Atheist Affirmation, Golden Compasses, and #!@* Mass-Forwards

Don’t you hate spurious email forwards, like how Bill Gates is giving away $400 from Macys if we can strike down Madalyn Murry O’Hair’s beyond-the-grave attempt to ban religious broadcasting, and forward it to all our friends? I know I do. But recently the senders have been getting more sophisticated, and doing something that I’ve long suggested that anyone do when faced with email-forwarding temptation: Look it up on Snopes.com

So now Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials novel trilogy is being adapted for the big screen, and because American Christians are borderline illiterate (it seems), now the hubub ensues. The warn-ers are taking us straight to the source. (You’ll have to click the link and read it yourself; Snopes is difficult to copy & paste excerpts from, possibly by design.) In the copy of the email I got, there was a preface: