The Booking Through Thursday topic for this week is:

1. Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday… Are you going to read it?
2. If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties?
3. If you’re not going to read it, why not?
4. And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to?

At first I wasn’t going to participate in BTT this week because I’m one of the few people on the planet not into HP. But I just finished writing a lot of my thoughts in a comment on Cindy’s Notes In the Key of Life, so I thought I may as well post them here also.

The short answer is no, I haven’t read the books or seen the films. The “why” will take a little longer to explain.

As a Christian trying to order my life by the Word of God, I have a problem with stories about witchcraft and the occult. One of the most notable passages is Deuteronomy 18:10-12:

“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.”

When we were watching the Lord of the Rings series, I found there are, of course, wizards in it. I did wrestle with that in my own conscience. Finally I concluded that Gandalf and the others are not wizards in the occultish sense of the word. They’re more like Middle Earth super heroes, a la Superman and Spiderman and Batman. It’s more fantasy than real occult — we don’t see witches and wizards or people in the occult world in real life riding on bird’s backs or powering off against each other with wands or staffs.

I thought also of the witch in The Wizard of Oz. She is a “fairy tale” witch — witches in real life aren’t green and don’t have flying monkeys. Really the implications of there being such a thing as a “good witch” in Glenda bothers me more than the Wicked Witch of the West. But in the story she’s more like Cinderella’s fairy godmother.

So in our family we’ve made a distinction between fairly tale type magic and the real occult. And even the fairy tale magic I’d rather have as little of as possible.

On the other hand, I have (rarely and not on purpose) read books and watched films that had a much darker and more dangerous pull and more palpable real evil even though there were no outwardly occult signs or symbols or people.

That said, we haven’t gotten into HP at all. He may be more the “fairy tale” type of wizard rather than really occultish — I don’t know. If any of my kids were interested in the series, I would have to check into it. But they are not at all interested. And though part of me wants to check them out just to see what they are all about and to speak of them intelligently when they come up in a conversation, my TBR pile is massive already and I don’t need another obsession.