Atheists and Fairytales

At a literary conference in Oxford ten years ago Philip Pullman, talking about the final book in his well known children's trilogy in which God dies, said: 'We're used to the Kingdom of Heaven; but you can tell from the genera thrust of the book that I'm of the devil's party, like Milton. And I think it's time we thought about a republic of Heaven instead of the Kingdom of Heaven. The King is dead. That's to say I believe the King is dead. I'm an atheist.'

However, all this blatant atheistic propaganda didn't go down too well in the United States where they still care about the messages their children receive. And, in spite of Pullman's hypocritical attempts to conceal his atheistic message, The Golden Compass flopped at the American box office in 2007 and plans to complete the trilogy were dropped by the film studio.

This month Pullman is again talking in Oxford about another book which he is promoting at the Oxford Literary Festival. An atheist of long standing and as far as I know not a New Testament scholar, Pullman has written a book on Christ. According to Pullman his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is part novel, part history and part fairy tale. This sort of thing, of course, has never been done before! Do I detect a slight whiff of desperation?