[sinkspur]

Next thing you know, I'll be called a some kind of heretic for reading my children stories in which animals talk and act like people.

Well, according to the poster above you, nothing is ever "just a story" or "just a movie."

So, if you find your child talking to the family dog, know where he got it.

[the lone haranguer]

Now you've got me worried. I talk to the family dog.
She just doesn't talk back. The cat is another story. :)

Seriously, why can't a story just be a story? Fantasy and imagination are sign of a health mind. As a fan of GK Chesterton, I agree with him when he says that the mind of reason is the one most likely to be the one that is mad. He further postulates that the one who is insane has not lost his reason, rather, he has lost everything BUT his reason. (His book, Orthodoxy, is the source of my butchered quotes.)

[sageb1]

The problem is not Harry Potter. The problem is the changing culture within which the books are being read. Take Harry Potter and other works of fantasy out of the above article.

"the continuing spread of what Pope John Paul II calls "the culture of death" has been made possible because Christians have not lived as signs of contradiction to the rise of neopaganism."

This is true with or without Harry Potter.

"When tolerance is the primary accepted social virtue, commitment to a particular faith is viewed as fundamentally antisocial and even threatening."