Pullman has made it known he is not against "the religious impulse," which, he writes on his website (www.philip-pullman.com), "includes the sense of awe and mystery we feel when we look at the universe, the urge to find a meaning and a purpose in our lives, our sense of moral kinship with other human beings." Rather, he hates "organized religion," which he equates primarily with churches, priesthoods, sacred scriptures, an invisible god, and objective truth. These characteristics are connected, in Pullman's view, with routine acts of violence, torture, and slavery imposed upon "millions" of people. In a November/December 2002 interview with Book Magazine, he said, "I'm for openmindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth." But how can such a statement be true if no one has the truth? Further confusing matters is a remark made by Pullman during a March 2004 public dialogue with Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and the head of the Anglican Communion: "I'm temperamentally 'agin' [against] the post modernist position that there is no truth and it depends on where you are and it's all a result of the capitalist, imperialist hegemony of the bourgeois . . . all this sort of stuff. I'm agin that but I couldn't tell you why." Fast-forward to today, and the pied piper has evolved from a fairy tale into a metaphor. The term "pied piper" now refers to an individual who leads children astray. For the devout Christian parent, Philip Pullman is such a man. Pullman is an avowed atheistic humanist whose disdain for the Christian God and the Catholic Church is well documented. His most popular work, the His Dark Materials trilogy, of which The Golden Compass is the first book, tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl who sets off on quest to overthrow God, the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Church. In Pullman's fictional universe, God is the "bad guy" and those who rebel against Him are the "good guys." Granted, these are not new sentiments in the history of literature and philosophy. Avowed atheists are found at all levels of academia, the popular media, and government. Yet what makes Pullman more dangerous than other avowed anti-Christian thinkers is the medium through which he promotes his ideas. His are not the dry academic treatises of the ivory basement. Rather, Pullman's dark fairy tales are marketed to children as fantasy literature. Lyra did the right thing in alerting her uncle to the plot to poison him. She may have discovered this information while breaking the rules, but attempted murder is a serious enough action to warrant disclosing this information to a responsible adult. Yet the problem here lies with Lord Asriel. He is not a responsible adult. This is proven by his reaction to Lyra's revelation. A responsible adult would show concern for the child's welfare and remove her from the potentially lethal situation. Lord Asriel, on the other hand, puts her into the middle of it and forces her to spy on his would-be assassins. This lack of responsibility is problematic because Lord Asriel is one of the story's main protagonists, and so his actions pervade the whole trilogy. The reader discovers near the start of The Subtle Knife that Lord Asriel is leading a rebellion against God, known as "the Authority." This is after Lord Asriel has sacrificed, at the end of The Golden Compass, the life of a child, a boy named Roger, who happens to be Lyra's best friend. Thus like many of history's revolutions, Lord Asriel's rebellion begins with the shedding of innocent blood. But more on that later. The point here is that Pullman promotes situational ethics and moral relativism early on in his books. Lord Asriel is intended to be a sympathetic character. Pullman leads the young reader to believe that it is acceptable for an adult to recklessly endanger the life of a child in order to protect his own--and when the incident with Roger is taken into account, that it is permissible to murder a child in cold blood if in doing so one serves a higher purpose. This is moral relativism at its worst. No end can justify as its means the shedding of innocent life. For Pullman, the ancient Gnostic heretics were right: the Serpent of Eden helped rather than hurt Adam and Eve. The loss of innocence is necessary step toward maturity. The Fall of Man should be a cause for celebration, literally "happy" yet not a "fault" at all. And in this topsy-turvy view, the Fall most certainly didn't merit "so great a Savior" in the person of Jesus Christ, as the Holy Saturday Liturgy proclaims. Gnosticism was a bubbling brew of Christian, Jewish, and pagan ideas that flourished in the early centuries ago. From their confused teachings comes Pullman's rejection of the Biblical God. He specifically identifies his Authority as Yahweh, God's Old Testament name, in The Subtle Knife. Knowledge saves by exposing this God as a finite, created usurper. In some interviews (e.g. Sydney Morning Herald on December 13, 2003), Pullman gives an unconvincing nod to the remote possibility of some ultimate Divine Principle somewhere but has seen no evidence of it himself. In others (BBC "Breakfast with Frost" for January 27, 2002), he's indicated that if a real God somehow exists, he thinks such a Being "deserves to be put down and rebelled against." Pullman builds subversive meanings into his characters' roles and names. Lyra's identity as the long-prophesied New Eve makes her a blasphemous double of the Virgin Mary, for that's how St. Justin Martyr described Our Lady around 150 A. D. Her original family name, Belacqua, means "beautiful water" in Italian. Her mother's first name, Marisa, is an Italian diminutive of Mary. (Outrageously, a symbol of the Madonna represents her in a reading of the golden compass.) Lyra's friend Dr. Malone the ex-nun is also called Mary, a name of uncertain history that's been variously interpreted as "beloved," "beautiful," "bitter," "long awaited," "bride of the sea," "drop of the sea" and the inaccurate but favorite title among Catholics, "star of the sea" (Stella Maris), which is attributed to St. Jerome. Thus Lyra, Marisa Coulter, and Mary Malone stand for the three phases of a woman's life or to Pagans, the Three Faces of the Goddess: Maid, Wife/Mother/Mistress, and Crone. But Lyra as the New Eve repeats the deed of the Old Eve, instead of reversing it as the sinless Blessed Virgin Mary did. Marisa's smothery mother-love for Lyra is a form of possessiveness that makes her no more nurturing toward others. Her marriage and her love affairs are for expedience and pleasure. Led away from religious life by carnal desire, Mary is no longer sexually active yet she knows how to make erotic experience attractive to others. (The original Mother Eve advised her to do it by telling stories.) Mary's role as the serpent in an alien Eden recalls the feminine features of the Tempter in much medieval and Renaissance art. Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children's Fantasy will be available in mid-December 2007. Paperback. 100 pages. $9.95.