Imagine, for a moment, that al Qaeda was large enough, and well-funded enough, that they had assigned at least one terrorist to each and every American.  Imagine that their surveillance and technology were sophisticated enough that the terrorist assigned to you knew every move you made, and could, for all practical purposes, read your mind.

And imagine that that terrorist's primary goal was not to kill you, but instead to destroy you--to so soak your mind and heart in fear and anxiety as to make you doubt everything you had ever believed to be true.  His or her delight would not be in seeing your cold, dead corpse, but instead to see you corpse-walk through your life, having given up on the existence of meaning, or the possibility of hope.

Now imagine that you could visit a website that asked you to answer a series of personal, probing questions.  Why?  So you could be matched more closely to the "perfect" terrorist, to someone whose strengths perfectly matched your weaknesses, to someone who could effect your malaise and hopelessness with more precision and speed than other terrorists.  Would you visit such a website, answer their questions, seek out their probing analysis?

Probably not.

If you were able to imagine an enemy who sought, with dogged determination, to smother each person with an avalanche of hopelessness and fear, you have imagined a demon.

I used to say that we in Western society are raised without any vocabulary of spirituality.  But I think that has changed.  Today, more and more people are willing to make statements about spirituality, even about spirits of some sort.  But few seem to be willing to talk about basic biblical concepts of the spirit realm as though it were accurately and simply described in scripture.  The vocabulary of spirituality that has come to exist seems to be a dictionary that each person invents anew, instead of caring at all for ideas that have been tried and proven.

One of those simple biblical concepts that no one wants to give any credence is that of a demon.  Maybe that's why The Golden Compass can get away with using a slight variation of the word ("daemon"--still pronounced like demon) to describe a concept that is completely at odds with the biblical concept.  Once a critical mass of a population has emptied a word of its original meaning, someone else can come in and fill that word with a meaning, even a meaning completely at odds with the original meaning.

So what does this have to do with my original word picture?  That picture was what came to mind when I was looking through the website for the movie The Golden Compass.  Since I haven't read the book or seen the movie, I can only comment on what little the movie's website puts forth.

But the plot, filled out with the symbolism that its terminology suggests, apparently revolves around at least two central ideas:

• freedom is destroyed by any teacher (especially Christian) which claims to be authoritative (look up the meaning of the word "magisterium");
• it is abhorrent to be a person without a demon (thus the form on the website that would be happy to sign you up with one).

I had read before of Compass' original author's intention to be the anti-C.S. Lewis; but I was taken aback by just how appealing and compelling a story the website, at least, presented.  Again, since I'm not really a reader of fiction, and I've never read the book, I don't know how skilled a storyteller Pullman is.  But if it weren't for the terrifying anti-theology that is plainly at the core of the symbolism and structure that at least the moviemakers (if not Pullman himself) have chosen, I would really be looking forward to seeing this movie.  But the more I soaked in of the story, and of the imaginary world in the movie, the more amazingly creative and demonic I could see it really is.  Wow.

Sometimes I hear about a book or movie that some Christian group or another wants to boycott or speak out against.  And even if I think they may have a point, they usually strike me as shrill and embarrassing.  This time, I really hope the groups that are coming out against this movie do not come across as shrill.  The seductiveness of this story, and the subtle and impressive ways it weaves falsehood into the very core of its story, are really rather frightening.

I can only hope that the masterfulness of this story and the obviousness of the evil to a practiced mind will spur even greater Creative works from those who are respectful of the Truth and Reality of Love.