The Fight in The Church

Everyone wants to defend Harry Potter and accuse Lord of The Rings; or, they want to defend LOTR and condemn Harry Potter. I believe its time to stop playing pick-up-sticks and get to the point.

No one will deny that there is witchcraft in Harry Potter, the books are based upon him becoming a wizard. Some people want to accuse these books/movies of promoting witchcraft, and based on some people I've met, yeah, these books open the door for it. However, people who are weak-minded enough to make these fictional books reality probably need to see a doctor. And there are countless other media publications with much the same problem, Aladdin, Snow White, The Wizard of Oz and so on and so forth. The reading of the book or watching of the movie is not what we really need to be concerned about. It is that it opens the door to these things.

Likewise LOTR does also open many of the same doors. But look beyond Gandalf's pointy hat and tall staff and find the source of his power, Illuvetar, the creator of Middle-Earth. And the term wizard in England during Tolkiens day simply meant a master of illusions; therefore, Gandalf is not meant to be a sorcerer. Saruman and Sauron who abondoned that path are explicitly portrayed as sorcerers and necromancers. The big problem is most people don't look that far into it, they look at a guy with a beard and pointy hat and automatically think "withccraft".

I do not think that people are necessarily sinning by watching LOTR or reading Harry Potter. What I would advise is going into both of them knowing they are fictional books and be careful of some of the concepts presented in these books/movies.

My next big point is LOTR, Harry Potter, and other movies with witchcraft are the only ones taking any heat, what about the movies with murder, stealing, lying? Those things are just as much sin as witchcraft is, and they also open peoples minds to those concepts, they can make people think nothing of those things, and there are some people (and I've met some personnally) who are negatively effected by those things.

Its time to stop squaking "there's withccraft" when we are not likewise gonna squak "there's sexual immorality". Its all equally sin, and simply watching something with witchcraft or stealing or murder or whatever is not a sin of itself, as long as you can do it in faith knowing its not sin, if you think it might mess you up, don't watch it!