[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: What is JKR's religious beliefs?

[Kathryn Cawte]

bboy_mn:
 
While Britian is certainly a diverse society and incorporates all
religious faiths, I think it is safe to say that someone named Patil
or Ghandi would be Hindu, and someone named Hishimoto would be Shinto.
If I meet a person of Thai ancestry who is a native born Brit, I think
it's still safe to assume they are Buddhist. While this is not
absolute, it's a pretty fair indicator. Equally fair is the assumption
that someone born in Britian and named Rowling is Christian. 
 
That combined with her own statements of the fact.
 
People who assume she IS are making a fair assumption, people who
assume she is not are making an irrational assumption that does
nothing other than promote their own prejudice and further their own
self-serving personal agendas.
 
Nuf said.
 
bboy_mn
 
 
 You seem to be working off the assumption that everyone who assumes she isn
t Christian is assuming that she's some kind of satanist (and I would point
out at this stage, not because I think anyone here believes this, but
because it seems to be a common assumption that satanist and pagan are
synonyms, that Satan is a Christian concept and in order to be a satanist
you'd actually have to believe in some kind of judeo-christian God). umm,
yeah got distracted sorry, but it bugs me that most people who talk about
satanists seem to think they don't believe in the existance of God.

Anyway the point I was making was that while it would be reasonable to
assume that she was baptized into Church of England/Scotland, without
reading her interviews, it would also be perfectly reasonable to assume that
she has *no* real faith of any kind. I'm a pretty average, middle-class
english person and looking at my family and friends the only ones I know
(with one exception, my exception, and I have a *large* and varied group of
friends and family) that have any particular religious beliefs that they
follow are either Muslim or Sikh. The majority of my group were christened
in a church but practice no religion and enter a church only for the
required appearances at christenings, marriages and funerals.

Being christened in a certain faith surely doesn't really make you a member
of that faith if you don't believe in it or follow it's teachings except
coincidentally where they happen to intersect with your own moral code (by
that I mean I don't steal/kill etc but I don't refrain because it's in the
ten commandments, i refrain because it's wrong)

and to drag this back to the original post - if the person the original
poster (sorry lost track of who it was) was talking about isn't allowed to
read harry potter for religious reasons then you might mention that the
Archbishop of Canterbury said in an interview that he liked the Harry Potter
books because they told of a struggle between good and evil. So if that isn
t an endorsement I don't know what is.

Hmm reading that back I might be skirting very closely some of the rules
about controversial topics but I don't mean any offense and i was just
trying to illustrate that it's perfectly possible for a 'rational person'
with no agenda at all to wonder if JK Rowling was a Christian.
Also I think I corrected most of the typos in that but I'm very very tired
so I apologise to all our 'spelling nazis' (of whom I count myself one) in
advance for the hideous number of errors that are no doubt still there.

K