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Old 02-21-2004, 03:27 AM   #11
HerenIstarion
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Quote:
Why would God create a being who had no free will to choose against a sin which He clearly condemns
You are mixing fiction with the world as we know it again. As you yourself give a definition up there, sin condemned is power coveted and got from supernatural being on the evil side to God. Being good at chopping wood, or writing poems, is natural ability and gift of God. Inside HP story, being good at magic is of the same rank.

Quote:
HP could be considered to take place in its own world with different rules from ours
That’s the point

Quote:
Where do you think these kids might turn when they find out Hogwarts doesn't exist? Where will they go to satisfy their desire to perform magic like Harry and co.?
One can not tell (in any particular case), but one is inclined to think they will grow up as normal as the next man, yet with richer imagination and more to remember than the said next man who haven’t got read HP stories (or other stories thought by adults as “endangering”). Haven’t you be playing cowboys after watching some Western movie, or pretending to be a knight after reading through Scott? When I was a kid, I was constantly imagining myself inside ME, being 10th of the Fellowship, running to and fro with a sword (Not real one, alas, could not have afforded one). Now I don’t claim perfect normality (what with all the chaps out there thinking me a geek ), but I don’t think it came in somehow as damaging to my soul. The point is, evaluation of using magical (and any other) abilities in the books is in the right place – to be brave is good, to be treacherous is bad, etc etc.

Only way HP can lead a child to the occult is once it is banned, for than it will be much more attractive (ah, how sweet the forbidden fruit is?). As in any other field, it is adults correct/incorrect behavior with regards of anything that may bring damage to a child

And, after all, the child is as much human as an adult, and the problem of choice is set before it as well as before any adult. There is no real living for the over protected, I can’t help thinking. The thing you fear, as far as I am to judge, is that HP readers will actually mix up fiction and reality and believe that magic is to be found in our world, and start finding it out and become witches and sorcerers as described by Merriam_Webster (or was it Oxford?) dictionary. But, without correct reaction of its tutors, it may be led to believe there are really green men on Mars, or, as the films assure us, that one can always get away with it if daring enough to rob a bank.

But is it not written:

Quote:
I suspect that belief and appetite for marvels are here regarded as identical or as closely related. They are radically different…
Quote:
Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s are is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief”… [but] what really happens is that the story maker proves a successful “sub-creator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world…”is it true” is the great question children ask… but the question is hardly an evidence of “unblunted belief”, or even of the desire for it
Which, of course, implies that if there is a “willing suspension” of something, once it is removed, the something remains.

a bit sliced quotes from Tolkien’s On Fairy-Stories, to be found in The Tolkien Reader. (My edition Ballantine Books ISBN 0-345-34506-1, ask for it and you’ll get a good read on it)
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