Sacrifice my love

[mooseming]

I've been following the theology discussions with interest and a 
growing awareness of my own ignorance. Given that my education 
consists of C of E Sunday school to the age of 10 I shouldn't be 
surprised!

Mostly I remember the pictures were hard to colour in because of all 
those little stones. The stones confused me because I lived on clay, 
there were no stones simply lying around. This led to enormous 
problems with the concept of `stoning to death' it made no sense, 
hanging, burning, drowning these I understood there being plenty of 
trees and water where I lived, but stoning seemed vastly 
implausible. 

I also had a problem with Jesus being able to tell the sheep from 
the goats which didn't seem hard to me and was therefore a rubbish 
metaphor. 

Fortunately a visit to Israel cleared up these issues it being 
literally littered with handy sized rocks and bereft of trees and 
water, also the goats and sheep there are practically 
indistinguishable especially from a distance.

My other lasting dilemma is the `give unto Caesar' parable. Mostly 
the parables were about being nice to people, forgiving, love etc. 
Give unto Caesar seemed to say Jesus was good because he was a smart 
arse and I couldn't quite square that with everything else, still 
can`t.

Actually I have one other dilemma which is `Jesus as sacrifice' but 
not wishing to offend anyone I'll skip over that and simply say that 
thinking about sacrifice in HP threw up a few ideas. Sacrifice is a 
major theme in HP and I wondered where JKR might be going with it.

Limited though my understanding may be I still have a moral 
philosophy (head for the high ground) which is that morality is born 
of culture and instinct. I do not believe that there is an absolute 
morality that exists beyond the human. I suspect in this I'm at odds 
with JKR. I have no idea what JKR believes, as she has pointed out 
no one has ever asked her, but this position would be consistent 
with HP.

If morality exists independent of individual experience, an internal 
otherness that is given to all at birth it would explain how Harry 
arrives at the age of 11 as a functioning social, moral individual 
in spite of his background. It would explain what is in the locked 
room, not warm woolly love but true good which encompasses tough 
love and hard choices. It is the white light of moral certainty that 
illuminates all our decisions and guides us to do what is best and 
not necessarily easy. Harry possesses this power `in such 
quantities' because of Lily's love and sacrifice, he has Lily's eyes 
and can therefore tell a sheep from a goat. Dumbledore is not 
Kneasy's machiavellian meddler but a man with his finger on the 
pulse of righteousness. 

Voldemort has this power not at all. This is how he has cheated 
death, by driving morality out. He does not know how he has expunged 
it ('it appeared that one or more of my experiments had worked') 
precisely because he can no longer tell which is the biggest bad. In 
regenerating his body at the end of GoF Voldemort made a mistake in 
using Harry's blood (forcibly taken) because, inadvertently, he has 
made himself vulnerable to virtue once more. Dumbledore knows this 
(the gleam in the eye) Voldemort does not, not knowing how he came 
by his immortality in the first place.

How can he have exorcised that which is `more wonderful and more 
terrible than death, than human intelligence, than the forces of 
nature`? The reverse Lily play. If Tom Riddle sacrificed someone who 
loved him for his own immortality then he has lost his humanity. Who 
is this someone and is she (for `she' she surely must be) the reason 
Snape has defected (if you think he has)? Was she at school with 
Lily, one of the group of laughing girls, and is she the reason 
Snape warned the Potters at Godrics Hollow (if you think he did)? 
Lollipops lite if you will. 

In the final showdown Lily's selfless sacrifice must surely be 
stronger than Voldemort's selfish one. Harry with the ability to 
tell right from wrong will act on it but what (or who) will the 
final sacrifice be?

With only weeks to go to the penultimate book I hope you can forgive 
this final spell of wild speculation but I thought it might be my 
last chance
..

Regards
Jo