Still, like so much else in our culture, Pullman's aversion to God would appear to boil down to sex. Mary Malone explains that her desire for sex was her primary purpose for abandoning the God in Whom she no longer believes. “And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? … And I took the crucifix from around my neck and I threw it in the sea. That was it. All over. Gone. … So, that was how I stopped being a nun,” she recounts.

Author and attorney David Limbaugh sums up the anti-theist condition succinctly:

“It seems the most militant ‘anti-theist’ these days are either arrogant scientists or unrestrained licentious types whose main obstacles to faith are not intellectual, but moral — and that moral obstacle seems invariably to be sex … sexual perversion, while perhaps not the worst sin, especially when compared to pride, for example, seems to be the one galvanizing the modern opponents of God.”

Psalm 14:1 tells us, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good.”

With The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman shares his heart with us — a heart that says, “There is no God.” And he clearly wants to influence your child’s heart as well. This movie’s creation — or chance materialization, take your pick — has a specific agenda. It is clearly targeted toward unsuspecting children with the furtive goal of enlisting the next generation of “fools.”

But do as he will, the loving God Whom Pullman rejects is bigger than all that. He’s so big, in fact, that He gave his only Son for you, me, and yes, Phillip Pullman.

Just the same, I think I’ll spend my eleven bucks somewhere else.