Why does Petunia hate magic so much?

[usergoogol at yahoo.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 27045

There are alot of incredibly cool theories being tossed around, but here's mine.

It's the incredibly common combination of intolerance and Christianity.

Although it is a well known fact that Christianity is SUPPOSED to be a tolerant relgion (Jesus was apparently a very tolerant guy, with all that love thy enemy stuff.) But, due to the simple fact that monotheistic relgions in general teach that their belief system is the divine message of God, and that those who are not on God's side get eternal torture, Christians can get a little annoying at times. And since the Bible is such a darned big book, its not so hard to interpet a certian scripture to ones own purposes.

So there was Petunia Evans, who found out that her sister (anyone know who is older?) has magical powers, and she was quite jealous. But when she realized that certian scripture frowns upon magic, she decides, "Well, she's not so great. She's just a freak. And she'll rot in hell too!"

Now, Lily became quite an excellent witch, which of course, annoyed Petunia even more, but at another level she figured, "She's walking the sinful road to hell!" And forgot about her. (Not a very Christian thing to do, but come now. She's a jerk.) Now, she marries Vernon Dursley, and has a lovely (in her mind) little child who she names Dudley. Then, her sister gets killed ("What did she think would happen she got mixed up with those things?") and she gets Harry. She decides (somewhere in that justifying Christian level) to prevent Harry from going to hell too. She doesn't exactly do very well, (even by Muggle standards) and Harry goes to Hogwarts too.

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Some have supposed that she is a witch, and that would be a delightfully amusing plot device. It's quite reasonable that she used her own magic to... supress her magic. As someone who believes that homosexuality is at least partially controlled by a gene, I believe that this no doubt happens in reality. Someone believes that thing "X" is bad, so they supress it. Of course, for this theory to work, (the way I'm figuring it) Petunia would have to be a bit younger than Lily, because she would come to her jealousy/quasi-christian stance on religion before getting magic of her own. A little ironic though, that her sister having something which she actually had caused her to repress it, causing her to be even more jealous.

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If it helps you figure where I'm coming from, I'm an atheist. 14.9 years old too, if that helps you get a mental picture of me.

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~User "I was a teenage heathen" Googol~