The pictures came from my HP Photosmart, so the darkness was definitely stretching its limits. Due to some miscommunication, some showed up in the band uniform, some in a weird mixture of stuff, and my wife dug out something that might look appropriate at Hogwarths.
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There was a big crowd of Harry Potter fans there, dressed up as characters from the books.
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At this point, I'm sure a few of my readers are scratching their heads about this. Some Christians have decided that the Harry Potter novels are anti-Christian, Satanic, etc. Sorry, but at least from having read the first two with my son, I just don't see it. J.K. Rowling wrote a fantasy--and one that didn't take itself seriously. Owls for mail delivery? Platform 9 3/4? Quidditch?
There have been a lot of books and television shows over the years that have used the idea of the supernatural for laughs. The Bewitched series, for example, was cute and funny in the first couple of seasons. What would it be like to marry someone with supernatural powers? How complicated would it make your life, especially if your mother-in-law wasn't just a typical mother-in-law, but was a witch? Then it started to elaborate on the "hidden world" of witchcraft, took itself too seriously, and just became stupid.
Other dramatic efforts have used the supernatural as a metaphor. The series Forever Knight made in Canada 1989-1996 was one of the more interesting ones because of the obvious parallels it drew between the world of vampires and pre-Stonewall homosexuality. (You don't have to agree with all of my assumptions below about homosexuality to see how strong the parallels were in Forever Knight.)
1. There were vampire bars--although the living might enter and just think it was a very decadent place.
2. No one chose to be a vampire--indeed, they were victims of vampires, but once in that state, there seemed to be no way out.
3. The vampires were estranged from everything Christian, reveling in their decadence, with a much stronger erotic undertone than in living society.
4. There were no long-term, stable family relationships because vampires can't have children--they can only "recruit" new vampires into the community by biting and infecting them.
5. It was a culture obsessed with staying forever young.
6. At least some of the vampires, like the hero, Nick Knight, have regular jobs, but they have to keep their private life in the closet.
7. Nick is working with a doctor to become human again, drinking animal blood, and trying to resist his vampiric urges--reparative therapy, so to speak, for the undead!
Now, there are definitely books that promote the idea of witchcraft as something serious. Where we lived in California, you could find stacks of books in bookstores that were entirely serious about this--and since this was a county filled with rich people desperate for spirituality (as long as they didn't have to change their immoral behavior), New Age, Wicca, witchcraft, "Old Religion," Satanism, and often bizarrely electic mixtures of these with Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism were very common--more common, as near as I could tell, than all branches of Judaism and Christianity combined.
This is the hazard that Christians should worry about--not some charmingly sweet books that clearly put witchcraft and wizardry in the realm of make believe. And besides, the Harry Potter books get kids to read. That's a good thing.
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