Do JK Rowling Haters Have A Point?

[Revan]

You guys, don't you know that Witchcraft is about Satain worship and demon summoning? Gawd, even I know that

Only ignorant and closed minded people say such things. It's not all about worshipping Satan. And I am quite annoyed with your post... Do you even know yourself what witchcraft is? Read upon is sometime. And you'll find your very wrong. Yes, of course, some Witchcraft is based upon worshipping Satan, but, in all the types witchcraft practices, this is only a very small amount.

[Theo]

I think he's joking, Pie.

[Blue_Spawn]

[Revan]

heh, Me stupid

[Ariadoss]

I used to think Harry Potter was for little kids, but I am an open-minded person, so I tried reading the first book – couldn’t get through it, and then the second – couldn’t get through it. Alas I opened to the part of the second book where Harry was hearing voices in the walls, I almost read to the end without reading the first part of the book! I was hooked, I had to read all of them and now I never stop re-reading them!

About Rowling being a Christian, they do celebrate Christmas at Hogwarts though X-Mass was originally a pagan holiday (now a capitalist one). I have also seen books about Christian fantasy authors like CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle were compared with Rowling.

[theDespiser]

whats good about books like this is that, if you ARE some religious....person...and youre kids are reading these books, you can let them know that its pure fiction, and its just meant to entertain, and that theres only one true god and magic isnt real and blah blah blah, or, if you DO believe in magic and stuff like that, you can help them differentiate from the book magic and 'real' magic and stuff like that...its all in how you relate the stuff to your kids...i dont think it really harms either side...

or any other side for that matter

[Alynna Lis Eachann]

Some of these people doing the anti-Potter thing actually have read the books... and they can go through every part and tell you what's good about it, but always with some sort of caveat that tries to force it down your throat that the books are really subversive, and the good parts are there for dress-up.

One of the arguments I seem to remember is that it's cruel to give children the hope that witchcraft will save them... Well, in my opinion it's cruel to tell them religion will save them, especially when they go to church every Sunday and believe in God but get abused at home. My point is that if a child can have hope in the face of adversity, and if he or she can learn to be a good person despite having horrible role-models, does it matter where that child learns it from?

One of the things that bothers me the most is that famous line, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," or whatever the original version says. The people that fall back on this are, in my mind, advocating the killing of other people. It's not acceptable to read and form your own opinion, but it's acceptable to kill based on the opinions of others?

[Avatar]

Well said Alynna. And just out of interest, the original Hebrew of that verse, said, "Thou shall not suffer a poisoner to live.

A crucial difference in my opinion, and a mistranslation that led directly to the deaths of thousands of innocents during the Burning Times.

--Avatar

[taraswizard]

www.exposingsatanism.org/harrypotter2.htm Link sent me by another watch member

[Alynna Lis Eachann]

OMG, is that for real? I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I've seen some coherent arguments against Harry Potter, ones that actually hold water, but that...that's just...

[Variol Farseer]

Well said Alynna. And just out of interest, the original Hebrew of that verse, said, "Thou shall not suffer a poisoner to live.

A crucial difference in my opinion, and a mistranslation that led directly to the deaths of thousands of innocents during the Burning Times.

--Avatar

I've read that the precise meaning of the Hebrew word is somewhat obscure. It means a poisoner, but also seems to have occult connotations. In Old Testament times, the modern distinction between technology and magic had not yet been drawn. Someone who could brew up a deadly poison out of various harmless plants and minerals must have been thought of as a pretty powerful magician.

Perhaps a better translation would be, 'You shall not permit anyone who harms other people by occult arts to live.'

As for the phrase 'The Burning Times', it is misleading and much misused. A Wiccan friend of mine has done a lot of research into this matter. She concludes that probably no more than 100,000 people were executed on charges of witchcraft and heresy during all those centuries. Most of the victims were convicted of heresy, not witchcraft, and considered themselves to be Christians, not pagans. (The largest groups of victims were Cathars and Hussites.) Joan of Arc was a victim of 'the Burning Times', after all, and she is now a saint in the calendar of the Catholic Church. Some thousands of innocents were burnt at the stake without trial from about 1500 to 1700, most often in Protestant countries; there is precious little evidence that any of them were pagan. It is an ugly episode and a blot on the history of Christianity, but efforts to compare it to the Holocaust in WWII are sadly misguided.


By the way, J.K. Rowling is a communicating member of the Church of Scotland. If she makes no explicit reference to this in her books, it is partly because religion is something of a taboo subject in the U.K. nowadays. A year or two ago, there was actually a project afoot to commission a new series of Narnia books with all the religious elements removed. Somebody seems to have realized that the result would be like a de-alcoholized martini, and I believe the idea was quietly dropped.