HP religion debates

[Caius Marcius]

No: HPFGUIDX 8373

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Keith Fraser" <keith.fraser at s...> 
wrote:
> There's been a lot of brouhaha about Harry Potter being supposedly 
> blasphemous or satanic because it contains magic. I think this is 
> nonsense, and here's something that puts the debate into 
perspective 
> and shows that HP is only under attack because it's popular.
> 
> In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (which I'm currently 
> reading the third book of, The Amber Spyglass, the first two being 
> Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife), no less weighty a subject is 
> tackled than a war against GOD (the Authority), who seems to be 
being 
> set up as a lying villain. Now, I have no problem with this idea, 
not 
> being very religious, but if I were a devout Christian I think I 
> would probably have shut the book and stopped reading at some 
point. 
> However, I haven't heard anything about fundamentalist groups 
trying 
> to ban this trilogy! I don't know precisely how popular it is, but 
I 
> certainly haven't heard a murmur against it.
> 
> Something to think about.
> 
> Keith

Maybe they know all about it, and are trying to keep it hush-hush.

I won't get into again whether taking HP off the Dirtroad Village 
school syllabus or out of the Podunk County Library truly 
constitutes "banning," especially in a county where 95% of
the 
population is within 30 minutes of a mass-market bookstore (everyone 
blessed one of which has all four HP volumes stacked from floor to 
ceiling, discounted from 15 to 25%).  Now, some of our more excitable 
fundamentalist friends are convinced that the secular authorities are 
trying to ban the Bible.  I doubt this is the case, but it seems to 
me they have a bit more evidence to go on: the State of Ohio, for 
example, had its motto declared unconstitutional several months back, 
because it came from the Gospel of Matthew ("With God, all things
are 
possible" – prompting one wit to suggest that Ohio replace it
with 
Ivan Karamazov's slogan, "Without God, everything is
permitted"). 

Since the alleged censoriousness of evangelicals is taken as a given 
by many on this group – i.e.,. one anti-HP site was described as 
giving "the" evangelical position on HP, presumably assuming
that all 
evangelicals are one unamimous, harmonious anthill on this matter  
(it's bigtime stereotyping, but hey, who doesn't? - to paraphrase 
Pascal, people so naturally stereotype that not to stereotype would 
merely amount to another form of  stereotypy).  I would like to see 
some hard actual real data here – what percentage of people in
this 
country actually want to ban/restrict HP? What percentage of 
evangelicals?  My guess is that even with the latter group, the 
number would fall well below 50%.  I doubt any polling organization 
has explored this issue, so if anyone out there has friends at Gallup 
or Roper, now's your chance to put a bee in their bonnet. 

As for Pullman, I've been put off on reading him not due to his 
religious stance, but because of the critics – every reviewer
I've 
seen feels compelled to throw in some snide anti-HP remark, implying 
that HP is mere cheez-whiz on white bread compared to the 
intoxicating medley of Amber Spyglass flavors.   Someday, I'll
get 
around to Pullman (maybe after JKR's Volume Seven).

As for anti-Deistic novels: my favorite in Anatole France's witty
The 
Revolt of the Angels, in which the guardian angel of a member of the 
French bourgeois abandons his charge after becoming convinced 
(through a display of theological erudition that would Hermione 
herself gasping in awe) that the being known as Jehovah is a mere 
evil demiurge, and seeks for the long-vanished Satan to lead a 
revolt. James Blish's The Devil's Day climaxes with a
successful 
revolt against the Deity by his Satanic Majesty 

More intriguing than either, however, is GK Chesterton's The Man
Who 
Was Thursday, a sort of Theodicial Alice-in-Wonderland, and one of 
the few tales that gets the uniquely Christian perspective of Good 
and Evil exactly right.  Fortunately, it's available online: 

http://www.ccel.org/c/chesterton/thursday/thursday.html  

  - CMC