Christians in HP - in a purely historical way(was:Re: Christianity in HP)

[ewdotson01]

No: HPFGUIDX 128507

Betsy:
> 
> There's nothing in canon that suggests that being a witch or wizard 
> would go against a monotheistic faith.  Magic is presented in an 
> almost scientific manner.  No gods or goddesses are called down.  
> Actually, there's very little chanting at all.  You call out the 
> *name* of the spell, but you don't call on an outside power.  
> Astrology and tea-leaf reading, etc., are treated as a bit of a 
joke 
> and not really real, and even the Centaurs seem to be doing 
> something more akin to chaos theory than out and out star-reading.  
> Compare that to the way magic is portrayed in "Buffy the Vampire 
> Slayer" where Willow was *constantly* calling on various gods and 
> goddesses and you can see that there's nothing really there, in the 
> Harry Potter world, to contradict a Christian witch or wizards 
faith 
> (or a Jewish or Muslim, for that matter).

Absolutely, and I think it's very important to keep in mind that 
Hogwarts has been actively recruiting muggle-born wizards for a 
millenium now.  While it may certainly be true that Britain is a 
largely secular country these days, that most certainly would NOT 
have been true 500 years ago.  Telling Farmer John that his son Timmy 
was a wizard would have been hard enough without mandating that he 
drop his faith too.  All things considered, I would expect that they 
would have had to have made it very clear when recruiting muggle-born 
wizards that there was no inherent conflict between being a wizard a 
being a Christian.  To be honest, given the steady influx of 
population from the non-magical world into the magical world, I would 
expect the magical world to be fairly comparable culturally to the 
non-magical world over time.  (I would expect there to be a certain 
lag in the magical world as change would happen on a somewhat 
generational level.)


"ewdotson01"