since HP has been met with such amazing love and success, why does it seem you want to convert those last few holdouts? Why do you care?
It’s not that I want to convince everyone to like the series. For instance, I love it, but I have no desire whatsoever to try to get Tantum ergo - who gave his personal reasons for not enjoying it that much earlier in this thread - to love it.
But the series’ Christian detractors inspire such resistance because it’s a shame to see them shooting themselves in the foot: this series is, as many critics have noticed and explained, quite Christian in its structure, themes, and imagery. It’s just hard to watch people attack something that promotes their beliefs.
Aren’t we all entitled to have opinions about fictional works and not be accused of LYING, defamation, and other evil actions if our opinions don’t happen to agree lockstep with others?
I agree, but your opinion on the series - as expressed earlier in this thread - does not constitute or include lying, defamation, etc. You have your reasons, and you’ve demonstrated them - for instance, you’re right: Rowling dropped the ball with the priori incantatem effect at the end of
Goblet of Fire. You’re right: Harry becomes obnoxiously angsty in
Order of the Phoenix, and it is irrefutable that Rowling uses all-caps
a lot in that book. So your views are not unreasonable.
What
is unreasonable, and what we who love the series do not tolerate, are false and absurd claims that the series portrays real magic (which is as demonstrably false as the elements you identified and dislike are demonstrably true), that it conveys a relativistic moral code, that it inverts traditional symbolism, etc.
Another person might come to a different conclusion, and in this situation that other person can easily be the one who is correct since we do not have ANY definitive statements about HP to lean upon.
This is quite a reasonable thing to say.
In practice, however, my experience is that most HP detractors use poor arguments. For instance, here are two examples I can think of, one on the supremely irrational end, and one on the supremely rational end:
Bad example:
“The series promotes and glorifies witchcraft and the occult! There are real occult practices in them.”
Arguments like that - for instance, in what that “ex-witch” wrote - are just obnoxious because of their blatant and rightly derided falsehoods.
Potentially good example:
“In the last book, the revelation of the full circumstances surrounding Dumbledore’s death portrays euthanasia in a morally ambiguous way. An impressionable young person could easily read this book and come away from it thinking that it is good and even merciful to kill someone to save them from suffering.”
While (for several reasons) I don’t agree with that argument, it is at least an example of a good one: based on the actual content of the books, and on an instance of real moral ambiguity in them.
Unfortunately, irishpatrick, you see far more examples that fall into the former category than the latter. If arguments like the former are all people can muster, then “Well my opinion may be valid, too!” is no defense.
