[HPforGrownups] Dawn breaks in the Garden (was Midnight...)/Dementor's Kiss

[Edblanning at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 38539

<Dicentra does some admirable summing up and decides that she, Pippin and I 
are all on the same side>

Good. We've got that settled then. A good week's work!
Anyone coming down to the Three Broomsticks so we can solve the Problem of 
Evil once and for all over a few butterbeers? ;-) 

I really just wanted an excuse to post this quote from Walt Whitman, which I 
came across today:

       This is what you should do: Love the earth and sun and animals,
                   despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks,
                               stand up for the stupid and the crazy,
                   devote your income and labour to others, hate tryants,
                               argue not concerning God,
                   have patience and indulgence toward the people,
                   re-examine all you have been told in school or church
                                           or any book,
                               dismiss what insults your very soul,
                         and your flesh shall become a great poem.

Some bits of it remind me strongly of Dumbledore.
But before I get a howler from the Mods for being too OT, I'd like to comment 
on this:

Bernadette:
>>I'm also uncomfortable with the idea
>>that they've chosen a method of social/judicial
>punishment where
>>they don't actually know the full effects of the
>>process, having
>>the possibly mistaken assumption that the soul is
>>destroyed, when
>>it may not be.  

Amy Z:
>Have we done any differently in having a death penalty
>in a world where we don't know what happens upon
>death?  It may just be that the WW concludes that a
>Kissed person has lost his/her soul because of the
>observed effects-it doesn't mean their theologians
>have a more definitive idea of what a soul is and what
>becomes of it upon death/being Kissed than Muggles do.

Eloise:
Good point. In English courts a sentence of death used to be accompanied by 
the words, 'And may God have mercy on your soul'. In the past, it was thought 
that we knew: the soul would be judged. I may well be wrong about this, but I 
thought this was also one of the reasons for witch *burnings*: if the witch 
was unrepentant, the burning acted as a purification of the soul. It is also 
why the condemned were accompanied to the scaffold by a priest and why for 
instance (going back to literature) why Othello was concerned to know that 
Desdemona had prayed before he murdered her. (I think that's right, although 
I'm more familiar with Verdi's opera than the play.)

The WW seems to accept that death can be a justifed penalty if it is carried 
out in the pursuit of justice, the aurors being licensed to use the 
Unforgivables, for example, but do we have any example of judicial killing 
*in cold blood*, as it were? I don't recall any mention of the death penalty 
as such in the WW, not for humans anyway. The Dementor's Kiss seems to be 
regarded as a fate *worse than death*. Many others die in Azkaban, through 
the effect of the Dementors. This seems to me to be worse than RL execution, 
at least in the supposedly humane way in which it is carried out in countries 
such as the US. (Note that I came from a country that does not have the death 
penalty and that I personally find the idea totally abhorrent. In any 
circumstances.) This touches both on last week's and this week's discussion 
topics, I think: the upholding by the wizarding establishment of a manifestly 
cruel and possibly corrupt judicial system. It is no coincidence that 
Dumbledore has set his face so resolutely against the use of the Dementors.

Eloise




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