakening of atheism in America is going to make for some very interesting times. Leaders of the Christian Right have spent years trying to cast themselves as the voiceless victims in a secular society, but the scapegoating is over. (Want to talk marginalized? How many atheists have there ever been in Congress or the White House?)

Nonbelievers know a lot about Christianity and Judaism, most having been raised in religious families. Believers, however, are somewhat less clued-in about atheists. Here are a few simple truths about who they are, and aren’t.

Atheists are well-behaved. Atheists seem to play well with others overall. They’re not in the news for getting caught doing things they tell others not to do. Most co-exist peacefully with believing family and friends. They pay taxes.

Atheists don’t start wars on behalf of atheism. They do join the military, however, and contrary to the cliché, they are found in foxholes. In fact, there is a lawsuit now against Defense Secretary Robert Gates and a major who harassed a group of “foxhole atheists” who simply wished to exercise their freedom of/from religion while serving their country in the Middle East.

Atheists have a thing for the American Constitution, particularly the First Amendment that separates church and state. They are secularists who support a government free from influence by any religion. They’re not anti-religious but nonreligious.

So when people like Mike Huckabee announce they want to “take this nation back for Christ” and make the Constitution fit the word of God, atheists worry, and feel that everyone else would be wise to worry along with them.

Atheists don’t take up much space. In fact, they only comprise 0.4 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, conducted through the Graduate Center at CUNY. (Agnostics would add 0.5 percent, the nonreligious 14.1 percent more.)

A total of 900,000 people isn’t even enough to fill 10 football stadiums, but evangelical leaders insist the godless are behind the decline of a whole nation. Uh, okay.

Atheists make good neighbors. Chances are, if you lived next door to an atheist, you might never know it. Atheists aren’t known for going door-to-door or shore-to-shore to un-convert people. They will help you even though there’s no heavenly reward in it for them.

For those who think the Golden Compass is atheism being propped on kids, you should note that the Chronicles of Narnia are the same, but for Christianity.

Why attack “Compass” but not C. S. Lewis?

I loved “The Golden Compass.” What a wonderful film. Not since I was a child had fantasy worlds like this one so effortlessly absorbed me. I was afraid my adult imagination could no longer afford such luxuries at the cost of my maturity and cynicism. But, thankfully, “Pan’s Labyrinth” and now “The Golden Compass” have both proven me wrong within the last year. I can’t remember the last time I was so happy to be proven wrong. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is, of course, a superior film, but “The Golden Compass” is without a doubt in the same league.

Today came the news of the films disappointing performance in the box-office and usually a film’s success or failure does not bother me. This had, though. After seeing it Friday, I walked out of the theater thoroughly satisfied and convinced it would be a classic for all children. It wasn’t until I had told others about the film that I heard various second-hand accounts of parents refusing to bring their children to see it. I was inspired to surf the net and see how far, and deep, this epidemic had spread. I found countless posts from parents and Catholics warning others how dangerous the impact of this film’s popularity would be. Some students from various schools posted letters from their principals and deans sharing the same fear. Many of the letters claimed, in different words but with the same sentiment, that “The Philip Pullman film, the first of a trilogy called His Dark Materials, has been compared to ‘Lord of the Rings’ and C.S. Lewis’ ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ series. Well, it’s not. ‘The Golden Compass’ is the exact opposite of the Christian-based classics. The film is viciously anti-God while weaving messages of atheism, witchcraft, evolution, divination, homosexuality, and immorality. The author himself boasts that, ‘I am of the Devil’s party and know it!’”

Now, I must not have seen the Director’s Cut of the film. Where is it playing?
I am a Catholic. I have read the bible from cover to cover. But I found nothing wrong with the film. And trust me, I looked hard. Maybe my bible is missing as many passages as the version of “The Golden Compass” is missing the scenes that bare the messages described above. But I am positive that Atheism is the belief that God does not exist, nor the Devil—so if they have quoted Pullman accurately then they have disproved the validity of their every accusation.

I was disappointed to find that not one Atheist or any advocates of atheism were so offended by the attack on their beliefs that they felt the need to rebut. Maybe they are too busy prepping the attack on the next film that supports Christianity.

But I do find it entertaining that Catholic Groups champion the works of C.S. Lewis, most specifically “The Chronicles of Narnia,” however they fail to list “The Screwtape Letters,” which depicts Lucifer as the good guy, when they speak of Lewis. I am sure if it were anyone else who wrote that novel, not the legendary and devout Lewis, the same groups would gather over milk and cookies to picket a film version.

Don’t let your children watch this upcoming fantasy film, behind it is nothing but Christian bashing and godlessness!

Religious furor over ‘The Golden Compass’ 

Earlier this fall, many Catholics began to receive e-mail messages warning of the “agenda” behind a “new Children’s movie out in December called ‘The Golden Compass.’ ” The film, these e-mails claimed, was intended to serve as bait for the novel on which it is based, the first in a fantasy trilogy collectively titled “His Dark Materials.” Kids intrigued by the film, the e-mails went on, would be tempted to read the trilogy and might thereby fall into the ideological clutches of its author, Philip Pullman, who seeks nothing less than “to bash Christianity and promote atheism.”

The messages had the breathless, marginally literate quality of rumors about spider eggs in bubble gum. Perhaps that’s why the controversy promptly earned itself a page at www.snopes.com, that venerable Internet clearing house for urban legends. Snopes lists this particular rumor as “true,” presumably because the e-mails use a few genuine, if cherry-picked, quotations from Pullman’s writings and press interviews. But that doesn’t keep the whole thing from being fundamentally ridiculous.

Most preposterous, of course, is the idea that anyone would make a $180-million movie with the purpose of tricking children into reading a seditious book. What self-respecting kid ever needed that much encouragement to ferret out whatever the adults are trying to hide?

Also — whoops! — no one’s been hiding “His Dark Materials.” To date, 15 million copies of Pullman’s books have been sold worldwide. “The Golden Compass” won not only the 1995 Carnegie Medal, a prize awarded by British children’s librarians, but also the “Carnegie of Carnegies,” as the public’s favorite book in the prize’s 70-year history. The final novel in the trilogy, “The Amber Spyglass,” won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 2001, the first children’s book ever to do so. It’s safe to say that copies of the trilogy reside in every decent children’s library in the nation. If there is indeed a “deceitful stealth campaign” afoot to lure children to Pullman’s books — as William Donohue, spokesman for the Catholic League, insists — it’s remarkably short on stealth.