This woman wants Harry Potter out of school libraries.
I pit this “Christian” woman who is campaigning against something she really knows nothing about. Her online “research” was visiting Christian sites and accepting their opinions about the Harry Potter Series.
from the article:
here is a link to news in Georgia.
She says this:
I don’t understand how “Christian” fantasy and magic is acceptable to someone who is campaigning against fantasy and magic in another series.
I wonder how many sites reported that Onion article as fact. I’d post a link, but I can’t seem to find it.
Weird. The Narnia books also include evil themes, witchcraft (including “good magic” practiced by the juvenile heroes and heroines), demonic activity, murder, evil blood sacrifice, and spells. Children in the books are exposed to “all of this”, and children who read the books are effectively being “taught” it.
But nowhere in either series is it suggested that evil or murder or “demonic activity” should be regarded as a good thing. The only real difference is that the spells and sorcery and what-have-you in the Narnia books are part of a thinly-veiled Christian allegory, while those in the HP books are not.
(And does anybody else think it’s hilarious that another school in this woman’s Georgia county school system is called “Dacula High School”? )
She is very far from the first “Christian” to try to ban the Harry Potter books. (I put “Christian” in quotes, because most Christians have no problem with them.) And she’s not going to be the last, unfortunately.
This was on the news here in Atlanta this morning - this is going before the Gwinnett (Atl metro area) school board here in Georgia. I wish it were an Onion article
No, there was an Onion article years ago about Harry Potter and satanism. Ah, here we go.
No, jali, I think asterion’s referring to the famous Onion article about children learning HP-type witchcraft in schools, which was initially quoted by many gullible anti-HP advocates as a factual source. (I can’t find the original Onion article now either.)
[In preview: Doesn’t matter, because asterion could!]
I’m still not sure which was funnier. The gullible anti-HP advocates taking the Onion as a source or the Chinese taking the Onion as a source with this article.
Dear Og, are people still on about Harry Potter? That is so 2000. You’d think they’d have the good sense to move on to The Amazing Race or something.
Followup question: Have you ever read any books, you ignorant slag?
I remember once the Readers’ Letters part of Reader’s Digest had a woman railing against HP. Her source: the Onion article. Seriously. RD kindly informed her that The Onion was a satire.
(How many of those four kids do you bet have read them, btw?) And it gets funnier:
See, if she doesn’t want kids to read books with bad stuff in them, then it would be hypocritical for her to read books that she thinks have bad stuff in them although she can’t know for sure whether they have bad stuff in them because she hasn’t read them. Thank Og at least her kids are going to the public elementary school instead of having her homeschool them, so they may get a little exposure to rudimentary logical thinking.
I remember that, too. If the magazine hadn’t belonged to the dentists’ office, I would have ripped out the page to hang on my refrigerator.
From my years in a Christian school, I know how succeptible some Christians can be to urban legends and rumors. In chapel one morning, the principal brought out an e-mail she had recieved detailing how half of Proctor and Gamble’s profits went to the Church of Satan and that the CEO had bragged about it on a daytime talk show. She gave us a list of their products and told us not to buy them.
After chapel, I informed her that she needed to be “careful” in spreading that story because Proctor and Gamble was so sick of this many-times-debunked tale that they were suing anyone they caught spreading it.
She also told us that children in China and Russia were routinely lined up at school and ordered to spit on a Bible and those who refused were shot. (Mind you, I graduated in 1996.) She also played records for us backwards to try to detect satanic messages, and informed us that K.I.S.S stood for “Kings in Satanic Service.”
I don’t think it’s the Christianity that does it, I think it’s the institution of the Sunday service sermon. I was quite startled some years ago when I started attending church services and heard some of the ridiculous junk that got into the sermons. (And this was a quite well-educated pastor in what’s generally considered a more “upper-class” denomination, at a well-to-do church in a university town.)
And I still remember a story a Unitarian friend (and professional astronomer) told me about being asked by his minister to preview her Christmas sermon discussing hypotheses of astronomical phenomena that might have inspired the Star of Bethlehem references in the New Testament. He pointed out to her that in fact, all of the hypotheses she mentioned have been pretty thoroughly debunked and there’s no convincing evidence for any of them. She thanked him and went on to give the sermon exactly as originally written, with no acknowledgement whatsoever that the “scientific basis” was mythical. :eek:
I think there’s a bad institutional culture among sermon-writers in this respect, where the notion seems to be that the important thing is the doctrinal or ethical point they’re trying to make, so it’s immaterial whether their allegedly factual examples and anecdotes about it are actually true or not. So they will shamelessly launch right into “A recent study found…” or “As Abraham Lincoln once remarked…” and to hell with the fact-checking.
I know a sermon needn’t have the same standards of scholarship as, say, published research. But yeesh, there ought to be at least some concern for not spreading outright lies and misinformation and making yourself look intellectually lazy, dishonest, or ignorant. You wouldn’t serve your congregation spoiled mayonnaise at the church supper, and you shouldn’t feed them unsubstantiated rumors and urban legends in the Sunday sermon either. I say all seminaries should have a mandatory course on using Snopes.
Little did she know… (Cue ominous music.)
[Channeling Der Trihs]You are being redundant here! I hate America![/CDT]
She was grossly mistaken. It actually stands for “Kids in Satan’s Service.” Jeez…some people.
My God! Does no one know it stands for “Knights in Satan’s Service?” What kind of drivel are people circulating out there?!
I thought it was “Knights In Satan’s Service.”
And W.A.S.P stands for “We Are Satan’s Pawns.”
Oh my Og! That’s just mind-blowing.
Clearly Catholics are just one small step away from outright Satanism themselves, but why would they want a “plant”??? 
The scary thing is that this guy has the intelligence to be literate and fairly well-spoken, at least on paper (Og, two analogies - we need a new set of expressions!).
I thought it was “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”
Learn something new every day, I does.