Classical & Biblical Quotations

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 172973

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Bart Lidofsky <bartl at ...> wrote:
>
> Ken Hutchinson wrote:
> > The error is one that is critical to me as I try to explain to
> > conservative Christian friends why I don't think Harry Potter doesn't
> > violate the Biblical proscription against magic. Magic as used in the
> > Bible is always an attempt to thwart God's will and so it is rightly
> > condemned. 
> 
> Bart:
> There is no Biblical prohibition of magic, per se. There are Biblical 
> prohibitions of certain kinds of magic, almost always mistranslated
(due 
> to the fact that scholars would rather be thought to be sloppy 
> translators than to be thought to take magic seriously).
> 
> While there are a number of ignorant (and yes, I do mean ignorant) 
> fundamentalist Christians who consider Harry Potter evil because of the 
> practice of magic, the more educated fundamentalist and evangelical 
> Christians have a more subtle problem; the idea that one can save one's 
> own soul through simple repentance, rather than through acceptance of 
> Jesus as their personal savior.
> 
> Bart
>

In the ASV, the version I have on my Palm, Exodus 22:18 says "thou
shalt not suffer a sorceress to live". Ok, not a prohibition on magic
per se, but if those who practice magic are to be executed is that not
the same thing? It is passages like this one that are the source of of
the common conservative Christian objections to the Harry Potter
series. At least that is what I hear in the media, I don't know of a
single one of my peers who does object to Harry Potter.

The more subtle problem you mention is so common in secular literature
and media that I doubt many would take Harry Potter to task over this.
In fact Narnia, which is much beloved among conservative Christians,
has a scene in which Aslan accepts as his own a young man who
worshipped another god. I have never thought that Rowling was hiding a
Christian message in the Harry Potter series. Perhaps those two
quotations in the graveyard argue otherwise, but I'm not sure if that
is the message she meant to send or simply something that some readers
will see in the scene.

Ken