Quote of the Day #55

Crazy Bill O'Donahue has been working himself into a frenzy over The Golden Compass. Speaking for his organization, the Catholic League, Bill has been crapping on the Golden Compass film for "overtly atheistic and anti-Christian" tendencies.

Author Phillip Pullman's reply:

"I am a story teller. [ ... ] If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon."

In Canada, the Compass is not without controversy. A Catholic school board in Ontario ripped the book from school library shelves; presumably alerted to the soul-destroying screed by someone on Bill O'D's spam victim list.

However, there's a problem. Due to a quirk of our founding Confederation, Catholic schools in Ontario are publicly funded (So, I believe, are Protestant schools in Quebec, but I haven't done any research on that, so don't quote me, O Avid Fan).

So by what right do they commit this act of censorship with their public money?

Well actually, I loosely (o so very loosely) agree with the course the school board has taken, if they're sincere. They say that Pullman himself is welcome in their libraries, that the books in question (of the His Dark Materials trilogy) will be available to kiddies upon request (don't like this--children fear the school librarian, and may be unable to suffer her purse-mouthed disapproval as the price of free inquiry, but still ...), and are not banned, merely "under review" (which I hope means "kept under wraps until Bill O'Donahue either quits bloviating or gets his rabies shot).

Because publicly-funded or not, these are Catholic schools, with an overt mission of encouraging good little boys and girls not to shed the conditioning forced on them by well-intentioned parents. It is their right to censor and blinker their kids in any way they wish. The minds will only be a little stunted, and they will have been properly taught to fear inquiry and the unknown, and to subordinate rational inquiry to dogma, right? Which is the mandate of yeshivas, madrassas, Catholic schools and the like all over the world.

Well, actually, I don't think so.

I always admired the Jesuits' insistence on rational faith. Admittedly this may in many cases simply amount to the teaching of mental circus tricks to enable the mind to perform the contortions necessary to support belief under any conditions. But they do earnestly try to get kids to think; a task more difficult in this day and age, when our putative leaders have decided they prefer their voters passive and sleepy at the polling booths and occasionally motivated by outrage.

But the Jesuits reasoned, rightly, that faith unquestioned, unchallenged, is worthless. The school board in this case needs to keep that in mind. Is the faith of a child so weak that it cannot survive a book? If this is the case, where are the millions of children of Jews, Muslims, and atheists who saw C.S. Lewis' thinly-veiled Christian gospel tale? Are they rushing in to convert to Christianity?

And there may be a positive net effect: More children reading. Like most things, books become more interesting when banned. I suspect a number of kids will read The Golden Compass for this reason. And many of them will say: "What the hell was all that fuss about?" And more importantly: "Why was this forbidden us?"

I doubt I would ever have read "Catcher in the Rye" had I not known it had been banned. My school kept it on open shelves. And "To Kill a Mockingbird"--another banned book--was required reading.

What the Church and school board really fear is that they may come up with the right answers.

Myself, I feel religious schools of any type shouldn't be getting secular tax dollars anymore, especially in this day and age, but that's just me.