Oh no! Witchcraft!
August 3rd, 2007So, I never thought this would happen in the San Francisco area. I’m sitting here at work with all four Harry Potter DVDs, and one of my co-workers came by and told me that they’re bad news. “They promote witchcraft!”
Uh oh. One of those arguments you just don’t want to get in. So I played along and she went away.
Just to let you know, I finished the 7th book the Sunday after it was released, so in 1 1/2 days I guess. Awesome book, not as good as #5 or #4, but still good. I won’t write a review though because it’s too hard not to give anything away.
Anyways, back to my original topic. I’m tempted to ask some Wiccans I know what brought them into practicing witchcraft. Was it Harry Potter? I imagine them giving me a look like I was smoking crack.
I got totally reamed out at work, by a Baptist co-worker, for letting my son read the “evil” Harry Potter series. I asked her if she’d read the books. She replied: “I don’t have to read them to know they’re evil!”
This is reason #125 why I wouldn’t make a good Baptist.
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I promote Witchcraft too…
wonder what she’d think of me?
“Taste religion chick - lick a Witch today!”
Tshsmom - One of these days, you should do that top 10 list.
Jean - So, was it Harry Potter that got you into witchcraft?
LMAO! Thats hysterical!!
Actually - I think Harry Potter is horrible. It just bores me.
The idea that a silly pop culture fad like Potter and Hogwart’s could make people throng to Witchcraft though?
Well thats like saying that practicing abstinence will cause a mass exodus to Christianity and you won’t get pregnant if you do it standing up…
Those people are clearly not very secure in their own religion’s merits. They need to reevaluate their Faith and consider its importance if it can be jarred that easily.
That person definitely is smoking crack!
Jean - You no like Harry Potter?
Actually, she’s not very secure. She gets into the holier than thou with it, which is usually a sign that she’s not secure in herself.
Kate - Heh. I think she needs to smoke some crack. loosen up, ya know?
In case of zombies:
http://media.techeblog.com/images/breaks.jpg
John - If I were running this country, all public buildings and government buildings will be required to have at least four of those. They’re every bit as important as fire extinguishers. I don’t think the average person is taking the zombie threat seriously enough. It’s time we started doing just that.
Hahahahaha…. Wow. Harry Potter wasn’t even a twinkle in J.K. Rowling’s eye when I found the Goddess. But.. i guess we could say that since it’s witchcraft, she somehow reversed time and seeped the stories into my brain retro-actively influencing me to the ‘dark arts’. But then again, you would think that the damn British accent would have stuck.
On a more serious note… I think that if these novels encourage younger and older people alike to explore spiritual ideas that fall outside of the prescribed mass religions, then that is one great novelist doing a great deed. God is dead to the majority of our ‘civilized’ population and what are we without a spiritual higher purpose than a bunch of cattle? One thing our culture needs badly is a sense of something greater than ourselves that is not prescribed by the doctor or the television. I think people need to explore other ideas about God, Goddess and spirit if we are to heal from the atrocities carried out in the name of organized crime.. oops I mean organized religion ;p Don’t just believe what you are told to believe, explore and discover for yourself.
Good thing those cases aren’t in public buildings–I’m afraid I’d be too tempted to use it.
Clothosfate - It really is a shame that organized religion too often uses religion to divide us instead of adding flavor to the human race. Thus, you likened it to organized crime, which as a historian, is unfortunately a fair assessment.
I do think with a higher purpose, people usually have more meaning in life. It’s not easy to be an existentialist. Very few people can pull it off without wanting to blow their brains out.
Jessica - We have to exercise constraint. It’s for the common good. We have to start taking the zombie threat seriously or the whole human race could be lost.
Ahhhhh, this takes me back to the early DND days.
Remember that D&D movie they tried blaming on witchcraft?
Just - I used to be heavily into Heavy Metal music, football, and D&D. Tipper Gore and her loonie Congress wives blamed Heavy Metal and D&D for everything. “Dungeons and Dragons is a pathway to Satanism.” Real life Tipper Gore quote. I guess nobody went after football because it would be political suicide. Heavy Metal and D&D made easier targets.
These types of things are just so ridiculous. They are perpetuated by people who have absolutely NO understanding of what witchcraft is or is about. As a witch (not wiccan, but still) I just simply tell people they don’t know what they’re talking about when I hear stuff like this. While many witches do have “magic wands,” brooms, and cast “spells” it’s nothing like Harry Potter and they are really more akin to ritual objects (like those used in many churches) to center and focus your attention on your prayers. That’s what spells are too - they’re more like prayers, except that we believe change doesn’t come from some exterior being “granting” your prayer, but that change comes from within - that we have the power and strength to guide our own paths. And, by the way, casting anything for or against another person without their knowledge or approval is strictly forbidden. So things like hexes and curses are not part of witchcraft.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but it’s just preposterous. When I met up with United We Lay a couple weeks ago, she said her in-laws kids told her witches eat children… seriously - people still tell their kids this shit. She was quick to correct them, probably much to the chagrin of the parents for making the kids question anything about what they’re told to believe.
Hi I know some one that does wiccan. He is pretty cool. I met him after J and I moved back to GB WI. He is friends with J but havent seen him in ages now again. He disappears for a while and then reappears when he wants to. He has this horse shoe tatoo on his forehead between his eyes.Just creepy man but he’s the nicest person you will ever meet really. You should have seen him when we told him I was pregnant with Kora. He knew when we saw him weeks before we found out but he wouldnt tell me what he thought was wrong why J and I were arguing. Then I saw him when I was seven months along with Kora and he told me we were having a girl and wow was it supring when she came out as a girl. LOL….. They are just plain weird people but interesting.
Tweety - I’ve known a few Wiccans in my day, and they’re generally pretty nice people. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure the guy who owned the last Martial Arts gym I used to train at was a wizard (I think regular Pagan, not Wiccan). I never asked him, because that’s not something I ask. He was really cool and I regret not staying in touch with him.
Laura - Yeah, there are all kinds. I’ve of course told my son stories of witches that ate kids but they were fairy tales. There were also fairy tales where the good witch saves everybody. I used to read both Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson to him, along with Narnia.
Then of course, as you know, I used to play D&D. One of my favorite characters was a wizard. I remember not so fondly Tipper Gore and her people saying “Dungeons and Dragons is a pathway to Satanism” and trying to get it banned. That mentality is so backwards and annoying.
Funny, well, not really funny, but that story about United We Lay’s relatives hits home just a little bit too hard.
Yeah. OK. Exactly. This is the attitude I’m talking about with all this “Satanic panic” stuff…if people can get so heated and irrational over children’s books, can you imagine how much more serious it is when a jury is told that the defendant is a Satanist because he watched a slasher film when he was a teenager? People who believe a GAME initiaties people into real human sacrifice are running the country!! This is TERRIFYING!!
Even worse, there are still people who get their children TAKEN AWAY from them because they are pagans. It’s terrible. Freedom of religion my ass.
A lady who used to work where I work (she apparently retired as I couldn’t find her in the directory when I looked her up to see if she wanted to see HP5 at the IMAX) is a Baptist (or of that type) and she loved Harry Potter. She would argue with the people at her church about how it didn’t promote witchcraft, etc. The religious nutballs, I find, are not to be argued with. I know without even asking that my Born Again Brother will never let his kids read Harry Potter books. My niece reads Christian kids books which looked just hideous - all about this 10-year-old girl preaching to her divorced father or some crap like that. No Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants for her.
Whatever happened to “Live, and let live.”
And it’s utterly sad that that happened in SF. I don’t think I knew anybody in SF who ever went to church, including me.
I wonder what they [Christians] see differently between J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings and those dastardly Harry Potter tomes? It’s that Tolkien’s off limits cuz he was C.S. Lewis’ homeboy. The subject matter, and treatment, are identical - good novice magic practitioners fighting evil.
SME - I think the most frightening aspect of all this is as you mentioned, yes, these people are running the country.
Laura - Do you know of any specific incidents? I’d love to post about that. That’s pretty scary.
I know in the past, a lot of Native American kids were stolen by the gov’t.
Kathleen - I found it better not to argue. It doesn’t get anywhere.
Badman - Well, you know more than I do about it. What do your peeps say?
My denomination is pretty tolerant. I think everyone at our church reads Harry Potter and plays Dungeons and Dragons.
Have you ever read the Jack Chick tract on D&D? I think that’s where some of this B.S. came from (or ended up). It’s archived at chick.com. Hilarious stuff, if it wasn’t being taken seriously…
SME - I love Jack Chick. I used to collect his stuff. My favorite was Bad Bob. He was the biker dude who sold drugs and got in fights. Then he reformed. Awesome stuff.
The one I remember best was when I was a kid and two dudes tried to out run a train with their car. One of the guys was telling him to stop but the other thought he could make it. Of course, they didn’t make it.
I wrote a post last week about my neice. She told me that witches sacrifice small children. Her parents are crazy Chrisitan. Emphasis on the crazy.
Heh heh. I find the tracts on walks all the time…funny where the dang things end up. My fave was “The Gift”, about how a rich man sent his son into the village to offer everybody free room and board in his mansion, and when they all declined the offer he had a psychotic tantrum and ordered his son to slaughter them all. The message: God loves you.
My old boss used to say things like you heard. How the books and movies are “Devil” because they teach kids witchcrafts and other completely uninformed Nazi-Christian bullshit. Of course, it’s to be expected here in the Bible Belt.
United - Sacrificing? Wow. Well, the crazy lady at work didn’t go that far.
SME - I’ll have to look out for that one. I don’t think I saw it.
Bsoholic - Yeah, I used to live outside of Houston, so know that stuff first hand.