[HPforGrownups] Re: Puzzlement of the day

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 166310

From: cubfanbudwoman <susiequsie23 at sbcglobal.net>
>Yet you're right, too, that for many folks in the U.S. it's a very 
>secular thing -- someone(s) who is being asked if they'll watch out 
>for, or even raise, the child should something happen to the parents.

Bart:
Just to confuse matters more, in Judaism, there is something that is colloquially called in English the "godparents", although their role is more customary than religious. Their only actual obligation is to help hold a male child while he's being circumcised. Customarily, they are also charged with ensuring that the child is properly brought up if something happens to the parents (note that they are not personally obligated to do the upbringing; they are in charge of finding homes for the children, and their own home is certainly an option). 

No place of worship has been mentioned in the HP novels. Yet, at the very least, one would assume that some of the Muggleborns would belong to some religion. Most of the customs of Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, as the Jehovah's Witnesses will be more than glad to tell you, have pagan origins. It is no coincidence that when St. Patrick and his armies came to Ireland, by no coincidence, churches, monasteries and convents arose where the old pagan temples were (and were dedicated to the Catholic figures that most closely resembled the gods and goddesses to whom they were originally dedicated). 

>From my readings, the more scholarly Christian objections to the Harry Potter novels come not because of the outer trappings of magic, wizards, and witches, but from the apparently atheistic society depicted. In other words, in her attempts to avoid showing religion, JKR appears to be glorifying its absence (this is their point of view, not mine, although I definitely can understand it, even if I don't empathize with it). 

The existence of an office of "godfather" is another example of the secular trappings of religion without the spirituality involved. 

In the book 1984, women are taught a technique of simultaneously welcoming and rejecting sex, so that they can bear children for the Party, but nobody will actually ENJOY the sex. There has been a growing emphasis in Western Society of keeping the external trappings of religion, but looking down on anybody with faith with an attitude of, "You actually BELIEVE that garbage????" (this is nothing new; for years, scholars translating the Old Testament have gone out of their way to mistranslate the sections dealing with magic, for fear that putting in the effort to translate it correctly might be intrepreted as actually believing in magic). 

Bart