Christians who hate the Harry Potter books (CWHHPB) have a new friend: Richard Dawkins.  Of course, CWHHPB hate them for one of three reasons: because the books are 1) full of evil and menace or 2) forgettable pop literature or 3) both.  Dawkins hates them because they promote “mythical thinking.”  Which actually sounds like a good thing to me, since the word mythos means story, and since the world is made of stories.  But to Dawkins, it means simply “unscientific.”  He says:

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.

Isn’t it also insidious to limit children to empirical data, rather than logic and reason and mystery and logos, which transcend sensory experience?  Of course, this isn’t about Harry Potter at all.  It’s about Christianity and theism in general.

It’s a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse. I wouldn’t want to teach a young child, a terrifyingly young child, about hell when he dies, as it’s as bad as many forms of physical abuse.

It will make Junior feel so much better to know the chasm of unfeeling blackness will envelope him upon death, and that he has no moral recourse to stop his father from abusing him with religion.