The Golden Compass & The Golden Rule

The Golden Compass movie irritates some religious persons who who feel it is an anti-religious movie. My response would be that, if you believe you should be free to proselytize, you must grant such freedom to others. It's the essential Golden Rule of proselytizing.

It's not that simple, of course. Each of us tends to believe that the communication of our message represents the proclamation of truth that will set humanity free, while the communication of competing messages represents a dark attempt to enslave humanity. When my father and I found ourselves differing on religion, he told me I had been brainwashed by outside forces. I asked him why his devout adherence to the religion of his heritage didn't show himself to be equally brainwashed. The issue was never resolved to either's satisfaction.

My first op-ed in my writing career was a July 1, 2002 column in the Daily News (before Chris' time as editorial page czar), on why atheists need to grant religious people the ability to express their faith:

Those who despise the slightest hints of public religiosity may be projecting outward their own overly dramatic fear of coercion. The Michael Newdows of our country may dimly sense a swirl of forces inside himself, asking him to reconsider questions about the meaning of his life and his world. Fearing where that would take him, he silences those voices, for himself and for others. There will be no coercion on his watch, no public prayers, nothing that hauntingly reminds him of issues he is trying to leave behind.

Yet the truth is that an open religious marketplace is the best antidote to coercion. The New Testament revealingly depicts how some of the apostle Paul's most fruitless missionary work was in Athens, where the bustling farmer's market of ideas gave him a short and fair hearing and a far more tepid response than he received in many other cities.

By contrast, climates that are repressive to religious expression unwittingly set the stage for an explosion of conversions (in much the same way that a religious parent's fanaticism often predicts the future rebellion of the children).

One passage that I regret the editor took out was about Jerry Seinfeld's old joke about why many men are homophobic -- they know they have weak sales resistance, always being talked into buying things they don't need or that don't work, and they fear they could be talked into being gay. The same applies both to many atheists and to the faithful types who condemn the Golden Compass. (Of course, they always claim that they're not worried about themselves but are simply looking out for likeminded people who are more gullible and more susceptible to being brainwashed; this "charitable interest" is behind much of the repression of human history.)

But both groups need to learn the rules of the marketplace of the ideas, to compete fairly, and to protect one another's right to compete.