Thus it was written in the epistle of Jim Phillips,
> Bruce Toback <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>
> <snip>
>
> > But try as I might, curmudgeon that I am, I can't find anything else to
> > rant about in all this frenzy. It's a frenzy over a *book*, for a change,
> > not a movie or a toy or a new dot.com IPO. Millions of kids in the
> > English-speaking world want to be the first to -- read a book? A 720-page
> > book?! A complex, non-saccharine, non-marketing-tie-in, non-dumbed-down,
> > thought-provoking book? By an author who started out writing just for the
> > fun of it, and to keep her 12-year-old amused? I really want to find
> > something bad in all of this, but somehow it all seems like good news.
> > Damn.
>
> You just didn't try hard enough, Bruce.  The other night on Fox News I saw
> some guy who was totally against the Harry Potter books.  Something about
> wizards and witchcraft and wicca-type stuff.  Actually, I think what he was
> against was some public school teacher reading these books to his kid in
> school.  Because witchcraft is a recognized religion, he thought this was
> just as bad as a public school teacher reading the Bible to his kid in
> school.

It's one of those difficult things.  One the one hand, I'm delighted that a
whole bunch of kids are wanting to read.  As Bruce says, it's pretty hard to
find something bad about that.  And I know that magic and witches have been a
big part of children's tales since before the Grimm brothers were born.  Still,
having lived in a country where demon possession and hauntings and suchlike do
happen I don't take such things as witchcraft and sorcery lightly.

Any further discussion of this probably ought to go offlist, as it is decidedly
off topic and likely to offend.  For those wanting to read more, perhaps
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ would be worth the time.  They seemed to
have a pretty balanced view of the Harry Potter controversy from what little
time I could spend there.

Suffice it to say that while I'm delighted that kids are reading, my kids will
get their reading material elsewhere and I, also, would object to someone
reading Harry Potter to them without my consent.

Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Sys, Southern Adventist University
          ==========================================================
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of
skepticism.
                        -- Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662)
          ==========================================================
         Deep thoughts to be found at http://www.southern.edu/~ashted