A friend's email from last week read: "You ought to leave Harry Potter alone. Billy Graham and the Pope may be fair game, but this is a kid's book and a very popular one. Yes, it has magic and creatures, etc in it, but kid's literature (and adults too) have always had this.
"I read the whole Lord of the Rings to my kids with all the creatures, magic, elves, dwarves, sorcerers, talking trees, ghosts, etc. and etc. The books are wonderful—they are not about these creations but basically are about the contest between good and evil, friendship and betrayal, love and hatred. Good, Friendship, Love win -- the creatures just help carry the story forward.
"C.S. Lewis milked the same ideas you've seen in fairy tales and mythology forever. What's wrong with that?"
"In the best of all possible worlds, people are not going to spend all their time praying."

Over the years, I've had quite a few people tell me they were in their mid-teens when they abandoned belief in the Bible and their Christian faith.'

I'll never forget one 40-something male colleague once succinctly summing it up for me, "By the time I hit 14, it was '(D) None of the Above.' " He had been raised a Lutheran by two believing parents and participated in church youth group activities through his early teens.

In his autobiographical book, "Surprised by Joy; The Shape of My Early Life," author C.S. Lewis—born in 1898, Belfast, Ireland—reveals he was 13 when he "ceased to be a Christian."

He partially attributes this "disaster," as he labels it, to the influence of a school matron, Miss C., who, at the time, was exploring Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism and Anglo-American Occultism.

"Nothing was further from her intention than to destroy my faith; she could not tell that the room into which she brought this candle was full of gunpowder," writes Lewis. "I had never heard of such things before; never, except in a nightmare or a fairy tale, conceived of spirits other than God and men."

Lewis says he immediately found a passion for the Occult--a "spiritual lust" which, "like the lust of the body, it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. . .

"It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians. But the result of Miss C.'s conversation did not stop there. Little by little, unconsciously, unintentionally, she loosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges, of my belief. The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultism began to spread—yes, and to spread deliciously—to the stern truths of the creed.

"The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) altering 'I believe' to 'one does feel.'

"And oh, the relief of it! Those moonlit nights in the dormitory at Belsen faded far away. From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting.

"I do not mean that Miss C. did this; better say that the Enemy did this in me, taking occasion from things she innocently said."

A few pages later, Lewis pontificates, "You may ask how I combined this directly Atheistical thought, this great 'Argument from Undesign,' with my Occult fancies. I do not think I achieved any logical connection between them. They swayed me in different moods, and had only this in common, that both made against Christianity. And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief. . .

"Dear Miss C. had been the occasion of much good to me as well as of evil. For one thing, by awakening my affections, she had done something to defeat that antisentimental inhibition which my early experience had bred in me. Nor would I deny that in all her 'Higher Thought,' disastrous though its main effect on me was, there were real and disinterested spirituality by which I benefited. Unfortunately, once her presence was withdrawn, the good effects withered and the bad ones remained."

Several years later, now in his late teens attending a boarding school named Bookham, Lewis says he had an "anxiety in the unconscious that came out in full waking thought."

He writes, "That, at least, would explain an experience I had, certainly once, and perhaps more often; not a belief, nor quite a dream, but an impression, a mental image, a haunting, which on one bitter winter night at Bookham represented my brother hanging about the garden and calling—or rather trying to call, but as in Virgil's Hell inceptus clamor frustrator biantem, a bat's cry is all that comes.

"There hung over this image an atmosphere which I dislike as much as any I ever breathed, a blend of the macabre and the weakly, wretchedly, hopelessly pathetic—the dreary miasma of the Pagan Hades."

By the time he turned 18, Lewis, in what he admits had become a "ravenous, quasi-prurient desire for the Occult, the Preternatural as such," had fully immersed himself in pagan writings—everything from Greek, Norse and Celtic mythology to Lucretius' Tantum religio and William Yeats' poetry.

On his delighted discovery of Yeats, Lewis writes, "His 'ever living ones' were not merely feigned or merely desired. He really thought that there was a world of beings more or less like them, and that contact between that world and ours was possible. To put it quite plainly, he believed seriously in Magic."

In general, Lewis recalls experiencing in this "enlightenment" period, "a kind of gravitation in the mind whereby good rushes to good and evil to evil. This mingled repulsion and desire drew toward them everything else in me that was bad.

"The idea that if there were Occult knowledge it was known to very few and scorned by the many became an added attraction: 'we few,' you will remember, was an evocative expression for me. That the means should be Magic—the most exquisitely unorthodox thing in the world, unorthodox by Christian and by Rationalist standards—of course appealed to the rebel in me.

"I was already acquainted with the more deprived side of Romanticism; had read Anactoria, and Wilde, and pored upon Beardsley, not hitherto attracted, but making no moral judgment.

"Now I thought I began to see the point of it. In a word, you have already had in this story the World and the Flesh; now came the Devil. If there had been in the neighborhood some elder person who dabbled in dirt of the Magical kind (such have a good nose for potential disciples) I might now be a Satanist or a maniac."

Lewis even admits, "Whether Magic were possible or not, I at any rate had no teacher to start me on the path."

Much of the rest of the book Lewis spends relaying his climb out from occultism and atheism to the belief "that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."

One of the defining moments he recalls is when he came to know "an old, dirty, gambling, tragic, Irish parson" with a "highly critical mind" who experienced a kind of demonic meltdown. Lewis says he spent 14 days and nights with this parson "who was going mad."

"He was a man whom I had dearly loved, and well he deserved love. And now I helped to hold him while he kicked and wallowed on the floor, screaming out that devils were tearing him and that he was that moment falling down into Hell.

"And this man, as I well knew, had not kept the beaten track. He had flirted with Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis, what not?

"Probably these things had in fact no connection with his insanity, for which (I believe) there were physical causes. But it did not seem so to me at the time. I thought I had seen a warning; it was to this, this raving on the floor, that all romantic longings and unearthly speculations led a man in the end—

Be not too wildly amorous of the far

Nor lure thy fantasy to its utmost scope."

Once coming to a belief in Jesus Christ, Lewis writes, in what is the last chapter of his autobiographical account, "There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologized and unmoralized, Paganism.

"The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. . . I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mystical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion—those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them—was precisely the matter of great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this.

"Myths were like it one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable, through all that depth of time, as Plato's Socrates. . . yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god.

"But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not a 'religion,' nor a 'philosophy.' It is the summing up and actuality of them all."

Editor's Note: On the topic of Harry Potter's influence on children, I wrote this article below in 2003 for my first website, Freespoken.com. Here it is:

I was at an afternoon Knicks game on Martin Luther King Day when I overheard a little girl behind me suddenly blurt out, "Daddy, daddy, the good guys!"

A little later, when the Knicks rumbled down the court and made a dramatic basket to the delight of the crowd, she yelled out for her father, "The good guys!"

Her father was sitting next to another man, and during a break in play, I heard the two of them ask the girl who the good guys were. "The blue," she answered proudly, referring to the Knicks’ uniforms of blue and orange.

This girl was probably only three or four and I could tell she had no burning desire to sit through this game. Since she was obviously taught to regard the Knicks as the good guys, I would assume she’s made the conclusion that the opposing team—whoever they are for the day—must represent the "bad guys."

The situation reminded me of the televised footage of young children in Iraq and other places who protest in the streets with their parents, chanting anti-American slogans as they set fire to pictures of Bush. They are told by their parents and society-at-large that we are the bad guys.

Scientific research says the brain of a young child is like a sponge and whatever the parent says or does has a lasting impression.

In a magazine article I have on this subject, it explains the newborn child’s brain contains about 1,000 trillion synapses, or points in which important connections between neurons are made. The number is twice as high as that for an adult brain and by age three the child’s brain is operating at peak levels for learning—at least twice as fast as an adult brain. By adolescence the number of synapses drops in half to 500 trillion.

This, according to the article, means any concept, event or experience that is reinforced with a child results in a signal sent to a corresponding synapse. If the signal continues to be sent, the concept or experience eventually becomes a permanent part of a child’s memory.

Limbic System’s Effects

Another article I saved from the New York Times Sunday Book Review section, written by Liesl Schillinger and appearing February 27, 2000, explains that while the brain's neocortex is responsible for writing, speaking and hatching schemes, it's the brain's limbic brain that makes up our "repository of emotions, instincts and implicit memories of nurturance, grievance and deep preference."

It is the limbic brain, common among all mammals, that "allows mammals to form attachment bonds with one another," the article says. "Love is definitely limbic."

As an illustration of how the limbic brain works in conjunction with the neocortex, the article gave the sentence: "THE cht MEOWED AND PURRED."

"If you read the sentence," the article explained, "your mind will correct 'cht,' both because the brain knows 'cht' is anomalous and because it remembers that it has seen the word 'cat' near the words 'meow' and 'purr' thousands of times. The implicit limbic memory of stroking a cat or having it twine between your ankles is awakened every time you read the word.

"By the same token," the article continued, "a woman (call her Lady X) who habitually indulges the memory of a certain dark and brooding man (call him Man X, whose glance was, to her, electric, who had crooked teeth, liked a certain kind of food and listened to Josh White) burns thousands of links to him into her brain.

"Long after he's gone, the neurons in her neocortex will forge a new connection every time she sees crooked teeth, hears 'Careless Love' or smells Indian food—and these neocortical facts will rain down on her limbic system, irrigating the trench of memory where Man X resides. Anyone she meets who resonates with Man X registers as warmly and familiarly as 'cat.' Anyone else is 'cht,' anomalous, a mistake—depending on his context."

Everybody 'Luvs' Harry

Okay, enter Harry Potter. Everybody knows young people around the world are crazy about this kid with supernatural powers who knows how to use a wand, make potions, cast spells and engage in "transformation" and divination.

Each of the published series of books, written by J.K. Rowling, have been read many times over by children of all ages, not to mention many adults.

The message reinforced by parents and society-at-large is that these books are well-written and fascinating and represent perfect reading material for kids to immerse themselves in, not only for their ability to turn a kid onto reading but because Harry represents all good values.

In fact, a story in the news Monday reported a priest from the Vatican gave the Vatican's seal of approval to the Harry Potter books, formally declaring they helped children "to see the difference between good and evil."

"I don't think there's anyone in this room who grew up without fairies, magic and angels in their imaginary world," Father Peter Fleetwood is quoted as saying in a BBC brief.

Magicians and witches, he explained, "are not bad or a banner for anti-Christian ideology.” He said author Rowling was "Christian by conviction, is Christian in her mode of living, even in her way of writing."

First of all, it is ridiculously obvious Rowling is not a Believer in Jesus Christ as her personal Savior. I’m sure she'd be the first to agree this is the case.

Secondly, occultism in any form is an abomination to the God of the Bible. It is clearly labeled in both the Old and New Testament as demonic and representing fellowship with Satan.

In talking about forbidden idolatrous practices in the time of the tribe of Levi, for one example, Deuteronomy 18: 10-12 says, "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."

The bottom line is Harry’s world is all about the occult—the world of magic and wizardry. Children obsessed with the books are engaging in occult fantasy. The good storytelling immediately captures their heart, mind and imagination and soon they are immersed in a mystical world of spiritual forces. They identify with Harry’s struggles and triumphs in a very real and sympathetic way and he becomes a character they feel great affection and admiration for.

Obviously this fits perfectly with what scientific research says happens to a child's brain associations when concepts and experiences are reinforced. Naturally, the child becomes much more likely to view the occult world—at least the "good" one Harry exemplifies—

in a positive light.

No Good in 'Good Evil'

As a Norwegian writer, Berit Kjos, explains in an article posted on the internet at http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/Harry9-99.html, "The child's feelings and responses are manipulated by the author's views and values. . .Page after exciting page brings the reader into the timeless battle between good and evil, then trains them to see the opposing forces from a pagan, not a biblical perspective. In this mystical realm, 'good' occult spirits are naturally pitted against bad occult spirits, just as in pagan cultures where frightened victims would offer sacrifices to 'benevolent' spirits who could help ward off evil curses and other threats. Few readers realize that from the biblical perspective, all occult forces are dangerous. But today, it seems more tolerant and exciting to believe this illusion than to oppose the lies. The words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah ring as true now as they did over 2000 years ago: 'Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. . .' (Isaiah 5:20)."

In response to people like the Vatican priest who say all us were brought up on similar fantasy tales dealing with magic and spirits, Kjos argues, "The stories and times have changed, making the new generation of children far more vulnerable to deception than we were. . . Unlike most children today, their parents and grandparents were raised in a culture that was, at least outwardly, based on Biblical values. Whether they were Christian or not, they usually accepted traditional moral and spiritual boundaries. Even the old fairy tales I heard as a child in Norway tended to reinforce this Christian worldview or paradigm. The good hero would win over evil forces without using 'good' magic to overcome evil magic."

Editor's Note:

In writing this article I found a very interesting website that lays out some of the dangerous occult aspects of the Harry Potter phenomenon. The site, http://www.spotlightministries.org.uk/harrypotterarticle.htm even reveals the likely origins behind Rowling using a thunderbolt on Harry's forehead:

"The startling thing about the thunderbolt," the site says, "is that it is often used in occultic imagery, especially in Satanism. Anton Szandor Lavey, the founder of the Church of Satan, often wore a medallion of an inverted pentagram with a thunderbolt through the centre of it. Thunderbolts also appeared as the SS symbol of Hitler's special forces (bearing in mind that Hitler was into the occult), and in various Heavy Metal and Death Metal bands."

The site refers also to what Jesus Christ said in Luke 10:18, "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning."

It points out that the forehead is exactly where the seal of God will be placed on those who love Him and serve Him. Revelations 22:4 reads, "And they will see His face; and His name will be on their foreheads."

Of course, the forehead is also where the mark of the beast will be received by those deceived by the Antichrist. Revelations 13: 15-17 says, "And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.
"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
"And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

Explained on the site is that Harry, very early on when his parents are still alive, discovers he is different from his non-Witch parents by certain supernatural events. One of them came when they went to a zoo and Harry talks to a snake. "It is here, out of all the animals, that Harry discovers that he is able to communicate with the snake (Philosopher`s Stone, p. 25-26)."

Of course, Satan appears as a serpent, or snake, when he gets Eve to fall for his lies and eat from the Tree of Good and Evil against God's direct order.

The Bible also depicts Satan as a snake in II Corinthians 11:3 and Revelations 12:9; 20:2.

The website points out that in book two of the Potter series, "The Chamber of Secrets," "Harry eventually discovers that the incident in the zoo wasn't just a one off, but that he actually has a gift of being able to talk to snakes through a language called Parseltongue (Chamber of Secrets, pp. 145-147)."