As to the article which started the thread, as I pointed out in another forum (not on FR) recently, there is a strain of protestant piety which fails to recognize the human capacity for imagination as part of our creation in the image of God, the Creator. The original poster should read Tolkien and Lewis's apologias for writing fantasy novels, and indeed the story of Lewis' conversion from mere theism to Christianity, and then consider the fact he overlooks about the Harry Potter stories: they are set in a world like unto our own, but where a particular class of peculiar people have access to actual, effective magic. Wicca posits that all people have access to actual, effective magic, though their "spells" are more like prayers than the spells of fantasy literature or the fervid imagination of witch-hunting puritans or animists. Unless one is deluded into believing one is an incipient wizard (in which case, why haven't you been hauled off to the North American equivalent of Hogwarts?) Harry Potter books are no more of an invitation to attempt sorcery than are the writings of the Inklings.
The article at hand, though, is interesting to me because as an Orthodox Christian, I have great compassion for those who have strayed from the Christian Truth as a result of (quite sensibly) rejecting the Augustinian distortion of the Gospel prevalent in Western Christian confessions. Most Wiccans grew up protestant or Roman Catholic, and have fled from the "God" who threatens capital punishment for arbitrary transgressions, and then to top it off punished children and great, great,...., great grandchildren for their ancestors trangressions; who demands adherence to a seemingly arbitary collection of propositions as the price for letting one off from infinite punishment for something one did not even do.
As an Orthodox, who sees God's warning to Adam and Eve (and all the negative "thou shalt not..." moral commandments since) as analogous to warning labels on bottles of poison, and who knows that Christ saves us be uniting human nature to the divine nature, and destroying death (not appeasing the infinite wrath of the Father by a barbarous blood sacrifice), that faith in Christ consists not in assent to some collection of dogma, but in following Him and His commandments to lay hold of His uniting of our nature to God's and His conquest of death, and that salvation is not being let off from punishment, but being united to God, being indeed deified, I have great sympathy for both Wiccans and freethinkers who hate the false vision of God and Christ presented by Western confessions which regard Augustine as the Father of all Church Fathers (many of which don't even know that is what they do). It is perhaps the greatest triumph the Evil One has wrough in his rear-guard action against his defeat wrought on Golgotha, that he has convinced so many that Christianity is this false vision, and not the True Gospel as preserved and taught down the ages by the Holy Orthodox Church.