To clarify, in case the sarcasm went over your heads, censorship by majority is stupid and completely wrong. The majority, throughout history have proven to be wrong during various times. In this instance, the belief in your supreme deity who will destroy other’s is completely wrong as well. If you want to do your children a favor, how about educating them with the tools of science to investigate the world they live in. Empower them to grow and understand the universe without indoctrinating them into some ancient belief system that continues to thrust itself against the wall of progress. Everything your religious beliefs have been based on have slowly dissolved because society is changing and progressing towards a greater understanding of our world. As our understaning grows, your religious views shrink. All you can fall back on is your false sence of faith, when evidence, progress, reasoning, a growing mountain of scientific proof that your archaic beliefs are just a product of fantasy and gullibility of simpler times. With all the tools we have now to investigate our world, you are a dying breed, it may take decades, perhaps centuries, but as always, progress will trump your misguided belief structure.

Science is not your enemy, but your educational levels and gullibilities sure are.

Do you sell Farenheit 451?

The only thing being empowered here is ignorance:

1. _The Golden Compass_ is the title of a single book, not a series. The trilogy of which it forms the first part is called _His Dark Materials_. Anyone proposing to censor a work of literature had better know at the very least how the work is identified and organized.

2. You are still selling the remaining two books of the aforementioned trilogy. Bear in mind that the first book (_Compass_), the one you have banned, is universally considered by those familiar with the books to be the LEAST controversial of the three. What can we conclude from this? Answer: far from being throughtful informed people, your customers are pathetic ignoramuses who have been incited into frantic mob action by some rumor they heard from a chain e-mail. If they were genuinely disturbed by the supposedly “antireligious” content of _His Dark Materials_, as opposed to being merely paranoid freaks, they would have banned the third book, not the first.

3. Criticism of religion does NOT constitute a violation of decency. (Read the last sentence again.) Anyone who says it does is a cretinous bigot and ought to be shunned.

4. “Family-friendly”: Do the moronic mobs who patronize your store really think that _The Golden Compass_ is inappropriate reading material for the children of their atheist neighbors? (Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot — atheists are immoral people who wouldn’t care if their children were exposed to drugs and pornography! So no wonder they let their kids read Pullman — six of one, half a dozen of the other!)

5. Frankly, I don’t know which is worse: that you allowed a magnificent, award-winning book like _The Golden Compass_ to be censored by a bunch of dunderheads, or that you issued a press release celebrating this fact.

I predict that you won’t stay in business long. But if you do, it will only be a sad commentary on the sorry state of certain backward segments of our society.