[Aquinasfan]

To her, and to me, there's no reason to warn people of the dangers of the occult because the most common danger is that people will waste a lot of time. So there's no form of warning within her books, and that doesn't bother me. To you the occult is a real and tangible danger so you see anything that portrays magic in even a neutral light as dangerous.

That would explain our differences then. I appreciate your candor and reasoned arguments. BTW, are you a Christian, atheist, agnostic or some other religion?

[discostu]

My family left the Catholic Church after Vatican II (they felt the Church had lost its way) but still raised me in a very Catholic world until around age 10 then we started going to 4 Square Gospel during which time I was saved, but the faith never really fit comfortably within my framework (I don't think the frankness of that crowd mixed well with the attitude of internalization that Catholicism instilled in me early in life, it still bugs me when people are very vocal with their faith in public, the Catholic in me says that faith, like sex, should be private, so people like Dieon Sanders rub me very much the wrong way).

Eventually the constant haranguing from the anti-D&D/ heavy metal sections of Christiandom actually caused me to actually investigate the occult (I really felt like I must be missing something that they were getting, so I went looking). The first thing I found was that they were pretty solidly wrong, you weren't going to learn anything "useful" in the occult from D&D or heavy metal (or by that point Doom). Next I found the whole occultist world to be pretty bogus. At that point it became rather difficult to believe in any form of spirituality and I was pretty solidly on the path to total disbelief, which is where I am today. I still study and enjoy religion both for the socialogical understanding and as a tool to transmit good moral instruction through the generations (oh, and I really dig Aquinas myself actually, a lot of great analysis and interesting monologues). I'm still very sympathic to Christiandom and get very angry when the ACLU starts on their shinanigans.

So in the end one would have to color me as a very sympathetic atheist.