I like the way Harry Potter makes religious people go all stupid. It amuses me no end. I mean, why do people care so much that everyone else thinks the same way as them?
Well evidently they do, and this is why Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he was popeified, presumably felt compelled to write letters to Gabriele Kuby to just such an effect. Kuby, a German Potter critic, had sent the Cardinal a copy of her new book Harry Potter - Gut oder Böse? (Harry Potter: Good or Evil?) in which she argues that the hugely popular novels run a risk of corrupting young people and preventing them from developing a balanced view of good and evil, which I take to mean a view endorsed by the Catholic Church. Not that I've read the book, but the story never really changes. In one of his replies Cardinal Ratzinger writes:
Subtle seduction of young people, you say. Well, Cardinal, you would know.
Not, you understand, that I have anything specifically personal against Catholic priests. I just think society would be a better place if they'd stop fucking our children.
Either way you look at it, I find it hard to believe that the Church has the balls to speak out about what's best for kids in this day and age. I mean, it's not like their approach has been working lately. And besides, from where I'm sitting it's not really all that different. Bunch of people in an old churchy-looking hall dressed in dark robes and doing weird shit with lots of candles. The only difference is that with Harry Potter the weird shit actually gets results.
Well, you know the rules. If you don't understand it, fear it. If you fear it, condemn it. Once it's condemned, try to stop everyone else from doing it. That's how you keep the organized religion ball rolling. There's no point in being religious if you can't be better than everyone else. Personally I think they could take a leaf from one of those books, couple of talking frogs, levitating septres and the like, perk a Mass right up. Probably attract lots more children too.
Comments
Here we have this amazing event: a book release, with full-on rock-star status. We have people, children, the planet over, lining up to catch the midnight release of… a book. A piece of literature, good God, in the year two-thousand and five, and our children are lining up to have a crack at it. Hallelujah-- and I couldn’t care less that it’s escapist fluff, all the better: here’s our next generation of fine minds lining up to use their imaginations, to READ, of all the things they could be doing.
That the pope (then cardinal) at one time felt the need to exercise the heavy responsibility of his office in condemning such activity fills me with great despair. Begone Ratzinger, and take your increasingly irrelevant witch-doctory with you. Why don’t you spend the currency of your influence on something positive for a change; why don’t you take your giant cult and do something constructive, like opening people’s minds to our gifts differing, like preaching tolerance, love for one another, and humility in the face of a vast cosmos? Ask a single fucking question for once, that would be a pleasant change, stop issuing proclamations, stop pretending like you’ve got any sort of inside track on the truth… stop your subtle seductions of our young, begone, begone, a thousand times begone.
Posted by: jt at July 18, 2005 09:45 PM
All rights reserved. Watch yourself.
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