Harry Potter. Sin or no?

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Exactly what part of what I said was a “lie”?

The priest has performed over 7,000 exorcism and has given scores of conferences on the occult. He’s claimed that names used in the series are those of real demons. Lie? How do you know?

He says that there was a boy who became possessed because he was reading the series. Lie? I think he’d be in the position to know if that were true or not.

Want a lie? “Harry Potter is a Christian fantasy.”

There is simply no evidence of that.
 
omgriley said:
the spells used in the HP series are real spells; a.
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Oh, really? If they’re real, how come they never work when I say them, huh? How come I’ve been trying for years to get my kitchen to clean itself and it’s never worked? Riddle me that, why don’t you?

I can’t even get a stinkin’ feather to levitate.
 
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Consider this excerpt from an article on Catholic Answers about this topic by Steven Greydanus, a well respected Apologist:

“In fact, it’s possible to identify at least seven specific literary characteristics common to Tolkien’s and Lewis’s fiction that remove the fictional situations in which magic may be safely and lawfully pursued from real situations involving real people. Each of these seven literary caveats against magic in the real world is present in Tolkien and Lewis but absent from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.
  1. Tolkien and Lewis relegate the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to wholly imaginary realms, with names like Middle Earth and Narnia, that cannot be located either in time or in space with reference to our own world. By contrast, Harry Potter lives in a fictionalized version of modern-day England that isrecognizable in time and space.
  2. Reinforcing the above point, in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s fictional worlds, the existence of magic is an openly known reality the inhabitants of those worlds are as aware of as we are of rocket science. By contrast, Harry Potter lives in a world in which magic is a hidden reality openly acknowledged only among a magical elite, a world in which (as in our world) most people believe that there is no such thing as magic.
  3. Tolkien and Lewis limit the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to characters who are numbered among the supporting cast, not the protagonists with whom the reader is to identify primarily. By contrast, Harry Potter, a student of wizardry, is the title character and hero of his novels.
  4. Reinforcing the above point, Tolkien and Lewis include cautionary threads in which exposure to magical forces proves to be a corrupting influence on their protagonists: Frodo is almost consumed by the great Ring, and Lucy succumbs to temptation and uses Coriakin’s magic book to eavesdrop on a pair of classmates. By contrast, the practice of magic is Harry Potter’s salvation from his horrible relatives and from virtually every adversity he must overcome.
  5. Again, Tolkien and Lewis confine the safe and lawful pursuit of magic to characters who are not human (notwithstanding the human appearance of some, like Gandalf and Coriakin, whom in fact we are told are, respectively, a semi-incarnate angel and an earthbound star). In Harry Potter’s world, by contrast, while most human beings (called Muggles) lack the capacity for magic, others (including Harry’s true parents and of course Harry himself) possess it.
 
  1. Tolkien and Lewis relegate the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation to characters who, in appearance, stature, behavior, and role, embody a certain wizard archetype-white-haired old men with beards and robes and staffs, mysterious, remote, unapproachable, who serve to guide and mentor the heroes. Harry Potter, by contrast, is in many respects the peer of many of his avid young readers, a boy with the same problems and interests that they have.
  2. Finally, Tolkien and Lewis devote no narrative space to the process by which their archetypal wizards acquire their magical prowess. By contrast, Harry Potter’s acquisition of mastery over magical forces as he attends school at Hogwarts is a central organizing principle in the story-arc of the series as a whole.
Like most people, J. K. Rowling says she doesn’t believe in magic. Yet also like most people, Rowling doesn’t share Tolkien’s and Lewis’s moral caution about attempted magic in the real world. As far as she’s concerned, the only caveat about magic is that it doesn’t work. For her, wizardry and witchcraft are imaginary constructs offering opportunities for storytelling with no more potential risk to the reader than fantasies about traveling at warp speed like in Star Trek, or developing super-powers from the bite of a radioactive arachnid like Spiderman. Rowling, therefore, has not seen fit to hedge about her use of magic as have Tolkien and Lewis.”

HP is most certainly not Christian in any stretch of the imagination. Nice try though.
 
is that a even a real question? Just because you can’t hop on a broom and fly around with a spell doesn’t mean the spell you’re saying isn’t a real spell performed in witchcraft and the occult.

I go back to my original statement. The claims that HP is demonic, uses real spells, has caused actual possesstion cases, and depict the names of real demons are all made by multiple expert catholic exorcists and theologians.

The rebuttals so far have amounted to: “Not uh!”
 
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Yeah, JKR trotted out the “Dumbedore is gay” thing long after the last book was published and she had safely made most of the money she would ever make from the series.

Bona fide LGBT hero, that.

That was the moment I lost all respect for JKR.

But I still maintain the books are squeaky clean…
 
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From the list you’ve just made, it isn’t explicitly anti-Christian, either; it just seems that Rowling didn’t think through the consequences or just wanted to write a story that’s “the real world, but with magic” and worked her way around it with the whole secrecy and Muggle things.

Note: Everything I say after this point may be a little off. I have neither read the books nor watched the movies. All of my information is second-hand.

It should be noted that magic causes most if not all of the plot problems as well as solving them. The universe of Harry Potter treats magic as a “thing that exists”, no more, no less, the same way most sci-fi treats technology, and while the world takes on the trappings of the real one, it most clearly isn’t and I don’t think anyone claims it does.

Honestly, saying “this fantasy system follows rule X instead of rule Y and takes place in location Z; therefore, it’s terrible and will literally destroy your soul” is philistinism. Judge the work on what it says, not how it says it. If it says things that you don’t want to hear about or don’t want your kids to hear, then put the book down and move on with your life. From everything I’ve heard about the series, it doesn’t do that.

And what the heck does “Not uh!” even mean?
 
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It’s a lie that the spells are real. They are made up Latin-ish silly words. There are no invocations or occult references. I have highly familiar with the texts. I’m not saying you’re lying… just the allegation is an untruth.
 
no evidence? Have you read the books? Scripture is quoted. The author has publicly stated that the Christian allegorical elements were deliberate. Harry is a Christ figure who lays down his life as an act of self-sacrificial love. In Harry Potter, there is no greater magic than that act of love… much like Narnia.
 
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Exactly. They’re completely made up.

As other posters have said, JK Rowling is a Christian. There are deliberate metaphors relating to Christianity, especially within the last book.

The claim that Harry Potter is demonic is nonsensical, and is regularly brought up in these threads, despite others showing the opposite.
 
JoshuaIsLord said:
It is no different from the Lord of the Rings.

It is good story line about Good vs Evil.

As in both stories, Good Magic users or Good Users of Magical Items combating Evil Magic Users or Evil Users of Magical Items.

As Gandalf is to Professor Dumbledore.
As Frodo is to Harry Potter.
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Mostly correct.

The one area that I find that HP differs from LotR is the use of torture.

Harry specifically (and deliberately) uses torture ( the Cruciatus curse), and specifically does so as a means of revenge.

It light of the books, it presents such means that are both intrinsically immoral and even illegal ( one of the 'Unforgiveable Curses) as somehow being justifiable in war.

That is NOT the message that we want our children learning. What should be presented to children is that a true hero forgoes such means, or if they fail, they sincerely repent of the wrong doing. That is what is expected of ALL of us, and thus should be role modeled.

Frodo manages this, in those times were he acts evilly towards Sam, Harry should have done so in regards to torture.
 
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Brendan said:
The one area that I find that HP differs from LotR is the use of torture.
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And so the same can be said for the Republican Party. How will we answer our children when they asked why we voted for bringing back Torture?
 
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JoshuaIsLord said:
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Brendan:
The one area that I find that HP differs from LotR is the use of torture.
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And so the same can be said for the Republican Party. How will we answer our children when they asked why we voted for bringing back Torture?
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By having those who torture arrested, something that did not happen to Harry.

But they problem is that books like Harry Potter encourage our kids to view torture as something that is acceptable.
 
Brendan said:
But they problem is that books like Harry Potter encourage our kids to view torture as something that is acceptable.
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And the when the Tortures begin anew under Trump, will this encourage our kids to view torture as something that is acceptable?
 
JoshuaIsLord said:
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Brendan:
But they problem is that books like Harry Potter encourage our kids to view torture as something that is acceptable.
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And the when the Tortures begin anew under Trump, will this encourage our kids to view torture as something that is acceptable?
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If they are, the Harry Potter books can be pointed towards as an influence, as they came well before the last elections
 
That’s not true. The Cruciatus curse is one of the three “unforgivable” curses. It is clearly portrayed in a negative light. Harry only attempted to use it when he was truly enraged after the death of his godfather… and yet he wasn’t able to use it fully as he has too much goodness in him. The curse requires true hatred. Dumbledore clearly doesn’t approve of their use throughout the series.
 
I’ve had Trump supporters “explain” to me that when Trump talks about supporting “torture”, he means something good and acceptable that is objectively different from the type of"torture" the Church condemns… couldn’t really make sense of it, but that was their position.
 
The Priest is passing on a false myth.

This is taken from a 16 year old article:

Here’s another quote from a reliable source, a person who was once involved in witchcraft. He says that the names used in the books are names of actual demons. I quote:

“The first book of the series, entitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, finds the orphan Harry Potter embarking into a new realm when he is taken to ’Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.’ At this occult school, Harry Potter learns how to obtain and use witchcraft equipment.”
This is not harmless white magic! We’re talking about something far more serious.
“Harry also learns a new vocabulary, including such words as Azkaban, Circe, Dracho, Erised, Hermes, Slytherin, all of which are names of real devils or demons. These are no characters of fiction.”

http://www.cmri.org/07-harrypotter.html
 
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