Christian extremists are getting worked up about a humorous book for kids.
Are you looking for last minute Christmas gifts for the kids? How about Aaron Leighton’s A Children’s Book of Demons, which offers hours of interactive fun colouring and drawing and dealing with the stresses of childhood life through some cartoonish demons. The book is humorous in tone, even as it helps kids deal with bullying and homework stress and whatever else little kids see as a burden. Good stuff, we say.
But the book, published back in July, has also been riling up the Christian lunatic fringe of late, and if that doesn’t tip the balance if you were considering a purchase, I don’t know what will. The notoriously deranged evangelist Elizabeth Johnston, who writes as The Activist Mommy, is particularly upset. In case you are wondering just what sort of activist (or, what sort of mommy, for that matter) Johnston is, she writes that “Postmodernists would like to think that the teachings of God’s Word regarding the immaterial realm are little more than persistent mythology that continues to hold humanity in the dark ages. But then, they publish garbage like this” and urges parents to complain to stockists. Her outrage certainly seems to be working as far as gaming the Amazon reviews goes. Here are a few:
Now, come on – don’t you want your kids to learn the Greek, Hebrew and Egyptian names of malicious demons? It sounds solidly educational, and arguably a lot less traumatising than the fire and brimstone, sacrifice, murder and atrocity laden Bible that Johnston and her ilk like to cram into the minds of impressionable kids.
