The Golden Compass and Religious Nutbags

It's gone beyond ridiculous to the point of hostile stupidity. The religious conservatives attacking Phillip Pullman's book and the film adaptation coming out continue to exhibit their blind ignorance and irrational stupidity by calling for a ban of this film, on the basis that it is atheist propaganda. It's one thing to hold certain beliefs, it's another thing to scream and cry for the rest of the world that they must hold the same beliefs, but you're a complete friggin moron if you stand on those beliefs based on lies and ignorance.

Both Pullman's books, His Dark Materials, and the movies, the first installment of which, The Golden Compass, releases today are neither atheist nor guilty of the sins the whackjobs claim.
How can a work that professes that there is a God, an afterlife, Angels and Demons, be atheist?!

The main complaint seems to stem from the fact that the villains in this book are a group of religious zealots, who also happen to be the government, and who are involved in experiments on young children. This, they claim, is atheist propaganda designed to show religion in a bad light. In this they might have a case, as the villains are indeed representative of "organized religion". However, the mere fact that the author implies that there is a God, in the example of Daemon's, the existence of Angels and the fact that the anti-hero/villain is actually trying to destroy God, defies the Atheist label.

The final complaint, and perhaps the most retarded of all, is the claim that the attempted removal of the characters' daemons, which are spiritually attached to their owners, represents castration. Again, morons. Read the book instead of just parroting spastic, reactionary preachers and stay at home moms with nothing better to do than scour the book shelves for objectionable reading material supposedly designed to indoctrinate your children to become evil satan worshippers. The Daemons represent the souls of the humans in this ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE (read the book!), and the attempted removal of these is a metaphor for the removal of the souls of children by cold and calculating cynicism in the form of power hungry despots. Sorry it had to be a religious organization that does it, but that brings me to my final rant.

One reviewer that I read decried the Atheist agenda of indoctrinating our children early. Gee, I wonder what those classes and church excursions I was forced into from the time I was 5 were all about?