I’m used to a fair amount of e-mail paranoia. The next great computer virus is coming. Madeline Murray O’Hare is back from the dead. Proctor and Gamble’s got a satanist logo. But then I go to Snopes.com, and it’s always wrong, wrong, wrong.

So, I expected the same with this: “There will be a new Children’s movie out in December called THE GOLDEN COMPASS. It is written by Phillip Pullman, a proud athiest who belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C. S. Lewis’s Chronical’s [sic] of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. Nicole Kidman stars in the movie so it will probably be advertised a lot. This is just a friendly warning that you sure won’t hear on the regular TV.”

But, lo and behold, Snopes says it’s true. “Pullman left little doubt about his intentions when he said in a 2003 interview with <i>The Sydney Morning Herald</i> that ‘My books are about killing God.’”