But nothing connects those physical postures
intrinsically to the worship of pagan gods. So if the intention isn’t there, there’s no worship of false gods. To fear otherwise is superstition.
Yoga is fine if treated as a purely physical/physiological exercise, divorced from its Hindu origins.
In this case, it’s a good spiritual impression, due to the morally and spiritually positive Christian structure, imagery, and themes of the
Harry Potter series. The little outline I made that curlycool reproduced on page two gives one of many examples of the series’ Christian elements.
These claims are
so absurd and outlandish that a part of me cannot help but believe that you are actually satirizing the anti-Harry Potter camp.
Absolutely false; you have given some specific examples, though, which is fortunate since you couldn’t have chosen better examples to illustrate how unambiguously ludicrous the claim that the spells are “real” is.
For those who haven’t read the book: an intelligent, self-aware, talking/singing hat - a rip over the brim is its mouth - sings a song about how the students will be placed into one of four “houses” (dormitories/student groups) based on personality. The song is in rhymed iambic lines of alternating trimeter and tetrameter. It’s silly and fun. For instance, the last four lines are:
So put me on! Don’t be afraid
And don’t get in a flap!
You’re in safe hands, though I have none,
For I’m a thinking cap!
One by one, the new students put the hat on their head; it looks into their minds and hearts, speaks to them privately if necessary, figures out which house they belong in, and then announces to the whole assembled school which house that student will be in.
Gabriel, and anyone still on the fence about this, please take note:
hats don’t talk. Also, the houses of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry don’t exist, because Hogwarts doesn’t exist.
The claim that the “Sorting Ceremony” is real… well, let’s just say that anyone who could truly think this most likely has a serious medical issue that genuinely inhibits his or her capacity to understand what is real and what is make-believe.
Works like this:
The witch or wizard points his or her wand at his or her target, says “Petrificus Totalus!”, and that person is paralyzed temporarily: the victim’s body instantly becomes as rigid as a board.
Wands in the
Harry Potter universe are made from fictional ingredients like unicorn tail hair, dragon heartstring, and phoenix tail feather.
The actual incantation - “Petrificus Totalus” - is just some random (and incorrect?) Latin.
The effect is fantastical and instantaneous, and no invocation is involved.
As you can see, the idea that waving a stick with unicorn hair in it at someone and saying some fake Latin can paralyze them, is an idea that could take hold only in the mind of someone medically incapable of understanding what is real.
He mentions certain ingredients that are real - bezoars, asphodel, wormwood - but they have absolutely no magical properties in real life, and no instruction on what to do with them is given.
For instance, Professor Snape asserts that a bezoar is a panacea. Well, in real life, it’s not.
The actual potions in the
Harry Potter series are obviously fictional and fantastical.
Only someone with a real medical condition that hinders their capacity to comprehend what is real could think, as an adult, that talking hats, unicorns, and all-curing bezoars are real.
In conclusion, I recommend
this link for a satirical summary. Ironically, the full Body-Bind Curse is one of the very examples he uses.
