In any event, my enjoyment of the [Harry Potter] books is enhanced by the knowledge that it also drives the fundamentalist right nuts. Ever since the books gained great popularity, they've been on the warpath against Harry Potter, as you can see from the excerpt from Jesus Camp above, in which we see the head of the camp telling children that Potter should be put to death. (Talk about Republicans for Voldemort!)
It's worth remembering just how deep that animus runs, as CLS at Classically Liberal explains in painstaking detail:
[I]t seems that when someone is campaigning against the book or the films, the leader of the campaign is invariably a fundamentalist Christian. For instance, fundamentalist Laura Mallory, of Lawrenceville, Georgia, tried to ban the Potter books from the public school library. She says the books have “evil themes” because they speak of witchcraft and spells. And the Bible clearly teaches such things are immoral. One child who opposed her efforts saw things more clearly. He said, “never at any time did I think the books are true.” But fundamentalists do think that there is truth in these books. Unlike most rational people, they do believe that witches and spells exist. They have no choice since the Bible condemns such things. To say they don’t exist questions the infallibility of Scripture. Most people are not offended by the theme of the Potter series because they don’t believe the “dark forces” actually exist.
Read the full post -- it's hysterical.
The degree of ignorance in the fundamentalist position is staggering, or it would be if I sxpected them to know anything about others' religions. I guess it's OK just to repeat that they're all false, so you don 't really have to know anything about what they teach. I find particularly annoying the conflation of Witchcraft and Satanism -- sorry, honey, but as far as I'm concerned, Satan is a Christian deity, not one of ours. Of course, they don't recognize Witchcraft as a religion, but then, they don't recognize the Pope as Christian.
And, of course, since the Bible says it's bad and the separation of church and state is a myth, there's no problem with demanding that public schools censor them.
I realize it's grossly politically incorrect, but as far as I can determine, anyone who thinks any sacred text is factual is missing a few screws. Fundamentalists of any stripe obviously have limited imaginations and have no idea of metaphor at all. One wonders how they function in this world.
The Nazis burned books, you know.
No comments:
Post a Comment