At the summit of the slope [Mary Malone] looked for the last time at the Dust stream, with the clouds and the wind blowing across it and the moon standing firm in the middle.
  And then she saw what the great urgent purpose was.
  They were trying to hold back the Dust flood.  They were striving to put some barriers up against the terrible stream:  wind, moon, clouds, leaves, grass, all those lovely things were crying out and hurtling themselves into the struggle to keep the shadow particles in this universe, which they so enriched.
   Matter loved Dust.  It didn't want to see it go.  That was the meaning of this night, and it was Mary's meaning too.
  Had she thought there was no meaning in life, no purpose, when God had gone?  Yes she had thought that.
  "Well, there is now," she said aloud, and again, louder:  "There is now!"
   "As she looked again at the clouds and the moon in the Dust flow, they looked as frail and doomed as a dam of little twigs and tiny pebbles trying to hold back the Mississippi.  But they were trying, all the same.  They'd go on trying till the end of everything."

I think it is more than that in two ways.  1.  he explicitly states that he means to undermine Christianity 2.  They are turning his book into a movie.

He has always been more popular in Britain than in America but issuing the book in a movie is a winning strategy in this country.  There are plenty of other anti-Christian works out there, sci-fi and otherwise, but they don't attract ire simply because they are not on the radar nor are they as like to be overtly evangelistic.

"I didn't seem much in the series that would actually shake anybody's faith in Christianity."

We had somebody on this forum whose faith was shaken by it, or at least influenced some thinking.  Remember Sir Somebody Something?

Do  I understand you to mean by 'interesting twists on religious orthodoxy' that you think the Pullman series is consistent with orthodox Christianity, but cast in materialistic terms?   I am trying to figure out how "the Christian account of reality is really true" can fit with "and it fits with materialist assumptions."  Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

"I meant "consistent" in the sense that the basic story of the NT is assumed to be true."

See, that confuses me, because the NT is basically the story of Jesus- God incarnate- coming to the rescue of fallen mankind, demonstrating in vivid terms that God is not indifferent to human suffering, but willing to participate in it in order to redeem it.  HDM posits a God that, besides being senile, creates human suffering and exploits the greed and lust of humanity to form oppressive regimes that somehow benefit him.   Moreover, there is no mention at all of the incarnation, Jesus gets named maybe twice, in passing.  But the incarnation of God, and the death and resurrection are what the Christian religion is built around.

Pullman insists that God does not love the world, ignores the giving of the son, and insists that the eternal life business is a lie- Yahweh sends believers and unbelievers alike to a realm of the dead which Lyra and Will seek out to destroy, the result of which is not new life in a resurrected body but dissipation of a person's matter into the universe, pantheism style.

"Of course, the Golden Compass is pure speculative fantasy (sans supernaturalism), and it was never intended to be taken as anything more than just that."

Oh, I don't think so.   Pullman explicitly stated in an interview that he wanted to undermine Christianity.  Undergirding this speculative fantasy is evolutionary theory and the multiverse.

...You could argue that, if both of these are true, there is in fact a universe in which the Golden Compass world is real.  I doubt Pullman would say that, but I've been hanging out with you long enough to know that you would be willing to believe an absurdity like that rather than the Christian account   Any materialistic explanation, no matter how absurd, is to be preferred over a supernaturalistic explanation.

Also, it does raise themes that are quite serious, some of which Sir SomebodySomething raised here.  Namely, what if God is the bad guy and Satan (ok, Satan is absent too, but you get the idea) is the good guy?  How does one know?   I'm not saying that it is bad to ask this question.  I think it is a good idea to ask it.  Pullman asks it, posits God as the bad guy that we are all glad to see get whacked, without dealing with the underlying substantive question which is really interesting, which is, just how does one know what is 'good' in the first place?

The most he says is that 'good is what helps someone.'  One sentence to justify 3 books.  Ok, that's a weakness of the series, but I'm not protesting that this argument is being made.  I am protesting your argument that it is nothing more than speculative fantasy and never meant to be any more than that.  His own words show otherwise but as the series ends with almost 50 pages of Mary Malone 'the temptress' laying out her evangelistic appeal for raw materialism, I think the series itself argues against your assertion, too.

I'm probably being too hard on you.  You probably read the series 5 years ago and I only read them a month ago and have been researching it.  But I would still be happy to hear you explain how the series is consistent with the NT at all.

"And let's keep evolution theory, an actual scientific theory, apart from speculations about a "multiverse", of which there are many, many versions."

The multiverse is also an actual scientific theory, unless you are here emphasizing a specific understanding of the word 'theory.'  I have often pointed out on this forum that though atheists like yourself are embarrassed by it, the multiverse is becoming the mainstream view.

...If one takes the many-worlds interpretation seriously and extends it as far as it can logically go, while you can't say that any imaginable alternative reality exists, you also can't say that it doesn't exist.  And with huge amounts of universes to work with, improbable scenarios can't be dismissed merely because they are improbable, just as it is improbable that a person can win the lottery five times in a row but if you make the attempt a trillion trillion times, its bound to happen sometime.

"As for naturalistic explanations, what we find is that most Christians allow such explanations to trump supernaturalistic explanations."

You mean atheists?

"What I believe is not that any natural explanation is always superior to a supernatural one, but that supernatural explanations almost always appear absurd when juxtaposed to alternative natural ones."

I've seen that process at work in you but we need not re-visit it here.  I'll merely restate my position which is that an evidence driven view takes precedence over perceptions of absurdity.  If it were evolution we were talking about, you'd say, yes, find evolution absurd, but if there is evidence for it, you are just going to have to change your perception.  Well, same thing for the supernatural.  There is historical evidence for a resurrection and though you have taken much liberty in spinning naturalistic interpretations of that evidence, the historical evidence is not consistent with that interpretation.  But you choose to favor those interpretations anyway because a resurrection strikes you as absurd on its face (evidence be d-mn-d) while the legend hypothesis has no evidence but at least is plausible and has the added benefit of being naturalistic.

"I meant it in the same sense that a morality play is nothing more than fiction.  The play itself is not meant to be taken seriously.  The questions and issues it raises are."

Sure, I mean it the same way, without the suggestion that fiction is not really anything.  So why can't I take issue with the questions and issues the story raises and point out that the author of the series intended them to serve a purpose beyond merely telling a story?

You realize that even in your qualification of what ways the NT is correct that you still don't have consistency with the NT?  For example, the 'superpowerful' being 'Yahweh' you are saying is being assumed to exist cannot be, by definition, the God of the NT.  HDM even speaks on occasion to the notion "Maybe there is a Creator, but we don't know" distinguishing that entity from Yahweh.  But the God of the NT is, by definition, the Creator therefore the 'Yahweh Christian God' in HDM cannot be the actual Christian God.

You know this is kind of ironic, come to think of it.  You are on the record somewhere arguing that the Gospel of Thomas should be considered as on the par to the four Gospels.  But it is the Gospel of Thomas, with its gnostic tendencies, which argue that matter is evil and that our goal is to escape into the spiritual.  HDM is really rejecting and attacking Gnostic notions which Christianity would join him in rejecting.  Remember, Christianity believes that God created everything and called it 'good.'  Gnosticism is a heresy;  HDM presents it as the Christian position.

"No, I rather like the idea.  I am deeply uncomfortable with your attempts to describe it as a "mainstream theory".  It has not achieved the status of much other than scientific speculation.  The QM version is interesting, because it restores determinacy to the quantum level, something which free will advocates might find disheartening."

You mean you're not making this very statement of your own accord?

"At best, it is a very popular idea, so I can go along with the claim that it is one of the "mainstream views" that physicists toss around.  Neither you nor I am qualified to judge the math."

Why must we limit ourselves to math in order to judge it? If the math seems to cross over into philosophical lines it can be reasonably uplifted or refuted with philosophical reasoning.