‘Tis the Season to be…an Atheist?!

Breaking news at this hour! A con-tra-va-see!

Did you know that atheists are trying to infiltrate the holiday season by indoctrinating our Christian youth?

How, you ask? Through the guise of a fantasy holiday movie entitled The Golden Compass. The film has been adapted from a book, which was part of a children’s series entitled His Dark Materials. The author of the series, Philip Pullman, is an atheist who wrote the books in order to construct a sort of counter narrative to C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. It has some unflattering metaphorical representations of the Church and shares the vision and values of nonbelief to
children.

When the studio adapted The Golden Compass to film, it removed or whitewashed all of those critical elements, rendering the original storyline completely unrecognizable. So why are the demagogues and Christian watch groups frothing at the bit over the film’s release if its anti-religious elements have been abandoned?

Bill Donohue said that while the film itself isn’t objectionable, it could encourage the children who go to see it to read the series, which would denigrate Christianity and promote atheism for kids. As a result, he and his band of monkeys in the Catholic League have organized mass boycotts of the film. It’s a very reasonable position: Other people do not have the right to posit an opinion, narrative, fantasy tale, or any other sort of expression that directly dissents with the opinions that Bill Donohue holds. I’m not sure if you were aware of this, reader, but Bill Donohue is actually God in disguise.

Pullman’s response:

“It causes me to shake my head in sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world.”

“A Girl Like Me”

Blown away by this short documentary from a 16 year old black girl… Take some time and watch…

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This is more than a year old, but I just stumbled upon it…

Gus Visser And His Performing Duck

And now for a bit of lighthearted fun….

Behold a cross-eyed dandy lisp his way through the lyrics to “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me” while gently squeezing the scrotum of a mallard to provide the plaintive, squawking “Ma!”

The performer? Mr. Gus Visser, vaudevillian extraordinaire, and his incredible Singing Duck. While, at first glance, just a bizarre oddity of the early sound era, this film clip is of actual historical note. It was made by Theodore Case in 1925 as a proof-of-concept for the sound-on-film process he was shopping around an all silent Hollywood… a process that would eventually lead to the birth of the talkie in 1929’s The Jazz Singer.