angelordevil said:
Very silly and sad...more sad than silly. I live in a province with a very high illiteracy rate. From what I've seen, Harry Potter seems pretty harmless...plus it gets kids reading, which is vital for their future. Who knows, they may even be inclined to pick up the bible to read one day.
Book-burning, it seems, would have the opposite effect, and instill a sense of fear....which we already have too much of....
Exactly.
Thaey are harmless -- they'd have no problem with them if they took out the FEW minor words there are (hell, damn), and eliminated the magical element. Then it would merely be a story of good v. evil.
With the magic, that's still all that they are. (I do not think that it advocates the occult...)
I don't get how they can't see that Harry is good - magic or not - and is fighting a darker side. (If Harry's bad, what's Voldemort?!?!) This leads me to believe that the majority of the people with protests regarding this book (or any "banned" book for that matter) have no even picked it up other than to throw it onto their censorship bonfire.
Yes, the Potter books are good (perhaps not great literature, but whatever), but from my experience (and my friend, who is a bookseller for a mega-book chain), these books pique interest in reading - which leads to an interest in other books...
Yes, that interest is sometimes limited to other books in the fantasy genre (His Dark Materials, The Seeing Stone (Arthur trilogy), Artemis Fowl, etc), but I think that eventually, they'll venture out from there...
In any case, it's still far better than children being glued to TV sets or their video game consoles...