“And if your kids do enjoy Harry’s magical world, you should give them copies of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
These books also feature wizards and witches and magic, but in addition, they inspire the imagination within a Christian framework—and prepare the hearts of readers for the real-life story of Jesus Christ.”
B U M P
I find it quite amusing to see how much the Harry Potter bashers contort themselves to justify in LOTR the same things they condemn in the Harry Potter series.
Ironically, as I was growing up in the early 1970s, the very same accusations being tossed around today about the Potter books were being said about the Tolkien books. In fact, for a time, the principal of my elementary school banned the Tolkien books outright. Of course the same principal canned the music teacher for playing a Beatles record in music class and routinely sent students home for wearing blue jeans but he wasn't the only voice speaking against the "evil" influences of J.R.R. Tolkien back in those days.
Rumors abounded back then that Tolkien's works promoted drug use (the hobbits loved to smoke those pipes after all) and the occult (it was said that the game Dungeons and Dragons was derived from LOTR).
All of that was nonsense of course and most reasonable people back then recognized that. But one thing that held true consistently was that those who hollered the loudest about Tolkien's works were those most unlikely to have read Tolkien's works. Otherwise they would have realized just how foolish their rantings sounded to the rest of us.
And so it is today with the Potter books. Any Harry Potter basher spreading the tripe that we hear today who actually sat down and read the books would want to slink under the nearest table and hide from the world for a while. They would be like those characters in those airline commercials ("Need to get away?").