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Ga. judge: Keep Potter books in school

2 hours, 52 minutes ago

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. - The adventures of boy wizard
Harry Potter can stay in Gwinnett County school libraries, despite a mother's objections, a judge ruled Tuesday.

Laura Mallory, who argued the popular fiction series is an attempt to indoctrinate children in witchcraft, said she still wants the best-selling books removed and may take her case to federal court.

"I maybe need a whole new case from the ground up," said Mallory, who was not represented by an attorney at the hearing.

Superior Court Judge Ronnie Batchelor's ruling upheld a decision by the Georgia Board of Education, which had supported local school officials.

County school board members have said the books are good tools to encourage children to read and to spark creativity and imagination.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, published by London-based Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, tell stories of children with magic powers. They have been challenged numerous times since 2000, making them the most challenged texts of the 21st century, according to the American Library Association.

At Tuesday's hearing, Mallory argued in part that witchcraft is a religion practiced by some people and, therefore, the books should be banned because reading them in school violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

"I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again," Mallory said. "I think we need him."

Wow...

Kinda makes you speechless... Nice to see that the judge had some sense and didn't go along with this bullshit..

I doubt her kids can even read.

I'm sorry, but I have to agree with this woman!  Witchcraft is an abomination unto God, and our children are very impressionable!  When a teacher reads such a book from a position of authority, children are likely to perceive the themes therein as being representative of what society, their parents, and, most importantly, God wants of them!  We should not be teaching our children that a reliance on magical powers will save them from worldly problems, or eternal damnation.  Rather, we should be teaching them to love God, and explain to them how loving God comes through what I like to call the three little commandments: hate gays, kill A-rabs, and support Dubya! 

If all we have to sacrifice is the desire of America's youth to be literate, then that's a small price to pay to ensure that our impressionable sons and daughters close their minds to all that is un-holy, and focus on doing God's work while listening to a Books-on-Tape Bible!

^^ you're post scares me, I hope that's sarcasm....

If you want your children to learn about god sent them to catholic school or something...

Sarcasm?  I keep a shiv in the spine of my Bible, so that after church I can gut the first liberal I see!

^^ you're post scares me, I hope that's sarcasm....

Don't see anything wrong with that...

sorry, I don't know you well enough to know if that is sarcasm or not..but seriously?

"rely on magical powers to save them from worldly problems"?? alot of people follow the bible blindly and rely on its 'magical powers' to solve their problems of their world.


witchcraft/magical powers= bible magical powers...one man preformed miracles,healed the sick,made lame men walk and rose from the dead...which is more unbelievable?

Alright, just to clarify, I'm completely kidding!

I thought "hate gays, kill A-rabs, and support Dubya" was a dead giveaway (notice the way I turn Arabs into two hard syllables, for example).

And the idea of keeping a shiv in my Bible for the sake of killing liberals after church...come on people!

At least tap1996 seems to have gotten my joke...

some of us are slow today...namely myself....haha! carry on : ok:

Yeah I pretty much got it after that post, Think it's time to hit the sac hehe  :hihi:

Which may be scary for both of us  :hihi:

The goal also is sacrifice critical thinking skills ... for if one uses their mind , one will see that myth for the lie that it is .

How can a myth be a lie? The Iliad isn't a lie, The Aeneid isn't a lie, they're mythological stories. But I'm sure we could indoctrinate some gullible types to take them as pure historical fact handed down by all-powerful invisible men who live in the sky and who want you to take up arms and slay the heretic Harry Potter readers. And a religion is born!

I'm sure I'll take some heat for this , but so what : Quite simply , religion . A myth is a lie if it is repeated .

So myths have a one-time use policy? If I tell someone a mythological story and they tell it to someone else it becomes a lie? Did you think that through at all (because it sounds pretty silly)?

The problem is people willing to cling to ignorance and belief in fairy tales, not stories running around being liars.

Ok , let me put this another way since obviously you did not grasp the meaning of my first post .

Religion is a myth ; religion is a lie .

EDIT: If you require further elaboration , I will be happy to enlighten you .

EDIT: Most myths are not preached as truth . That is when it becomes a lie . It seems you want to argue symantics and not substance .

I think the confusion was with your statement "a myth is a lie if it is repeated" which doesn't really make literal sense. However, I understand what you meant and you are certainly correct. When myths are preached as true that is when they become lies. Though I will argue that most (or at least a good percent of) myths are preached as true, but not forever. I mean, the Greek myths we study today were once taught and believed by some amount of the people. Looking back on them now we see them as myths. I'm sure in a few hundred years people will look back on the story of Jesus rising from the dead in much the same way that we look back on the story of Horace rising from the dead, or Heracles traveling to the underworld for some task, or any other myth we study. What are today's religions but the myths of tomorrow?

No, I'm arguing intent over content. Or, to simplify, context. You seem to have both nailed the idea and completely failed to grasp it; Obviously it is disingenuous to preach myths and parables as fact but the lie is in the preaching, not in the myth. If that's not the substance of the argument against fundamentalism and literalist interpretations of religious texts. . . .

I do require further elaboration, enlightenment if you will, as I obviously do not grasp the complexities of your "religion is a lie" argument. From the viewpoint that any given religion is a framework of social ethics and personal morals usually illustrated through narrative storytelling, I fail to see how the combined content of the major religions is inherently good, bad, true or lies. On the other hand, I do enjoy the idea that some Jewish preacher would dedicate his life to encouraging personal interpretation of religious texts and personal devotion to spirituality rather than devotion to monolithic religious institutions and yet managed to become the poster child for the most monolithic and dogmatic  religious bodies of the following two millennia. It's basic irony but I like it.

I think that there is a difference between faith and organised religion. There was a time in history when 'the church' would make outrageous claims about a splinter of wood been from Jesus' cross. Thousands would make pilgrimages just to see the said splinter.

At another point in history, people had to pay money to priests so they could secure their place in heaven........

Yes, aspects of religion can be fabricated - people's faith can be exploited.......

I think "a few hundred years" might be on the optimistic side. Sadly, the diminishment of one "faith" is usually due to the increased popularity of another. It would be nice to see the end of the old religions but if the price of that is the rise of scientology or the moonies or something then it's not really an improvement.

As for the Greek myths, I think it's a stretch to try to equate them with the contemporary belief systems. Even if you confine the comparison to deity myths you'd be hard-pressed to make a convincing argument for any sort of analogous relationship between the Greeks' obscure heirarchy of household gods and the monotheistic institutionalized  religions which followed. I think that the relationship of the people or their society to their gods is so utterly different as to be irreconcilable, which makes comparing the level of blind faith both difficult and pointless.     

The problem with the church is it wants everyone to think alike, and not for themselves. I personally think theres nothing less harmful than Harry Potter. Like kids are gonna watch Star Wars and then go off chopping peoples limbs off thinking that prosthetic limbs are completely life like.

I disagree with your first statement. I think that "faith" is a product of organized religion, particularly of monotheism. The importance of devotion and unquestioning belief, at least in Christianity, seems to stem directly from the adoption of that religion as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Prior to that change-over the concept of religious piety was rather different, even the adoption of Christianity by Constantine was motivated by political and social pressures rather than faith, and the public reasoning behind it was about gaining the sponsorship of a powerful deity rather than any spiritual correction of their heretic ways. Faith, belief, devotion, piety - prerequisites for acceptance by monotheistic religious institutions, rather than the breeding ground for the acceptance of those religions by the people. Basically, unless you're being asked to believe in impossible and improbable things and accept them as literal truth, faith has no function.

I can't speak for other people, but for me my faith comes from a 'knowing' and from my own personal experiences. There is a great mystery to the cosmos and I respect it.

Then the question is clearly; What do you have faith in?

I would define faith as belief in something which is unproven. Obviously that would differ from believing in something that you know to be true or have experienced for yourself. Would you say that you have faith in something or things that you have no rational or evidentiary reason to believe?

Yes, it is well known that materialists and dualists speak a different language. The fact that scientists are unable to prove a theory/idea does not mean that it does not exist. Scientists need to keep developing their laboratory equipment.......Paul Davies says that scientists are getting close to developing a super machine to test such claims - but the cost!

Maybe 'faith' and 'experience' should be left alone by scientists - it is not their field. It is more of a area to be tackled by the humanities.

Maybe dualists and materialists need to work on developing a common language. Music is pretty universal.

I believe that there is a mystery to the universe - I have seen, witnessd and felt many things that constantly reinforce my 'faith'. How many times does something have to be experienced for it to be proven?

Personally, I wouldn't classify that as "faith." I don't think that it requires any stretch of imagination to believe that there are things that we don't know, and the fact that we continue to learn and discover is proof that there are still unknowns. So I'd call that a belief, but not one requiring of faith.

To take you up on the tangent you offered;  Science and faith (as I defined it earlier) are inevitably intertwined because they deal with the same subject, collective ignorance. Faith is a product of our collective ignorance, in that there are things we do not know or can not explain and so any conclusions or beliefs drawn about those things are unproven and requiring of faith. Meanwhile science is all about learning, knowing and explaining previously unknown and unexplained things. Since both work within the same sphere of human experience there's no way they can avoid each other, until either everything is known or nothing is known.

Ok, what I have done is tried to make sense of my experiences.
I have used my information processing skills: data to information to knowledge to wisdom.

In gaining wisdom in certain areas I am now able to classify experiences and summarise/categorise them under the heading 'faith'.

Everyone will have a different word for how they would describe the taste of chocolate.
Science cannot prove exactly what chocolate tastes like.

1)"Chocolatey," I think.
 
2) I think that's a spurious statement at best. Humankind cannot definitively describe what chocolate tastes like, other than it tastes like chocolate. Same goes for chicken. However, science allows us to analyze and synthesize flavors - is synthesis of a flavor not a description of flavor in its own terms? What does chocolate taste like? It tastes like chocolate flavor, just like our chocolate flavored beverage and food products! Science 1: stolat 0.

Science may not be able to describe, in words, every phenomena that is "known." But a failing of language is a failing of language, not of knowledge. I think it's fair to say that most of us know what chocolate tastes like, or the flavors of many different types of chocolate, I'm not sure that the inability to put it into words has any impact on the value of understanding the chemistry, biology or  physics involved.

It's just a concept/tangent that we were discussing in philosophy class. Any philosophical discussion usually does not end with Science1: Stolat 0!!!

It's not to do with language - scientists cannot test the differences in people's taste. When I bite into a piece of chocolate who is to say that my experience will be the same as yours. All human beings are unique and see the world through thier own unique eyes. Somethings are indeed hard to put into words - that is why we have music.

Thanks for contributing to the discussion (no sarcasm intended).

PS. Look up the dictionary meaning of 'materialist' and 'dualist'.

I thought you'd enjoy that.

I would seriously still argue that the example you're giving is rather unfair as no methodology has any way of reconciling disparate perceptions. To say it's a failing of science is to ignore that it's a failing of every other institution and social construct. If your palate, like your personality, is a cumulative result of everything it's experienced and everyone has a different range of experience then no two are precisely the same. How then do you objectively measure "taste" and describe it accurately to every individual? Isn't it inherently impossible to objectively describe something which is unique? I'd equate the chocolate flavor argument with something like saying "science can't describe how pain feels," - true, but neither can anything else. "It hurts!"

Also, I would like to hear music describe how chocolate tastes. 

I did this and, surprisingly, both of them had the same definition: "Philosophical beliefs held by people who haven't realized that it's all Determinism."

Oh God, not the old deteminism vs free will debate!! Who pulls the strings?

PS. the good thing about music is that it is a science (sound waves) + maths (theory) and it is also an universal language that can speak directly to our souls.

It always amazes me when playing music, the transcendence from theory/notes on a page to something quite intangible.

Why not?  It's the best debate!


Agreed, but we should also be worried about the quality of souls, based on the state of music these days.

Yes, your last point in particular is very interesting.

Look how far away we have come from classical music (a very structured and balanced music style), developed during the 17th century Age of Reason.

The music of the Romantic Era (1900's) was a direct backlash against the highly structured Classical style. Free flowing melody lines/escapist lyrics.

I guess the good thing about music is that it comes in waves.......

(Sound waves, get it.....!!)

I stand corrected , I should have said : those who proclaim that some magic man in the sky will grant your wishes are liars . However , "intent over content" are two sides of the coin . The former is a manifestation of the latter .

"it is disingenuous to preach myths and parables as fact but the lie is in the preaching, not in the myth"
Hell , that is what religion is . You just made my argument .

"From the viewpoint that any given religion is a framework of social ethics and personal morals usually illustrated through narrative storytelling"
You forgot the part about dogma .

"I fail to see how the combined content of the major religions is inherently good, bad, true or lies"
Dogma is bad.

" I do enjoy the idea that some Jewish preacher would dedicate his life to encouraging personal interpretation of religious texts and personal devotion to spirituality rather"
He also advocated the mutilation , death , and destruction of those who disagreed with him .

They both pray/prayed to magic man/men , and they both think/thought those prayers were ansered ... one and the same .

So do I. Why judge?

25! Grow Up!

Not really, the Greeks switched horses when their gods failed them. Their devotion lasted as long as their luck.

Dieties played an intimate role in the every day lives of ancient people .

I can vouch for that! In a previous life I was known as Akasha.

1) If you mean they're two sides of the same coin in that never the twain shall meet, at least when it comes to religious texts, then I agree with you.

2) Oh, I guess you didn't mean that.  If intent is the manifestation of content then how do you explain the divisions and deviations in the beliefs of the many, many factions of Christianity? They're all playing from the same sheets, why the different tunes?

3) If you can't distinguish between text and dogma, content and intent, religious institutions and religion then we obviously can't have a legitimate discussion.

In the same way the daytime television plays an intimate role in the daily lives of the housefrau contingent. Also; your post has no relation to the quote.

the differentiations are relatively minor .

Yeh, you were disagreeing with a statement that I made earlier today - how I separate organised religion and faith. Fuckin Crazy was adding to that idea.

As far as the 'ancient people' comment goes read my previous post.

Oh, well that explains it then. Your point is totally valid.

Its been a long night ... with little sleep yesterday . give a few moments
I agree , but surely the ancients , as a whole ,.were devoted in their beliefs , why else have them if they meant nothing ?

Well, he wasn't adding much. It was a bit of a Penguin Classics moment. Threw me.

Akasha? Sounds like a sneeze.

See Ann Rice, Vampire Chronicles, Book 2, Akasha - Queen of the Dammed.
I could have also said, yeh, in a previous life I was Cleopatra........

But then I couldn't have said it sounded like a sneeze.

See, you laugh, I laugh, we all laugh......

Symbiosis.

On a related note; I can't read Ann Rice. Bit too florid for me, like a knitted doily.

That is a bizarre analogy.

The last? book in the series - The Vampire Lestat is all about theology, religion, faith, life after death etc.

I did read that one. Also about vampire rock. Too much vampire rock.

enlighten me , what was the logic in the Greeks abandoning their horses when the Gods failed them .

Abandoning horses would be silly and cruel. They switched horses. Completely different. Different enough to be an analogy for turning to a different deity when your current "sponsor" isn't cutting the mustard.

Obviously deities weren't expected to sit around actually cutting mustard all day, that would be pointless.

memnoch the devil?
kinda cheesy. cool story tho.

Their belief structures were fundamentally different to ours. Monotheistic religions demand belief in one "true" god and strict adherence to "his" rules during your life with the promise of reward or punishment in the afterlife. It's a metaphysical concern. Polytheistic religions (pagan, if you prefer) dealt with immediate physical concerns, you need your crops to grow or you need to win a battle with a neighboring community or your child has a dose of the pox and there's a god, or more likely a number of gods, who deal with those concerns. And if the god you picked fails you, you can always turn to a different god. Some worship was context-sensitive; Not every Roman needed to pray to Mars every day but if you were a Centurion marching off to war then you'd probably want to check in with the guy. They had gods and held beliefs in the power of those gods and were devoted to their worship, but there were many gods with overlapping responsibilities and if one god wasn't working out for you there was always another option. Isn't that completely alien to monotheism? The idea that gods are accountable and dispensable?   

So today's religions can be considered more organised - in that there are churches set up where people are required to congregate and worship.

I do not think that the ancient Egyptians or Romans went to organised masses. They looked for signs around them to reinforce their beliefs and trust in certain deities.

Every religion has its own name for 'god'. Yaweh, Buddah, Krishna.......but I think they are all talking about the same thing. Ultimately......

Personally, I think that 'god' becomes visible in acts of humanity that every human being is capable of - Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King.....

I don't know about the Egyptians, but the Greeks and likely the Romans would have small shrines in their own homes for their personal or family patrons. Something as simple as a mural depicting the god in question. Of course, the Romans ended up attending christian masses but that came later. Who has time for church when there's naval battle re-enactments and the rending of flesh on display at the local amphitheater?

I really prefer to avoid the "all religions are talking about the same god, the little drop of goodness inside all of our hearts" bit. I prefer humans to take responsibility for human behavior, good and bad, and leave the middle-men out of it. Besides, the idea of monotheistic humanism  is mind-boggling - I can't even fit it into my head. Existentialism and religion should never meet head on.

And that takes us back to our philosophical discussion that we had earlier today - materialists vs dualists and never the twain shall meet.

I think the "I exist therefore I am" argument is rather lacking.......
What is one person's reality compared to another's.......
How do you know that you really exist?
Say if everyone around you is just a figment of your imagination? (Try fitting that concept into your head!!!!)

Big Questions of Existence 101.....

"I think, therefore I am. I think."

I shot through most of those dead-enders in my early teens. And like everyone else I failed to answer any of them satisfactorily but I did learn one thing; Failure is always an option. Now I use them as lullabies and substitutes for counting sheep. Regardless of whether or not there is a true objective reality we're all still stuck with our perceptions. And we can question them and examine them and alter them but they're still our perceptions. And if that's true, then the question of objective reality in philosophical terms is largely irrelevant because none of us live in an objective reality, everything is filtered and distorted by perception.

All I know for sure is this; If everyone around me is a figment of my imagination then I'm either a sado-masochist or a glutton for punishment.

The idea of philosphy is to keep raising questions........that may lead us closer to truth....
In ancient Greece people used to spend hours.....contemplating such things.......

Philosophy always succeeds in raising questions. Unfortunately, no undisputed answers. But some good books.

And the Greeks had to spend hours contemplating these things, these things take hours to contemplate! And if we had a stable of slaves to do our bidding we'd all have more time to ponder unanswerable questions. And television would probably improve too.

Well, 300 Spartans is on TV right now!! Classic film!

I've never seen it actually. Is everyone running around with pseudo-roman bowl shaped haircuts and speaking in american wild-west dialects? 

Sorry dude, I'm focussing on the bare chested men in loin cloths and skirts to notice much else!

Ah, it's the trans-gender porno version of ancient Greece. Nice.

Perhaps a few hundred years is too short a time, though a worldwide tragedy that wiped out a great deal of people would speed up the process a tad. Maybe a thousand years or so is a little more realistic? And I was not suggesting that the religions which will one day take the place of the ones we have now would be an improvement. Rather, I was suggesting that this is a probable outcome. I wasn't making a judement call as to whether or not these religions would be improvements. Though they certainly could be, we are too far deep into the theoretical at this point to make any sort of judgement about much of anything.
          I will disagree (as I'm sure many who study myth would) with you on your point about Greek myths being incomparable to modern monotheistic religions. The myths themselves do not have to correspond to each other in some way (and I apologize if this is not what you were arguing). The point I was trying to make was that people once believed in the Greek system of gods. We now view them as cool, interesting stories that are fun (to some) to study. We determine what it was about society that caused certain attributes of the gods, why some gods were more important than others, etc. Religions that are no longer practiced are seen as myths to us, worthy of study but not true. And I'm sure that one day (unless man wipes himself out) the religions of today will be studied as cool, interesting stories, with experts trying to determine why the religions developed the way they did and what societal factors caused or allowed such religions to pop up. Do you disgaree that we can talk about Christianity and the Greek god system as being similar in that both mean (or meant) very much to a great number of people, both are (were) a way of life for many, people base life decisions on whether or not it goes against what God/Zeus has decreed?
         In fact we can even compare the religions on a more specific level, though this really wasn't my point. As I don't have any resources in front of me at the moment I can't go deeply into anything, but even a cursory glance at the various flood stories of various civilizations and religions will show a great deal of similarity. The same goes to myths regarding deities or persons who are killed and rise again. But such is not the point I was making. My point is that there is indeed a relationship between the myths we study and the contemporary myths that many believe. The myths need not correspond exactly to each other in every respect for a relationship to exist. They both attempt to explain the world, set down rules to live by, create some sort of afterlife, etc. Am I making sense? Perhaps I've not understood your complaint with my statement. If this is the case please do be patient in explaining what you meant.

So, do y'all think Harry will die in the last book?  ;D

I think we're talking about different things there. We an certainly compare myth to myth and find a large number of similar stories across all religions, that's absolutely true. I think what I was saying earlier was that it's not possible to compare something like the Catholic Church to an analogous body or doctrine in ancient Greek or early Roman culture, and that the dogmatic and authoritarian relationship that monotheistic religious institutions have with their followers seems rather different than the more decentralized and personal pagan approach to religion. In short, I don't think you could compare Greek polytheism to modern Christianity or Islam as belief systems but myth to myth, story to story, they all do cover a lot of the same ground and borrow from each other liberally. 

No.  He'll die in Book 7 and be raised from the dead in book 8, thus sending poor Ms. Laura Mallory into a frenzy.  :rofl:

I completely agree, nor was I ever suggesting otherwise. Seems there was some misunderstanding in our initial posts. Thanks for clearing that up!