Exactly.
Here’s a good article on the Twilight series from the perspective of Biblical Christianity.
“Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden”
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-08-024-f
From the article:
“This brings us back to the Garden of Eden. As mentioned above, Twilight is a romantic retelling of the story of Man’s Fall presented in the engaging and exciting wrappers of a romance and an international thriller. This may sound like a stretch, but consider the first book’s cover—a woman’s arms holding out an apple—and its opening epigraph—“But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not taste of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17).
“This isn’t, however, the story as Moses told it or as Christian saints and sages have understood it. As a Mormon, Mrs. Meyer departs from the traditional Christian understanding of that event, and the nature of her departure appeals to rather than repels her readers.
“Christians understand Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God, their “original sin,” or Fall, as the beginning of man’s distance from God, a distance that man could not restore on his own, but that required the incarnation and sacrifice of a divine, sinless Savior to accomplish.
“Mormons reject this interpretation. Not only do they hold the Pelagian view that human conscience and free will are sufficient for salvation, but they go a step further, asserting that, not only was the Fall not a bad thing, it was actually a good, even necessary thing for human salvation.”
It’s no surprise Mormon Mitt likes Twilight, but lovers of the Jesus Christ of the Bible (as opposed to the Book of Mormon) should stay away, and keep their kids away, too.
Why even bring Christianity and the Bible into it at all? It may have had some symbolism in the author’s or illustrator’s mind on a deeper level, but she definitely was not trying to teach religious dogma at all! It was just a fun series of sci-fi.
It is so irking (and I am a Southern Baptist) that there are some that have to find a reason to take the just plain old fun out of a reading exercise. There was no deep hypnosis of our children going on in those books to suck them into believing bad is good. In fact the monsters were trying to redeem themselves for good to triumph over their evil beginnings.
My own pastor and I had a huge disagreement over Halloween and he tried to force us to change it to ‘the Harvest Festival’ and not let the kids dress up like casper the friendly ghost, and pumpkins, et al. He felt it was some kind of threat to religious teachings. I said fine, we can just take our Halloween fun and go somewhere else with it. We don’t HAVE to get together at the church. They were going to have fishing games and playing games where you win prizes at church Harvest Festival. If you are going to get technical on me, that is gambling!
And I told him what better way to teach your children the difference between paganism and Christianity. Or that the events in the Bible were real, not fiction or evil rituals. And your relationship with God through the Spirit is real. And warn them that Satan also is vying for a relationship with them in paganistic ritual and and temptation to do things that are wrong.
It doesn’t have to be scarey...it can also be fun! And though we need to teach our children about the bad, they are much more receptive to something that is fun before you get to the serious part.