Bible stories are “vital” for children’s education, said children’s author and atheist Philip Pullman yesterday, according to UK newspaper The Telegraph.

Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival, Pullman was emphatic that stories are what children need most of all, but storytelling has been neglected because of the distractions of television and the Internet.

An unlikely advocate for the Bible, Pullman included the Bible in his list of stories children should know, along with Greek mythology and fairy tales – like those he selected for his 2012 book of Grimm’s fairytales.

Pullman is well known for his fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, the first book of which, The Northern Lights was made into a movie in 2007 under the title The Golden Compass.

Christianity Today, reporting the movie release of The Golden Compass, observed that though Pullman’s books contain some parallels to C S Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, they contain a strikingly different kind of tale, and on a certain level oppose them. Pullman’s books depict the death of God and a key scene involves a former nun telling two children that she left the Christian faith because it’s “a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all”.

Pullman, writing in The Guardian on the occasion of Lewis’s centenary in 1998, said the Narnia books are “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I have ever read,” with “no shortage of … nauseating drivel.” Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator in 2003, named Pullman “the Anti-Lewis.”

Featured image of Pullman: englishpen_flickr