While making "Dogma," Kevin Smith received a sign from above.

He's just not sure whether it was a thumbs up or thumbs down.

"I saw my first tornado," says Smith, whose film shoot near Pittsburgh, with star Linda Fiorentino, was interrupted by one of Pennsylvania's infrequent twisters.

"I went outside and it was like I saw the funnel," Smith says. "It was weird. Linda was going, 'Oh, this ain't good.' And she says, 'If it hits us, you know this movie is damned.'"

It didn't -- a fact that Smith takes as a good omen. But if God wasn't weighing in on "Dogma" that day, he's an exception. Just about everyone else has.

The unorthodox -- literally -- comedy has been the target of attacks from the Catholic League, from conservative critics, and from vociferous letter-writers, virtually none of whom have seen the movie.

The film, starring Fiorentino, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, George Carlin, Chris Rock, Alan Rickman, Salma Hayek, Jason Mewes, and Smith, opens Friday.

Smith says his hate mail ranges from amiably weird ("I don't think you're anti-Catholic. I think your problem is that you were born and raised in a town with water on both sides") to scary ("... we're going to come in there with shotguns"). The hate mail is now regularly posted at Smith's Web site, www.viewaskew.com.

Pressure was so intense that Miramax, the Disney subsidiary that was to have distributed the film, dropped it. "Dogma" is now being distributed by Lions Gate.

The irony, of course, is that Smith is Catholic -- devout and practicing.

Indeed, it's unlikely anyone but a Catholic could have come up with "Dogma," a movie which uses some of the more obscure articles of the faith as the basis for an ingenious, offbeat comedy-fantasy.

In the film, Affleck and Damon play banished angels who scheme to return to heaven via a plenary indulgence -- a loophole in the faith which would allow their sins to be forgiven, in this case merely by walking through a certain church door in Red Bank, N.J.

What they don't know is that to do so will circumvent the will of God, thus making God less than omnipotent and causing the universe to disappear.

"Plenary indulgence is something that exists -- I didn't make it up," Smith says. "You'd be given partial or full forgiveness for your sins, based on something you did, or a sacrifice you made. Or, if it was ceremonial, something like entering a church. When I was 12 or 13, my church had its centennial, and they actually declared a day of plenary indulgence, where you walk through the door and your sins are forgiven. You're given a clean slate."

"Dogma" has other eyebrow-raising ideas: a heroine (Fiorentino) who works in an abortion clinic; a 13th apostle, Rufus (Rock), who claims he was omitted from the Bible because he's black; and a cameo appearance by God, looking very much like Alanis Morissette (which it is).

And as anybody who has seen a Kevin Smith film might guess, the movie has its share of bathroom humor and sex jokes, not to mention the return engagement of burnouts Jay (Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith), the latter a sort of pothead Marcel Marceau.

"It's going to be time to retire Jay and Silent Bob soon, because Lord knows I don't want to be the 45-year-old Silent Bob," Smith says of his cult role. "That would just be sad."

"Dogma" was brewing in Smith's mind even as the indie director was putting the finishing touches on "Clerks," the $27,000 comedy about convenience store clerks that put the then 23-year-old writer-director on the map in 1994 (and is the basis of a prime-time ABC cartoon series, starting in February).

"It was written before 'Clerks' came out, and I continued to do about a redraft a year on the script after that," Smith says.

After "Clerks," the Highlands native continued to mine the quirks of the New Jersey slacker scene in his follow-up films "Mallrats" (1995) and "Chasing Amy" (1997). But meantime, he was marshaling forces for his epic film about religion -- to be told in the style of the comic books and graphic novels that are Smith's second love.

As a matter of fact, he also recently incorporated a religious theme into several "Daredevil" comics he wrote -- though without the firestorm that "Dogma" ignited.

"Comics are such a small fringe industry now that you can't really kick up a storm by attacking a comic book," Smith says. "The Catholic League loved this movie, and loved going after it, because it was a Disney movie, and Disney is always their primary objective. When we were no longer a Disney movie, it kind of let the wind out of their sails, and they changed their campaign to say, 'Now Disney should drop Miramax.' And then, of course, they had the Brooklyn Museum thing later in the year. It's just been a banner year for these guys."

One thing "Dogma" is not is an attack on God or religion, Smith insists.

The 28-year-old Red Bank resident goes to Mass every Sunday, is good friends with his priest, and is a family man with a 4-month-old daughter.

No, the target of "Dogma," if there is one, is the rigid belief systems that can lead to prejudice and hypocrisy.

"What people don't know about Catholicism, or don't talk about, is that it's a very litigious faith," Smith says. "Catholics are always looking for the loopholes. Especially when you're young, and you're trying to figure out how you can [have sex] without it being a sin. You have to be a kind of lawyer if you want to be a Catholic, if you want to skate through the holes."

Indeed, much of the uproar over "Dogma" may come down to the fact, not that it mocks the Catholic faith, but that it takes it at face value.

It's one thing, for instance, to say that angels are sexless.

It's quite another for Rickman, playing an angel named Metatron, to demonstrate the fact by pulling down his pants.

Unorthodox? Definitely. Irreverent? Perhaps. But "Dogma" is also very much pro-God and pro-religion -- something that protesters might find out for themselves, if they actually took the trouble to see the film, Smith says.

"If there's a target for the satire, it's certainly not God or the faith, it's the people," Smith says. "It's like, 'Lord, save me from your followers.' I'm a guy who really wants to believe, and get past the people who make it difficult. God doesn't make it difficult. God makes it really easy. God gives us a beautiful world to live in, and wonderful experiences to have. Unfortunately, there are also people who make it so damn crappy."