Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books or makes a direct correlation to the Catholic faith. Catholics can make that correlation all they want, but the books are pure fantasy.

eta: by which i mean that even as a someone who heavily studied religions, i never grokked the series as an attack against a belief system, but against a superpowerful Oligarchy using an ancient belief system to do terrible things to people, and that it is a good thing for people to question what they are being told in the name of Faith...which i consider to be true for every belief system.

Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books.

Yes. Because, as you say in the very next sentence, the books are fantasy. C.S. Lewis named the lion Aslan and not Jesus, and yet people get that Aslan is a Jesus figure without him being specifically named as such.

as a someone who heavily studied religions, i never grokked the series as an attack against a belief system

Many other people (I don't mean Buffistas, though several certainly have), however, did read it that way, and if Pullman himself said that he wrote it that way means that the interpretation is, at the very least, extremely viable.

It struck me as being more actively Gnostic than anti-Catholic.

I'm not Catholic, and I found the third book offensive.

Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books or makes a direct correlation to the Catholic faith.

The Authority is explicitly identified as being "God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty." And then there's an ex-nun whose view of the church is fairly pivotal. I didn't see the books so much as anti-Catholic as anti-religion-in-general, but a) I'm not Catholic, and b) that's basically why I was reading them.

Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books or makes a direct correlation to the Catholic faith.

Well, no, but:

'I hope the wretched Catholic church will vanish entirely' >[link]

"I've been surprised by how little criticism I've got. Harry Potter's been taking all the flak... Meanwhile, I've been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God". >[link]

It's not like he's shy about views on the matter. I mean blah blah intentional fallacy all you want - enough people agree with the author in this case that I think arguing that the books are not anti-religion/anti-God/anti-Church is a difficult case to make at best.

(Personally I couldn't make it through even the first book because psychic and/or talking animals give me fantasy hives. And since I was never a fan of Narnia in the first place, I never really felt the need to take it down a peg by reading the atheist version.)

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I love talking animals and daemons are some of my favorite.

Wow, i hadn't seen that first interview before, Jess.

Obviously many of us get different things out of reading the same books :) Love the beauty and variety of interpretation.

I need more themes for my monthly classic book salon. So far, we've done quests, eponymous heroines, russian authors, and classic horror. Next up is "Water, Water, Everywhere" for which I am reading Two Years Before the Mast.

I've gone through various Top 100 lists and 1001 Books to Read Before You Die and have produced the following themes: "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew," "Books and the Bookish," "Religious Characters and Settings," "Colonialism and Independence," California Dreaming," and "War, What Is It Good For?". Lists to follow.

I'm looking to add any classics (or contemporary books on the literary side) that fit these themes. The book lists are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to give people ideas for what they might read, so that they can vote on topics.

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (daily life in 19th-century England)
Jane Austen: Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre, Shirley
Charles Dickens: Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities
Maria Edgeworth: The Absentee, Castle Rackrent
George Eliot: Middlemarch, Silas Marner
Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford, Mary Barton, North and South
William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Anthony Trollope: The Barchester Chronicles (especially Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset), Phineas Finn, The Way We Live Now