Narnia a cause of nausea?

I have been looking forward to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe since I saw the trailer for it this summer (before Batman Begins, maybe?). So, I was thrilled to be able to finally view the film last Friday. I had heard mixed reviews of it beforehand, so I went in hopeful that it wouldn't be a disappointment. I had also seen the BBC version several years before, and I knew it would be an improvement over that version!??

I'm not a movie critic, but I really enjoyed it. I thought the acting was well done, the effects were great, and the film really seemed to "work" in all aspects. It is, in some regards, a movie for children, but I was very entertained and felt like it was as good as or better than most movies I would typically go to see. There are much better reviews out there, so if that's what you're after, I would recommend going somewhere else.

The thing I have been most interested in is seeing the reaction of the "secular" world to this film. And, as expected, there has been a considerable amount of ink (or pixels if you prefer) devoted to exposing this movie as a hateful, bigoted, Christian left-hook to the sensibilities of every open-minded, tolerant soul, err, person who goes to see it.

You can read one such article here.

The author, Polly Toynbee, suggests the audience bring along their own sick bag because "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion." In my mind, that would probably be a movie about flying airplanes into buildings or cutting off a person's head with a kitchen knife while saying "God is great!? all in the name of a "peaceful and respectful religion." But, strangely enough, that's now what she was writing about. The biggest offense in the movie (and Christianity) is this:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart.

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