Potter Plans World Domination

Word just in: The world is flat. Moreover, the sun is 32 miles across, and it is 3,000 miles from Earth, the moon being 3200 miles away.

Also in tonight's news a squadron of Vietnamese Potbelly Pigs flew from Little Rock to Denver for the Republican Convention. But worst of all children and adults who have read the Harry Potter books or have seen the movies made from them are convening a vast coven in New York City in preparation to take over the world by witchcraft, led by Potter himself now that Voldemort is dead.

Sadly, we have people in this country and other civilized places that might believe that. They are the ones, fundamental Christians mostly, stamping the Potter books and movies with the curse of witchcraft and trying forbid all children and adults from reading the books or seeing the movies. Especially if the children do, say the fundamentalists, they will be-not can be-will be made into witches and wizards and follow the dark arts themselves. Some say J. K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, is the Anti-Christ, and that her sole purpose is to steal the minds of our children and establish the kingdom of Satan.

How can anyone believe such rubbish in the 21st Century? They can believe it because the Bible tells them so, and because they have to have a reason why everything, including their children, is going to hell in a hand basket because it couldn't be their fault. It's Rowling's fault. It's the devil feeding them drugs. It's soap opera with their uncontrolled sex on the screen. It's rampant communism leading them down the garden path. It's liberalism turning their minds. It's conservatism making them cold and heartless. It's rock and roll, hip hop, rap-it is anything but us, the adults responsible for our children's upbringing.

Denigration of witches is the product of our Judeo-Christian culture. Condemned by both the Old and New Testaments, witchcraft and sorcery have motivated atrocities against thousands, maybe millions, or people for millennia. Anyone who was different could be classified as a witch and be hunted and treated abominably, testified to by our history of Jim Crow and legislated segregation, the Salem witch trials, or the fight Wiccans have had recently to have Wicca recognized by the Federal Government as a religion with all the right and privileges there unto.

The classical image of a witch is an ugly old woman hunched over a cauldron in which floats eyes of newts, oil squeezed from rats, blood of zombies, or other such nonsense. Shakespeare has them seated on slimy ground predicting Macbeth and Duncan's fates. Likewise wizards are gnarled ancient old men with distorted faces and misty eyes reaching out with wands to condemned their prey. And if we can imagine living in a world dominated by superstition where the only occasional light at night was fire with its distortions and dancing shadows creating supernatural images to accompany stories of ghosts and goblins and the undead, which to gullible people were real, it is easy to understand belief in witchcraft.

But classical witches and wizards never existed, and they do not today. Anyone who is not addled knows that. Most children are not addled, and they know HARRY POTTER IS FICTION. If they do not know it is fiction and if their parents do not, then they are addled and need psychiatric help. Get real. How many little boys leap from tall buildings in attempts to fly after seeing any of the Superman movies? Do any of your children insist they are in Oz after seeing The Wizard of Oz, who turns out to be a bumbling charlatan? If they do, take them to a doctor.

My point is that J.K. Rowling created Harry Potter from her mind, one of most incredible, in my opinion, since C. S. Lewis died. And my second point is that the vast majority of children and adults know it.

I don't mean to insult anyone's belief, and I am not taking on the superstitious aspects of religion. But when religion, particularly fundamental Christianity in this case, stands between children and some of the finest literature created in this and the last century, someone needs to attempt to shake them to their senses. Witches and wizards, except for members of Wicca, do not exist.

People cannot cast spells like the characters in Rowling's novels. No one has ever exited who can do that, neither do they now nor will they ever in the future. We see life, or should see life, through the lenses of modern science. We see our souls through the lenses of religion. We know more now than those sad, deluded people in Salem, Mass., who condemned innocent men and women to death because they were found to be different and who could perhaps do something someone else could not do. Like the woman condemned a witch because she made apple dumplings. She had to make one in front of the court to prove she did not use magic to get the apple inside the pastry.

Finally, who am I to say all this with such great authority, condemning as a fool anyone who believes in the reality of magic and witchcraft? Read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows; I may be Lord Voltemorte.