Soul’s Code

Viral video from the Sarah Silverman Show on Comedy Central: “Give the Jew girl toys”

Gen-X comedienne Sarah Silverman leads the charge to divorce an increasingly commercial holiday even further from its roots with her, um, touching song, Give the Jew Girl Toys.

She sings a seminal line to Santa: “What does Jesus have to with you? You’ve got about as much to do with Jesus as Scooby-Doo.”

Why New Line Cinema and Warner glossed over the dark side of Philip Pullman’s trilogy

BY PAUL KAIHLA —  The $180-million Hollywood blockbuster opened Hollywood’s 2007 Christmas season with the marketing slogan: “One small child can save the world.”

But the book it’s based on, the first in a fantasy trilogy called His Dark Materials, was released in 1996 with a slightly more sinister air.

The author, a stuffy 61-year-old Brit named Philip Pullman, is a celebrated anti-Christian crusader. The heroine in His Dark Materials, for example, is not on a mission from God but allied with forces out to kill God.

As the Atlantic Monthly lays out in an exhaustive exposé in its December issue, the Time Warner studio that’s releasing this film, New Line Cinema, scrubbed all of the anti-religious references from the script  — and sanitized it for all of the bible-thumpers in America.

Can you guess the source of these lines of sacred text?

That it may please thee to make wars to cease in all the world; to give to all nations unity, peace and concord; and to bestow freedom upon all peoples,

That it may please thee to visit the lonely; to strengthen all who suffer in mind, body, and spirit; and to comfort with presence those who are failing and infirm,

That it may please thee to forgive our enemies, persecutors and slanderers, and to turn their hearts,

You could be forgiven for thinking they’re from some kind of meditation on loving kindness in the Upanishads or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But this excerpt is a Christian prayer called The Great Litany that runs for six pages.

Acutely Buddhist in its appeal for universal compassion, The Great Litany was performed in procession by thousands of churches around the world to mark the First Sunday of Advent — the official beginning of the Christmas season for all of you chocolate fiends with Advent calendars, and Day One of a new church year.